Category: video games

Fixing My Playstation 2

12 years and going strong!

I don’t recall when I picked up my PS2. If I recall correctly, and as time goes on that becomes harder and harder, I picked it up in 2002 which makes my console nine years old. Through those nine years it has faithfully played every CD, DVD, and PS2 game I’ve put into it. Well, that was the case until last month or so… Then it started giving me intermittent “disc read errors” that slowly, but surely devolved into complete inoperability.

I have a slim PS2 that has been sitting in a box for years. But, I was not ready to give up on my old one, especially since one of my goals this year was not reduce the amount of waste I generate. It is not easy to recycle advanced electronics and companies are not (yet) taking them back to recycle.

I poked around on the internet and found a guide at ifixit.com that guided me through the process and all it cost me was an #00 phillips screwdriver.

The bottom of the PS2 with the screw caps removed.
The opened case, the optical drive is on the right.
Optical drive with its cover removed. All it took was a little rubbing alcohol.

The whole operation only took 30 minutes or so… and I’ve been running the PS2 through its paces and it is working fine. I hope to get another nine years out of the console before I need to take a look at it again!

MADE: Creating a space for Video games

That’s the video pitch for the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in San Fransisco. MADE is raising money right now on Kickstarter to rent out a space where they can set up the Museum (as of this writing they had 50 more days and only $8,000 more to go.) I’ve already given money to the program. I’m writing this though to tell you why you should to.

Unlike books, movies, music, paintings, sculptures, and every other artistic work. Video games don’t have museums, galleries, libraries, or archives to preserve them. They don’t even have the recognition of being works of art in many circles. Videogames, as seen by the mainstream, are just more disposable entertainment. Sadly, this view is too often held even by game designers and publishers who have been only too happy to condemn design documents, artwork, and code to the trash heap.

This problem is compounded by videogames digital nature. Digital storage mediums degrade at a rate that would give archivists heart-attacks. The hard- and soft-ware necessary to run much of this code does not only degrade with time, but some of it is irreplaceable and no one knows how to repair or maintain it. Code can be preserved but art has to be delivered in a context and much of it is being consigned into landfills or recycled at e-waste centers.

That’s where MADE comes in! They want to not only preserve videogames as artistic works but to present them in their original context. Old Sierra On-line games running in DOS, Atari 2400s hooked up to old CRT televisions, etc.

To read more about the preservation crisis that the video games industry is facing please see John Anderson’s articles on the subject [1, 2]

I know that the space MADE sets up is going to be small. But, I can envision a day when MADE is just as large and important  as the MoMA, or Smithsonian  and where people will come to see and experience the work of past designers who were able to meld story, art, and interaction into what we so commonly call “games.”

I know you’ve got five dollars lying around you aren’t using, so why haven’t you clicked over to Kickstarter and helped preserved our heritage?

I want to see more games like TWEWY

Silly name, good game

I finished The World Ends With You (TWEWY) last Friday. The game was an enjoyable romp. The story didn’t make a lot of sense and the character (and costume) design was atrocious but the gameplay was solid and more important scalable. Why is scalable bolded like that? Because it is the single greatest thing it has going for it and the single greatest thing I wish started showing up in more games!

TWEWY doesn’t punish a player for not learning the minutiae of its various game play mechanics. It doesn’t penalize you for not being able to sink in the hours and hours to master controlling characters on two screens simultaneously, or learning the intricacies of its mini games (like tin pin slammer and fashions.) TWEWY is only as difficult as you want it to be. You can set the difficulty level at any time, you can set how your secondary characters works at any time and you can safely ignore all the mini-games, sub-plots, and interesting game design elements if you want, and still see the ending of the game.

More difficult than it looks.

Why is this so important? Well, I’m not six or sixteen anymore. I have a fucking life now and I no longer have the luxury of six or seven spare hours in a day to immerse myself in my favorite pastime. If I did I’m sure I could master all the nuances of tin pin slammer, or figure out just what types of experience go into making my pins evolve. Seven-year-old-me loved that shit and ate it up. Seven-year-old-me had the free time to memorize enemy stats and talk endlessly about the differences in the magic systems in various JRPG gaming franchises and how that compared with said systems in western game franchises (oh, the misspent hours of my youth…) I do not.

I don’t want to hear anyone down in the comments say something like “Maybe you just suck at gaming,” or “If you can’t commit to a game don’t play it.” The answer to my lack of time isn’t to give up my most cherished pastime. And you should slam your head against a wall for thinking I, or anyone else, should. The average age of a gamer today is 34. In general 34 year-olds have full-time jobs, family commitments, social commitments, community commitments, etc. What they don’t have is a lot of free time to sink into games that demand they ‘master’ them in order to enjoy them.

God, these kids look stupid.

I just wish more designers did things like this. The difficulty in video games has been declining for years, but as implemented in TWEWY it allows the player to decide, on the fly, how difficult they want things to be. So, when the player is looking for something more challenging or has the time to sink into it they are rewarded for it. At the same time I can play and enjoy the game as well.

Here is a case where gamers can have their cake and eat it too. So why aren’t designers catching on?

What’s Unique about Mother? (Thoughts on Earthbound)

When I played Earthbound I saw a lot of things, some good some bad, but not amazing and mostly I saw a typical JRPG. Earthbound is Dragon Quest with a setting swap. This isn’t an insult to the game. It’s simply an acknowledgment that the game isn’t genre defining, revolutionary, or paradigm shifting.

It’s hard to say when I became a “nerd” who played video games.  Acquaintances in grade school might have pegged me as a “nerd” but it was because I took a great deal of enjoyment out too many think fantasy novels.  I got the Nintendo early on in its life cycle but never had more than  two or three games for the system until everyone had upgraded to 16-bit systems and were getting rid of their “obsolete” NESs.  I was there to accept or purchase cheaply their unwanted games.  Games like Bionic Commando, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Kabuki, Castlevania, Metal Storm and others.  I even scooped up a copy of the NES Game Atlas.  It was with these 8-bit hand me downs that I became a “nerd”  who played video games, or just a gamer.  But, while all the other nerds were playing and talking about Super Mario World, I was exploring the intricacies of  SMB2 and 3.

I certainly heard people talk about Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger but I never played them until after the SNES was yesterdays news and people were talking of Saturns, Playstations, and N64s.  My earliest experiences with the SNES were at friend’s homes with games like Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, Star Fox, and Super Punch-Out.  I missed out on Final Fantasy 3, Secret of Mana, and the Lufias.  I sold my NES and all those games, nearly 50, to get enough money to buy a SNES when it started being bundled with Donkey Kong Country (’95 or ’96, I think.)  Again, many people were moving over to 64-bit systems and just giving away their games, move rental chains too were selling carts at a heavy discount to make way for Saturn and Playstation CDs. With people beginning to talk about 3d gaming and witnessing such early attempts as Jumping Flash, and later more refined ones as Resident Evil, I could only be jealous.  Luckily, I had such familiar, and phenomenal games, as Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid to sooth my gamer’s lust.  Those games that took my breath away and still do.

In 1997, I  succumbed to the marketing blitz of Final Fantasy 7 and sold my SNES and games to buy myself a PSX and that game… I can’t really say I became a fan of the series or JRPGs until then…  That is a different story though, and this introduction has gone on long enough.  What I’m trying to say is all of the above might have something to do with why Earthbound just doesn’t do much for me.

There are a number of games on the SNES that I can play again and again.  All of them I played for the first time more than 1o years ago though, the same is true for many NES games.  On occasion I pick up a game I’ve never played and play through it but I find that a lot of the charm I see in these old games must be supplied solely by me and the personal emotions that are tied up with them.  NES and SNES games I play now are not accompanied by any such emotions and so, the flaws and limitations of the them are much more apparent to me.

Earthbound fans love to talk about the game, and they love to tell you how amazing it is.  I believe them when they tell me these things, but I also believe that much of that pleasure is not in the game itself but tied up in their memories of it.  When I played Earthbound I saw a lot of things, some good some bad, but not amazing and mostly I saw a typical JRPG.  Earthbound is Dragon Quest with a setting swap.  This isn’t an insult to the game.  It’s simply an acknowledgment that the game isn’t genre defining, revolutionary, or paradigm shifting.  Someone I know stated that the Mother series was all about evoking nostalgia but when you have no emotional attachment to the game, and not much to its genre (circa 1995) there isn’t an fuel for the Earthbound to ignite and player’s without a specific history, a cultural reference, are left in the cold.

Did you play Earthbound when it came out?  Did it blow your mind?  How so?  I’d really like some other people’s thoughts on this…

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