Reader Reviews

Gaming Itself

by juggler

My childhood experiences with video games were with the like of Battlezone and Tron (and later, Star Wars) in the arcade near our regular summer holiday destination - and much later, with the Commodore 64. I won't spend long extolling the virtues of this revolutionary machine with its 8-bit colour, 64Kb RAM, the MOS6581 SID-chip, a three-voice subtractive synthesizer, the MOS6566 video chip with support for 8 21x24 pixel multicoloured sprites.

Suffice it to say that many games developed for the beige beast are now regarded as seminal.

Since those days I'd barely played any video games until about a year ago when two things happened - I stumbled across a modern Star Wars machine on Brighton Pier and saw a clip of Rogue Leader on the telly. I impulse-bought a GameCube a couple of weeks later, together with copies of Rogue Leader and Pikmin.

I don't know what I was expecting from the machine. I certainly didn't want to lose hours of my life to goggle-eyed thumb-cramping mindlessness, especially not after staring at a monitor all day - my youthful exposure to a C64 had contributed to my becoming a software engineer. If I'd thought about it for more than a nanosecond I would never have bought the thing.

Having handed over the readies I was convinced that we knew how to do it better in the old days - joysticks with one or two fire buttons, rather than two analogue thumb sticks and countless other buttons. Games that were properly hard, games that took lightning reflexes and hours of dedication, games where pausing and saving were unknown and endurance was part of the experience.

I was very pleasantly surprised. In retrospect my initial games couldn't have been better chosen to suck me back into gaming. Rogue Leader has enough old-school arcade-style space combat and jaw-dropping graphics to remind me of my youth, while Pikmin typifies the differences between consoles and the C64. While Pikmin owes a debt to the classic Lemmings it really shows how imaginative and structured games have become. More importantly, Pikmin seduced my wife to the way of the GameCube (so much so that she is pestering me to buy an Xbox so she can play KOTOR).

A year on... and the Cube will sometimes go untouched for a week or two but has remained part of our leisure time - watch a video, go out for a meal, put a game on?

There are a lot of very average games around. I just don't have the time to fiddle with awkward controls or dodgy camera mechanics. Complete waste of time, so bye bye Super Monkey Ball, ta ra Wind Waker, ciao Harry Potter. I do have lots of time for well paced, beautifully thought out and tested games - hello Star Fox Adventures [Tom seems to be frothing at the mouth... -Ed], welcome Metroid Prime, wotcha Timesplitters 2.

I'd love to see more co-operative multiplayer games. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance has been the only one which has worked well so far... roll on Pikmin 2.