The Gamer’s Quagmire #19: Golden Age & Golden Anniversary
The Gamer’s Quagmire: 19th Edition
- Jamison DeLorenzo
This week is a special week for gaming. No, it has nothing to do with games that may be coming out. No major tournament is around the bend. This isn’t even an anniversary of a game’s release. This is a special week because in three days I’ll be knee deep in video games along with some friends. Last year I spent vacation in my own personal Mecca- Cooperstown, NY. This year I will be going somewhere that almost undoubtedly close to Nirvana.
Ironically I will be in Seattle (if you don’t follow music at all then that last joke isn’t as clever as it would otherwise seem). For those that love playing video games for days on end without interruption understand that sometimes this is better than any vacation that involves traveling. The only thing that can possibly make these events better is a steady supply of alcohol, food, and friends. This is my A vacation for the year, so rather than sit down this week and ripping studies linking video games to pot smoking or a racy Hitman advertisement I figured I would outline my own gameplan for the week. Not only will I be sharing a can’t-miss video game marathon schedule I’ll also be fleshing out a schedule to abide by for the upcoming week.
Who said I couldn’t be constructive?
Everyone has their favorite games, but those willing to listen to a few suggestions for a great multiplayer gaming week should be ready for some expert advice. You see we already had our first Golden Age of video games and you may not know it. PacMan revolutionized gaming and put it on the map. In that sense the video arcade had its Golden Age, but video games overall didn’t have them at that point. I was lucky to be in college when it happened. Networked gaming was just starting to happen and the most entertaining games were just picking up steam. Here they are in no particular order.
The game that could be the most addictive and provide the most heated and drawn-out battles known to man is Civilization II. It’s true that there are sequels in this franchise that make needed improvements, but this game always afforded the opportunity to make battles last for over 5 hours. No, I don’t mean the game would end. I mean that your attack to conquer one nation’s capital could take 5 hours. Once you hit the modern age and you attack another nation technologically equipped to deal with all of your cruise missiles, battleships, Aegis Cruisers, Mechanized Infantry, and Marines (or, as I called them, kitchen sinks) the battles can become very intense.
The race to build Wonders, create a massive army, colonize a new continent, and get the spaceship launched can cause you to be so strung out on caffeine that people could be yelling in your ear and you wouldn’t hear them. You don’t get the full experience of this game until it takes over an hour to complete one turn to handle all the events from each of your cities. Also, for added fun give a unique them to your Empire so even the simplest of tasks becomes highly entertaining. My own invention is the Weird Al Empire, where every city was an item from one his songs. By the end of the game the most dominant city in the game was a dead heat between Cement Pond (which built the UN in 3 turns) and Jurassic Park, home of the Apollo Project.
Civilization II is more than just a great network game. The long drawn out battles make for great conversation later and creating a strategy in this type of game is much more interesting than strategies in fast-paced games. This isn’t a great game for 4+ people due to its enormity- you need a group of people who love playing the game to fully enjoy it. Plus there’s the added bonus of eliminating the French.
If you are feeling a little more retro you can always fire up GTA. I’m not talking about Vice City or anything recent- I’m talking about the original top-down view GTA. This is one of the best multiplayer games ever made (the tanks in the second game were way too overpowered for multiplayer use). The deathmatches and the cannonball runs are sources of endless fun. Causing and endless chain of exploding cars is always entertaining. Trapping someone next to car and pushing them into a river is high comedy. Taking a superbike over a bridge too fast and exploding when landing is too irresistible to pass up. There’s always something good going on when 4 people are trying to run each other over at the same time.
Next comes the revolutionary shooter Quake. This game provided the opportunity to have a multiplayer deathmatch server running 24 hours a day. It’s true that the only thing more irritating to college network admins was the original Napster, but imagine logging onto the server when someone has over 300 kills. The intimidation factor there is incredibly high. Sure, later on the multiplayer servers became smart enough to recycle the matches every 5 minutes so the maps didn’t become stale but what’s the fun in that?
Besides, first person shooters always seem to bring out the most taunting and trash talking than any other genre in existence. There aren’t a whole lot of insane things to do in this game (like placing proximity mines under armor- always a fan favorite from GoldenEye), but rocket jumping finally became a reality with this game. There were maps where you could crush someone inside a room with a switch. You could force people into lava with a rocket burst effect. Don’t forget the hilarity of hitting someone with a quad-damage rocket in a low gravity map. You could be completely outclassed in a match but if you had the most spectacular kill there is no guilt involved in milking it, and Quake was the first FPS that started allowing this to happen. Certainly not the best of the Quake series but it did open a lot of doors.
Those of you who enjoy the squad-control games fell in love with StarCraft. Honestly I think there is something wrong with you if you didn’t play this game for over 4 months if you liked this style of game. The game was simply too well put together not to enjoy it. I played this game for over 3 years and loved every minute of it. The second WarCraft game was pretty slick but it never was that fast-paced. StarCraft started to enforce the idea of having a quick twitch reflex, and ever since its release fans have been waiting for a sequel to it… and we’re still waiting.
When you start hooking your computer up to a television so you can record and play back your matches you know you have succumbed to your obsessive side, and it’s quite easy to do with this game. If you have ever tried perfecting a defense to the point where you could stop any invasion with a couple well-placed photon cannons, 2 dragoons, 2 templars, and 2 reavers you, well, that probably means you’re just me. My badge of honor was when my two main reavers lasted the entire 3 hour battle and each had over 800 kills. I think it was at this point the idea of veteran units started to cross my mind.
The current crop of multiplayer games are very compelling and some of them capture whole point of good multiplayer action. The graphic power of the XBox 360 is a great draw. PGR 3 and Ghost Recon are jaw-droppingly amazing games. Ghost Recon definitively drives home the point that the 360 is a next-gen game. Sometimes finding an awesome multiplayer game is as simple as digging through your closet for a classic from 5 or even 10 years ago. Sometimes that’s what a perfect gaming week is all about.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
This article is written and copyrighted by Jamison DeLorenzo and all thoughts are solely his and do not necessarily represent anyone else’s including anyone else at this site. This is a weekly article which deals with anything and almost everything gaming. Feel free to post comments or e-mail. Thanks for reading.
Post your comments in the Forum!
April 10, 2006
The Gamer’s Quagmire #18: Franchise Spring Training
The Gamer’s Quagmire: 18th Edition
- Jamison DeLorenzo
The start of April is an event I look forward to every year. It’s true that the heavy snow is once again 6 months away as opposed to over my head but the main reason is that it is baseball season once again. Baseball’s popularity in America is nowhere near where it used to be and it has definitely been surpassed by football as America’s sport. Being the stubborn person that I am baseball will always be my favorite spectator’s sport. I live and die with my favorite team each year. I feel myself become nervous deep into regular season games. And when the Mets made the World Series in 2000 I fell off the couch crying tears of joy. And, naturally, when they kept losing gut-wrenching games in the World Series I nearly destroyed multiple city blocks. Even though I have favorite teams in other sports the same emotion doesn’t match my emotion for baseball.
If you can imagine a grown man crying about sports it may be a sad picture but I will gladly own up to it. Baseball is more than a game for some, and when you are a big fan you feel the pain of every loss, every injury, and every trade that involves one of “your players.” Some people learn to deal with it and nothing else. Other people love playing the what-if game, and I’m one of them. Video games allow your creative side to thrive as you are allowed to create players, obtain players you’d otherwise kill to have on your team, and see your team hoist the championship trophy at the end of the year.
Incidentally, if you’re a Yankees bandwagon fan (I think 64% of all Yankees fans are bandwagon) can you honestly tell me you’re happy when you win each time? Isn’t winning now just something you expect? Aren’t you simply relieved that the most expensive team ever put together didn’t lose? I can’t take it when you win and I can’t stand it when the Mets lose (and despite what it sounds like I’m not looking for sympathy). All of you are killing me. This especially holds true for the Mets’ bullpen.
At the beginning of every baseball season I find a cheap and recent baseball game that includes a team franchise mode and I play it. The Mets will always become the best run team in the majors with a stellar pitching staff, awesome defense, and young hitters that always includes a phenomenal left-handed rookie first baseman. Baseball fans that enjoy video games on any level can gain a lot of happiness seeing their teams win even if it is a video game because on some level it restores hope that it is possible for your team to succeed in the playoffs.
Just don’t hold your breath for the day that the top franchise mode player for a sport becomes a real life GM. Then again if a reality show comes to fruition with that premise I would not be remotely surprised. Heck, there are teams could not possibly run worse as a result- just ask the 3 Tampa Bay Devil Rays fans. It may bother me if people are taking hints from my columns to start TV shows, but given royalties everything will be fine.
What I find extremely troubling is that football and basketball games are at the point where a lot of the action that you would see in real life you will see in the game. It’s true that you will never be able to truly replicate all of the magic that players like Michael Jordan or Barry Sanders had but the animations, gameplay, and presentation are all great or borderline exceptional for those games. Baseball has somehow been left in the dust. For example, last night after tooling around with NBA2K6 (the best basketball game I have ever seen, bar none) I loaded a game to be played by the CPU and just watched it while I was getting ready for bed. For the most part the game was close to watching a real NBA game. The changing camera angles were good, the court looked real, a decent percentage of the player movements were believable and fluid, the commentary wasn’t horrid (which is an honest upgrade over normal telecasts), and even the final score and stats were passable.
For whatever reason baseball simulations cannot seem to get it right. The pitching animations are almost always clumsy, the AI for baserunning almost always seems flawed (there are always situations where runners never advance when they should without holding up a flashing neon sign and slamming a turbo controller button), and the outfielders almost never field the ball the way I want them to. Either fielders will just run to where a ball will eventually roll to instead of trying to catch it or they will wait for the ball to come to them rather than charge the weakly hit single. There are other fundamental flaws that bear mentioning.
Hitting mechanics have slowly been getting better, but there is still some work to do. There are three modes players get in when at the plate. Obviously there is a default mentality players have when they’re at the plate in non-pressure situations. When video games finally allowed a power swing button that covered a power hitters’ tendency to swing for the fences we got coverage for a second swing mode. The third type of swing I have yet to see anywhere- the defensive swing. Anyone who has seen their pitcher suffer through a 14 pitch at-bat trying to get some annoying batter out on a 3-2 count where the hitter is fouling off every conceivable pitch known to man and looks like he’s swinging an oar should wonder why there is no way to do this in a baseball video game. If video games are going to allow a power swing there should also be a defensive swing.
Another problem I see is that when players slide into bases it is always the same animation. Some players slide head first and some slide feet first. Aside from this not being in a game I’ve seen yet with any consistency (this is never an option for creating a player and it should be) there are other slide situations which need to be handled. Occasionally you will find a game that gives you the chance to barrel over a catcher at the plate trying to tag you out. All games from now on need to have this along with a player trying to slide to one side of the plate. When a throw is offline to the plate the catcher moves to get it (not that many games have inaccurate throws to the plate other than at the plate or way over the catcher’s head) and the player adapts his slide to compensate. Hey, sometimes players decide to try and leap over the catcher when they hunker down to block the plate. The other missing slide animation is players taking out fielders on a double play attempt. I have yet to see this work. Maybe I haven’t tried the right game yet, but it would be nice to see an aggressive slider take out a fielder just because he can- or am I the only Ty Cobb fan still around?
Field conditions should also have an effect, although this usually boils down to nothing more than boning over the Colorado Rockies. It should be more than being able to hit home runs in Coors Field with a soup ladle. Sliders should look like pathetic fastballs, curveballs should hang, and sinkers should arrive at the plate with engraved home run invitations. Oh yeah, and the pitchers throwing them should develop serious control problems, flawed throwing mechanics, and debilitating arm injuries by trying to counter these conditions. This isn’t just because it makes the games trickier and even more believable but because if there are pitchers whose careers I want to ruin I want to be allowed to do a sign-and-trade with them purely out of spite. Every baseball fan has at least one pitcher that is loathed to the point of wanting them to join the Broken Arms Retirement Home (whose most prominent residents include Pedro Astacio and Denny Neagle).
After several years of trying to figure out a way to brush hitters back off the plate, a common tactic for every good power pitcher, we need to see players actually be brushed back. I want to see dirt on their clothing. I want to see them stare down a pitcher after diving out of the way of a tight heater. I even would love to see players charge the mound and start a bench-clearing brawl. Much to my chagrin an inside heater has yet to affect any hitter’s mentality for what pitch is coming let alone where they stand at the plate. If the Rocket or Pedro just gave a hitter some chin music it is going to have an effect on the rest of the at-bat. The heater to the chest followed by a splitter making a hitter’s knees buckle simply doesn’t work at anything other than randomly at an easy difficulty level. There are certain things a higher difficulty level shouldn’t eliminate, and this is one of them.
Player development is another major weakness in baseball games. There should be ways to upgrade your play on the field through training. Locker and weight rooms should be upgradeable. Viewing and analyzing film should have some effect. A luxury team plane worthy of Soul Plane should be available for team travel. Even questionable and possibly illegal modes of training should be allowed. If I want to run the risk of players receiving suspensions that’s my choice. I’m not looking to create Jose Canseco 2.0 but I am looking for some freedoms in improving my roster. I’d also like graduates of the Dusty Baker school of managing to have their pitchers’ arms blow out after three years of being ridden like a championship steed.
(And Cubs fans, despite not being one of you, I highly sympathize).
Finally we have the complex idea of the farming system- another form of player development. No other sport has three different levels of minor league sports. Honestly it would be a major pain to manage players on four different levels of play but that’s what running a baseball franchise includes. This should be an option for fans of franchise mode who revel in having control over as much over their franchise as humanly possible. If I want to demote a player to AA from the bigs because his last 3 pitching performance reminds me of the first 20 minutes of a Bad News Bears film then let me do it. If a hitter’s swing starts to bear a striking resemblance to a rusty gate then off to minors they go. General Managers of a baseball need this level of control over a franchise, and when you can’t scout, develop, and train players the way you would like to a franchise mode becomes a source of frustration and not enjoyment. If I can specify promotional events and define different levels of parking costs and tickets in a gaming football franchise then why not in a gaming baseball franchise?
What I do like is that the commentary has been getting better in these games. Random camera shots of fans, the dugout and bullpen are all well and good. Still, for some reason watching a baseball video game still doesn’t emulate a good baseball experience. Even playing through a baseball franchise doesn’t feel like I’m running a franchise in as much as it feels like managing a fantasy team. In the era of replicated stadiums, facial texture mapping, and ESPN we need to have a good baseball video game experience. It’s time.
This article is written and copyrighted by Jamison DeLorenzo and all thoughts are solely his and do not necessarily represent anyone else’s including anyone else at this site. This is a weekly article which deals with anything and almost everything gaming. Feel free to post comments or e-mail. Thanks for reading.
Post your comments in the Forum!
April 3, 2006
The Gamer’s Quagmire #17: The Finality of the Playstation
The Gamer’s Quagmire: 17th Edition
- Jamison DeLorenzo
Last week you saw here a nice long talk about a game from the previous generation of gaming. Effectively it was me finding a ton of text written several months ago that I never bothered to finalize and post. What’s troubling me is that this week there was only one topic in the video game world that has inspired me to write anything- the official end of the PlayStation era. Considering this was the first console I ever put down money for there are a ton of fond memories for this hallowed console.
Up to 1998, well after the PS1’s release, the only consoles I ever had were the ones that my parents purchased for me. I had an Atari 2600 and a Super Nintendo. These were fantastic machines and can show gamers today that you don’t need overpowering technology to make a great game. What fans of a previous generation like to say is how there are great games on those consoles and that newer consoles don’t offer anything new. In their defense they have a great point.
Still I never hold hands with them as they cross the tunnel vision line. Games do not have generations in as much as the consoles do. If someone sat down and just started implementing the first Final Fantasy game now it would blow the presentation of the original Fantasy Fantasy as we know it now away. Would the gameplay be any better? It would be silly to attempt that argument but if you want to run with it go right ahead. When I look back at the PS1 era, which is now officially over, I don’t think about all of the bad games that came with it because that’s not how I want to remember the generation.
I remember the generation as the time I was able to start foraging on my own into the gaming universe. The games were now purchased on my own decisions as opposed to begging and pleading from my parents. Oddly they never seemed to object to any of the games I asked for, but with the PS1 things became different for me. This time I could walk into a store, point at a game, and get it. Did the best games on the PS1 stack up against the best on the Super Nintendo? Spending this week going over the merits of Castlevania IV, which I maintain is the peak of the franchise, could be an interesting exercise. I am not even going to spend time talking about my favorite game on the console.
One game typified the console more than any other game- Final Fantasy VII. Its sequel is a much more interesting game and discussion. It’s not because of the story or the characters but because of the mass reaction to the game. VII brought a wealth of popularity to role playing games, to Square, and to video games itself. The graphics in that game, with the exception of those geometric disasters known as the character models, were way beyond anything we had seen in an RPG before. That sold the game more than anything else to people. The story was also exceptional, which obviously helped, but that’s not what drove the sales figures.
Final Fantasy VIII was in every respect a great game for the series. It demonstrated superior graphics, an interesting new battle system, a fresh set of compelling characters, a top rate soundtrack, and, of course, the best card game ever invented- Triple Triad. It also weeded out the bandwagon Final Fantasy VII fans. To this I say good riddance because VIII represented everything right about the franchise in that the sequels are sequels in name only. Final Fantasy VIII very well could be my favorite game for the console, but I still don’t think about VIII when I first think about the first PlayStation.
I like to think about the reason I bought the console in the first place. Final Fantasy VII was the next game in a series I became addicted to on the Super Nintendo. All of the Nintendo fans couldn’t understand why Square decided to jump ship to Sony’s platform. In 1997 the young gamers didn’t understand the power of the CD versus the cartridge (ironically Nintendo didn’t seem to understand it either until 4 years ago). I still remember boycotting the PS1 until Square released the game for a Nintendo console. Aaah, to be young and overpoweringly naïve. Sooner or later I caved.
And not just in the dungeon crawling sense either (sorry, sometimes it’s impossible to resist those jokes), as the day of the console purchase I was in my room playing Final Fantasy VII all weekend. I considered it my own birthday present as it completed my very first makeshift gaming epicenter that I could be proud of. A computer next to the bed, stereo with CD player under the bed, TV at the foot of the bed and then the PS1 on top of the television. It was a work of art I tell you. There’s nothing like being able to listen to music, do homework, watch a ball game and surf the web all from one spot. At the center of it all was still Final Fantast VII.
My first experience with the game was the year before coming in from class and seeing friends huddled around a television arguing about something. I set my bag down, walked into the room and almost began to cry. Somehow my stubbornness had caught up to me. As I sat in awe of the game for the first time rather than just turning a blind eye to it I saw what I was missing. After the first six hours melted by I realized I had to get back to my studying routine. But for 2 months of intermittent playing with my roommates Final Fantasy VII became the game that was more than all of my past role playing experiences. I didn’t just talk with a couple friends at school about the game. Now I was sitting down going through the whole game with a group of friends for hours on end. We steadfastly played during the day, during the weekend, and even while our sink was spitting up sludge.
I guess some memories as just too poignant to forget.
Cloud, Tifa, Barrett, Cid, Red XIII, Aeris, Sepiroth, and all the other characters in the game reminded me so much of Final Fantasy III it scared me. When you can stuff over 10 characters together into a cohesive story it is an amazing sight to behold. Cloud was a hero you could get behind because you felt his pain when he found out what he was- a bio-engineered weapon (and if you didn’t know that by now I’m still not apologizing for telling you now- this game is almost 10 years old). I felt my skin crawl in the darkness every time Sephiroth’s music started playing. All of the characters were bonded together. Cloud and Tifa were friends from childhood. Barrett and Tifa were both involved in Avalanche. Red and Cloud were both products of materia. The list goes on and on, but the point is that you saw how characters with many different backgrounds bonded together and all went after the one man bent on destroying the planet.
Well, everyone except for Yuffie- but nobody else really liked her anyway.
Ooh- if you enjoy what-if exercises here is a fun one to chew on. There was a group of characters in the game who were the ShinRa’s main enforcement body known as the Turks. They were shady, tough, and great with weapons and martial arts. Imagine a game being released today with a group known as the Turks without controversy. Perhaps that is being far too cynical, but it sure is fun to think about.
Final Fantasy VII to this day is one the most universally accepted RPG’s in the history of gaming. In fact the only other game you could mention in the same argument is the one I mentioned last week- Knights of the Old Republic. The Advent Children movie released on UMD last year was a service by Square Enix to the fans of the franchise (because lately there literally has been nothing else). Watching that movie it was hard to explain why I loved it so much. After thinking about it for a long time I began to see that the characters reminded me of how much I loved the game and the game meant a lot more to me than the movie itself. It has been almost nine years since experiencing the game for the first time and I still remember everything about the game down to the Turtle’s Paradise flyers, the golden chocobo breeding mechanism, and the secret of the Underwater Materia. That is staying power… and a dash of insanity.
So was it just the characters and the story that separate this game from the rest of the PlayStation pack? Why think of this game instead of another game when someone mentions a PlayStation? I still hold onto games from the PS1 because there were plenty of good ones worth playing over and over. Playing Final Fantasy VII on the PC even seems like a fresh experience (where else can I play a classic game and get segmentation faults?) after going through the game over five times. I bought the PS1 with the sole purpose of playing that game and not only was I not disappointed but it remained one of the powerhouse games for the console throughout the console’s lifespan.
At the end of the day the PS1 era was more than any one game though. It was the very first console that was truly mine. I grew up as a gamer with that console. Yet somehow when my parents came to see me at college the kid jumped back out and stashed the console with one of my roommates. On the surface college had to be about the studying and the degree, but in the end it was about the gaming and doing it on a student teacher’s salary. At $500 per console today companies may forget that which makes the official end of the PS1 era more significant than it might otherwise seem.
This article is written and copyrighted by Jamison DeLorenzo and all thoughts are solely his and do not necessarily represent anyone else’s including anyone else at this site. This is a weekly article which deals with anything and almost everything gaming. Feel free to post comments or e-mail. Thanks for reading.
Post your comments in the Forum!
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