Cataloging the Detritus of my Life
The above animation can be yours as a program or screensaver for either Macs or Windows if you give absolutely anything to the Americares Foundation which is raising money right now to help those caught in the on-going disaster in Japan.
This is a really nice piece of pixel art and you can proudly show it off on your desktop and do something nice for those in need!
Despite the fact that I have a backlog of video games that is, let me check… At least in the double digits (I haven’t updated it in awhile) I find myself returning to the same stable of games again and again.
Am I the only person who does this? I’m guessing not, going by all the videos, forum threads, and websites dedicated to old video games; how to find them, how to play them, how to beat them, how to exploit them, and on and on. (I even indulge in this myself. Click on that ‘Let’s Play’ tab at the very top of the page to see.)
I like to think that this is more than blind nostalgia operating. That there are very good objective, quantifiable reasons why I play Megaman 2, Castlevania, or King’s Quest IV time after time and year after year. The problem of course is that games, as works of art, are notoriously difficult to objectively quantify or qualify. The hobby does have widely held corpus of “great” games, but the list is highly mutable and it has been argued contain sgames that are present merely for their age. Furthermore, what qualifies a game as “great?” The criteria available to use is nigh endless and contradictory.
I’m no ludologist (and I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to pretend to be an amateur one ) so I’m not going to attempt creating a list of the various components of games that qualify them as “greats.” I’m sure if I could isolate said components they would not match up with others’ lists anyway.
Sometimes it is merely the presence of the ineffable that defines greatness, I suppose…
Here’s my list of games I just can’t, and wouldn’t want to, quit (in no order):
Do you find yourself going back to a set of “knowns” time and time again? Regardless of how many new “unknowns” you might have and want to consume? If so, please share them below in the comments and why you think it is you keep going back to them!
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 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!
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.
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.
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?