KodyMyers.NET

This is a continuation of the rant Ode to a Console.

After giving it some more thought, I think it’s finally dawned upon me why I’ve been so turned off by consoles as of late… It’s all the bloody sports games. With the notable exception of the Final Fantasy series, when I think of console games anymore it’s nearly synonymous with sports and racing games. The Playstation 2 has fallen victim to what I have dubbed “The Genesis Effect.”

You see, before the Playstation hit, there were only two major consoles on the market to choose from: the Sega Genesis and the Super NES. Choosing one (if you were the type who was confined to choosing only one) was easy then. If you enjoyed sports games to the exclusion of most else, you chose the Genesis. If you didn’t really care for sports games, you chose the SNES. It was as simple as that, really. This is an overgeneralization, I know, but my mind views the world through strange eyes sometimes.

So not long ago, fighting an uphill battle against the rising popularity of the Playstation and Playstation 2, Sega pulled out of the console war. Who now would publish all the sports games? That’s night – Sony. The available Playstation library is now polluted by games featuring ATVs, bikes, race cars, monster trucks, deer hunting, wrestlers, skaters… and let’s not even mention all the garbage EA puts out. The Playstation 2 has become the Genesis of our time, and from me, that’s not a compliment. Yes, I know other consoles suffer from these same afflictions, but none currently like the PS2.

My distaste for sports games is probably rooted in my overall contempt for professional sports in general, but I digress. I’ll save that rant for another day. Even so, I admit that I still own NBA Jam and Gran Turismo 3, though I can’t say that I ever managed to extract any measurable amount of fun from either. Now I simply can’t see myself purchasing another sports or racing game ever again.

My penchant in games and literature is nearly parallel. I am of the opinion that games should be an escape from reality, not a mirror of reality. In the same way I tend more toward sci-fi and fantasy novels than fiction novels and non-fiction literature. Like I hinted at above, my allegiance to the Final Fantasy series weighed heavily in my decision to purchase a PS2 in the first place. The knowledge that Squaresoft would be publishing on the PS2, coupled with DVD functionality and backward compatibility with the already huge PS1 library, pretty well sealed the deal for me.

So here I sit with a gaming machine that still holds a great deal of prominence today, unable to love it as I feel I should. I’ve even considered selling it a couple of times, but as a gamer I just can’t see myself parting with it. I continue to hold on the hope that one day I’ll dust it off and find out just how much I’ve under-appreciated it all this time. Until then, I’ll stick with my PC games.

I’ve been a gamer for as long as I can remember. From the board games of my tender youth, to the Atari, to the Commodore, to the GameBoy (old skool, mind you), to the Super NES – games have always been the source of my great power. It used to be that console games were my passion. Absolutely nothing could replace the feeling of holding that controller in my hand, which functioned more as an extension of my physical self than a piece of technology.

Sometime between then and now, though, something changed.

You see, I’ve owned a Playstation 2 pretty much since the day it was released. You may remember that it was nigh impossible to buy a PS2 within the first three months of its release, so it went without saying that anyone who owned a PS2 at that time went through great pains to obtain it. It’s almost as if gamers were required to endure tests and trials of epic proportions in order to prove they were indeed worthy of being blessed with a PS2. Okay, perhaps I exaggerate a bit.

Anyway, to get back to where I’m going with all this: I used my PS2 more as a DVD player than a game console. Here I was with a powerful new machine with an extensive game library already available, and I just wasn’t interested in it. Like I said, something changed in between my SNES days and my purchase of the PS2.

Here we sit now on verge of the dawn of a new generation of consoles, and I don’t even have 10 games for my PS2. The only reason I have more than 5 right now is because 4 of my games were given to me. It’s almost embarrassing, but that last game I purchased for it was Gran Turismo 3.

This is why I found myself startled to suddenly be pulled back in by such a silly little game as Katamari Damacy – a game I’m seriously considering purchasing now. Released last September, it slipped under my radar of awareness until its designer, Keita Takahashi, showed up with a keynote speech at the 2005 Game Developer Conference. This a brief article from GameSpot regarding the talk is the source of one of the most provocative comments I’ve ever heard from a game designer: “Children would be better off playing outside.”

I’m still searching for a good English transcript of the speech, which is proving difficult because it was delivered in Japanese. From the pieces of it I’ve gathered, though, he is one of the few game designers out there who realizes that better technology does not automatically produce better games.

The deep wisdom of this is present in every good game that comes to immediate memory. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Frogger, Legend of Zelda, Super Metroid, Super Mario Brothers. Street Fighter 2, Sonic the Hedgehog, ad nauseam. Do you think people still play these games today because of the cutting edge graphics? It’s all about the gameplay, with an efficient interface being a close second. Look and feel may run a distant third.

Imagine the opportunity to create your own Nintendo game. Now, imagine doing it for college credit.

I had a chance to check out the open demo of Guild Wars that ran during E3 last week. The initial download consisted of a small executable that downloaded and installed the rest of the game content as needed. I didn’t mind the particularly long downloads, which were typically between 2 and 10MB. It is, after all, my own fault that I still connect to the internet using a dial-up ISP. What I did mind was the forced 3rd-person perspective.

Guild Wars is billed as a “Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game,” or MMORPG, for short. The word “role-playing” indicates that players will be assuming the roles of a fictional characters – characters whose personality traits are created by their players. Role-playing is a difficult thing to describe without writing an essay, and since there are many out there who possess a greater command of language than I, a quick Google search for “roleplaying” turns up the following article: What Is Roleplaying?

[Edit (24-May-2010): That page is gone since Geocities fell off the face of the planet. Check out the definition for role-playing in Wikipedia, instead! -KM]

In order to understand who your character is, you must essentially walk in his or her shoes and experience the game world through his or her eyes. Successful games such as EverQuest place players into a 1st-person perspective, thereby helping to maintain the suspension of disbelief that the player truly is that character (an important aspect of role-playing games, which are intended to provide a diversion from harsh reality). A 3rd-person perspective game discourages the players’ attachment to their characters by forcing them to see their characters from the outsite in.

This is why I doubt Guild Wars will be a long term success, and why I won’t be playing it.

Anyone familiar with the rave scene can find humor in the following quote. It’s absurdity was what made it so effective in 1989, however today it comes off as just plain ironic.

Games don’t affect kids. If Pac-man had affected us, we’d all be sitting in darkened rooms munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.

– Kristian Wilson (Nintendo Inc., 1989)

The irony here is that clubs and raves, quite popular in urban scenes, are characterized by their dark dancefloors with laser and strobe light illumination. Techno music (also known as electronic music because it is produced entirely with drum machines, synthesizers, and other such sound-generating equipment, hence the “repetetive electronic music”) is played very loudly, and the aforementioned pills would be “Ecstacy,” the dangerous drug of choice for many clubgoers.

I dunno. Maybe this is one of those things where if you have to explain the joke, it’s no longer funny…