Bioshocked

As you likely saw, there was no blog last week, because I'd done something amazing. I preordered a game to pick up on release day. Specifically I preordered Bioshock Infinite. This is a significant occurrence, it's the first game I've actually gone out and ordered since Final Fantasy VIII, which was also, incidentally, the one time I've ever gone out of my way to get the collectors edition of a game. Anyway, the stars aligned for me on the runup to Bioshock Day. I got some interest on my savings the week before release, and the review on IGN appeared a couple of days after that. The score was amazing so I ordered.

I was slightly thrown by the actual release day. When did games start being released on a Tuesday? I've clearly missed something here. I thought games got released on a Friday so you can ignore all your friends and play all weekend. Not anymore it seems! Nevertheless, it was fortunate that I also had release day off. I played all day, again, something I don't do often. It was wonderful.

If you haven't played it yet, I urge you to do so. Go out in your lunch hour, pick it up tomorrow. It doesn't matter what format you choose. It's beautiful in every possible way. It's light is blinding, it's colours deeply saturated. It animates beautifully. Columbia feels lived in, a world held up by the sheer force of belief of it's inhabitants. The voice acting is stellar. The use of it's licensed music is unique. Elizabeth is utterly, utterly wonderful, the most believable AI companion I've seen since Alyx Vance. She will stir genuine emotions in you. The villains are memorable and the Songbird is terrifyingly powerful. Best of all, the story is fabulously dense, covering a myriad of themes, building to a melon twisting gut punch of an ending. Basically I'm saying if you don't play this, you are missing out on what will probably be the best release of this year and in all likelihood the best game of this console generation.

The first thing I wanted to do when I finished it was start it again.

There's so much buried in Columbia you'll never find everything on your first playthrough unless you use a guide. Do yourself a favour, play it like a real gamer and leave the guide in the shop. Take pleasure in the exploring, the discovery. If you buy a guide, you're basically buying spoilers, the screenshots will steal the
awe from every new area. I will be buying the other companion book however. The Art of Bioshock Infinite, a near 200 page hardcover full of concept art from the game. If you decide to do the same, wait til you finish the game. You don't want spoilers, the game has so much impact when you see it with fresh eyes. (Update: The book arrived today, and it's beautiful, chock full of amazing art. Best of all is the cover under the dust jacket, a shot of Elizabeth and the Songbird embossed in what might just be gold leaf. As you can probably tell, I'm very pleased with it. As a both fan of the game and a book nut, I can honestly say this is an essential purchase.)

So again. Buy Bioshock Infinite! It means Irrational Games will make a ton of money which they can plough into making Ken Levine's next opus. The world needs more games like this, and gaming as a whole needs more men like Ken Levine. He's like a gaming Chris Nolan, somehow making the unapologetically high concept suitable for the mass market. Just as film has it's easily recognisable auteurs, gaming is starting to gain a few of its own too.

Make sure you stay for the credits too, there's a nice little surprise from around the midpoint.

Now go buy it!

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.

Bethesda Blues

My particular corner of the internet is full of coverage on the imaginatively titled PlayStation 4 right now. It's exciting, and I missed all of it. I didn't stay up for the livestream, and a day of office-y stuff means that the only PS4 coverage I've been able to catch has been on my phone while on the bus this morning. So, whilst I digest all the (likely) amazing numbers and graphics, a guest post from a friend of mine, who is possibly a bigger gaming nerd than I am. Think of him as my new resident expert in first person RPGs. A genre I tend to stay away from, because I just don't click with them.

Skyrim. Arguably one of the greatest RPGs on the modern day console. Perhaps equally rivalled in my opinion by Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas. Both of which are supremely competent in delivering a fresh, vibrant atmosphere that really draws you in. One flaw however. That moment where you’ve battled through hordes of enemies, used a considerable amount of arrows/ammo open the door to the final boss/leader of a gang and you’re excited to get some awesome loot and get some major experience or possibly an achievement/trophy and then… oh. Its froze on the loading screen. Bugger. Hard resetting the console, load up and…! OH! You haven’t saved for a while and the autosave isn’t from that door! It’s… from a few doors back… you know… through all those enemies?

Frustrating isn’t the word. I’ve been playing video games since I was 5, and the awesome colours and soundtrack to Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive fuelled an obsession that still burns bright now, 19 years on. But since the advent of DLC and extra in game content, the world of video games is as ever changing as the Wasteland. But for some games its more trouble than it’s worth in my opinion.

So, back to my main point… WHYYOUFREEZEEPICGAMES? Fallout 3, epitome of awesomeness, made even more awesome by 5 DLC Quests as it were. Now, I purchased the GOTY edition on PS3 and was pleased as punch! All 5 DLC packs at once. Epic! No. Apparently the code is only strong enough to support 3 of the DLC packs, as 5 prove too much for the game to handle! Constantly freezing, often just going into VATs mode froze the entire game, forcing a hard reset. Ridiculous. I found this happened increasingly often in the Mothership Zeta DLC; potentially because (after googling) it was the last DLC pack I had left to do, and the game struggled to load it. This, coupled with the fact it was actually a bloody hard bit of DLC, meant it forced me to put the game down for a few months! I just couldn’t bear to play it. I did, and bossed it, and now I’m happy again but there’s still that odd moment where I load a new area or enter VATs mode and boom. Frozen. That’s the gripes out the way, but it is relatively minor I guess in comparison to the rest of the game. It’s beautiful. As a quick side point, how awesome is the Cowboy Repeater in Fallout: New Vegas? One of my favourite weapons.

Skyrim is completely the same, beautiful game, delicious storyline, ample sidequests, but it’s a HUGE game. This game froze long before DLC was released. There is always an awkward moment where it freezes on the loading screen for a new area and you think… ‘Do I turn my Xbox on and off? Will it corrupt my save file? (Which is 100 hours +)’ Games shouldn’t do this; it is the responsibility of the studios to ensure the game on the shelf is as close to perfect as it can be. This again was a reason I put Skyrim down for a month or so before completing it… that and Halo: Anniversary. (GrownupGamer's note: That's just on Xbox. Think how the PS3 owners feel. They've had to put up with the famous framerate issue and a huge DLC delay.)

Those games are just two from a possible massive list but they are two that are my favourites and quite frankly have been spoiled on the whole by the incessant glitching and freezing. (Fallout 3 more so, admittedly) but what do they have in common? Bethesda. Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an attack on a fantastic games studio… oh no. Merely a gripe about a major chink in its armour. Bethesda have massive potential, just need to fine tune the DLC problem and I think quite possibly will make it to the coveted top spot of my favourite games developer. (2K currently hold this honour – for their blinding Borderlands and Bioshock games). 

However, the most recent Bethesda game I purchased was Dishonoured. Unfortunately this has not even made it to my disc tray yet! (Which after reading numerous reviews seems an abhorrent idea) but I just simply have not had the time. Although I am eager to scale the heights of Dunwall I am cautious. Cautious of getting so deeply involved in a game that if/(when?) it freezes I will be disenchanted and my faith will have plummeted once again. Hopefully I will be proven wrong. Only time will tell, and with the release of DLC already for Dishonoured, will this be enough or will there be more? Either way; just the look of this game excites me.  

(GrownupGamer's note: Fear not Guest Blogger! Dishonored is only published by Bethesda. All of the developmental heavy lifting was done by Arkane Studios. I've played it and didn't see a single glitch.)

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.