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Should this be in the "Future of Gaming"?
Well, all it says is how I barely give a monkey's to the future now.
But FOG hasn't been all about FOG since... well, long before I joined! :-D
So a Golden Age. What would I mean by that.
Perhaps the best example is I could say that the 60's was a Golden Age for music and culture.
It had fifties roots, and at the turn of the decade it probably seemed that all the rock and roll excitement was already over. But then comes in The Beatles, Bob Dylan et all and there's a big boom...
Then by the 70's it's settled into it's own cliché and it's all gone normal again.
Not that there wasn't great music ever after.
The music has generally been getting a lot better ever since, but was it ever as exciting again? Was there ever such a rush of cultural evolution?
Now maybe I've got this big misconception about the 60's, and that I've got it all wrong on stereotypes and whatnot, but you get the idea what I'm trying to describe as a Golden Age, right?
Good. Let's continue. :-)
So where would I place this Golden Age of gaming?
Perhaps somewhere between 1993 and 2003, the boom happening in the late 90's, shaping the standards for 21st gaming as we now know it.
I think it starts with the Mega Drive, Snes, and PC.
The pre-Pentium PC.
I guess I could place the Mega Drive and Snes together. Both were giving very similar styles of games at the time. I've a personal preference for Nintendo's, but people were getting impressed with both.
I can't speak for the Mega Drive, but by 1994, Nintendo had delivered Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 6(3 for us Westerners), Donkey Kong Country, Secret of Mana, and many more that don't spring instantly to mind.
Anysway, during the 16bit era, games had suddenly reached new complexities in graphics, gameplay and story.
There was also this Starfox game. A 3D space shoot em up.
I played it once and didn't rate it, I played it again recently and still find it unplayable, but as a glimpse of where games were going, could there have been a better example?
The PC? It had odd games, like PGA Golf, but wasn't really showing itself as a proper games machine. I mean, they were still mostly based around Windows 3.1. It was almost purely configured for working. The hardcore could still get their games through MS DOS mode, but it was hardly up there with console gaming. But newer games were starting to push it to new levels. Doom was certainly a very new style of game (second FPS if I remember right, and a huge step ahead of its predecessor) putting you in the eyes of a soldier in a "3D" world of monsters.
And there was this new "internet" starting to get around as well.
Not quite THE Golden Age there and then... (although I bet some people out there would certainly feel it was, the 3D phobic punks!) but I guess you can say that these were the roots of what followed over the next few years.
So where did games go from here?
The Saturn and the Playstation dropped in.
First shown was the Saturn with the new wave of 3D games.
I personally, at the time, thought that these 3D games were a load of crap – Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, didn’t rate them at all. I still liked my platforming and adventure games. But that’s not the point. The point was people were experimenting with 3D.
The Playstation also launched with 3D games, such as Ridge Racer.
But most of these games were 3D in visuals only, the gameplay still being similar to the classic 2D counterparts. A platformer like Pandemonium had 3D visuals but only the forwards and backwards, and up and down of classic 2D games.
But things were moving forward.
People were already starting to see lifelike realism in games like Tekken and Fifa.
The PC was also slowly starting to move on as a gaming platform, with the new Windows 95 supporting games, making it that little bit more user friendly, and new graphics cards to give them power to match that of the new 3D consoles.
And then the N64 was released and the boom started.
Mario 64 probably wasn’t the first fully 3D game, but certainly the most important.
Analogue control allowed you a full range of directions in 2 dimensions, and a jump/accelerate button for the third.
So all of a sudden we’ve got games where you can control a character to move around as if it’s a real world. All beautifully drawn and animated. We take it for granted now, but at the time…
And then it all started to come together at once.
The N64 was my favourite. The most powerful console at the time (and in those early days it even wiped the floor with the PC). Once Mario 64 broke a barrier for 3D gaming, everything seemed possible. Lylat Wars materialised as everything the original Starfox showed potential for, Goldeneye brought the PC’s most prided genre to console gaming, Zelda made the ultimate adventure, and to top it off, 4 player splitscreen gaming was standardised and gaming suddenly had found a new dimension.
Nintendo also dropped Pokémon on the world.
Before that, did anyone ever imagine a computer game franchise could out do Disney? After Christmas 1999, everyone seemed to be carrying around gameboy colors with them, (even though the Pokémon games weren’t really in colour – just red or blue!).
I also saw glimpses of what the Playstation could offer. Now it didn’t quite have the ability to make N64 powered 3D worlds (although some games did do some pretty neat tries) but it had a strength of its own:
Cds could hold more information than ever and this meant that music and full motion video could be added with ease. Games reached new epic and cinematic heights, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid perhaps being the most notable.
The line between games and films blurred and people who had never cared about “silly games” before suddenly got hooked.
Sure, N64 owners could scoff and say that they were all about the story and atmosphere rather than gameplay, but that’s what made them special.
Also, sports games were being given the true “as seen on TV” experience:
Fifa, WWF games (back when it was still WWF!!), ANY sport could be “simulated” with realistic motion capture making them look just like on TV.
And these games did make it to all the consoles, but the Playstation version nearly always came out on top, the N64 lacking cartridge space for detailed videos and good commentating, and the PC lacking a decent standard controller.
Gran Tourismo may have bored me, but car obsessives must’ve been amazed to see their dreams could be played through on a game, with every intricate detail perfectly modelled out to simulate what it would be like to drive a £100k car around fast corners.
And Lara Croft certainly brought a new image to games.
Basically, games crossed into interactive Film/TV territory and grabbed hold of a new audience.
The PC was taking gaming into yet ANOTHER direction.
It had already established favourite genres, such as First Person Shooters and Real Time Strategy games, something that consoles would never pull off, business games like Sim City…
Processing power and new media storage meant that more atmosphere and cinematics could be put into games, and with new graphics cards being developed, the PC was becoming home to some of the nicest eye candy around.
And it had an ace card up its sleeve:
Online gaming suddenly boomed.
You see, the year had gone 1996 and internet was becoming popular.
But 1998 nearly everyone I knew had access to it.
The MSN gaming zone became the centre of a new social life and clan warfare picked up big time. Playing with and chatting to anonymous people around the world was a pretty new experience, and sort of gave those pale nerds a new social life.
Now looking back, most of these games were filled with lag, bugs and god knows what else, but the whole community thing was great.
All the crazy mods and new levels people were starting to create, character skins, all this DIY game editing. Most of the quality was crap, but that was half the fun!
Each gaming platform offered something new and special, things we take for granted now but seemed so special at the time. I’ve not scratched the surface. I’ve perhaps just given you the most obvious examples. You’ll all have your own memories of what blew you away during this time and what changed your life forever.
Personally, I don’t think ANY game will grab me as much as Goldeneye, Smash Brothers, Pokémon Red and Zelda: Majora’s Mask did.
I guess they were my personal gaming legends, closely followed by Mario 64, Zelda OOT, WWF No Mercy, Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Perfect Dark.
So what happened from there?
Well, the Dreamcast game and promised the best of all worlds, which technically it could’ve produced, having the N64 analogue stick and even more power, bigger CDs than the Playstation and a modem for online gaming.
It turned out to sort of end up jack of all trades, master of none, despite bringing out some very special games, nothing enough to drag people away from their current consoles.
And then the new breed came out – the PS2, the Xbox and the Gamecube (the PS2 came out a while before, but lets face it, was their ANYTHING to be excited about for the first 6 months).
Perhaps the last hurrah was when the first wave of titles showed us all the limitations that stopped the old breed from being perfect had been removed, that now ANYTHING was possible.
Pikmin and Rogue Leader weren’t the big epic Nintendo games we’d been expecting, but if things were only going to get better…
GTA 3 wowed the world by allowing you full freedom in a living, breathing city to do what the hell you liked. And this was just the start…
The Xbox mixed together the ingredients of all the greatest FPS (despite fudging level design) to give Halo…
But other than that we were starting feel like we’d seen it all before.
Nearly every game could have it’s skeleton traced to a last generation one, and although it felt different at first, you got bored of the game quicker, a hidden sense of déjà vu sneaking up on you.
Not that we don’t get the odd fresh game, say Pikmin, Animal Crossing, GTA 3 and Fable, but they’re a select few hardcore choices. And it’s not that games have gotten worse – some of these “classics” look VERY dated now, and some are almost unplayable, but at the time it all seemed so fresh and new.
No game had looked like an actual horror movie or sports game before.
No game had let you explore and entire, detailed, 3D virtual world before.
No game had let you contact millions of random people from around the world before.
It all came together at once.
And so my hardcore gaming days are coming to a close, a prospect that might’ve horrified me about 3 years ago. But it’s true.
Games just don’t grip me anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy them, but once upon a time they used to mean so much more. NOTHING else was as important.
I came across a PC version of Final Fantasy 7 recently, and it hooked me like no game had in a LONG time, but that week of antisocialness (and it was LIGHTWEIGHT antisocialness compared to the day, because I actually tried to talk to people and be tactful about locking myself away rather than not giving a monkey’s about ANYTHING except for the game in hand) left me feeling sour.
And when a guy who was giving me tips was telling me about how he (back in his gaming heyday) had found all the billions of secrets, tricks – and trust me when I say that this game is stuffed to the gills with them – it just seemed like such a chore when as in my prime I’d’ve been buzzing until I’d found every single last thing.
And then I’d started over and done it again.
Perhaps it was a sign that it was the beginning of the end when I didn’t get EVERY single cheat in Perfect Dark and I was just happy to finish it on the hardest setting.
Or maybe it was just a sodding hard game! :-D
So there’s no question that I grew up a little.
But it wasn’t just that. Games started to let me down long before I had no time for them. God knows Dringo’s heard no end to THAT! :-D
So c’est le vie and life goes on.
I still play games, and games are still good.
There are still clever and original things coming out of the industry.
Here and there.
But will there ever be a time like that Golden Age, when everything just boomed at once, when not one game that people never dreamed imaginable came to being, but several at once.
Will it ever be as special again?
Well, not on the same scale, but perhaps there is some interest on the horizon.
The DS and PSP are about to roll into town and all of a sudden, these quality 3D virtual worlds are coming to your pocket for wherever you need them, and wireless Bluetooth means that you’ll be able to connect to people within a certain radius without having to meet them in person.
Text messaging is popular enough as it is.
I can see the Touchscreen whiteboard picking up big time, not to mention games of wireless perfect dark in the park… or at school… or wherever…
Portability, wireless connectivity, major online gaming, I think that’s where the future of gaming is going?
Me, I’m thinking I want to be leaving behind the virtual obsessed way of life and go and find my Buddhist inner enlightened self, master Wing Chun Kung Fu and make some great music.
But I’ll never forget what, for just a few years, those pretend worlds really meant to me.
There you go, there was a big long essay rant for you all.
Nearly 2 and a half thousand words?
I remember when things like that seemed like such a chore… :-D
And to think it was a combination of “brain numbing” gaming and cheapskatedness that enticed me into these forums and got me writing. :-)
Here’s to anything that can drive your imagination.
Well, all it says is how I barely give a monkey's to the future now.
But FOG hasn't been all about FOG since... well, long before I joined! :-D
So a Golden Age. What would I mean by that.
Perhaps the best example is I could say that the 60's was a Golden Age for music and culture.
It had fifties roots, and at the turn of the decade it probably seemed that all the rock and roll excitement was already over. But then comes in The Beatles, Bob Dylan et all and there's a big boom...
Then by the 70's it's settled into it's own cliché and it's all gone normal again.
Not that there wasn't great music ever after.
The music has generally been getting a lot better ever since, but was it ever as exciting again? Was there ever such a rush of cultural evolution?
Now maybe I've got this big misconception about the 60's, and that I've got it all wrong on stereotypes and whatnot, but you get the idea what I'm trying to describe as a Golden Age, right?
Good. Let's continue. :-)
So where would I place this Golden Age of gaming?
Perhaps somewhere between 1993 and 2003, the boom happening in the late 90's, shaping the standards for 21st gaming as we now know it.
I think it starts with the Mega Drive, Snes, and PC.
The pre-Pentium PC.
I guess I could place the Mega Drive and Snes together. Both were giving very similar styles of games at the time. I've a personal preference for Nintendo's, but people were getting impressed with both.
I can't speak for the Mega Drive, but by 1994, Nintendo had delivered Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 6(3 for us Westerners), Donkey Kong Country, Secret of Mana, and many more that don't spring instantly to mind.
Anysway, during the 16bit era, games had suddenly reached new complexities in graphics, gameplay and story.
There was also this Starfox game. A 3D space shoot em up.
I played it once and didn't rate it, I played it again recently and still find it unplayable, but as a glimpse of where games were going, could there have been a better example?
The PC? It had odd games, like PGA Golf, but wasn't really showing itself as a proper games machine. I mean, they were still mostly based around Windows 3.1. It was almost purely configured for working. The hardcore could still get their games through MS DOS mode, but it was hardly up there with console gaming. But newer games were starting to push it to new levels. Doom was certainly a very new style of game (second FPS if I remember right, and a huge step ahead of its predecessor) putting you in the eyes of a soldier in a "3D" world of monsters.
And there was this new "internet" starting to get around as well.
Not quite THE Golden Age there and then... (although I bet some people out there would certainly feel it was, the 3D phobic punks!) but I guess you can say that these were the roots of what followed over the next few years.
So where did games go from here?
The Saturn and the Playstation dropped in.
First shown was the Saturn with the new wave of 3D games.
I personally, at the time, thought that these 3D games were a load of crap – Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, didn’t rate them at all. I still liked my platforming and adventure games. But that’s not the point. The point was people were experimenting with 3D.
The Playstation also launched with 3D games, such as Ridge Racer.
But most of these games were 3D in visuals only, the gameplay still being similar to the classic 2D counterparts. A platformer like Pandemonium had 3D visuals but only the forwards and backwards, and up and down of classic 2D games.
But things were moving forward.
People were already starting to see lifelike realism in games like Tekken and Fifa.
The PC was also slowly starting to move on as a gaming platform, with the new Windows 95 supporting games, making it that little bit more user friendly, and new graphics cards to give them power to match that of the new 3D consoles.
And then the N64 was released and the boom started.
Mario 64 probably wasn’t the first fully 3D game, but certainly the most important.
Analogue control allowed you a full range of directions in 2 dimensions, and a jump/accelerate button for the third.
So all of a sudden we’ve got games where you can control a character to move around as if it’s a real world. All beautifully drawn and animated. We take it for granted now, but at the time…
And then it all started to come together at once.
The N64 was my favourite. The most powerful console at the time (and in those early days it even wiped the floor with the PC). Once Mario 64 broke a barrier for 3D gaming, everything seemed possible. Lylat Wars materialised as everything the original Starfox showed potential for, Goldeneye brought the PC’s most prided genre to console gaming, Zelda made the ultimate adventure, and to top it off, 4 player splitscreen gaming was standardised and gaming suddenly had found a new dimension.
Nintendo also dropped Pokémon on the world.
Before that, did anyone ever imagine a computer game franchise could out do Disney? After Christmas 1999, everyone seemed to be carrying around gameboy colors with them, (even though the Pokémon games weren’t really in colour – just red or blue!).
I also saw glimpses of what the Playstation could offer. Now it didn’t quite have the ability to make N64 powered 3D worlds (although some games did do some pretty neat tries) but it had a strength of its own:
Cds could hold more information than ever and this meant that music and full motion video could be added with ease. Games reached new epic and cinematic heights, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid perhaps being the most notable.
The line between games and films blurred and people who had never cared about “silly games” before suddenly got hooked.
Sure, N64 owners could scoff and say that they were all about the story and atmosphere rather than gameplay, but that’s what made them special.
Also, sports games were being given the true “as seen on TV” experience:
Fifa, WWF games (back when it was still WWF!!), ANY sport could be “simulated” with realistic motion capture making them look just like on TV.
And these games did make it to all the consoles, but the Playstation version nearly always came out on top, the N64 lacking cartridge space for detailed videos and good commentating, and the PC lacking a decent standard controller.
Gran Tourismo may have bored me, but car obsessives must’ve been amazed to see their dreams could be played through on a game, with every intricate detail perfectly modelled out to simulate what it would be like to drive a £100k car around fast corners.
And Lara Croft certainly brought a new image to games.
Basically, games crossed into interactive Film/TV territory and grabbed hold of a new audience.
The PC was taking gaming into yet ANOTHER direction.
It had already established favourite genres, such as First Person Shooters and Real Time Strategy games, something that consoles would never pull off, business games like Sim City…
Processing power and new media storage meant that more atmosphere and cinematics could be put into games, and with new graphics cards being developed, the PC was becoming home to some of the nicest eye candy around.
And it had an ace card up its sleeve:
Online gaming suddenly boomed.
You see, the year had gone 1996 and internet was becoming popular.
But 1998 nearly everyone I knew had access to it.
The MSN gaming zone became the centre of a new social life and clan warfare picked up big time. Playing with and chatting to anonymous people around the world was a pretty new experience, and sort of gave those pale nerds a new social life.
Now looking back, most of these games were filled with lag, bugs and god knows what else, but the whole community thing was great.
All the crazy mods and new levels people were starting to create, character skins, all this DIY game editing. Most of the quality was crap, but that was half the fun!
Each gaming platform offered something new and special, things we take for granted now but seemed so special at the time. I’ve not scratched the surface. I’ve perhaps just given you the most obvious examples. You’ll all have your own memories of what blew you away during this time and what changed your life forever.
Personally, I don’t think ANY game will grab me as much as Goldeneye, Smash Brothers, Pokémon Red and Zelda: Majora’s Mask did.
I guess they were my personal gaming legends, closely followed by Mario 64, Zelda OOT, WWF No Mercy, Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Perfect Dark.
So what happened from there?
Well, the Dreamcast game and promised the best of all worlds, which technically it could’ve produced, having the N64 analogue stick and even more power, bigger CDs than the Playstation and a modem for online gaming.
It turned out to sort of end up jack of all trades, master of none, despite bringing out some very special games, nothing enough to drag people away from their current consoles.
And then the new breed came out – the PS2, the Xbox and the Gamecube (the PS2 came out a while before, but lets face it, was their ANYTHING to be excited about for the first 6 months).
Perhaps the last hurrah was when the first wave of titles showed us all the limitations that stopped the old breed from being perfect had been removed, that now ANYTHING was possible.
Pikmin and Rogue Leader weren’t the big epic Nintendo games we’d been expecting, but if things were only going to get better…
GTA 3 wowed the world by allowing you full freedom in a living, breathing city to do what the hell you liked. And this was just the start…
The Xbox mixed together the ingredients of all the greatest FPS (despite fudging level design) to give Halo…
But other than that we were starting feel like we’d seen it all before.
Nearly every game could have it’s skeleton traced to a last generation one, and although it felt different at first, you got bored of the game quicker, a hidden sense of déjà vu sneaking up on you.
Not that we don’t get the odd fresh game, say Pikmin, Animal Crossing, GTA 3 and Fable, but they’re a select few hardcore choices. And it’s not that games have gotten worse – some of these “classics” look VERY dated now, and some are almost unplayable, but at the time it all seemed so fresh and new.
No game had looked like an actual horror movie or sports game before.
No game had let you explore and entire, detailed, 3D virtual world before.
No game had let you contact millions of random people from around the world before.
It all came together at once.
And so my hardcore gaming days are coming to a close, a prospect that might’ve horrified me about 3 years ago. But it’s true.
Games just don’t grip me anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy them, but once upon a time they used to mean so much more. NOTHING else was as important.
I came across a PC version of Final Fantasy 7 recently, and it hooked me like no game had in a LONG time, but that week of antisocialness (and it was LIGHTWEIGHT antisocialness compared to the day, because I actually tried to talk to people and be tactful about locking myself away rather than not giving a monkey’s about ANYTHING except for the game in hand) left me feeling sour.
And when a guy who was giving me tips was telling me about how he (back in his gaming heyday) had found all the billions of secrets, tricks – and trust me when I say that this game is stuffed to the gills with them – it just seemed like such a chore when as in my prime I’d’ve been buzzing until I’d found every single last thing.
And then I’d started over and done it again.
Perhaps it was a sign that it was the beginning of the end when I didn’t get EVERY single cheat in Perfect Dark and I was just happy to finish it on the hardest setting.
Or maybe it was just a sodding hard game! :-D
So there’s no question that I grew up a little.
But it wasn’t just that. Games started to let me down long before I had no time for them. God knows Dringo’s heard no end to THAT! :-D
So c’est le vie and life goes on.
I still play games, and games are still good.
There are still clever and original things coming out of the industry.
Here and there.
But will there ever be a time like that Golden Age, when everything just boomed at once, when not one game that people never dreamed imaginable came to being, but several at once.
Will it ever be as special again?
Well, not on the same scale, but perhaps there is some interest on the horizon.
The DS and PSP are about to roll into town and all of a sudden, these quality 3D virtual worlds are coming to your pocket for wherever you need them, and wireless Bluetooth means that you’ll be able to connect to people within a certain radius without having to meet them in person.
Text messaging is popular enough as it is.
I can see the Touchscreen whiteboard picking up big time, not to mention games of wireless perfect dark in the park… or at school… or wherever…
Portability, wireless connectivity, major online gaming, I think that’s where the future of gaming is going?
Me, I’m thinking I want to be leaving behind the virtual obsessed way of life and go and find my Buddhist inner enlightened self, master Wing Chun Kung Fu and make some great music.
But I’ll never forget what, for just a few years, those pretend worlds really meant to me.
There you go, there was a big long essay rant for you all.
Nearly 2 and a half thousand words?
I remember when things like that seemed like such a chore… :-D
And to think it was a combination of “brain numbing” gaming and cheapskatedness that enticed me into these forums and got me writing. :-)
Here’s to anything that can drive your imagination.
Ineedsleep wrote:
> I nearly had him into gaming with one of the Sonic games. He'd been
> on it approx. 3 hours when I got home and he switched off the Mega
> Drive and swore he'd never play again. Why? He'd spent 3 hours
> trying to kill off tails and complained when tails kept coming back.
> Numpty :D
Fantastic! :-D
> I nearly had him into gaming with one of the Sonic games. He'd been
> on it approx. 3 hours when I got home and he switched off the Mega
> Drive and swore he'd never play again. Why? He'd spent 3 hours
> trying to kill off tails and complained when tails kept coming back.
> Numpty :D
Fantastic! :-D
Yesterday morning i actually bothered to rent GTA, got it home played it for maybe 10-15 minutes, got back to his house to save, switched it off and haven't been back to it.
It's got to go back tommorow and i'm left with the feeling i'm finished with console gaming.
It's got to go back tommorow and i'm left with the feeling i'm finished with console gaming.
I still love my games but I'm only 15 so there is still plenty of time for me to grow out of them. I have my Gamecube and I play it fairly reguarly but nowhere near as often as I played my N64, so I reckon it has got nothing to do with growing up and it's just a case of the games not being as enticing, as was stated in the original post.
I still have my N64 and every now and then I'll set it up for a quick go at getting those last remaining gold bananas or actually managing to complete the last level of Rayman 2. I doubt I'll be getting out my Gamecube in two or three years to have a round of Mario Golf. The games just don't have the same lasting appeal. Maybe it's just a nostalgia thing.
I still have my N64 and every now and then I'll set it up for a quick go at getting those last remaining gold bananas or actually managing to complete the last level of Rayman 2. I doubt I'll be getting out my Gamecube in two or three years to have a round of Mario Golf. The games just don't have the same lasting appeal. Maybe it's just a nostalgia thing.
Does he like football? Well he is a Huddersfield Town fan so make of that what you will :)
I nearly had him into gaming with one of the Sonic games. He'd been on it approx. 3 hours when I got home and he switched off the Mega Drive and swore he'd never play again. Why? He'd spent 3 hours trying to kill off tails and complained when tails kept coming back. Numpty :D
Anyway, the only time I get to play or watch what I want is when he is out so he can keep going for me.
I nearly had him into gaming with one of the Sonic games. He'd been on it approx. 3 hours when I got home and he switched off the Mega Drive and swore he'd never play again. Why? He'd spent 3 hours trying to kill off tails and complained when tails kept coming back. Numpty :D
Anyway, the only time I get to play or watch what I want is when he is out so he can keep going for me.
I don't think I'll ever completely grow out of games.
But now it's a "something to do", "take it or leave it" fun blast here and there, compared to being what I lived for.
I guess I've started to get more of a buzz out of the real world, so escapism to the virtual world just doesn't seem so necessary anymore.
Flock - I know what you mean about the dumbing down of games - Mario Sunshine and Zelda Windwaker were HUGE anticlimaxi, following from their N64 predecessors. But even if these newer titles had achieved their ultimate full potential, is there ANYTHING they could've done to impress you like their predecessors did?
Sleepy - Have you ever tried getting a nice 2 player game for you and your "hubby" to enjoy together? No good examples come to mind, but there must be a good one somewhere. Could become a "couples" thing like crossword puzzles! ;-)
Does he like football? Pro Evolution Soccer?
And I fact that you're choosing films instead, probably not that you're going off gaming, just gone off it from the point where it was ALL you wanted to do, down to the point where you only like it as much as watching a film so sometimes choose that instead...
Flock with GTA Andreas likewise...
But yeah, could I ever give back something decent to the real world if I never saw any of it for living in pretend ones?
I guess it's time to choose "life". :-D
But now it's a "something to do", "take it or leave it" fun blast here and there, compared to being what I lived for.
I guess I've started to get more of a buzz out of the real world, so escapism to the virtual world just doesn't seem so necessary anymore.
Flock - I know what you mean about the dumbing down of games - Mario Sunshine and Zelda Windwaker were HUGE anticlimaxi, following from their N64 predecessors. But even if these newer titles had achieved their ultimate full potential, is there ANYTHING they could've done to impress you like their predecessors did?
Sleepy - Have you ever tried getting a nice 2 player game for you and your "hubby" to enjoy together? No good examples come to mind, but there must be a good one somewhere. Could become a "couples" thing like crossword puzzles! ;-)
Does he like football? Pro Evolution Soccer?
And I fact that you're choosing films instead, probably not that you're going off gaming, just gone off it from the point where it was ALL you wanted to do, down to the point where you only like it as much as watching a film so sometimes choose that instead...
Flock with GTA Andreas likewise...
But yeah, could I ever give back something decent to the real world if I never saw any of it for living in pretend ones?
I guess it's time to choose "life". :-D
> Here’s to anything that can drive your imagination.
Amen to that. I don't believe the gaming scene will ever explode again like it did, it's not possible. I'm not so sure you get tired of seeing the same old thing but it is more a case of your lifestyle changing.
I grew up, worked hard, played hard and then got a Mega Drive and Sonic and that was it I was hooked. My friend bought a N64, I bought the PS and we used to swop consoles and games. Now I have a PS2 but didn't buy it until FF came out.
Hubby hates me playing on the consoles and I used to have it fired up before he locked the door on his way out. Recently though I've found that sometimes I just cannot be bothered loading it up and will watch a film instead.
I hope I never stopped playing games. It would be a sad day to realise I've grown up and out of them a second time.
Amen to that. I don't believe the gaming scene will ever explode again like it did, it's not possible. I'm not so sure you get tired of seeing the same old thing but it is more a case of your lifestyle changing.
I grew up, worked hard, played hard and then got a Mega Drive and Sonic and that was it I was hooked. My friend bought a N64, I bought the PS and we used to swop consoles and games. Now I have a PS2 but didn't buy it until FF came out.
Hubby hates me playing on the consoles and I used to have it fired up before he locked the door on his way out. Recently though I've found that sometimes I just cannot be bothered loading it up and will watch a film instead.
I hope I never stopped playing games. It would be a sad day to realise I've grown up and out of them a second time.
Ok read the whole thing.
I'd say the golden age for myself was when the programmers started to work the PSone out, maybe around 97 when you had the likes of FF, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, games that had a story, were visually new and were almost a different genre or certainly a big step up.
I've not bought a game in over a year now, not since (the dissappointing) Broken Sword 3 and if i'm honest the PS2 hasn't done much for me, the only new things it's really introduced to me were GTA 3 and ICO, something different, i'm sure getting it online would have helped but i never did. I was in Blockbusters on monday night and San Andreas was available and i couldn't be bothered, not a good sign for my gaming future.
I think the problem is we've now gone too mainstream and the developers dont want to alienate the casual gamers by pushing things forward, Broken Sword 3 was a prime example of dumbing down for the public, it's happened with FF as well, i'm moving away from console gaming onto my pc, can't wait to finally start playing CIV 3 online and Sim City and all the games you've been playing for years, i've got a lot of new types of games to catch up and thats exciting.
I'd say the golden age for myself was when the programmers started to work the PSone out, maybe around 97 when you had the likes of FF, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, games that had a story, were visually new and were almost a different genre or certainly a big step up.
I've not bought a game in over a year now, not since (the dissappointing) Broken Sword 3 and if i'm honest the PS2 hasn't done much for me, the only new things it's really introduced to me were GTA 3 and ICO, something different, i'm sure getting it online would have helped but i never did. I was in Blockbusters on monday night and San Andreas was available and i couldn't be bothered, not a good sign for my gaming future.
I think the problem is we've now gone too mainstream and the developers dont want to alienate the casual gamers by pushing things forward, Broken Sword 3 was a prime example of dumbing down for the public, it's happened with FF as well, i'm moving away from console gaming onto my pc, can't wait to finally start playing CIV 3 online and Sim City and all the games you've been playing for years, i've got a lot of new types of games to catch up and thats exciting.
Should this be in the "Future of Gaming"?
Well, all it says is how I barely give a monkey's to the future now.
But FOG hasn't been all about FOG since... well, long before I joined! :-D
So a Golden Age. What would I mean by that.
Perhaps the best example is I could say that the 60's was a Golden Age for music and culture.
It had fifties roots, and at the turn of the decade it probably seemed that all the rock and roll excitement was already over. But then comes in The Beatles, Bob Dylan et all and there's a big boom...
Then by the 70's it's settled into it's own cliché and it's all gone normal again.
Not that there wasn't great music ever after.
The music has generally been getting a lot better ever since, but was it ever as exciting again? Was there ever such a rush of cultural evolution?
Now maybe I've got this big misconception about the 60's, and that I've got it all wrong on stereotypes and whatnot, but you get the idea what I'm trying to describe as a Golden Age, right?
Good. Let's continue. :-)
So where would I place this Golden Age of gaming?
Perhaps somewhere between 1993 and 2003, the boom happening in the late 90's, shaping the standards for 21st gaming as we now know it.
I think it starts with the Mega Drive, Snes, and PC.
The pre-Pentium PC.
I guess I could place the Mega Drive and Snes together. Both were giving very similar styles of games at the time. I've a personal preference for Nintendo's, but people were getting impressed with both.
I can't speak for the Mega Drive, but by 1994, Nintendo had delivered Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 6(3 for us Westerners), Donkey Kong Country, Secret of Mana, and many more that don't spring instantly to mind.
Anysway, during the 16bit era, games had suddenly reached new complexities in graphics, gameplay and story.
There was also this Starfox game. A 3D space shoot em up.
I played it once and didn't rate it, I played it again recently and still find it unplayable, but as a glimpse of where games were going, could there have been a better example?
The PC? It had odd games, like PGA Golf, but wasn't really showing itself as a proper games machine. I mean, they were still mostly based around Windows 3.1. It was almost purely configured for working. The hardcore could still get their games through MS DOS mode, but it was hardly up there with console gaming. But newer games were starting to push it to new levels. Doom was certainly a very new style of game (second FPS if I remember right, and a huge step ahead of its predecessor) putting you in the eyes of a soldier in a "3D" world of monsters.
And there was this new "internet" starting to get around as well.
Not quite THE Golden Age there and then... (although I bet some people out there would certainly feel it was, the 3D phobic punks!) but I guess you can say that these were the roots of what followed over the next few years.
So where did games go from here?
The Saturn and the Playstation dropped in.
First shown was the Saturn with the new wave of 3D games.
I personally, at the time, thought that these 3D games were a load of crap – Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, didn’t rate them at all. I still liked my platforming and adventure games. But that’s not the point. The point was people were experimenting with 3D.
The Playstation also launched with 3D games, such as Ridge Racer.
But most of these games were 3D in visuals only, the gameplay still being similar to the classic 2D counterparts. A platformer like Pandemonium had 3D visuals but only the forwards and backwards, and up and down of classic 2D games.
But things were moving forward.
People were already starting to see lifelike realism in games like Tekken and Fifa.
The PC was also slowly starting to move on as a gaming platform, with the new Windows 95 supporting games, making it that little bit more user friendly, and new graphics cards to give them power to match that of the new 3D consoles.
And then the N64 was released and the boom started.
Mario 64 probably wasn’t the first fully 3D game, but certainly the most important.
Analogue control allowed you a full range of directions in 2 dimensions, and a jump/accelerate button for the third.
So all of a sudden we’ve got games where you can control a character to move around as if it’s a real world. All beautifully drawn and animated. We take it for granted now, but at the time…
And then it all started to come together at once.
The N64 was my favourite. The most powerful console at the time (and in those early days it even wiped the floor with the PC). Once Mario 64 broke a barrier for 3D gaming, everything seemed possible. Lylat Wars materialised as everything the original Starfox showed potential for, Goldeneye brought the PC’s most prided genre to console gaming, Zelda made the ultimate adventure, and to top it off, 4 player splitscreen gaming was standardised and gaming suddenly had found a new dimension.
Nintendo also dropped Pokémon on the world.
Before that, did anyone ever imagine a computer game franchise could out do Disney? After Christmas 1999, everyone seemed to be carrying around gameboy colors with them, (even though the Pokémon games weren’t really in colour – just red or blue!).
I also saw glimpses of what the Playstation could offer. Now it didn’t quite have the ability to make N64 powered 3D worlds (although some games did do some pretty neat tries) but it had a strength of its own:
Cds could hold more information than ever and this meant that music and full motion video could be added with ease. Games reached new epic and cinematic heights, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid perhaps being the most notable.
The line between games and films blurred and people who had never cared about “silly games” before suddenly got hooked.
Sure, N64 owners could scoff and say that they were all about the story and atmosphere rather than gameplay, but that’s what made them special.
Also, sports games were being given the true “as seen on TV” experience:
Fifa, WWF games (back when it was still WWF!!), ANY sport could be “simulated” with realistic motion capture making them look just like on TV.
And these games did make it to all the consoles, but the Playstation version nearly always came out on top, the N64 lacking cartridge space for detailed videos and good commentating, and the PC lacking a decent standard controller.
Gran Tourismo may have bored me, but car obsessives must’ve been amazed to see their dreams could be played through on a game, with every intricate detail perfectly modelled out to simulate what it would be like to drive a £100k car around fast corners.
And Lara Croft certainly brought a new image to games.
Basically, games crossed into interactive Film/TV territory and grabbed hold of a new audience.
The PC was taking gaming into yet ANOTHER direction.
It had already established favourite genres, such as First Person Shooters and Real Time Strategy games, something that consoles would never pull off, business games like Sim City…
Processing power and new media storage meant that more atmosphere and cinematics could be put into games, and with new graphics cards being developed, the PC was becoming home to some of the nicest eye candy around.
And it had an ace card up its sleeve:
Online gaming suddenly boomed.
You see, the year had gone 1996 and internet was becoming popular.
But 1998 nearly everyone I knew had access to it.
The MSN gaming zone became the centre of a new social life and clan warfare picked up big time. Playing with and chatting to anonymous people around the world was a pretty new experience, and sort of gave those pale nerds a new social life.
Now looking back, most of these games were filled with lag, bugs and god knows what else, but the whole community thing was great.
All the crazy mods and new levels people were starting to create, character skins, all this DIY game editing. Most of the quality was crap, but that was half the fun!
Each gaming platform offered something new and special, things we take for granted now but seemed so special at the time. I’ve not scratched the surface. I’ve perhaps just given you the most obvious examples. You’ll all have your own memories of what blew you away during this time and what changed your life forever.
Personally, I don’t think ANY game will grab me as much as Goldeneye, Smash Brothers, Pokémon Red and Zelda: Majora’s Mask did.
I guess they were my personal gaming legends, closely followed by Mario 64, Zelda OOT, WWF No Mercy, Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Perfect Dark.
So what happened from there?
Well, the Dreamcast game and promised the best of all worlds, which technically it could’ve produced, having the N64 analogue stick and even more power, bigger CDs than the Playstation and a modem for online gaming.
It turned out to sort of end up jack of all trades, master of none, despite bringing out some very special games, nothing enough to drag people away from their current consoles.
And then the new breed came out – the PS2, the Xbox and the Gamecube (the PS2 came out a while before, but lets face it, was their ANYTHING to be excited about for the first 6 months).
Perhaps the last hurrah was when the first wave of titles showed us all the limitations that stopped the old breed from being perfect had been removed, that now ANYTHING was possible.
Pikmin and Rogue Leader weren’t the big epic Nintendo games we’d been expecting, but if things were only going to get better…
GTA 3 wowed the world by allowing you full freedom in a living, breathing city to do what the hell you liked. And this was just the start…
The Xbox mixed together the ingredients of all the greatest FPS (despite fudging level design) to give Halo…
But other than that we were starting feel like we’d seen it all before.
Nearly every game could have it’s skeleton traced to a last generation one, and although it felt different at first, you got bored of the game quicker, a hidden sense of déjà vu sneaking up on you.
Not that we don’t get the odd fresh game, say Pikmin, Animal Crossing, GTA 3 and Fable, but they’re a select few hardcore choices. And it’s not that games have gotten worse – some of these “classics” look VERY dated now, and some are almost unplayable, but at the time it all seemed so fresh and new.
No game had looked like an actual horror movie or sports game before.
No game had let you explore and entire, detailed, 3D virtual world before.
No game had let you contact millions of random people from around the world before.
It all came together at once.
And so my hardcore gaming days are coming to a close, a prospect that might’ve horrified me about 3 years ago. But it’s true.
Games just don’t grip me anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy them, but once upon a time they used to mean so much more. NOTHING else was as important.
I came across a PC version of Final Fantasy 7 recently, and it hooked me like no game had in a LONG time, but that week of antisocialness (and it was LIGHTWEIGHT antisocialness compared to the day, because I actually tried to talk to people and be tactful about locking myself away rather than not giving a monkey’s about ANYTHING except for the game in hand) left me feeling sour.
And when a guy who was giving me tips was telling me about how he (back in his gaming heyday) had found all the billions of secrets, tricks – and trust me when I say that this game is stuffed to the gills with them – it just seemed like such a chore when as in my prime I’d’ve been buzzing until I’d found every single last thing.
And then I’d started over and done it again.
Perhaps it was a sign that it was the beginning of the end when I didn’t get EVERY single cheat in Perfect Dark and I was just happy to finish it on the hardest setting.
Or maybe it was just a sodding hard game! :-D
So there’s no question that I grew up a little.
But it wasn’t just that. Games started to let me down long before I had no time for them. God knows Dringo’s heard no end to THAT! :-D
So c’est le vie and life goes on.
I still play games, and games are still good.
There are still clever and original things coming out of the industry.
Here and there.
But will there ever be a time like that Golden Age, when everything just boomed at once, when not one game that people never dreamed imaginable came to being, but several at once.
Will it ever be as special again?
Well, not on the same scale, but perhaps there is some interest on the horizon.
The DS and PSP are about to roll into town and all of a sudden, these quality 3D virtual worlds are coming to your pocket for wherever you need them, and wireless Bluetooth means that you’ll be able to connect to people within a certain radius without having to meet them in person.
Text messaging is popular enough as it is.
I can see the Touchscreen whiteboard picking up big time, not to mention games of wireless perfect dark in the park… or at school… or wherever…
Portability, wireless connectivity, major online gaming, I think that’s where the future of gaming is going?
Me, I’m thinking I want to be leaving behind the virtual obsessed way of life and go and find my Buddhist inner enlightened self, master Wing Chun Kung Fu and make some great music.
But I’ll never forget what, for just a few years, those pretend worlds really meant to me.
There you go, there was a big long essay rant for you all.
Nearly 2 and a half thousand words?
I remember when things like that seemed like such a chore… :-D
And to think it was a combination of “brain numbing” gaming and cheapskatedness that enticed me into these forums and got me writing. :-)
Here’s to anything that can drive your imagination.
Well, all it says is how I barely give a monkey's to the future now.
But FOG hasn't been all about FOG since... well, long before I joined! :-D
So a Golden Age. What would I mean by that.
Perhaps the best example is I could say that the 60's was a Golden Age for music and culture.
It had fifties roots, and at the turn of the decade it probably seemed that all the rock and roll excitement was already over. But then comes in The Beatles, Bob Dylan et all and there's a big boom...
Then by the 70's it's settled into it's own cliché and it's all gone normal again.
Not that there wasn't great music ever after.
The music has generally been getting a lot better ever since, but was it ever as exciting again? Was there ever such a rush of cultural evolution?
Now maybe I've got this big misconception about the 60's, and that I've got it all wrong on stereotypes and whatnot, but you get the idea what I'm trying to describe as a Golden Age, right?
Good. Let's continue. :-)
So where would I place this Golden Age of gaming?
Perhaps somewhere between 1993 and 2003, the boom happening in the late 90's, shaping the standards for 21st gaming as we now know it.
I think it starts with the Mega Drive, Snes, and PC.
The pre-Pentium PC.
I guess I could place the Mega Drive and Snes together. Both were giving very similar styles of games at the time. I've a personal preference for Nintendo's, but people were getting impressed with both.
I can't speak for the Mega Drive, but by 1994, Nintendo had delivered Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 6(3 for us Westerners), Donkey Kong Country, Secret of Mana, and many more that don't spring instantly to mind.
Anysway, during the 16bit era, games had suddenly reached new complexities in graphics, gameplay and story.
There was also this Starfox game. A 3D space shoot em up.
I played it once and didn't rate it, I played it again recently and still find it unplayable, but as a glimpse of where games were going, could there have been a better example?
The PC? It had odd games, like PGA Golf, but wasn't really showing itself as a proper games machine. I mean, they were still mostly based around Windows 3.1. It was almost purely configured for working. The hardcore could still get their games through MS DOS mode, but it was hardly up there with console gaming. But newer games were starting to push it to new levels. Doom was certainly a very new style of game (second FPS if I remember right, and a huge step ahead of its predecessor) putting you in the eyes of a soldier in a "3D" world of monsters.
And there was this new "internet" starting to get around as well.
Not quite THE Golden Age there and then... (although I bet some people out there would certainly feel it was, the 3D phobic punks!) but I guess you can say that these were the roots of what followed over the next few years.
So where did games go from here?
The Saturn and the Playstation dropped in.
First shown was the Saturn with the new wave of 3D games.
I personally, at the time, thought that these 3D games were a load of crap – Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, didn’t rate them at all. I still liked my platforming and adventure games. But that’s not the point. The point was people were experimenting with 3D.
The Playstation also launched with 3D games, such as Ridge Racer.
But most of these games were 3D in visuals only, the gameplay still being similar to the classic 2D counterparts. A platformer like Pandemonium had 3D visuals but only the forwards and backwards, and up and down of classic 2D games.
But things were moving forward.
People were already starting to see lifelike realism in games like Tekken and Fifa.
The PC was also slowly starting to move on as a gaming platform, with the new Windows 95 supporting games, making it that little bit more user friendly, and new graphics cards to give them power to match that of the new 3D consoles.
And then the N64 was released and the boom started.
Mario 64 probably wasn’t the first fully 3D game, but certainly the most important.
Analogue control allowed you a full range of directions in 2 dimensions, and a jump/accelerate button for the third.
So all of a sudden we’ve got games where you can control a character to move around as if it’s a real world. All beautifully drawn and animated. We take it for granted now, but at the time…
And then it all started to come together at once.
The N64 was my favourite. The most powerful console at the time (and in those early days it even wiped the floor with the PC). Once Mario 64 broke a barrier for 3D gaming, everything seemed possible. Lylat Wars materialised as everything the original Starfox showed potential for, Goldeneye brought the PC’s most prided genre to console gaming, Zelda made the ultimate adventure, and to top it off, 4 player splitscreen gaming was standardised and gaming suddenly had found a new dimension.
Nintendo also dropped Pokémon on the world.
Before that, did anyone ever imagine a computer game franchise could out do Disney? After Christmas 1999, everyone seemed to be carrying around gameboy colors with them, (even though the Pokémon games weren’t really in colour – just red or blue!).
I also saw glimpses of what the Playstation could offer. Now it didn’t quite have the ability to make N64 powered 3D worlds (although some games did do some pretty neat tries) but it had a strength of its own:
Cds could hold more information than ever and this meant that music and full motion video could be added with ease. Games reached new epic and cinematic heights, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid perhaps being the most notable.
The line between games and films blurred and people who had never cared about “silly games” before suddenly got hooked.
Sure, N64 owners could scoff and say that they were all about the story and atmosphere rather than gameplay, but that’s what made them special.
Also, sports games were being given the true “as seen on TV” experience:
Fifa, WWF games (back when it was still WWF!!), ANY sport could be “simulated” with realistic motion capture making them look just like on TV.
And these games did make it to all the consoles, but the Playstation version nearly always came out on top, the N64 lacking cartridge space for detailed videos and good commentating, and the PC lacking a decent standard controller.
Gran Tourismo may have bored me, but car obsessives must’ve been amazed to see their dreams could be played through on a game, with every intricate detail perfectly modelled out to simulate what it would be like to drive a £100k car around fast corners.
And Lara Croft certainly brought a new image to games.
Basically, games crossed into interactive Film/TV territory and grabbed hold of a new audience.
The PC was taking gaming into yet ANOTHER direction.
It had already established favourite genres, such as First Person Shooters and Real Time Strategy games, something that consoles would never pull off, business games like Sim City…
Processing power and new media storage meant that more atmosphere and cinematics could be put into games, and with new graphics cards being developed, the PC was becoming home to some of the nicest eye candy around.
And it had an ace card up its sleeve:
Online gaming suddenly boomed.
You see, the year had gone 1996 and internet was becoming popular.
But 1998 nearly everyone I knew had access to it.
The MSN gaming zone became the centre of a new social life and clan warfare picked up big time. Playing with and chatting to anonymous people around the world was a pretty new experience, and sort of gave those pale nerds a new social life.
Now looking back, most of these games were filled with lag, bugs and god knows what else, but the whole community thing was great.
All the crazy mods and new levels people were starting to create, character skins, all this DIY game editing. Most of the quality was crap, but that was half the fun!
Each gaming platform offered something new and special, things we take for granted now but seemed so special at the time. I’ve not scratched the surface. I’ve perhaps just given you the most obvious examples. You’ll all have your own memories of what blew you away during this time and what changed your life forever.
Personally, I don’t think ANY game will grab me as much as Goldeneye, Smash Brothers, Pokémon Red and Zelda: Majora’s Mask did.
I guess they were my personal gaming legends, closely followed by Mario 64, Zelda OOT, WWF No Mercy, Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Perfect Dark.
So what happened from there?
Well, the Dreamcast game and promised the best of all worlds, which technically it could’ve produced, having the N64 analogue stick and even more power, bigger CDs than the Playstation and a modem for online gaming.
It turned out to sort of end up jack of all trades, master of none, despite bringing out some very special games, nothing enough to drag people away from their current consoles.
And then the new breed came out – the PS2, the Xbox and the Gamecube (the PS2 came out a while before, but lets face it, was their ANYTHING to be excited about for the first 6 months).
Perhaps the last hurrah was when the first wave of titles showed us all the limitations that stopped the old breed from being perfect had been removed, that now ANYTHING was possible.
Pikmin and Rogue Leader weren’t the big epic Nintendo games we’d been expecting, but if things were only going to get better…
GTA 3 wowed the world by allowing you full freedom in a living, breathing city to do what the hell you liked. And this was just the start…
The Xbox mixed together the ingredients of all the greatest FPS (despite fudging level design) to give Halo…
But other than that we were starting feel like we’d seen it all before.
Nearly every game could have it’s skeleton traced to a last generation one, and although it felt different at first, you got bored of the game quicker, a hidden sense of déjà vu sneaking up on you.
Not that we don’t get the odd fresh game, say Pikmin, Animal Crossing, GTA 3 and Fable, but they’re a select few hardcore choices. And it’s not that games have gotten worse – some of these “classics” look VERY dated now, and some are almost unplayable, but at the time it all seemed so fresh and new.
No game had looked like an actual horror movie or sports game before.
No game had let you explore and entire, detailed, 3D virtual world before.
No game had let you contact millions of random people from around the world before.
It all came together at once.
And so my hardcore gaming days are coming to a close, a prospect that might’ve horrified me about 3 years ago. But it’s true.
Games just don’t grip me anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy them, but once upon a time they used to mean so much more. NOTHING else was as important.
I came across a PC version of Final Fantasy 7 recently, and it hooked me like no game had in a LONG time, but that week of antisocialness (and it was LIGHTWEIGHT antisocialness compared to the day, because I actually tried to talk to people and be tactful about locking myself away rather than not giving a monkey’s about ANYTHING except for the game in hand) left me feeling sour.
And when a guy who was giving me tips was telling me about how he (back in his gaming heyday) had found all the billions of secrets, tricks – and trust me when I say that this game is stuffed to the gills with them – it just seemed like such a chore when as in my prime I’d’ve been buzzing until I’d found every single last thing.
And then I’d started over and done it again.
Perhaps it was a sign that it was the beginning of the end when I didn’t get EVERY single cheat in Perfect Dark and I was just happy to finish it on the hardest setting.
Or maybe it was just a sodding hard game! :-D
So there’s no question that I grew up a little.
But it wasn’t just that. Games started to let me down long before I had no time for them. God knows Dringo’s heard no end to THAT! :-D
So c’est le vie and life goes on.
I still play games, and games are still good.
There are still clever and original things coming out of the industry.
Here and there.
But will there ever be a time like that Golden Age, when everything just boomed at once, when not one game that people never dreamed imaginable came to being, but several at once.
Will it ever be as special again?
Well, not on the same scale, but perhaps there is some interest on the horizon.
The DS and PSP are about to roll into town and all of a sudden, these quality 3D virtual worlds are coming to your pocket for wherever you need them, and wireless Bluetooth means that you’ll be able to connect to people within a certain radius without having to meet them in person.
Text messaging is popular enough as it is.
I can see the Touchscreen whiteboard picking up big time, not to mention games of wireless perfect dark in the park… or at school… or wherever…
Portability, wireless connectivity, major online gaming, I think that’s where the future of gaming is going?
Me, I’m thinking I want to be leaving behind the virtual obsessed way of life and go and find my Buddhist inner enlightened self, master Wing Chun Kung Fu and make some great music.
But I’ll never forget what, for just a few years, those pretend worlds really meant to me.
There you go, there was a big long essay rant for you all.
Nearly 2 and a half thousand words?
I remember when things like that seemed like such a chore… :-D
And to think it was a combination of “brain numbing” gaming and cheapskatedness that enticed me into these forums and got me writing. :-)
Here’s to anything that can drive your imagination.