I was considering digging out Riven this morning, to play it again after a considerable period since I first played it. If you haven't any idea what Riven is, then I shall tell you. It was the sequel to the highly successful Myst game. The game was a sort of point-and-click RPG adventure, but that description doesn't do it justice at all. They eventually made 5 games, all of which loosely followed on from the previous, however for me, Riven was the best. It just looked so damn good.
I've been having some gaming nostalgia this week. My son acquired Final Fantasy XII for his birthday last week and it's reminded me of just how good Final Fantasy VII was. That period (around 1997) must surely have been the pinaccle of games production, because all my favourites came out around then, not forgetting Tomb Raider II especially, with it's fantastic Venice levels. The best levels Lara ever traversed.
What's happened to games since then? I think it's the Internet that's to blame. The gaming industry have been pushing online gaming to the detriment of the games themselves. The three games I've mentioned above gave tremendous value for money. The gameplay lasted literally months (certainly if you had other stuff like work to fit in also). My son has finished many newer games in 2 or 3 hours and because he isn't going to be playing them online, it strikes me that he's being cheated out of valuable gametime, since so much of the disc is now devoted to that end.
Perhaps the new HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs will allow game creators to fully develop both elements, solo gameplay and online play without sacrificing either, although I just can't see it myself. I think the day of the massively long-lasting game is well and truly over. They will have gotten lazy now. Games used to take years in the making, but now they want quick releases with the result that the games need to be kept short and more emphasis placed on graphics and controls. It's npt too late though, let the thinking man back in so we can enjoy the beautiful looking, long lasting, intelligently created game, once again.
5 comments:
I quite agree!
Old games simply rule. To be fair to new games, they do have a bit of an uphill struggle. Firstly there's the nostalgia factor which is hard to compete with, and then the sad fact that the more games there are the harder it is to be both original and playable at the same time, so there's a lot of potential for originality points gone too. Then, of course, graphics haven't really moved on in any way other than incrementally any time recently, whereas things like Tomb Raider 1 were a major shift (I was going to say paradigm shift but I dislike the phrase. But I thought you might like it so I hedged my bets and put it here anyway so you would take me seriously.. talking frivolous nonsense about a trivial subject. Yay!) in graphics, 3d! Moving camera! Full range of exploring! etc.
I preferred TR1, and the level (whichever one it was) with the broken staircases and the deep water. Glory days. I played that on a 486 DX2/66 and was blown away by the graphics. I nearly had a heart attack when the T-Rex appeared!
In one sense I suppose I'm not the ideal person to comment on the relative merits of old vs new games, because I've not bought or played any for quite a while, but this is because nothing has caught my eye - I'm looking for something which is intricate, long lasting, deep and fulfilling. Not much to ask for, sure, I know, but all I see are row after row of uninspired first-person-shooters and racing games of one form or another.
And yes, online games, which I just don't want to know. Paying monthly for a game seems like a bad idea to me, and there's also an implied commitment of time required which I'm not sure I want to have to try to honour. The other thing which puts me off online gaming is that the element of competition is king. Long gone are the days when I could be all teenaged and sit around doing nothing but gaining a ludicrous degree of competence at a game - long gone for me, that is, but for the hordes of online gamers it is a different matter. I don't want to play a game where I will be pwned inside thirty seconds by some autistic teenager who plays the game in his sleep and has nanosecond reflexes. I prefer to take things at my own pace and extract the value, rather than at the pace of the quickest, and extract the piss.
I worked in a games shop at the time that Ultima Online came out. It was the first game we knew of that could ONLY be played online (retail). The number of people bringing it back was astonishing. 33.6k modems were king. This may have had something to do with it!
It was a bold experiment at the time, and now that genre has reached its peak with things like World of Warcraft. The business model is working incredibly well and with the fact that the games industry has been financially struggling for some time, I can't see publishers willing to deviate much from a winning formula, irrespective of disk capacity. The sad fact is that making a game these days requires an astonishing amount of work and thus costs an obscene amount of money. I think that gems like those of the past were products of their time as much as anything else, and "we shall not see their like again".. well, not often, anyway.
FF7 was fantastic fun.
Civilization was another groundbreaker. I loved that game, it was the first one I actually sat up all night playing. On the Amiga.
Thanks for the peek back through the Mysts of time. ho ho ho.
Commander Keen, anyone?
Very well spoken Loz, thanks for the comment. I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Unfortunately for the present generation, unless they go "Old Skool", they'll never ever experience a game like FF7!
I played FFXI for about a year and a half but I wouldn't put the hours in, when I gave it up I wasn't very far in at all by most standards, sometimes months would go by when I didn't get around to playing it, partly because it deliberately didn't let you alt-tab out of it so making time for it was a big deal, and also partly because I preferred doing stuff on my own to having to work with other people. Most of the content in the game you'll never see unless you spend a ridiculous amount of time on it.
With great games like FFVII I liked to hold back and level up as much as possible, I'd move on when I couldn't stand it anymore - I played 7,8 and 9 and some of the older ones on the old playstation.
Oh, my worst memory of FF7 is having to click through a conversation that seems about fifteen minutes long, in a stairwell with Barrett I think.
My favourite part of FF VII was the Golden Saucer and the in-game games. But my abiding memory is just how long it lasted and how well made it was... value for money really! But yes, you had to devote a great deal of time to it!
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