Vintage Values

This week I spotted a tweet from Keith Stuart, the Guardian's gaming correspondent (@keefstuart). He'd bought an NTSC copy of the near mythical Snatcher on PC Engine. Despite not actually owning a PC Engine. Long story short, he replied to a tweet of mine about me looking for Snatcher on Mega CD saying that he was too, along with Sonic CD, which is fetching silly money. 

This surprised me, because I own a copy of Sonic CD, having picked it up from the bottom of a bargain bucket full of unloved games for unloved consoles for about four quid sometime around 1995, so I never expected it to be all that expensive. Yet somehow in the intervening years prices for it have shot up, so much so that a used copy of a twenty year old game costs almost as much as what it did when it was new. The first hit from a cursory search of eBay has it going at £37.00, with a sealed copy going for a whopping £499! This is madness! First of all, why are there any sealed copies of a game that old even in existence, especially a game as good as Sonic CD, and second, £499! Sonic CD isn't even all that rare, is it? What kind of insane nerd would pay that out that sort of money for a game?

Wait a minute, that would be me. I spotted Mickey Mania on eBay afterwards and the thought genuinely did cross my mind. Mickey Mania is a title I've wanted for years. I somehow had a demo of it and it was so far superior to the Megadrive version that it became a case of the Mega CD version or nothing. Unfortunately by that point, Mega CD games were already getting pretty hard to find, so I wound up not getting it. Now I've seen it on eBay though, I've wound up valuing titles already in my Mega CD collection, just for the kicks. They're mainly titles that I'd thought were pretty insignificant in the history of gaming, yet would never get rid of because they are some of the first I ever bought with my own money. 

So let's look at them. I searched Mega CD in ebay and arranged by highest price first so that I could pick out titles in similar condition to my own, ie, immaculate. After the initial shock of the £999 copy of Final Fight (which I don't have) the first find was Keio Flying Squadron. Would you like a copy? Why that would be a minimum £50 my good man, unless you want a sealed copy, then it would be £494.99. Paws of Fury, yours for the bargain price of £44.99. Battlecorps, £20, or you can have it sealed for £42.99. Ground Zero, frankly awful, yet a great investment, I picked it up when I didn't know better for a fiver in '95, today it's £35. Pugsy is going for £34.99, Microcosm, £18.99. Shockingly, even Road Avenger, Tomcat Alley, Thunderhawk and the Sol Feace/Cobra Command double Pack are going for a tenner each, and they're as common as a very common thing. Then there is Pitfall, which I couldn't find on eBay. I should hope so too, I spent eight years tracking a copy down. Perhaps it's a title so rare that I could name my price, but probably not. I've taken to Twitter to see what the retro gaming community I seem to have fallen in with thinks. 

Still, my collection of bad to middling Mega CD games is somehow worth a fortune and with the notable exception of Sonic CD, which is rightly considered a classic and one of the best in the series, I have no idea why. I mean it's not as if your life is going to be enriched by playing Ground Zero. It's wank. Really, it is. Great though I believe Thunderhawk to be, it's by no means a classic and although Paws of Fury is beautifully animated and a lot of fun, it's not a title that would ascend to the pantheon of fighting game greats. Also despite what I said earlier, after seeing these insane values and thinking about them like a rational adult, I've really been turned off trying to find the games I wanted so badly all those years ago and couldn't get hold of. They're all titles that are sort of considered in some circles to be their definitive versions. Titles like Flashback, which seems to be impossible to find anyway, Final Fight, Earthworm Jim, the Ecco games, Mickey Mania, Eternal Champions or even Shining Force CD. Really, I'd given up hope of owning Snatcher or Shining Force CD years ago, they're rarer and harder to find than traditionally mined, naturally sourced, billion year old Sea of Tranquility Moon Cheese after all, but somehow even Mickey Mania costs three figures now, and it's just a platformer whose defining features were a trip through the titular character's greatest hits and the level where Mickey gets chased by a moose. I could get it on PS1 for one figure. But I don't want to, I want it on the Mega CD because I had a demo of it, and that's probably why the values on games like this are so high.

Despite all the ranting, now that I'm starting to come to terms with the shock that other people besides me like the Mega CD, I now want to value my N64 collection. There's a boxed copy of Conker's Bad Fur Day in there, and it's in great condition. Like the Mega CD, I bought most my games cheap on the second hand market after the N64 became a defunct console. And that was mainly because I couldn't afford a PS2 but needed new games to play. It's quite likely that their individual values have appreciated greatly. I could be sitting on a fortune. While I'm at it, I might as well check out my stack of PS1 games too. There's a few esoteric titles in there that might be worth a bit as well. Sometimes I even wonder how much my Atari 800xl cassettes would be worth if I still had them. Really though, there's no point, because knowing the value of my retro games collections isn't going to matter a tiny bit. I'm not going to be selling any of my old games anytime soon. Perhaps I'm being irrational here, but they have a far greater sentimental value. They're like a record of my childhood almost, although that notion is perhaps no more irrational than the way some retro titles are valued on eBay.

Nostalgia it seems, is now worth an irrational amount of money.

An Experiment

Today I booked the date for my christmas present, a day at the Ron Haslam Race School. Basically the idea is that I get a day at Donnington Park riding race prepped motorcycles while being tutored by a riding great. For a car analogy, it's like being taught to drive by Damon Hill. I'm pretty nervous already, and the event itself is a good 21 days away yet. Although I own a pretty fast bike I've never ridden a race prepped machine before, let alone been on track.

This presents a fantastic opportunity. I've always been a bike fan, and I own a copy of SBK X on my 360. It's the official game of the World Superbike Championship, Donnington Park is on the championship calendar and therefore, in the game. So I'm going to use it to see if I can learn the track in the game, hopefully then, when I get there in real life I'll know which way it goes when I'm there in real life.

Now obviously there are a few caveats to this. The main one being that riding a sports bike is a full body experience, and how comfortable you are at speed is based on how positive the feeling is that you get from the bike. You feel the road in your hands from the bars, the bike will try and launch away from you under acceleration and throw you forward on the brakes. If you're good you'll be touching your knee down in the corners, if you're amazing you'll be dragging an elbow as well. There's nothing strapping you on, so you just have to hang on as hard as you can. No matter how good the physics of the game are, there is no way to replicate that. Another big issue will be that I will be much slower in real life than I am in the game, so braking points will be totally different. My real life abilities won't let me brake anywhere near as late as I'll be able to in-game. Thankfully though, turn in points and lines through the corners should be pretty similar, which will be helpful.

So I'm going to experiment. Half an hour a night learning to ride Donnington Park in SBK X and then we find out if being half decent at a track in a video game can be any help when you go there in real life.

If I survive, I'll report back with my findings!

How to end the curse of Bad Game Movies

Despite the (perhaps contentious) exceptions of Prince of Persia and the first Silent Hill, it has become an accepted truth that movies of games are universally awful. You only need to clap eyes on the litany of failed adaptions to see that this is true. Illustrious names like Super Mario Bros, Doom, Max Payne, Final Fantasy, Hitman, Resident Evil, the entire output of the director Uwe Boll. All movies based on great games, all varying in quality from bad (Resident Evil), to so awful that the world is a slightly worse place due to their existence (the entire output of the director Uwe Boll).

I've come to realise it doesn't have to be this way. The way I got to this point is long and winding, a bit like the plot of the literary adaption that helped form this theory. But bear with me.

The Lord of the Rings. Three films. 654 minutes. Coming up to 11 hours. Far. Too. Damn. Long. For a film at least. I've famously bitched about this in real life many times before. There is way too much content in The Lord of the Rings novels to squeeze into three films with acceptable runtimes. It is however, the perfect runtime for a TV series. I only realised this after watching through the Death Note box set. It's a literary adaption that really benefits from the long form of a TV series. Now I'm not saying LotR would make for a good TV series, but HBO's recent mega budget adaption of Game of Thrones, which I've moved on to post Death Note, shows that a really sizable story can be successfully adapted to the small screen.

In separate, yet related events, a recent pub conversation quickly degenerated into the cartoons we watched as kids. Unconditional love and praise was lavished upon the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Earthworm Jim. There were also fond memories of the Super Mario World and Legend of Zelda cartoons that showed in the half term holidays while we were at school. Something along the lines of, "If they could get it right with these, why can't Hollywood get videogame movies right?" was said. There was some metaphorical beard stroking, then we shut up and got more beers in.

Whilst I was nursing the inevitable hangover, I had an epiphany.

This is where Hollywood has been going wrong with games. They're making movies. Think about it. A decent game is typically over ten hours long. If it's well written, the story will be designed to fit into that runtime. Far too much content to squeeze into a movie of respectable length. Videogame movies typically fail on story, either by compressing a story so much as to miss some of the key beats or by adapting a title with a plot so sparse that there's little in the way of structure holding the movie together. A long form adaption, such as a high budget TV series in the vein of Band of Brothers or Game of Thrones, or a miniseries such as the well received Dune would be the way to go.

So first of all the game you choose to adapt needs an exemplary story. Anything less won't work. A lot of game movies fall at the first hurdle with this. The story of the game is too sparse, so the script writers Make Shit Up to fill in the gaps, which inevitably ends in a disjointed film. Second, you need the original writer of the game in question on board. Part of the reason Game of Thrones works so well is because George RR Martin is involved in the production. It helps keep the adaption faithful to the novels, to realise the setting and makes sure that any changes in the story fit smoothly. Changes to certain in game events will be necessary to make a game's plot flow properly in a non interactive medium.

Let's take Spec Ops: The line as our hypothetical video game TV adaption. The following paragraph is highly idealised and probably in no way similar to the way a major TV production is brought about. But for the sake of this little thought experiment, let's say it is. By some miracle HBO have optioned the game for a series. They've given it a substantial budget, have the original writer on board and the production team behind a notable Iraqi war film. For the sake of example, let's use The Hurt Locker. The production team like the themes the game presents and want to remain as faithful as they can to the story of the game, but need to cut some of the many firefights to maintain the flow of the episode. However, cutting the firefights down to the major setpiece battles shortens the runtime of the final product, so that it doesn't fill it's projected ten episode run. So we need extra story, and here's where having the original author on board is important. Where a screenwriter coming from outside the original story would firmly be in Make Shit Up territory at this point, the original author would probably not be, having already made his shit up months or years in advance. He likely has some material cut from the game that elaborates on the motivations of the trio of factions that are battling in post apocalypse Dubai. So in place of the cut firefights, we now get scenes with the CIA working up the remaining civilian population and the private reaction of the Radioman to the carnage being caused all around him. The story is fleshed out, the situation for its protagonists gets even more FUBAR, the target runtime is reached and it hopefully knits together seamlessly because all of the additions have come from the mind of the person who conceived the story to begin with. All that remains is to film it. The production team decide to merge the formula of the seminal Band of Brothers with that of their own desert war movie and we have a series that might just work.

It's not a sure fire way to end the curse of the Bad Videogame Adaption, but it's perhaps the most feasible. And think of the possibilities it could unlock. Ponder for a moment, the potential of a series based on Mass Effect. While the intricacies of the choice based branching plot would have to be hammered out, it could still be the first worthwhile space opera on TV since Firefly was cancelled. Of course, if you like your sci-fi a bit nastier, there's always Dead Space, with it's dense unitology backstory and its clever combination of the aesthetics of The Thing and Aliens.

Or how about an adaption of Sly Cooper. The game itself is basically Hustle with animals. A hand animated series where each episode is a heist tied together by an overarching plot would work beautifully. It's got it all. Daring stunts, outlandish baddies, high tech gadgets, a great buddy dynamic, and the simmering attraction between Carmelita Fox and Sly. Stir in a splash of James Bond glamour and sprinkle liberally with the stolen essence of Aardman's ability to appeal to both adults and children and you have a surefire hit on your hands.

Bioshock could work nicely in both movie or TV format, depending on whether you wanted to film the first game, or the novel and both games. It would be expensive to implement and would need a bit of reworking but would be entirely worth it. On the surface, Bioshock is basically one man rampaging through a crumbling undersea city, listening to a voice on the radio, shooting the mad inhabitants and picking up audio logs. Not a very interesting concept for a TV show. Jack is a non character that only exists for the player to interact with the world, it's the story around him that makes Rapture so compelling a place to inhabit. So we make the story the focus. Instead of focussing on Jack, focus on the characters and the events that brought him to Rapture in the first place. Film the audio logs. Use an ensemble cast. Weave the resulting scenes together into a Pulp Fiction style tapestry bookended by Jack's arrival and departure from Rapture. Intersperse the tapestry with flashes of Jack being directed through Rapture by whoever has latched onto him at that segment of the story, Atlas, Ryan, whoever. It would be a difficult, yet absorbing picture, that would not only need the hand of Ken Levine, who recently killed a Bioshock movie project, but also a skilled and deft director to make sure the whole thing doesn't fall apart under the weight of its own ambition.

Hollywood execs rightly see the videogame world as ripe for movie adaptions, it's just a shame that most of the time they're the wrong people looking at them. TV execs that should be approaching the major game studios as well. In addition to this, the studios need to make sure that they retain creative control of the property being adapted, so that the vision of the original game isn't compromised by the transition to celluloid. This is something Ubisoft have already learned. They are about to make their first foray into feature film with Assassin's Creed, in which Michael Fassbender is rumoured to be starring. If I can see what needs to be done, then it really can't be that hard, can it?

Assassins Creed is another title I think would work better as TV series, given the scale of it's vision. But hopefully the powerhouse that is Ubisoft can end the curse of the Bad Game Movie and produce a good film. All the ingredients are there, and if they can't, then there's really no hope of ending the curse at all is there?

Days of future past.

I've been neglecting the blog. And it's the fault of Persona 4.

Somehow, a PS2 game has really got it's claws into me. Living a life as a Japanese high schooler, only with less work and more climbing into TVs, has been so compelling that I've completely ignored both Max Payne 3 and Tekken Tag 2, a pair of titles that I've been really excited about finally getting my paws upon. In fact, the only time I've turned my 360 on in the past two weeks was to finally finish Braid last night.

I have, however, been ruminating on whether or not I want a Playstation 4. At the moment, the answer is not until I've seen more games. The signs are good though. Chief among which is the appointment of Mark Cerny as the system architect. What this man does not know about making games is probably not worth knowing. He was a producer on the seminal Sonic 2 and has been a design consultant on pretty much the entire output of both Naughty Dog and Insomniac games. It shows Sony's commitment to making the PS4 a console led by developers rather than engineers.

The PS3 has a reputation of being a bit of an animal to work with, mainly because of it's arcane proprietary architecture. It's exclusives show that when a developer can get to grips with it, the PS3 is still capable of some really amazing stuff, take The Last of Us as a perfect example. However, for me personally, the simple fact of the matter is that the 360 is a better games machine. Multiplatform games, particularly Unreal Engine based games tend to run better on the 360. Couple that with a superior online storefront and the ease of getting a game going and unfortunately for the lifelong Playstation fans, and I count myself as one, the 360 wins out.

Getting into the games on the PS3 is a headache. When I started Resistance 2 I had to wait half an hour for the console to update, another half an hour for a patch to download and install and then just to really rub it in, I had to wait for the game to install as well. While the 360 does all of this, console updates are infrequent, patches never take more than a few minutes and installs are optional. The barrier of entry is lower.

Anyway, enough of the rant, because thankfully it looks like Sony have spotted the problem and are fixing it. The PS4 is always on, always connected, and will download updates and patches in the background as you play. Hooray! Lay on some clever social features such as auto downloads of demos for games you may be interested in and a feature which looks to crib from Windows remote assistance and the PS4 looks set to fix the patching and online bugbears of the PS3. It makes the whole shebang look more attractive to me as a result. Having trouble with that boss? No worries! Hit up a mate and let him or her take over to show you how it's done. Best of all is the mooted streaming tech. No more waiting for that game to download, now you can play it as soon as you hit buy.

Unfortunately the games are the sticking point at the moment. With the exception of Jonathan Blow's latest and Watch Dogs, I'm not seeing a lot new. It basically boils down to more Killzone, more Battlefield, more Assassin's Creed (as much as I do love it), and more Infamous. Sequels basically. Although saying that, the recently announced Thief does look interesting as does Drive Club, but it doesn't really feel next-gen. On a brighter note, there are heartening rumblings that Sony will be embracing the indies, which is fantastic. Some of the best and most imaginative games of recent years have been independently developed, and if Sony really gets on side with the indie studios, helping with discoverability and marketing, we could possibly see something of an indie golden age during the next console generation.

There has been a bit of bitching about the lack of native backwards compatibility, but the fact of the matter is that the architecture of the PS3 and PS4 is so divergent that Sony would have to add a cell chip into the PS4 hardware to make such a thing happen. Anyway, what's wrong with keeping your old consoles? I still have all of mine, I'll be building a shelving set to house them all soon. It's a bit of a bummer that all your PSN titles won't carry over. Maybe Sony can rig up a work around with their new streaming tech. We'll probably have to pay for the privilege, but it'd be worth it to be able to keep playing Journey.

So in conclusion, the prospects are exciting, but really it's all about the games. If the new hardware can fire up the creativity of the developers, then the PS4 will definitely have my attention. I'm interested to see not only what all the extra horsepower can facilitate in terms of new gameplay mechanics, but also if the new Move enabled DualShock with it's touchpad will be less of a useless gimmick than sixaxis turned out to be. It's supposed to be due for Christmas. Watching the PS4 hype machine for next few months is going to be entertaining.

There has been another console announced recently that you may not have heard of. It'll blow the minds of all you retro gamers out there. It's called the RetroN4, and unbelievably, it plays your vintage games through HDMI on your snazzy new HDTV. Does that not sound amazing? As far as I understand it plays both PAL and NTSC NES, SNES, GBA and megadrive cartridges. It packs six controller ports, two for each console, with the SNES pads probably doubling for the GBA. So you now have no excuse to be ignoring those carts gathering dust in the depths of your games collection. It's definitely no looker and I have no idea how it actually works. I'm guessing hardware emulation. And if that's true then I'm hoping it has 2X SaI filtering. It magically polishes up the look of your old games to match your rose tinted memory of them.

I'm wondering how much of a legal grey area it is. We know that the major games companies, Nintendo especially, HATE emulation when it's not them doing it. This is because downloading a rom is piracy, even if the title has been out of general circulation for years and the company that made it isn't making money from it. Will emulating a console using genuine cartridges change that? I was expecting Ouya to become a hotbed of homebrew fullscreen vintage console emulation due to its open source nature, but the RetroN4 sounds slightly less likely to land you in any hot water with the law. Besides, you know it'd be way cooler to be playing your old games on their original carts with genuine control pads than with roms on the generic Ouya pad. Google the RetroN4 and tell me you don't want one.