Artistic shmartistic. I’m not a loser, but I’d love to be a kid again, and I have no problem being labeled permanently immature :).
Most likely, that’s the case. I just think it was a very poor choice of words.
Although, as far as his opinions, I disagree with them almost entirely. I think game sequels can do something movie sequels can’t: refine the basic feel of the game. The basics of a movie are acting and writing, and it’s a rare sequel that can improve on the feel of a unique first movie.
But the basics of a game are the gameplay concepts and a little refining can go a long way. Look at Super Mario World and Super Mario 3. Mario World refined nearly everything about Mario 3 to create a more overall polished game and actually improved upon a classic.
There’s been so much great gaming packed into the past twenty years that I think it’s a mistake to say that there was just one golden age at some point and that we’re entering another.
If we had to pick just one earlier golden age, I’d agree with Justin. If we needed another bookend game, I’d say that we could call it the period between Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island in '95.
But, again, right after that you had the PSX/Saturn/N64 era. The stuff being done with polygons back then might seem crude now, but it was incredibly exciting at the time.
And right from there you go to the Dreamcast and its woefully short lifespan, to the PS2 and its insanely massive library, to where we are now.
I think it’s really hard to isolate particularly great times for gaming. It would probably be a lot easier to identify some low points. You did have that stretch, for instance, right after the deaths of the Genesis and SNES and before the launch of the N64, where you were getting a boatload of god-awful games for the PSX and Saturn. It wasn’t until Mario 64 that 3D games really took off. I’d be fine calling, say, '95 - '96 sort of a doldrums in terms of gaming.
I agree with you in principle, but I have to disagree that Super Mario World is a better game. I think Mario Bros. 3 is better than its successor in almost every respect (graphics being an obvious exception, although even then I think Bros. 3 has superior art direction).
Could you expand on that? I like SMB3, but Super Mario World is the best video game ever made in my opinion.
I think Super Mario Bros. 3 has superior level design (just look at how much variety there is among the various worlds), better music, awesome foes in the Koopa Kids, wayyy cooler powerups in the various suits and Karibo’s shoe, and has a much better final world (though in terms of final bosses I’d probably give it to Bowser’s Mode 7 clown ship thing). I find the entire game, from start to finish, to be a masterpiece.
I like Super Mario World a lot (although I think it has aged poorly), but I find it uninspired compared with SMB3. Compared with its predecessor (and, for that matter, with its contemporary - Sonic the Hedgehog), I find the level design and art direction of SMW to be bland. While there’s certainly a lot of meat to SMW, I find the whole gates system of uncovering new paths tedious.
I think that SMB3 is by far the pinacle of 2D Mario. Along with a select few games, the pinacle of 2D platforming.
I agree with you somewhat about the powerups. I’d have liked it if they kept Kuribo’s shoe, the tanookie suit, the racoon suit, the frog suit, etc. But with a couple exceptions, those weren’t heavily involved in the game. The shoe was on one board IIRC. Yoshi and the cape also serve to balance these out a bit, if not completely.
In every other respect, I find SMW to be an improvement on SMB3. It was longer, with more replay value, special worlds, better bosses IMO, mini bosses.
I probably would be annoyed with the hidden levels except I got a strategy guide back then and found them all. I agree that the concept of hiding that many levels is assholish. There’s 20-something stars out there waiting for me on Super Mario Galaxy right now that I can’t find, and I don’t feel like digging for them on the internet or dropping the money on a strategy guide. Every few weeks I turn it on, dick around for a few minutes, remember how hopelessly out of ideas I am regarding where the rest of the stars are, and turn it off. And now I might not ever find them, because I’m sure I’ve forgotten a lot of the ones I’ve found, and I’m not going to play the whole game again to make sure I don’t miss one.
If you’re going to set “golden ages” for video games, I would define the first one as 1979 or so to around the time of the Atari crash (1983). Yeah, the games looked primitive by today’s standards, but video games were everywhere, and everyone was playing them. It was the height of the arcade era, and the machines were at every convenience store, department store, etc, and opening an arcade was practically a license to print money. In Japan they actually ran out of the coins used in arcade machines, as Pac Man fever set the world on fire. On the home front, the Atari 2600 was still selling like crazy, Mattel’s Intellivision was seducing gamers with its better sports games, and the Colecovision gave us even better graphics. And the “big 3” were all coming out with new systems promising perfect arcade ports. 2600 Pac Man pre-orders were being hawked at places that wouldn’t dream of selling video games, such as grocery stores, for up to $80 a pop. People that didn’t normally play video games would pump quarters into Pac Man, or sit down and play Kaboom with the family. This was definitely a golden age by any definition, until the bottom fell out. A series of major and well documented screwups by Atari caused many budding game companies to fold as their backers got cold feet. If Atari could go down, anyone could. And there were literally too many games and too many systems for anyone to make the kind of profits Atari had in the late 70’s to early 80’s.
You could also make a case that the second era began with the NES (1985?) and continued through to the SNES/Genesis era (1993ish). Arcades were still present, although on the decline, and most of them were filled with slightly different fighting games. The Commodore 64 computer was going strong and had literally thousands and thousands of games for it, although piracy prevented a lot of companies from actually making any money on it (for example, the C64 game M.U.L.E. was one of the most popular games, but the developers claim they made next to nothing on it because of all the people copying their version from someone else). Your casual gamers had stuff like Super Mario. Video games were back in a big way. Definitely another golden age.
Era 3 began with the Playstation (1995), which I believe had one of the longest life spans of any console, and spawned a ton of great games whether you were a casual gamer, hardcore gamer, or anywhere in between. However, I wouldn’t call this a golden age, the Sony PS and the Nintendo Game Boy were pretty much the only shows in town. Maybe a silver, strictly on the strength of the PS, which IMHO was one of the best systems ever released. Nintendo had a handful of good games for the N64, but only a handful. Their Virtua Boy was a disaster from start to finish, and the system actually gave people headaches and eyestrain. Sega tried to get the jump on the PS by releasing the Saturn 6 months early, and it bombed right out of the gate. They also came out with a couple handheld systems, none of which went anywhere. Trip Hawkins’ 3DO was horribly expensive ($700), and was never a serious contender. Atari released the Jaguar and handheld Lynx systems, neither of which sold. PC gamers were forced to manually configure their memory files for every single game, and jump through all kinds of hoops, just to play mediocre games.
Are we in another golden age now? We might be in the beginnings of one. We have a strong console market, a strong handheld market, and a strong PC market. Nintendo’s Wii is proving surprisingly popular, especially among the casual gamers, and their DS is selling pretty well. Sony’s not the king anymore, but the PS3 has some great games, and the PSP has some very cool and original games. Microsoft seems to have learned from their mistakes with the original XBOX, and the 360 is the number one system. For me, I’ve been catching up on some newer games since I built my new PC, and there’s some great stuff out there. Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, the Half Life series, Far Cry, Crysis, the list goes on and on. Yeah, there’s a lot of sequels but that’s true of every era in video gaming, including the one most people on here are referring to as the “first” golden age. You want innovation? Nintendo’s Wii and the Guitar Hero games are pulling in casual gamers in ways I haven’t seen in years. I laughed at my non-gaming sister’s Wii, until she kicked my ass on every game she has for it, then at Guitar Hero for the final humiliation. There is some originality out there, a la Crush for the PSP, but most companies are going to go with the proven formula. Nothing new, back in the 80’s there were tons of Pac Man and Space Invader clones for every original, back in the 90’s we had dozens of nearly identical fighting games, 2000’s was a boatload of RTS clones, etc.
http://www.ufo-extraterrestrials.com/ X-com clone released May 1997. Out of the box, it’s good, definitely better than the Cenga games. With the mods (found here), it’s the 2nd coming of X-Com, and even, dare I say it? Better than X-com.
I hear a lot of you harking on a lack of innovation in games these days, that they’re simply all clones of previously existing games… and while this is true to an extent I could say the same thing about the majority of games during any of the previous generations of gaming. For every Mario and Sonic there were Spots and Rocket Knights and Bonks etc, and let’s not forget that Madden started in '93 or so or the sheer and ungodly amount of Galaga and Raidan clones there were (though Legendary Wings was awesome)
Just in the past month, though, we’ve had two great, original games. Mirror’s Edge is unlike anything I’ve ever played, and while it might take a cue or two from other games it is wholly an original experience. The same could be said for the new Prince of Persia game which just came out (and which I played for a couple hours last night) while not an original name, and based on the Assassin’s Creed engine (another game I could cite as being very innovative) the game takes a lot of things in an entirely different direction than any game previously has done. I could even cite Guitar Hero as being incredibly innovative in its design, though it wasn’t the first rhythm game by a long shot.
Not saying we’re in an “everything’s peachy golden age” but there’s still innovation going on, even if a lot of it is curbed by the budgets games require these days and the sheer amounts of shovelware out there.
Going to disagree here somewhat.
1993 is a pretty arbitrary time to cut things off. If I had to choose a specific game to end things, it would, again, be Super Mario World 2, or mayyybe Donkey Kong Country.
Also, the 3D0 and Jaguar were both released before the PSX.
I also think you’re too dismissive of the N64 (and the Saturn as well). It didn’t have a library as huge as that of the PSX, but its important games were really, really important.
I prefer to think of things in terms of game releases, anyway. For the 32-bit era, I’d say that we can start things off with Virtua Fighter on the Saturn and maybe end with, say, Perfect Dark on the N64. If you wanted to isolate things further, you could mark the start of the PSX’s “golden age” with the release of Final Fantasy 7.
I’m also not sure how useful it is to talk about home consoles, arcades, and PC games in the same terms.
Donkey Kong Country definitely. I always hated Yoshi’s Island and was always a little miffed that it carried the subtitle “Super Mario World 2”.
Yeah, quality of later games aside, DKC is probably a pretty good game to sort of close out the 16-bit era. That or Sonic & Knuckles; I can’t remember which was released first.
Either way, major releases for both systems trickled to a stop after that, though there were some great ones (Yoshi’s Island on the SNES, Vectorman on the Genesis).
The huge popularity of DKC also anticipates the preoccupation with “3D” graphics that defines the 32-bit era. It’s also fitting that a 2D platformer should close out the 16-bit era.
Really? You think if the kids who played Fallout 3 and Bioshock went back and played Fallout 2 ( favorite game of all time) and System Shock that they would think the newer games aren’t as good? I think this is a clear case of perspective and rose colored glasses. No body, including me, would ever play F3 first, then play F2 and say it was better. Same goes fr System shock.
Great write up, Apocalypso. My mom was just telling me (confirming a very vague, early memory, actually) that my dad would stop at gas stations back in the early '80s, even when he didn’t need anything, just to play video games. I also remember that up until I was 10 or so, most airports had arcades in them, and no matter how short our layover, he would run down to it and get a few games in. Last new game he played, to my knowledge, was SMW. Though my mom allegedly has him playing some of the minigames on Wii Fit now :).
Now I am a sad panda. I picked up that game, back a decade ago, and found it to be so awful that I later threw out the CD ROM’s. I remember one mission, in particular, where it seemed like every single goddamn alien had a rocket launcher and I couldn’t go three feet without my entire squad being blown to pieces.
I may have to see about picking up a copy on Ebay or something and slapping some mods on. Thanks!
I disagree. I recently loaded up both of the earlier games and I still find them to be superior. I do, honestly, believe that if a kid from today gave the older games a chance, he/she would find them to be much deeper and more rewarding than the newer clones. Then again, I liked the customization in SS2 a lot more than the generic “Invisible War” style reboot in Bioshock, and I’ve always preferred turn based to real time.
Arcades may be pretty much dead in America, but they’re still going strong in Japan. Every mall and shopping center has at least a few games in it, and there are still (sometimes huge) dedicated gaming centers with nothing but arcades (and, unfortunately slot and pachinko machines). Most good games won’t be released in America just cause there’s no market for them. That’s why the Street Fighter IV arcade wasn’t released in America (though I wouldn’t consider it a good game, either. Oh Capcom wherefore hast thou betrayed our beloved SF series?)
While he is certainly not representative of all young gamers, I can contrast between myself and my 19 y.o. son. I can enjoy a SS2, a Fallout 1 & 2, and other text-heavy games. He cares more about the eye-candy than the depth. He never really experienced the pixelated fun of pre-3d card PC games, and cannot fathom what people saw in those games. He needs photo-realism or highly-stylized animation for “immersion”. Those old, simple, one-button Atari games (that you can now get on a joystick that hooks up to a TV dirt cheap) - rubbish. “Too simplistic”. So while I may enjoy slogging through a text-based game like Wasteland in all its 2D goodness, he won’t. And while I would enjoy a more text heavy game that captured NPCs as well as Baldur’s Gate 2 did, he wants fully spoken parts and just clicks thru screens of dialog (and then looks up spoilers for the clues he missed by skipping the dialog).
(Anyone remember how you had to keep your own journal of quests for Daggerfall because the game couldn’t? Now you have to install a mod just so the game doesn’t lead you directly to the quest site for Oblivion. Despite its bugs, I still preferred Daggerfall - I enjoyed the greater number of factions and would have liked to have seen that aspect expanded upon, rather than shrunk in Morrowind and Oblivion)
Weird… have you tried strapping him down, Clockwork Orange style with Balduar’s Gate 2 and… okay, bad idea.
oh the days of keeping your own journals for games… Not that I terribly miss them, but my bro and I used to keep a notebook and pen near my console and his computer just for these types of games (I remember drawing my own map in the original Legend of Zelda, as well as taking notes the first time I played through Myst)
I think it’s safe to say that games have improved a lot in a number of ways, but those improvements have come at a cost. It’s harder to have thousands of dialogue options in a game where they all have to be spoken as opposed to just text-based. It’s harder for a game to become completely immersive if everyone looks almost human but just slightly off, their unnatural characteristics come out more than if they were just 2d sprites that allowed your immagination to fill in the gaps. That said, (and mind you, I played ZORK) I have had several simply jaw-dropping moments in games where you just think “holy shit, that’s beautiful!” and that’s a cool experience on its own.
I could swear that Daggerfall had a quest log. I know I didn’t keep written notes and there was a function to locate the dungeon/castle/town/whatever where your next goal was. It didn’t work in towns or dungeons. I’m not reinstalling that to confirm it, however.