This is the fourth time I’ve sat down to write my next blog entry and hopefully it will present itself with more luck than the previous three. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but I hate everything I write lately. I think it may be because I’m trying way too hard to find something witty and meaningful to talk about when all I really need to do is speak from the heart about whatever happens to be on my mind (which I’ve done, this may be the lengthiest blog post I’ve orchestrated). Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the evolution that video games have experienced and how in depth they’ve become over the years. The thing that sticks out like a ginger at a rap concert for me is the story that a game is capable of telling. The evolution of gaming isn’t just noticeable through the story, but the game play, graphics, and ways to experience them as a social network as well. The story, however, is the icing on the cake for me because it satisfies my insatiable love for a good adventure. It’s not hard for me to tell if a game has a crappy story because I’ve come to consider myself to be a decent critic when it comes to the art of storytelling. I love a good story no matter what format it’s being told in, whether it’s movies, books, or games. The most popular of the three seems to be games, for me anyway. It’s easy to sit down and view an entire story via movies, or spend a few days (or years in my case), reading the story, but games have the most unique ways of telling a one. Unlike books and movies, I actually get to live and play through the story rather than watching or imagining it. It’s amazing to be able to explore an imaginary world and experience firsthand how the mystery unfolds before my eyes, almost as if I were protagonist himself (or herself).
With the unconditional help of technology, consoles have far surpassed the gaming capacity of its predecessors. With bigger and better consoles on the market, games have been able to evolve from three hours of simplistic button mashing in a game that lacks a story, to games that require more hand eye coordination and a story with complex plots. I’m not saying that old school games are dumb, they just don’t necessarily require a whole lot of skill and there’s no emotional connection to them. The evolution of games has gotten me thinking about how popular it has become over the years, and how the culture of gaming has changed through my own personal experience. I’ve played hundreds of games and I’ve enjoyed most of them, but it took me awhile to realize what I liked about the games I was playing. At first it was mindless fun being able to control something on the television. Then I stumbled across and fell in love with the multiplayer aspect of games because being able to own (also known as pwn) your family and friends in a virtual world really fueled my competitive spirit for a long time. Heck, I still enjoy multiplayer games even if that’s all the game has to offer. But it wasn’t until my second year in high school that I realized what has always kept me hooked to gaming. It’s a recipe of mindless fun, multiplayer, and the most important ingredient, the story. This epiphany came to me when I was introduced to a special game that will forever be a favorite in my eyes as long as I breathe the stale and polluted air on this earth.
Thinking back on the old school games I use to play, I’ve come to the conclusion on how I think they were most likely developed. The idea to create something fun to play was put into action and the story was built around that. This stuff was revolutionary back then, I mean look at Mario for example. Mario was fun because of its simplicity and quirky game play which allowed the gamer to control an Italian plumber wearing a pair of hideous, yet legendary red overalls, throughout his own two dimensional world. The player needed to maneuver Mario through a series of obstacles that were made up of enemies, sink holes, and random blocks just levitating in the middle of nowhere. Mario was also able to interact with his environment, such as jumping on the heads of his enemies or using his fist of steel to punch coins, flowers, mushrooms, and stars out of the levitating blocks. As random as they are, they all granted some sort of reward. Earn enough coins and you’ll be rewarded an extra life. Run into the moving mushrooms so mini Mario can become a man. Jump on the flower so it can change the color of Mario’s overalls to white and provide him with flaming boogies used to off baddies (looks like he’s picking his nose to me). Oh, and my favorite was the star because it was like the Grim Reaper harvested his death touch into it, which allowed whoever possessed it momentary badassery upon whoever he made contact with. Sometimes I wish I had that in real life. In all, this game was colorful, the bad guys weren’t scary (unless you find walking mushrooms and turtles scary), and best of all, it was very approachable. Looking back on it now I think to myself, hey that game was fun, heck it probably still is, but did I really care about the story? Was the story a suspenseful, on the edge of my seat, nail biter? No, I’m maneuvering my way through a series of interactive puzzles so I can defeat King Koopa (or is it Bowser), to save Princess Peach. And all that ungrateful stuck up bitch offers as a reward for risking your fictional life is, “thank you”, followed by a sign that says your quest is complete. She could have at least kissed the poor guy before running out and getting kidnapped again in the sequel. I’ve just gotten too use to games having compelling stories that make me feel like I’m a part of something making it so I could never go back and have the same kind of enjoyment with those old games. Actually that’s wrong, I think Mario is probably just as much a blast as I remembered it because it was surrounded by the mindless fun games use to revolve around.
I probably would have played more games as a child, but instead we had this other crazy fun thing to do called playing outside. I suppose eighteen years ago it was okay for people to let their kids roam the neighborhood without worrying about which one of their twenty registered sex offender neighbors might invite their kids in for ice cream and sex. Sadly that’s the truth. I’ll let my daughter outside, but she’ll never be allowed to leave the yard where I couldn’t see her. One Christmas my parents bought us a Super Nintendo, which made me realize that playing outside was indeed a requirement. I mean, it was nice to have a console around the house because I could play a game whenever I wanted, but that turned into whenever Mom and Dad allowed me in the house. Seriously, I think they would kick us out and lock the door until the street lights came on. If I was thirsty I had to drink from the hose because there was most likely no way I was getting inside. Perhaps part of that is a fabrication generated by my forgetful memory, but back then it didn’t matter because that’s typically what kids did in the days where technology was as adolescent as we were. I have some pretty vivid memories with that console though, like this one time my Dad let me stay home from school because I was “sick” only to send me in an hour later because I wouldn’t get off of Street Fighter II. I could have played that off a lot better now that I think about it, but I didn’t know how to play my parents at the retarded age of 10. Either I was really dumb then or my brain was intellectually celibate, or maybe I was just a normal ignorant kid who wouldn’t know how to play hookie until he was older. Street Fighter II was easily my most played game on the Super Nintendo and it was one of the mindless fun games that let me punch my brother in a virtual world without getting in trouble. It was one of those games that tried to force a story down your throat when it really wasn’t needed. Each character had their own unique ending, but they were pretty bad because some endings would clash together, which made them contradict whatever the heck was going on. So Chun Li did kill that guy? Because in his ending Guile spends an eternity flying around the galaxy for fun, picking up hot alien babes at every planet. Sure I’m making that up, but it’s not too farfetched from the typical ending in any fighting game I’ve ever played. Mortal Kombat is my favorite in the genre, but I do have to say that every time I viewed a characters ending, it felt like I was on some sort of roller coaster ride through soap operaville. I never really knew who was dead, good, alive, pregnant, whatever. Developers of fighting games don’t realize that we’re attracted to the flashy characters and their amazing moves. That’s all we needed to keep us entertained. You spend two minutes on a single match and then rinse and repeat, that’s what the game is, so why force a story in? That would be like a football game adding an irrelevant campaign story to help water down its mediocre game play. Oh wait, that did happened and it sucked (Blitz the League).
After years of playing games that were just stupid fun, I reached a point where I fell in love with what games could give back to me. Perhaps I was always too young and ignorant to ever pay attention to the stories that any game attempted to share with me. The summer of 2001, my parents moved us to Cheyenne so we could be closer to my Mom’s side of the family. At first I suffered the typical trials and tribulations of moving from one High School to the next, but I found my place and made it nice and cozy for a long stay. Football season had come and gone too fast and I had made quite a few friends from it. But since I wasn’t really that active in the winter months, I’d become bored. I had started working at this store called “Mail Boxes Etc.”, which you may now know as, “UPS Store”, and with the bite size fragment of money that I made from there, I was able to purchase my own console. Sadly it was the original Playstation (I wanted the Playstaion 2), and the only game I owned was NFL Blitz. Believe it or not, smashing your foes into the ground and causing a fumble on almost every play actually does get boring after awhile. I suppose you could say anything gets boring after paying it too much attention. For example, Keanu Reeves got old after fifteen minutes into the Matrix. BAM! Take that you overpaid Barbie. Seriously, if that talentless, handsome bastard can act, then so can I, right? Anyway, the Playstation really started getting dull playing the same game, so I went out and bought Tony Hawk. That game got old faster than last months Ipod. Honestly, I just wasn’t interested enough to play the same boring thing over and over again. I don’t know how many times I can do aerials, grinds, and kick flips on the same map and still never have enough points to move onto the next hopeless skating wasteland. My time would have been better spent watching “Murder She Wrote,” than playing Tony Hawk, stuck on the same map for hours doing the same flips and tricks over and over and always expecting a better outcome. Didn’t Albert Einstein define insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,”? Correct me if I’m wrong about who quoted that, but my wife never fails to remind me of it whenever she see me playing a game where I’m doing the same exact thing over and over as I try to unlock whatever insane achievement I’m going for.
So during the holiday season, I’m at my Grandparent’s house chilling down stairs with my Uncle as he unravels the mystery that is his new console. “An Xbox?” He explained to me that it was a new console released by Microsoft and that he purchased a bundle that included the console, two controllers, and three games. Those games were Test Drive: Off Road, Amped, and Halo. I contemplated which game we should try first and decided that Amped would be a good choice. I only chose it because it looked like a Tony Hawk game on a snowboard. Even with my distaste for Tony Hawk and its redundant lameness, I still wanted to play a different game that resembled it. Surprisingly it was an enormous amount of fun. I felt like the king of the world boarding down this unique mountain and performing impossible tricks on its pimped out trail. With giant hills, half pipes, and things to grind on so easily accessible, it made Tony Hawk look as appealing as Barbie’s Horse Adventures. Amped was a lot more generic and straight forward, which entertained me the most because in a skateboarding game I had to go around finding things to do tricks on rather than having a plethora of items to choose from on my run down the hill. Sure, it still had crazy objects like Tony Hawk did, but it also had smack talking snowmen that were begging to be found and wiped out. Despite being a lot more fun than Tony Hawk will ever be, I still grew bored of it. We all had to take turns because there really wasn’t a decent multiplayer packaged with the game, so we moved onto the next best thing.
Test Drive: Off Road looked to me like the typical racing game until James Hetfield melted my face as he screamed, “Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire.” The soundtrack to this game alone was inspirational and we couldn’t wait to jump in. The game was pretty good for awhile, but there’s only so much you can do in racing games that it becomes mind numbing over time. I think it may have been Christmas break when my brother and two cousins were hanging down stairs at my Grandparents house in the tiny bedroom my Uncle utilized as his game room. There really wasn’t much space in there, but we did manage to all fit in. We were tired of the same old games when we decided that we’d give the third game in my Uncle’s Xbox collection a try. I looked at the cover and immediately thought that this game was made for the same dorky people who worship Star Trek. Pointing his weapon at whomever happened to be looking at it, was a man wearing a suite of green armor, whilst in the background some dudes in jeep were shooting at the aircraft that was chasing them. Seriously, the cover was the reason we hadn’t tried the game earlier since we thought it looked gay, but out of boredom of the other games, we popped it in anyway.
Stay tuned for part II of the most amazing blog post ever.
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