The Return of Point & Click

I am on a Point & Click bender.

When I think about it, it all started last year when I finally managed to play Discworld Noir. I originally started it as a sort of project in Discworld completionism. It's one of the only Discworld stories not covered in one of the novels, so I was playing it for that, rather than to sate a need for point & click gameplay. So imagine my surprise when I found myself not just enjoying the story (which was pretty much a given) but also the game itself as well.

Yes, the game is archaic, and on the PS1 at least, adorably low resolution and crashy, but it's also well written, well acted and truly brain testing. I'm not ashamed to admit I used a walkthrough in places. Once I had finished it, fond memories of the Broken Sword series, the only other Point & Click adventures I've played, began to surface. I waxed lyrical about them for a while and then moved on to the next game.

Those memories probably would have stayed just that if it hadn't been for the remastering and rerelease of Grim Fandango. A game many consider to be Tim Schafer's magnum opus that was sadly overlooked, and until now, practically unplayable on modern hardware. It's a game I've been curious about since I first played Psychonauts way back when it was first released. So when I spotted Grim on sale on the PlayStation Store I bought it. Then shamefully, I didn't play it. Disgraceful.

My redemption arrived in the form of Broken Age on PlayStation Plus. Another one of those games that I was curious about but never played. Mostly in this case because of an old laptop that was incapable of playing it. And now here it was for (sort of) free for my  console. I started it straight away, then didn't really touch another game til I'd finished it. I enjoyed it that much. Broken Age is charming, funny, pretty, well written, well voiced and everything you expect a good game to be. But it also harked back to the brain bending old days of Point & Click that I'd experienced with Discworld and Broken Sword and I liked it for that too.

The floodgates opened when the Steam Sale arrived. Armed with a new and moderately powered laptop, I wound up buying Machinarium and Broken Sword 4 & 5. I've spent the best part of the last week playing Broken Sword 4, and whilst it's ropey and doesn't really work too well on modern hardware I'm still happy with the time I spent with it. It kind of ended abruptly, but the story was still better than 99% of what other games have to offer. And if I'm being honest, the stories are what are attracting me to these games. Plus it's Broken Sword! Few genres can tell a story as well as Point & Click can and the Broken Sword games are shining examples of that. I went straight into Broken Sword 5 as soon as I finished it.

I use the word gorgeous to describe games a lot, but Broken Sword 5 is the real deal. After two games of industry trend dictated (and pretty rubbish if we're honest) polygons, Revolution Software have gone back to glorious hand drawn 2D roots. Every single background is a work of art comparable to any cel animated film. The advent of high definition has really bought 2D back. The high resolutions let highly detailed and colourful backdrops burst from the screen. Games like Broken Sword 5, Ori and Dean Dodrill's excellent Dust really make me think that we're in a new golden age of 2D at the moment.

I finished it yesterday, and I can safely say that Broken Sword 5 is every inch a proper Broken Sword game. I particularly love it's very English sense of humour and the callbacks to the rest of the series. Once I've finished it, I plan to give my mouse hand a rest so that I can finish the bundle of papery joy that is Tearaway, and then I'll finally get started on Grim Fandango. And after that: Machinarium.

The pointing and the clicking won't stop there though. PSPlus has given me Kings Quest to have a crack at, and I've added Monkey Islands 1 & 2 to my steam wishlist. Then there's the remasters of Full Throttle and the seminal Day of the Tentacle on the horizon too.

What a time to get back into the genre,

The neglect, oh dear lord the neglect.

Play it again, Samael...

It’s been a long time, and it’s been so because of the relative dearth of pretty much anything interesting enough to write about as far as gaming is concerned.

“But what about Destiny?” I hear you ask.

Destiny. A bajillion dollar combination of multiplayer FPS, Diablo and marketing blitz that has, unsurprisingly, not lived up to the hype. No thanks. If you love it, then that’s totally okay and I won’t look down upon you for it. But it’s not for me. I’ve been turned off multiplayer shooting for years now, and I’ve never been taken in by loot grabbing dungeon crawlers.

That said, whilst I wasn’t blogging, I did spend sixty-odd hours inside Dark Souls, which you might point out, is a loot grabbing dungeon crawler. And I’d be wrong to disagree with you. But it’s often so much more than that, and that’s what makes it so compelling. Most importantly for me, it’s not a ‘click on the monsters until they disappear’ dungeon crawler in the vein of Diablo.  The superb combat system, combined with the immense challenge, generally forlorn atmosphere and the fact that it’s often  genuinely beautiful means it all adds up to something so much greater than the sum of its parts. And that was what surprised me about it. I gave it a try because it was incredibly cheap and wound up finding one of my new favourite games.

So, I’ve still being gaming, but for the most part I’ve been delving into the collection rather than buying new games, and if I’ve not been gaming I’ve been spending hours with Rocksmith, and I don’t think it’s worth blogging about how bad at guitar I am.

The Year of Zelda is still a thing. I managed to finish Spirit Tracks, even though it was so endearing I didn’t want it to end. The best part about the whole game was being able to blow the whistle on the train any time I wanted. I know that’s a really juvenile thing to say, but every time I pulled on that rope in the corner of the screen, my inner seven year old did a tiny muppet flail. What struck me about the DS Zelda games was that they are Proper Zelda Games, that haven’t been dumbed down just because they’re on a portable with a generally young userbase. The same level of love and attention has gone into them as a full sized console title. Case in point, in Spirit Tracks, the overworld music is tied to the beat of the train. So the faster you go, the quicker the beat of the song. Attention to a tiny detail like that can really anchor you to a game’s world. Other devs take note…

I went straight from Spirit Tracks to my newly returned copy of Minish Cap. There was a certain amount of surprise when I found that not only did my old GBA SP still work, but that my Minish Cap save was still there from the first time I attempted to finish it. I’d expected one or the other to be dead. I was a bit shocked to find that you need to use an adapter to use headphones with an SP though, which kind of put a dampener on things. Still, Minish Cap turned out to be excellent, with an old-school world map that looped and twisted upon itself, while gradually revealing its secrets with continued play. It put me in the mind of a top down Metroid. Add that to classic Zelda gameplay and some stunning 2D art and you have a game that is more than worthy of both your time and the Zelda name.

Ocarina of Time, the big kahuna, was supposed to be next. But I discovered that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing and found myself all Zelda-ed out. So, to tide me over til the release of Trials Fusion, I moved on to Jak and Daxter, generously given to me by a friend. We all know how good a game it is, so I won’t gush too much about it here, but I will say with the exception of a sometimes dodgy camera, Jak and Daxter has aged beautifully and I don’t understand why I’d never played it sooner.

Trials Fusion loomed on the horizon just as events in Jak and Daxter came to an end, and I downloaded it as soon as funds allowed. If you know me, you will know I’m an absolute sucker for anything with the Trials name attached to it. Sadly, Fusion turned out to be a little disappointing. More Trials is undeniably a Good Thing, and Fusion is a very good game, but it doesn’t reach the heights of Trials HD and Trials Evolution. And the reason for that is that basically, it’s just too easy. The barrier to entry has been lowered, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And if it means that more people will experience one of the most satisfying games out there then I’m all for that. The problem is the difficulty curve has been massaged to such an extent that it doesn’t offer any challenge to players with experience from the other games in the series.  It took me months to get all golds in Trials Evolution. I’d achieved the same in Fusion within two weeks, with the odd platinum thrown in for good measure. I won’t say that Ubi buying Redlynx has ruined the series, because it hasn’t, but the lowering of the difficulty has pretty much stymied its replay value.  I haven’t been back to Trials Fusion anywhere near as often as I have to Evolution. Bit of a shame really.

At a loss for what to play, I stood back and looked at the collection, going down and down until I found something that jumped out. Eventually my eyes fell upon Discworld Noir. A game that I have blogged about in the past about finding, and one that for some reason had never started. Still, no time like the present, right?  After digging out an RGB scart cable and hooking up my PS2, I found myself looking for the non-existent PS button on the controller to fire it up, which was a bit embarrassing. Still, once I’d worked out how to switch the thing on, I was greeted with what, despite its great age, might be one of the best written, and thanks mostly to the immense talents of Rob Brydon, best voiced games I’ve ever played. Sure, the game itself looks endearingly rubbish, is buggy and i so low-res that you could count the pixels, but it feels like playing a lost Discworld Novel. I loved every moment of it, and if you’re a Discworld Fan, you owe it to yourself to play Discworld Noir. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

A stint with the utterly sublime Sly Cooper followed while I tried for some reason to put off going back to Zelda. The vintage Warner Brothers cartoon does Ocean’s Eleven styling still looks great and the game itself provided ample distraction from the fact that I should have really been playing Ocarina of Time. Thankfully, during that time, I finally got my GameCube back from my sister and with it, my proper copies of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, none of that HD remake or waggly Wii port nonsense for me. With that, there was no excuse. I had to start Ocarina of time. I hooked up the N64 using my GameCube composite lead (yes I know I should have an RGB conversion, but anything is better than a co-ax cable) and dived in.

Now I’m dreading going to the Water Temple, but loving every minute of the time I’m spending in Hyrule. Yes, the save system is Mesolithic, but while I’m surrounded by chunky 90’s polygons, muddy N64 textures and sound so lo-fi its almost cute and I find myself thinking that sometimes, this is all I need. So what if new games aren’t interesting at the moment. I have a massive back catalogue that’s full of good stuff. I don’t need a new gen console yet, and as it turns out, there are plenty of interesting games. They’re just not new ones.

Retracing Steps

I've been away a while. You know how it is, too much to do, not enough life to do it in. Mostly though it's because of Persona 4 and Spec Ops: The line. This post was supposed to be about Spec Ops, but over the weekend Edge Magazine ran an article on Yoshi's Island, and I was really impressed by how well the overall look of the game had aged.

Have you played anything old recently? Did it look like total ass? Probably. But then again, maybe not? You might be lucky enough to have played something that inexplicably looked great even though it was made before some of the people you know were even born.

That really does happen to people. You don’t realise how old things are sometimes. My girlfriend recently had to explain what a floppy disc was to the kids she was teaching. Really. My sister didn’t know you could play both sides of a vinyl.

But I digress.

If old games look good, they look good for two reasons.

1: Absolutely sky high, top notch, incredible art design.

2: The ability of the artists to translate that into polygons or pixels.

Take Ridge Racer Type 4 as an example. It arrived late in the PS1’s life and Namco had really got their Ridge Racer mojo. Hell, even the intro movie looks great and it was made in in the last century! Ridge 4 is bursting with personality, from the Pooka trackside on Phantomile, to the Cessna buzzing overhead on Wonderhill. Each locale is lovingly crafted, yet clear and clean. Grab a screenshot and you can see the attention that went into every single inch of every single track. There are blazing orange sunsets, taxiing aircraft and bright blue seas. There is something like Chinatown, cobbles and winding mountain tarmac. Ridge Racer has always felt like a great place to drive in, but Ridge 4 is unmatched, before or since. 

Really though, the thing that still makes Ridge 4 pop is the cars. Almost every one of them beautiful to behold, with great race liveries, despite the low resolution. Watching them blazing through the night trailing red streaks from the tail-lights is still a joy to behold. Gran Turismo had real cars, but Ridge 4’s were desirable. To this day, I want an Assoluto Bisonte, and if I ever become a millionaire I’m going to approach Namco for the models and find a way to build one on top of a Ferrari chassis. All the supercar houses in all of Europe never made a car as beautiful as the best that Ridge 4 could offer. 

Another great example from the Playstation era is WipeOut. Play any WipeOut game released before WipeOut HD and you'll be surprised by how fresh and clean they still look. A lot of this is down to the peerless concept work of The Designer's Republic, whose sleek, clean and bold vision of the future of racing seemed to jump fully formed into the hands of Psygnosis all those years ago.

Art quality is crucial to how well newer games age. If you check out most last gen games with realistic graphic design, they will look pretty bad to your modern High Dynamic Range Lighting addled eyes. I remember the first Max Payne blowing my socks off, but returning to it now, it's not so pretty. On the other hand, games with a really stylised look fare better. Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, Sly Raccoon, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus may not outshine more modern games, but I've never said, "Ugh, this looks awful," whilst playing them. In the future, it will be games like Braid, Alien Hominid, Limbo and the flat out gorgeous Bastion that will have us commenting about how well they have aged.

The same holds true to 16-Bit too. Mortal Kombat has looks pretty bad next to contemporaries such as Street Fighter II or the fabulously obscure but tons of fun Brutal: Paws of Fury. Compare MK's digitized sprites to the fluid animation of Brutal's silhouetted character select screen and there's no competition.Yoshi's Island's crayon aesthetic means it still looks as charming now as it ever did, whereas the SNES' other SuperFX fueled graphical powerhouses frankly don't. 

I could go on and on with games like Flashback, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Wind Waker, Alundra, Final Fantasy, E.G.G and Sonic. In the end it always comes back to the art. Good art, it seems, is timeless and without borders. Just as the art connoisseur can appreciate the works of the old masters in the gallery, the gamer can find good graphics no matter what the age of the system he or she is playing on.

All this makes me sound like a graphics whore, and you know what, I am. I'm not afraid to admit it. And while there are a lot of great games with badly aged graphics (here's looking at you GoldenEye), there's a pretty strong correlation between games looking nice and playing nice. Besides, everybody likes to look at something pretty, and it can be a great way to get people to look at classic games who may not necessarily check them out. The next time someone tells you they don't play old games because they look rubbish, or because they play badly, find a way for them to play Yoshi's Island. If you can't lend them a SNES, find it on the GBA or emulate one. It's easy enough. At the very least, show them a youtube video and get them to guess how old it is. I guarantee you they'll probably get it wrong. Even if they don't, they'll jump on the retro wagon eventually.

Retro gaming is getting a lot of love at the moment. Old, but cool is how it was described in Wreck It Ralph, and that's pretty much on the money. Personally I think it's because there are people old enough now to have been around gaming for as long as they can remember. They're looking back and wanting to recapture the memories with their mates, or in cases like this on Penny Arcade, sharing the past with their children. That's cool in itself, although realising they game you're playing with your young 'un is older than they are can be pretty harrowing experience.

It seems to come to us in different ways. I have a friend who can quote correct eBay prices for rare games off the top of his head, who is consumed with the desire to own every Gamecube game ever. There's me, always late to the party, trying to get hold of something I missed out on first time round or looking out for old stuff that remains easy on the eyes. I recently paid £23 for a thirteen year old copy of Discworld Noir on the PS1, and I'm irrationally excited about it. I've even managed to find room on my memory cards so that I can play it on the TV rather than emulate it on my laptop. I have a feeling that G-Police and Colony Wars will be next on the list. Then there are the hardcore retro heads, like the guys who run 8-Bit Lounge at the Hare and Hounds in Birmingham. That they have access to all this stuff in itself is amazing, but that they are willing to share it all and let you play for free is special. If you haven't heard of them before, check out the site and perhaps show your face at the next event. It's a great show of how inclusive gaming can be, and a side of our hobby that's rarely seen by a mainstream  media that sometimes focuses too much on the negative aspects of games.

We are getting to the point now where gaming has a long enough history to look back upon to appreciate the significant works of the past in the way we do with other media, such as film, music or art. Interest in old games is something I think will continue to flourish as the medium as a whole continues to mature. After all, you've got to know where you've been to find out where you're going. No matter how well, or otherwise, the graphics have aged.