Pac-Man Nastalgia

Yesterday I entered a tournament, I was tested in various combat situtions where I was required to shoot my weapons at fellow combatants and fight to the death. I emerged victorious and was assigned a team to lead into the second part of the tournament. There were various games that my team was required to win to stand victorious, capture the flag, bombing run, assault were the games that my team and I competed in against other teams. We destroyed, literally, every single person on every other team that got in our way. After all the blood and violence, we finally emerged the victors. Then I got up from my computer and went and made a sandwich.

The game I just described is called, UnReal Tournament 2004 (or UT2K4 to the initiated). The game, contrary to its title, is VERY real. When you kill in the game, you can see the blood fly. The environments look very real as well, with physics effects and lighting effects mirroring the real world. The in game controls required me to hit over 20 different buttons to do distinct things. My ability to play this type of game came from very humble beginings.

There was a time, and Im probably dating myself by saying this, when video game controllers only had one button and a joystick. The games were seriously complex though. I mean, in one semi-popular game, you had to run across busy streets with your frog, the main character, while dodging cars. Once you got across the street, you had to cross a lake by jumping on fast moving lily pads without falling in the water (because, of course, water kills frogs as easily as cars). That was the entire premise of the game. It was an age of wonder, let me tell those of you who do not remember. The graphics were simplistic at best or what kids today would consider barbaric at worst.

Like all things temporal, it changed. A few years later, a new video game system was released and it had FOUR buttons plus a directional pad. Our minds were nearly blown! The graphics too changed dramatically. This new system carried an 8-bit graphics chip. To tell you the truth, we did not even know what that meant but we DID know that the graphics were just AMAZING! The main characters were actually human shaped and had different colored clothes and you could tell that Mario had a mustache. Never mind that the main character was a plumber, of all things, that grows to three times his size when he eats a mushroom (what?) and fights against a giant evil turtle named Bowser to save the Princess of the Toadstools. Hmm, what is a toadstool anyway?

This was just the tip of the iceberg though. After 8-bit graphics came 16-bit graphics. Along with that we got controllers with EIGHT buttons plus the directional pad. Sega entered the market to compete with Nintendo and we were split. I remember having heated discussions in the middle school lunch room debating over which was better: Super Nintendo or the Genesis? The battle lines were drawn and if you were a fence sitter you had no friends.

In retrospect, that was probably a dumb thing to be debating in light of the times (the Gulf War was brewing, and the world debated their response) but we dealt with what we knew, and we knew video games.

The great companies on the other side of the pond, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony by then, decided to skip 32-bit graphics altogether and move on to 64-bit. Thus entered the Nintendo 64, Sony Playstation, and the Sega Dreamcast. All three offered revolutionary (at the time) graphics and gameplay. The directional pad was joined by a joystick (or 2) and TEN buttons. The games made anything we had previously played seem like what the cavemen would play.

This pattern, doubling the graphics output of the console systmes every couple of years, has continued with the 128-bit generation (the PlayStation 2, Gamecube, and Xbox). The games have gotten better and the graphics more realistic. The video games today make the older games seem dumb. I would argue, however, that the games of yore were better in many respects.

The games that came before super realistic graphics required the gameplay and story to be all encompassing to mitigate the fact that the graphics were cheesy. Thats why those games are classic and will always hold a soft spot in the hearts of many a gamer. Today's games lean on their superior graphics like a crippled man leans on a crutch. Many of these new and "better" games have weak gameplay and weak storylines (not all, but lots). That just did not happen 15 years ago because the games that were weak in gamplay and storyline were games that were rejected before being produced or rejected by buyers.

Today graphics are so good and so few people read reviews of games before buying that terrible games (with good graphics) make huge amounts of sales. Its a terrible tragedy of the video game industry.

In the days of 8-bit things were different, simpler and I liked it that way. I love today's graphics, but I hate that I have to search around more to find the games with good graphics AND good gameplay. The industry has lost its way and I wish it would find a way to bring back the quality of days gone by.