NES

The Nintendo S-Box

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I just read a question that I find strange. Someone wanted to know the best NES games, with the understanding that most of the big ones would be superseded by later, better remakes. It was pointless to play Metroid, for instance, though maybe the first Zelda did a few unique things. Were there any games that were still worth playing?

The reason I find this strange is that the approach seems so askew. The reason to go to NES games will be less in terms of what they have to offer mechanically from a contemporary perspective; the main appeal here will be their method. It’s in the look, the sound, the technical limitations that result in the problem-solving that forms the basis of most of the design.

The most interesting things that you’ll find here are informed by these ephemera of a context that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Metroid isn’t interesting on the NES because of the shape of its world or what the buttons do; it’s because the game is both glitchy as fuck and designed so that most of its genuine surprises come off like possible glitches. The experience of playing the game feeds from a sort of cognitive dissonance between what you’re seeing and what might be, that creates a sense of endless possibility.

The best NES games feed into that dissonance, to create an idea that anything could be out there.

I guess I mean to say that the experience of the NES is one of uncertainty. The system is like a Schrodinger’s Box. Nothing is clearly defined except in the moment of experience — a moment that for all you know may never be recaptured.

  • Why do the rocks in Zelda look like turtles?
  • Wait, there’s a second quest? Where the world has different rules?!
  • Could there be another world entirely, if you burn the right bush?
  • Can you get to the end of the minus world?
  • What exists outside the normal Metroid levels?
  • Can you hit Deborah’s Cliff with your head?
    • Super Mario Bros. a third time?
  • What happens if you climb off the screen?
  • Am I meant to be able to do the thing I’m doing?

It’s childhood myth and legend encoded in inconclusive living hieroglyphics. Whispers in the night. Nightmares in silicon, filtered through corroded contacts, coaxial cable, and the roughly traced path of an electron gun.

Back then it was very hard to pass judgment on what was a “good” or a “bad” game; it was more that some things were more opaque than others, and better at hiding their secrets.

And then you get to the chaos wrought by the Game Genie, which at first wasn’t exclusively a cheating device — it was a hacking device, allowing you to fundamentally alter the experience of playing. Make Mario walk backwards. Be Small Firey Mario at any time! Make the entire world black, so you have to feel your way around…

To that end, Simon’s Quest is one of the most definitive NES games. It is pure ambiguity, obfuscation, and interpretation from start to end. It even has three endings, to enhance the what-might-be.

I should make a list of the definitive NES experiences, in the sense of those games that most embody the uncertainty that we have so dearly lost over the years.

Reference Boundaries

  • Reading time:2 mins read

A notion on which I’ve often dwelled of late (and may well have discussed here or on some social media outlet) is that when I was young I had no concept of a bad videogame. Games that today carry a reputation as horrible, poorly designed duds — Deadly Towers, 8 Eyes, Dr. Chaos, Hydlide — just seemed to me, at the time, as if they were above me somehow. I didn’t understand them, much as I was unprepared to understand much of the world. In that, they held a certain mystique.

I didn’t play them much, as I couldn’t get far and I got frustrated — but I never blamed that on the games. It never occurred to me to pass judgment. I just figured they were made for someone else, or for a time when I was older and prepared to understand them.

Even today when I look back on these games I get an intriguing sense of cognitive dissonance. I understand that they weren’t altogether successful creative efforts, for one reason or another — but they challenge me to look at things in ways that I otherwise wouldn’t, to try to understand how and why they are as they are.

In that, I find these games endlessly fascinating — whereas my fascination with more accessible, clearly well-designed games ended long ago, once I got everything that they had to say.

Air Fortress

  • Reading time:8 mins read

The Goodwill by my house is a well of pleasant surprises, from a $3.00 unopened, factory sealed copy of Torchwood: Children of Earth to a well-kept VHS copy of Dark Crystal. Yesterday on entering I noticed a glass cabinet by the register. The first thing that leapt at me was Spider-Man for the Sega Genesis. Decent game; I have the very similar Master System version. I don’t need it. Still, they had Genesis games! On closer inspection I also saw a stack of NES cartridges. The spines faced away, so I could only see the top game — some sort of top-down racer. The cashier was busy, so I waited.

On the way out I flagged down the lady and asked to flip through the games. The selection did not inspire me. there was a Wheel of Fortune game. There were two copies of another racing game. There were a couple of licensed games. And then at the very bottom, a well-worn rental copy of Air Fortress. That was it; though I had only played it in emulated snatches, I knew that I wanted to look deeper. The game was fairly obscure; it had a strange structure and mechanics; it was by eventual Nintendo second party Hal Labs. It’s just, when you’re flipping from one eccentric ROM to the next it’s hard to focus on any game for too long. Having the physical cartridge would give me an excuse to do so.

Air Fortress is a curious game, and obscure in more than one sense. Its director, designer, and programmer Hiroaki Suga didn’t seem to do much else. He ported the second Eggerland (or as we know it, Lolo) game from the MSX to the Famicom Disk System. (Later the first Lolo for the NES proper would compile the best levels from all of these earlier games into a single megamix for Western audiences.) He was in charge of New Ghostbusters II, and wrote music for a pinball game and a Game Boy version of Shanghai.

His game was released in severely limited quantities. The history of the NES being as opaque as it is, there are many conflicting version of the story — but according to one version Hal produced just 20 copies to sit alongside the NES test launch in 1985. In 1987 Hal pushed it out again for a larger official print run of 385 copies. As the story goes, people had to order the cartridge directly from Hal Labs — and in turn Hal would throw in a wall poster. Finally in 1989 the game entered regular production, and even was selected for a major Nintendo-sponsored game-playing competition — but its time was past and it never really gained traction or widespread recognition.

So check this out. The game is at least as old as Zelda and Metroid, and it feels like a postmodern indie retro game. It starts off with a Zelda-style story scroll that you’d swear was deliberately ripped off of that game but which was more likely parallel development. The character is named Hal Bailman because, well, Hal Labs and… Bailman? I don’t get that part. It’s a cool name, though.

The game has, for the time, an eccentric structure; it alternates between side-scrolling shooting segments and… well, not platformer areas. And it’s not quite action-adventure. Let’s just call it action-adventure platforming, though, to make the point and move on. During the shooter segments you bulk up on the game’s two kinds of power ups (of which we will speak more soon), then the adventure-platforming segments are where we see the real Hal-style contextual puzzle level design come into play.

The hesitation in that last paragraph comes from the game’s unusual mechanics; in the platformer sections Mr. Bailman has two main moves: shoot, and fly. He also can walk along the ground, slowly. The D-pad is used for all motion, and both buttons shoot. One shoots a standard projectile; the other shoots bombs. The effect of this control scheme is a little like the dual-stick, dual-trigger setup of modern first-person shooters — except minus a dimension.

There are two on-screen counters: one for energy, and one for bombs. These two counters correspond to the two power-ups. You can use the bombs at any time, and they can be replenished; they work sort of like the missiles in Metroid, except more so. Some things can only be destroyed with a bomb, and some things are better disposed of with one. Energy is an interesting thing, worthy of its own paragraph.

Energy serves two roles: not-dying, and fuel. Think of the way breath meters work in so many water levels, where a character’s life will drain to represent depleting oxygen — and often the less life the character has, the less breath available for submersion. Similar concept here, except we’re talking up instead of down. As you fly, your energy temporarily depletes — making you all the more vulnerable. As you sustain injury you lose freedom of motion, and you need to think harder about what you’re doing.

So there’s a minor juggling act. Next let’s add gravity and momentum, so the player needs to master the physics of the jet pack — all while avoiding injury and keeping an eye on fuel.

While we’re speaking of momentum, let’s conserve it — meaning recoil. When the character shoots, floating around or otherwise, he is repelled in the opposite direction. The game makes use of this property alongside everything else to construct clever, deliberate logistical problems. Say, you float down a well with spikes at the bottom and along the left wall. To move ahead you need fly below an underhang, just pixels above the tips of the spikes — yet that narrow passage is blocked by a robot sentry. If you shoot the sentry without thinking, chances are you will fly back into the spikes. If you lose control of your flight, chances are you’ll graze the bottom spikes. If you dawdle to think about it, chances are your fuel will run out.

So the levels are nice. The build-up of new concepts is very slow, and indeed there aren’t many to play with — but then the game keeps throwing in new loopholes. When you beat the first fortress and destroy the core, you continue a screen or two to the right and board your little, er, space scooter, which has somehow found its way to the exit. Presto; on to level two. When you beat the second fortress, the screen begins to blink and shake. After way too much time wandering you realize the place is going to blow up. There’s no countdown timer; you just have to intuit that things aren’t right, and bolt back to the entrance fast as you can. Otherwise, game over!

The game’s map designers had more storied careers than its director; the head one, Akio Hanyu, went on to program several of the Kirby games and the first two Smash Bros. games. The others worked on Sylvalion and the GBA e-Reader. (Remember that thing?)

Aesthetically the presentation is all over. The game looks bright, simple, and appealing, but hardly sophisticated. Then you look closer and you notice the backgrounds. What could be a flat color or repeating pattern, and in another game would be, will instead be a complex web of cross-hatching or dithering, the scratches getting denser toward the walls and more scattered in the center of a room. The character seems to have all of four frames of animation, but does he need much more? The same uninspiring music repeats through the whole game, or at least seems to; only the space opera bombast of the main theme really stands out.

Should you die, and you should, the game has a password continue — a short one; maybe only half a dozen characters. Considering its vintage (again possibly pre-Icarus), that’s novel stuff as well.

Air Fortress is a progressive game from an era when that didn’t make much sense. It trades spectacle for concept — and the kind of concept that only someone who designs games or has been playing them for long enough to look at them analytically (much longer than they had existed at the time it was made) would really notice or appreciate. It’s actually a very simple concept, that raises several questions about the assumptions that go into most design — and that works largely because of the game’s careful, didactic level design, that helps to illustrate how very simple the concept is yet how complex its ramifications can be at any given moment.

That concept? That you have a jetpack and a gun, and that every simple little thing you do has consequences. Physics and the energy system make sure of that. I mentioned how the controls bring to mind modern first-person shooters. The energy system calls to mind the “shield” innovation in Halo, and the attention to the physics of every motion is still fairly novel after twenty years.

As I play Air Fortress I think of Fishbane and Hero Core. This might well be their contemporary. The decisions here sort of make the game feel like a modern literate gamer’s idea of 8-bit design, with the benefit of a lifetime of hindsight and with the limited resources and attention span of most indie designers. It’s designed just far enough to make its point, play with its notions, and move along.

These days, that’s all I ask from a game — and it’s all I really have the patience to absorb.

Portfolio

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Back in the NES era every game was part of a publisher’s collection, and the collection was expanded in waves. I sort of miss that context. You’d get fold-out posters presenting a broad range of software, all in the same template, as if they all were aspects of a greater whole.

The implication was, to fully understand a given range you needed to collect them all: Kid Niki and Side Pocket and Ring King and Break-Thru. The sense was that any given game was just part of the picture, and together they all added up to something more — like a band’s albums. It helped that across the range they had consistent, usually hand-painted artwork.

It’s this that lent the publishers a sense of an overall creative voice and personality. As if Konami and Acclaim were individual people. A player got to know and appreciate these voices, like old friends. Every new templated game was like the sharing of a new confidence.

A change of template was a change of mission, and a break of template — your Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 3, even Wizards & Warriors — was a radical event. The suggestion that this game stood alone, apart from everything else a publisher had to say, was startling. These were event games. Mission statements.

The non-event games, though — even if they weren’t important unto themselves, they also had a part to play. They were the album tracks to the hit singles of the standalone games. I’ve written before that when I was younger I had no concept of a bad game. There were games that I understood and got into, and there were… strange games. There were big games and there were small games. And time was, for every Metroid or Kid Icarus there were a dozen Wrecking Crews, Gumshoes, Balloon Fights, or Clu-Clu Lands. Collectively these games set the field and the context that both lent the event games their special meaning and made the whole medium feel vibrant, alive, like anything could happen.

Today, every game is a standalone. There isn’t as much sense of a constant dialog, with occasional upsets and asides. In the mainstream at least, nothing is as special and nothing is as intimate. Or as complex and varied. The last vestige was the Sega Dreamcast.

You get some of that now by following indie authors, but you don’t get the context — it’s like iTunes, versus full albums by an artist like Nine Inch Nails. You get bits and pieces; not a sense of place and posterity.

The Playlist / Those Tenuous Twos

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

You may have read the first part of this column in the December 2009 Play Magazine. It was intended as a single article, and the start of a whole series of such lists. In the event, I was asked (due to my incorrigible verbosity) to break the article into three pieces; only the first found its way to print. Here is the column in full.

Used to be, when a game was successful enough to demand a sequel, the design team would do its best to avoid repeating itself. Though I’m sure they mostly wanted to keep their job interesting, the practical effect was that if the games were different, they would both remain relevant. In an arcade, Donkey Kong Jr. could stand handsomely by its father, each shilling for its own share of the coin. You might call them companion pieces, rather than updates or replacements.

When home consoles hit, design teams were even more modest, and were generally left to do their own thing. So starting on the NES, you will see a certain trend: successful game spawns weird, only tenuously related sequel; fans of the original scratch their heads; a greatly expanded dev team releases a third game, which is basically just the first again, on steroids; fans think it’s the best thing ever, because it’s exactly the same, except better! And to hell with that weird second chapter.

Thing is… usually the second game is the most interesting you’ll ever see.

The New Generation – Part Two: Masterminds

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Something is happening to game design. It’s been creeping up for a decade, yet only now is it striding into the mainstream, riding on the coattails of new infrastructure, emboldened by the rhetoric of the trendy. A new generation of design has begun to emerge – a generation raised on the language of videogames, eager to use that fluency to describe what previously could not be described.

First, though, it must build up its vocabulary. To build it, this generation looks to the past – to the fundamental ideas that make up the current architecture of videogames – and deconstructs it for its raw theoretical materials, such that it may be recontextualized: rebuilt better, stronger, more elegantly, more deliberately.

In the earlier part of this series, we discussed several games that exemplify this approach; we then tossed around a few more that give it a healthy nod. Some boil down and refocus a well-known design (Pac-Man CE, New Super Mario Bros.); some put a new perspective on genre (Ikaruga, Braid); some just want to break down game design itself (Rez, Dead Rising). In this chapter, we will highlight a few of the key voices guiding the change. Some are more persuasive than others. Some have been been making their point for longer. All are on the cusp of redefining what a videogame can be.

Balloon Fight (***)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Time was, Nintendo was a company was a game. Then Mario was a commodity was a template was a cult.

The guy who dragged Japan’s oldest hanafuda manufacturer into videogame design was a quiet, oddball toy inventor named Gunpei Yokoi. Thanks to Yokoi, Nintendo had already been making “inventive and strange” toys and arcade amusements; in the late ’70s, videogames were just the next logical step. He rounded up a posse, agreed to babysit a slacker friend of his boss’s family, and built from the ground up Nintendo’s first design studio: R&D#1.

Before long, the kid — an art school graduate named Miyamoto — set the editorial tone of bold colors, bolder concepts, and boldest character design. Then he graduated again to set up his own internal studio, and over the next five years completed and refined the two or three ideas he would ever have as a game designer.

( Continue reading at ActionButton.net )

Donkey Kong 3 (*)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

It’s been said that each of us only has one tune to play; all we ever do is change the way we play it. It’s also been said that Donkey Kong and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s tune originates in his personal hobbies, filtered through a love of Japanese and Western fairy tales. The Legend of Zelda has its roots in the fields and caves behind Miyamoto’s childhood home. Pikmin comes from Miyamoto’s garden. And Donkey Kong 3 is based on the premise that it is fun to spray DDT up a gorilla’s asshole. While being attacked by bees.

( Continue reading at ActionButton.net )

Five That Didn’t Fall

  • Reading time:53 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part nine of my ongoing culture column for Next Generation. After the popularity of my earlier article, I pitched a companion piece about companies that had lived past their remit, yet technically were still with us. On publication we lost the framing conceit and the article was split into five pieces, each spun as a simple bottled history. In turn, some of those were picked up by BusinessWeek Online. Here’s the whole thing, in context.

A few weeks ago we published a list of five developers that made a difference, helped to shape the game industry, then, one way or another (usually at the hands of their parent companies), ceased to exist. One theme I touched on there, that I got called on by a few readers, is that although in practical terms all the listed companies were indeed defunct, several continued on in name (Atari, Sierra, and Origin), living a sort of strange afterlife as a brand detached from its body.

This was an deliberate choice; although Infogrames has been going around lately with a nametag saying “HELLO my name is Atari” – and hey, why not; it’s a good name – that doesn’t make Infogrames the historical Atari any more than the creep in the purple spandex with the bowling ball is the historical Jesus. (Not that I’m relating Infogrames to a fictional sex offender – though he is a pretty cool character.) The question arises, though – what about those companies which live on in both name and body, yet which we don’t really recognize anymore? You know who I’m talking about; the cool rebels you used to know in high school, who you see ten years later working a desk job, or in charge of a bank. You try to joke with them, and they don’t get a word you’re saying. You leave, feeling a mix of fear and relief that (as far as you know) you managed to come out of society with your personality intact.

The same thing happens in the videogame world – hey, videogames are people; all our sins are handed down. This article is a document of five great companies – that started off so well, ready to change the world – that… somehow we’ve lost, even as they trundle on through the successful afterlife of our corporate culture. And somehow that just makes us miss them all the more.

Boundary Scout

  • Reading time:5 mins read

My brother has been hounding me about how to recreate that crazy mysterious glitchy feeling from old NES games, and this whole time I’ve been telling him that I figure it’s impossible. But uh, I guess not!

Apparently the trick is to actually focus on making it seem mysterious and glitchy!

Well, the focus here is on the glitchiness — mostly because I think that would be a cool-n-subversive way of doing things. I think the real point is in the kind of thoughts and emotions and behavior that those glitches trigger in people who are prone to pick at them. I think all of those qualities are very close to the ideal purpose and potential of videogames in general.

It’s that feeling of breaking through the boundaries of an established system — of the suggestion of unknown yet possibly grand potential hidden somewhere beyond the mundane, that you — as a free agent and very clever person — are specially qualified to unlock.

The way a person might break through the boundaries could be mechanical or emotional or intellectual. Some of the best touches in some of the best games borrow from this principle. See the scanning in Metroid Prime, how it comes directly out of the themes at hand, then ties everything together, hinting at a sort of order and coherence and reality to the entire Metroid series and everything in it that you never really suspected before. Yet it never shoves the stuff down your throat; it’s just there for you to put together on your own — much like all of the abstract stuff in the original Zelda and Metroid and whatnot, except deliberate and intellectual rather than incidental and material.

And then there’s Riven.

I think my point with the overt fake-bugginess was to exaggerate and glorify the whole pointless search process that we go through — poking the edges of the scenery, seeing what’s possible within the world, experimenting, and only rarely being rewarded with anything for our effort. And when we are rewarded it feels cloying and false, like those dumb treasure chests that have to be at the end of every single cul de sac in every single dungeon, to overtly reward you for going down and simultaneously make you feel obligated to go down every one.

It’s working on the suggestion that maybe this behavior has a real purpose behind it after all, that sometimes — just sometimes — there’s something magical and special and completely unprecedented to find. And the point to that is to bring into light that whole behavior, that whole mindset — which, again, I think is implicitly what videogames are made to suggest, yet which I don’t feel is often really addressed for all (or even much) of its potential.

I think this mode can be addressed in less gimmicky ways, even if the gimmick is maybe one of the clearest ways to illustrate it. The problem is that a videogame has to work on a couple of levels at once. It needs to have a completely workable status quo, that feels solid, that the player is convinced is meant to be solid, for the player’s subversion of that status quo to mean anything. There’s a lot of psychology here; the player shouldn’t know immediately whether he’s supposed to be able to do what he’s doing, and that it has been accounted for; just that, for whatever reason, he’s able to.

Beyond the psychology and the multiple layers to keep track of, the game of course has to be designed and programmed as well as possible, to avoid unintentional exploits. So there’s a certain level of virtuosity required here.

…

Maybe I’m overstepping the line a bit, in defining the importance of these characteristics. The basic nature of a videogame lies in the causal relationship between the player and the gameworld; the basic potential lies in the narrative ability of that causal relationship (what it means for the player to act, given the established boundaries of the gameworld). The natural mode of player action is to explore those rules and challenge them. I suppose it doesn’t follow that the player need subvert a status quo as-such; it’s just, this is a good way to illustrate that mode of player interaction and its narrative and emotional potential.

The player should feel free; that he is at all times in control over his immedate decisionmaking, and that through his decisions he is just perhaps blazing into unknown territory, doing something nobody else has done, having a unique and visceral personal experience that’s entirely generated by his own free will. Half-Life 2 is great at making the player feel clever and subversive for doing exactly what the game is expecting.

I think it’s a misdiagnosis of this quality that has led to this sandbox nonsense (most recently reined in and made less inane by Dead Rising), and sense that players want “freedom” in their games.

…

I’ll get back to this. Will post what I’ve got now.

A Cosmetic Conundrum

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part seven of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under a different title; something like “The Problem With Game Consoles”. People seemed to take this article more seriously than I intended.

In May I finally saw a PlayStation 3 up-close – and dear lord. Whereas the Xbox 360 at least puts on a pretense of tenability, sucking in its gut like a real man, Sony’s system sets a new standard for girth. Maybe it was the rotating display, walled behind likely-bulletproof Plexiglass – yet I swear it must be the most outrageously massive game console that’s ever been designed. And that’s on top of looking like a space ship based on the template of a waffle iron. Whereas the Sega Genesis looked like you could top-load a CD into it, the PS3 looks like you could top-load a side of bacon.

The Crying Game

  • Reading time:14 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part six of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation under the title “Can Videogames Make You Cry?”.

A few weeks ago, Bowen Research published the results of a survey, on the role of emotion in videogames. Hugh Bowen polled 535 gamers on their own views and history, with the end goal to rough some kind of an objective analysis out of their subjective experiences, and thereby maybe to shed some light on what emotional effect videogames have had in the past. The paper is well, and humbly, written; its conclusions, though, are less than revelatory: the only genre that tends to elicit reasonably complex emotion is RPGs (presumably Japanese ones), while other genres all inspire at least some basic kind of motivational urge in the player – be it rage or fear or what have you. Meanwhile, the paper is full of comments about Aeris, and the profound affect of her death on people who had never played Phantasy Star II.

The problem, I suppose, is in the question being asked: “Can videogames make you cry?”. It’s a binary question about a complex issue, much like asking whether Americans are happy and then concluding “sometimes!” And indeed, Bowen’s answer seems to be “well, yes… probably. In theory.” A second issue is the way Bowen approached the issue as a matter of statistics – and then based his analysis on the subjective responses of a skewed sample. “Gamers”, as with any obsessives, have by nature a peculiar perspective of their medium – a medium which, furthermore, is not yet refined as an expressive platform.

The question should not be whether videogames are capable of eliciting complex emotion – as, given the complex analog weave of our brains, anything can result in an emotional response of any depth and sophistication. Rather, what Bowen might have asked is how innately bound any emotion is to the current fabric of videogames (that is, whether it has anything to do with what the medium is trying to accomplish), how much emotional potential videogames might ideally hold, and – assuming some degree of innate potential – how best to insinuate emotion into the framework or theory of a videogame. Or rather perhaps, how best to cull emotion from that same framework.

The Nintendo Syndrome

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part two of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

So Nintendo’s at the top of its game again – or near enough to clap, anyway. The DS is one of the bigger success stories in recent hardware history. People are starting to buy into the Wii hype; even Sony and Microsoft’s chiefs have gone on record with how the system impresses them. Japan is mincing no words; 73% of Famitsu readers polled expect the Wii to “win” the next “console war”, whatever that means. And these people aren’t even Nintendo’s target audience.

Satoru Iwata has done a swell job, the last couple of years, taking a company that was coasting on past success, whose reputation had devolved to schoolyard snickers – that even posted a loss for the first time in its century-plus history – and making it both vital and trendy again.

So what happened to Nintendo, anyway? How is it that gaming’s superstar was such a dud, for so many years? What’s the white elephant in the room, that everyone has taken such pains to rationalize? It is, of course, the same man credited for most of Nintendo’s success: Shigeru Miyamoto.

NextGen’s Top Ten Years In Gaming History

  • Reading time:30 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published in some form by Next Generation. I was asked not to include 1999 or 2000, because the Dreamcast was perceived as a low mark in the industry rather than a high one. I was also asked to include the previous year, to suggest that we were in the middle of an upswing. So… that explains some of the selections.

In videogames, as in life, we tend to get things right about a third of the time. There’s one decent Sonic game for every two disasters; one out of every three consoles can be considered an unqualified success; the Game Boy remake of Mother 1 + 2 was released in one out of three major territories. With the same level of scientific accuracy, one can easily say that, out of the thirty years that videogames have acted as a consumer product, there are maybe ten really excellent milestones, spaced out by your 1984s and your 1994s – years maybe we were all better off doing something out-of-doors.

It kind of makes sense, intuitively: you’ve got the new-hardware years and the innovative-software years, spaced out by years of futzing around with the new hardware introduced a few months back, or copying that amazing new game that was released last summer. We grow enthusiastic, we get bored. Just as we’re about to write off videogames forever, we get slapped in the face with a Wii, or a Sega Genesis – and then the magic starts up all over again, allowing us to coast until the next checkpoint.

This Week’s Releases (May 15-19, 2006)

  • Reading time:5 mins read

by [name redacted]

Episode forty of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Game of the Week:

New Super Mario Bros.
Nintendo
Nintendo DS
Monday

Out of all the pre-release devisiveness, in my experience New SMB takes the ribbon. Every time the game’s brought up, the Internet melts just a little. There’s no pleasing anybody! Maybe that has something to do with the game’s own conflicts: it wants to both revisit the style of Super Marios 1 and 3 for the NES and to “update” it with all the advances since Super Mario World. It wants to both play on nostalgia and to attract all the new and disillusioned eyes who have gravitated toward the DS. It wants to both be the successor to the Super Mario Bros. mantle and to come off as something altogether new.

So what we’ve got is a forward-pressing 2D platformer (as with the NES games) that calls upon the moves introduced in Super Mario 64 to help Mario more precisely explore a 3D world, flashy gimmicks introduced in Smash Bros. as a kind of a joke, and a whole lot of silly scripted events and mechanic-wanking intended to impress the pants off of anyone who thinks he knows how Super Mario Bros. works. And yet, it’s kind of fun. Maybe it’s a little too concerned with the past instead of with doing its own thing – and maybe it’s too concerned with making the past appealing to people who weren’t there at the time – yet maybe the gamers are a little too concerned about Mario.

In its overkill, its mix of old and new, the game clearly isn’t taking itself very seriously. The game gives off an air of exuberance; it knows it’s just screwing around, and it doesn’t care. Within those constraints, New SMB is pretty neat. The past has had its time; if you’re going to bring it up again, you’d better either take it somewhere new and inspirational or have shameless fun with what’s there. Ikaruga and Jonathan Blow’s Braid do the former; New SMB does the latter. Fair enough.