Way back in the days of the NES, we played an altogether different type of game. For one thing, the plots of our games rarely if ever made a lick of goddamn sense. If you're the type of guy who has to point out every single inconsistency and plot hole in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, please stay far, far away from an NES. Expect many questions to ensue, such as "Bionic Commando's arm is cool and all, but wouldn't it be a good idea to send a guy who's at least physically capable of jumping?" or "Did Samus really think bringing nothing to the hostile alien planet but a gun that only fires four feet in front of her was enough?" or the ever‑popular "Since when did plumbers shrink to half their size when they get injured?"
She's done such a shitty job arming herself that I'm honestly betting on the walking Bart Simpson heads to win this one.
One of the most egregious examples is Contra. Here we have a game where an evil alien army is doing some really bad stuff off on their remote island base, preparing to invade and probably enslave Earth. The chips are down and to be quite honest, things have never looked this bad. I imagine that this situation resulted in a lot of scientists dramatically removing their glasses and proclaiming "My god...." in a soft voice that still carries all of the weight of a truly apocalyptic scenario.
We are all standing on the brink of destruction. Everyone knows they have only one day to live, and they're trying to make the most of it. Husbands are telling their wives they love them. Overworked office employees are telling bosses to suck their balls. Children are finding out what happens when you pee on an electric fence. This is truly our darkest hour. Humanity has slipped in the shower, sustained a serious spinal cord injury, and fallen into a coma. The human race is on life support, and all of the Christian protestors in the world aren't going to stop this alien army from disconnecting the feeding tube. It's judgement day.
The
Alright, let's go! We're go....... oh, you aren't sending thousands of soldiers? Budget cutbacks, I understand. How many are you sending? Two? Only two thousand? That wasn't as many as I was expecting, but it should still work. Oh, not two thousand. Two hundred? Wait, you're only sending two as in literally two guys? I get it, you're sending the two best stealth infiltration experts you have, and they're going to sneak into the compound and assassinate the alien leader. It like it! Oh, they don't do stealth. That cool, I saw a movie once where a jaunty African American and a paranoid Jew stole a UFO and used it to give the aliens a virus. It was one of the most asinine plot developments in
If these guys aren't available, who the fuck is going to punch the aliens in the face and go, "Welcome to Earff" now?
Not only are these guys the center of the most poorly planned military operation in history, they're also a lot weaker than you would expect a couple of Rambo clones to be. If they're going to be sent to take on the entire army with only a crappy rifle, you would expect them to be superhumans who can kill alien lifeforms with their bare hands, heal wounds with gunpowder, and the ability to behead enemy soldiers with their steel boners wouldn't be a bad touch.
Unfortunately, these guys are complete and total pansies who will die not only from the most minor of injuries, but also seem to drop dead from anything that even slightly irritates them. One hit from any type of enemy will kill them instantly. I can accept them dying from a crushing blow delivered with inhuman force by the swinging spiked pseudopod of a towering alien guardian, and although it would be nice if these alleged badasses could take more than one bullet before kicking it in, I can accept that a bullet to the head would get the job done.
But it doesn't stop there. Touching the body of an alien soldier instantly kills you while the soldier keeps charging forward like nothing happened. Making contact with a mounted gun barrel will cause instant death even if it isn't firing at the moment. Hell, the friggin' bottom of the screen causes an instant meeting with the reaper. If these clowns actually managed to kill off the alien leader I would be afraid to pat them on the back for a job well done out of fear that the force of my hand would completely rupture their spinal cords.
To be fair, I'd also be concerned about messing up that sweet flat top.
That leads right into the next main characteristic of old‑school games: holy fuck were they hard. As you might expect, surviving a game environment that is completely packed with enemy soldiers with bullets whizzing around in every imaginable direction and spike traps randomly popping up as a commando who is so prone to dropping dead from minor injury that he makes Mark Prior and Ken Griffey Junior look like iron Howitzer tanks by comparison isn't particularly easy. Contra is so hard that one of the first ever cheat codes in gaming history was created specifically for this game.
Contra isn't the only game from that era that drove children to contemplating seppuku as a more palatable option than trying to beat them. Battletoads is a game that is supposedly about humanoid amphibians who fight their opponents with devastating punches and attitude, but we could never know that for sure. As far as we know the last ten levels of Battletoads are about getting drunk in a bear suit, punching a few clowns, demolishing a Honda Civic with a green and purple sledgehammer, and topping it all off with beating off to a rerun of Charmed. We'd never know because no gamer in the history of mankind has gotten past the fucking speedbike section of level three.
Oh, and you'd better believe it doesn't stop there. Ask any male in his twenties today and he'll more than likely have a story about how his NES gave him hypertension at the age of six. Ask them how easy the bosses are in Mega Man when your character has only slightly less mobility than a recent stroke victim. Whisper the name "Bo Jackson" to someone who played Tecmo Bowl and watch them go into a psychiatric episode. Find someone who tried and failed to beat Ninja Gaiden, look into the eyes of his shattered soul, utter the words, "Level 6‑2" and watch him collapse into a quivering, catatonic heap.
Jetpack ninjas??? Are you motherfucking kidding me?
Old people like to talk about everything that they overcame in their time. My grandpa always used to brag about how his generation overcame the depression in addition to kicking both Jerry and Tojo's ass in one war. Well guess what? My generation has overcome more than you could ever hope to accomplish. I single handedly defeated an entire alien army with only two buttons! Not only that, you didn't die instantly just from touching a Nazi. Suck on that, old man! You think the haunting dreams you still have about your buddies being ripped to shreds with Kraut machine gun fire is bad? Try seeing the face of Bo Jackson every single time you dream about football. The worst part is if you change the dream from football to baseball, Bo is still fucking there. Adolph Hitler may have been one of the most frightening madmen to ever live, but he sure as hell wasn't a multi‑sport athlete.
I'll tell you which way: Right into my fucking nightmares.
The brain‑melting difficulty of games didn't just stop with the strength of the enemies and the design of the levels. That wouldn't be punishing enough. If you wanted to save your progress, you would have to copy down absurdly long passwords, and that was only if you were lucky. Some games wouldn't even give you that option and just force you to beat the whole thing in one sitting. Are you upset that you ran out of lives and you wasted two hours of your time because you have to start all over? Well tough shit, you should have played better.
Passwords were more forgiving, but not by much. If you ever wanted to pick up where you left off in Metroid, you would have to copy a 24‑character case sensitive password and enter it when you came back to the game. In another example of how much harder the NES was than World War II, you didn't have a Navajo Windtalker to help you enter the code. If you messed up even one letter, you were completely screwed. Did you mistake that lower case L for an upper case I? Again, the NES says tough shit. You should have paid more attention. I never found school to be very difficult because no teacher has ever been as hard on me as my NES was, and I filled a lot more slips of paper with 24‑character passwords than I did with spelling tests.
This is a password entry screen from Rambo for the NES. It is literally twice as long and intricate as the password I use to get into my online bank account.
Old‑school games were also marked by a great level of simplicity. The Atari 2600 had a joystick and only one action button, while the NES had a directional pad and a whopping two buttons to press, not counting select and start. In Castlevania, you could walk around, jump, and whip. In Contra, you could walk, jump, and shoot. In Super Mario Brothers running, jumping, and spitting fireballs was the extent of your physical capabilities. Elaborate button combinations that allowed you to execute dragon punches, kill fools with a charged plasma pistol / battle rifle combo, or bang hookers were unheard of.
The final characteristic that drastically sets old games apart from the modern ones is length. In the days of the NES most games were incredibly short. Contra may require hours upon hours of intricate memorization of level layouts and the movement patterns of the bosses in order to get to the end of the game in one piece, but the truth is that if you were to turn on an invincibility code and run through the whole game, it would take less than a half hour to get the job done. The whole game is eight levels long and none take longer than five minutes to run through. (Note from the author: Right after writing this paragraph I loaded up my copy of Contra and beat it in 22 minutes. I did this because I want every sentence of this book to be impeccably well‑researched, and it most definitely wasn't because all of this talk about Contra gave me a serious itch to play it.)
And if you heard me screaming, "Suck my spread gun, you tentacled alien cocksmoking faggot!", I assure you it was just part of the research process.
All of these characteristics of old‑school games stand in stark contrast to what we have today. As far as length goes, it has become more or less unacceptable for a full‑priced game to take less than ten hours to complete. Some games take the length to ridiculous, unnecessary extremes, but that's for another chapter. But getting back to the subject, ten hours is an absolute bare minimum. If a game dares to be that short, it had better offer incredible graphics, a great story, interesting characters, wonderfully realized gameplay mechanics, and it would be nice if it would babysit your children once or twice a month. If a game like The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay wants to be that short, the only way game reviewers and the general public will let it off the hook is if every other aspect of the game is a heartfelt apology for the length. And we're talking about a game that is literally over twenty times longer than Contra.
Also changed is the plot. While most current video games still have a long way to go before matching the fully realized storytelling of
This one screen is the only thing you get for beating Friday the 13th on the NES. I'm not even close to shitting you.
Today, video game developers put real thought into the stories of their games. Most can't match what Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese do, but the ambitious and at the very least technically impressive Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid series show that the medium has the potential to top what movie studios can do. Hell, significant thought is put into the plots of even the most testosterone‑charged and disposable games. If God of War, a game about a bloodthirsty psychotic Spartan who murders everyone and everything he meets can be given a legitimately compelling story, anything can. In 1988 nobody gave a shit if story was non‑existent, while nowadays game reviewers will dock a game points if the story sucks. Game companies are going so far as to hire actual writers and
Another huge change is in the complexity. Gone are the days of Double Dragon where all you can do is move around and push two attack buttons. Thanks in part to a drastically higher number of buttons on the controller, and partly to more sophisticated design, a character in a fighting game can literally have over 100 moves. Not only does Yoshimitsu from Tekken have dozens of different kicks, punches, throws, blocks, and slice attacks, he can also execute a move where he sits down on the ground and totally makes jerking off motions with his sword.
However, in my opinion the most drastic change that has been wrought upon video gaming between now and the 80's is a hugely reduced level of difficulty. Today's gamers hate playing a game where one hit kills you, dying launches you all the way back to the beginning of a level and negates over a half hour of work, and puzzles can only be solved by an entire squad of NASA scientists. Although some modern games such as Devil May Cry 3 reach such a miserably high difficulty level that even the most basic enemies in the game kick your ass, and some resemble the cakewalk of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which can be beaten by most special ed dropouts without so much as a single Game Over screen, most strike a balance and give you a reasonably challenging experience with a few difficult parts in a package that is overall beatable but not so easy that it causes the player to lose interest.
So in today's gaming world we have games that are long enough to justify their price, offer a rich level of complexity, make a serious effort to tell a fully realized, legitimately engaging story, and bring gamers a reasonable level of difficulty that makes video gaming much more of a leisurely activity than a masochistic exercise. There's also the obvious fact that decades of advancement in computer technology has resulted in games that look and sound immeasurably better.
Every single person and object in this picture is gray, but somehow every single detail vividly pops. Yeah, I don't understand it either.
These are all good things, right? Shouldn't we celebrate better‑looking, more enjoyable, and more immersive games? According to some people, the answer is a resounding "hell no!" These people are the self‑proclaimed old‑school gamers. They're the ones who think games were meant to be short and tough. They believe cut scenes outlining a story are stupid because games shouldn't try to be movies. They think developers should be arrested for spending a lot of time trying to make a visually attractive game because it's time that could have been spent refining the gameplay. They think any remotely lengthy game is padded, today's gamers are coddled by low level of difficulty in games, and Nintendo is the devil for aiming the Wii at the casual gamer market.
Aside from a few personalities such as George "Maddox" Ouzounian, there are less and less high‑profile proponents of an old‑school gaming mindset, and I'm proud to report that a majority of gamers do not fall within this sect, but I have still heard enough of this type of logic that I feel the need to address their main points and show why despite all of their claims to the contrary about how games have lost their soul, the truth is that times are better than they've ever been.
The main idea behind the psychology of the old‑school gamer is that games are meant to be short and difficult, and the long and relatively easy games we play today have missed the point. Along with this they believe that simplicity is a virtue when it comes to game design. This is completely absurd. Games weren't short and difficult in the 1980's because developers had a philosophical belief that a gaming experience should be torturously difficult and offer the player only a minimal amount of content. That is completely and utterly fucking ridiculous.
It's kinda like saying cavemen used clubs to hunt because they just didn't like guns.
The real reason why games were short is because about a half hour's worth of content was about all they could fit in an NES cartridge. These old‑school gamers imagine game designers in the 1980's as cranky old men who could give you a hundred levels if they wanted, but decided to only give you eight because if you get all hundred you'll get spoiled and greedy. It's like they're drunken stepfathers who are really hard on you at a young age and you hate them at the time, but when you grow up to become a successful architect you're thankful he kicked your ass so much. In the eyes of an old-school gamer, a conversation between a gamer in 1988 and the guy who envisioned Contra would go something like this: (For this exercise, the developer will be known as Bill and the gamer will be known as Little Stevie)
Little Stevie: Bill, I had a really fun time playing Contra.
Bill: Why do I give a shit if you liked Contra?
Little Stevie: I just wanted to say thank you for making it.
Bill: I'd rather have a roll of toilet paper than your thanks, you little fucker! At least I can wipe my ass and get some use out of that! What can your thanks do for me?
Little Stevie: Oh gee, I don't know.
Bill: You don't know anything, and that's the problem! Your mother left me raising an empty‑headed little turd!
Little Stevie: Okay, um, those eight levels are fun and everything, but do you think you could do more? I mean I did pay 70 dollars for that copy of Contra.
Bill: You greedy little sack of shit! You want more than 8 levels? You're lucky I developed that game for you at all! Right now I wish I could punch you right in your ungrateful mouth and snatch the 70 clams from your pocket, you fuckin' crotch sniffer!
(30 years later. Adult Stevie goes to Bill's house)
Adult Stevie: Bill, I have a great job and a family of my own, and I just wanted to say thank you. I was so ungrateful when I was seven and all I had was a jungle, two enemy bases, a waterfall, an ice field, an energy zone, a hangar, and the alien's lair. I wanted you to give me more. Maybe a lava level, or a factory, or maybe a city level. Now I realize that the complete lack of length or variety made me a better man. I can't have everything handed to me! I love you!
Bill: Come here, ya little bastard!
(Adult Stevie and Bill share a genuine hug)
That's just not how it was. Developers actually would have loved to make their games longer and prettier, but there was a pretty finite limit on how much could be crammed into an 8‑bit cartridge that has about 48K of storage space. (For those of you keeping track at home, just one JPEG image makes for a larger file.)
This image of Gary Busey is 102 KB. One picture of Gary Busey takes up over twice as much memory as an NES game, which was the absolute pinnacle of home entertainment technology in 1988. Is this an interesting comparison that shows how incredibly far technology has progressed in two short decades, or is it indisputable proof that Busey is the most powerful entity in the universe?
On that same note, this is exactly why games were so difficult. Many of their games only sported a half hour of content, so they needed a way to keep people coming back and playing for hours and hours. Most new cartridge games would cost a wallet‑raping $70, so getting people to play for a long time to justify the purchase was a necessity. The answer was to make the games gut‑wrenchingly difficult. Games that require certain levels to be practiced over and over before they could be understood, and reward the player with slightly more progress that results in them seeing slightly more new content with each play was a clever way to turn their brief games into long‑lasting experiences.
Technical limitations also resulted in the brutal save and password systems. Old‑school gamers believe that modern games that offer copious save points or the option to save whenever you want coddles a gamer (I call it convenient), and they nostalgically remember a time that you had to beat a game in one sitting. Again, this isn't because game companies wanted to punish you in order to make your eventual triumph all the sweeter, it was because the ability to save your game was a technology not yet mastered, and lengthy passwords were the most relief they could give.
Also, what exactly is wrong with games that look good? It seems like only the most contrarian Tucker Carlson or Stephen A. Smith-type cable TV commentator could think that something looking good is actually a problem. Of course gameplay is more important that graphics, and a great‑looking game that's no fun to play belongs in the trash heap, and there are plenty of butt‑ugly games that are fun enough that the visuals don't really matter, but ugly, unsophisticated graphics are not something to be respected. If a game developer in the modern era puts out a game that looks like complete and total ass, they aren't following some sort of old‑school philosophy about the importance of visuals, they just didn't do a very good job.
Only third grade teachers and self-proclaimed old school gamers will actually praise you for making something that looks this shitty.
I'm reminded of people like Quentin Tarantino who have an abiding hatred of CGI and digital effects in cinema. They talk about how movies should be real and don't need artificial computer‑generated monsters and explosions, and you should only see what the camera sees. They regret that more stuntwork isn't being done with human stuntmen.
I say fuck a whole lot of that. CGI is awesome! Without CGI you couldn't have Obi‑Wan completely wrecking Anakin's shit and leaving him to get set on fire and have his face melted on that awesome lava planet. When you do special effects with CGI instead of having a human deliberately wrecking a car he's inside, you also prevent that occasional horrible death that results. To those people who believe that no movie image should be computer generated, what the hell do you think was used to make the credits at the beginning and end?
There are two kinds of people: Those who love the computer-generated, heartwarming Toy Story movies, and fucking coldhearted assholes who I hope die horribly.
I'm completely cool with people who enjoy real stuntwork over CGI action, but why do they have to believe that anything that's not what they like shouldn't be allowed to exist? I think CGI action sequences like when King Kong kicked the living shit out of those three T‑Rexes is generally way cooler than real‑life stuntwork, but I still appreciate Jackie Chan's fights and think these things should be allowed to exist as well.
The same idea goes for these "purists" who hate when games attempt to have serious, involved storylines and have the gall to include cutscenes that you can't skip. Now I get completely annoyed with boring cinematics that can't be skipped and I hate it when games try to force a bad plot upon me as much as the next guy, and the simple or non‑existent plots of old‑school games do have a certain charm, but I think it's ridiculous to say that games shouldn't try. Video games have the potential to be fully immersive experiences that blend interactivity with a top‑notch storyline and memorable characters that come together to engage us on every imaginable level in a way that not even movies can achieve. How in the ever‑loving fuck can that be a bad thing?
Not only do I think developers shouldn't allow their creative visions be limited by the pressure to make an easily accessible game that people can quickly play that doesn't require them to sit through a lot of story to understand, they should run completely wild with their imaginations. They should be encouraged to try absurdly outlandish things. Trying crazy things and failing is necessary for an art form to mature. Shenmue for the Sega Dreamcast was a game in which you were dropped into a virtual city and allowed to do whatever you wanted. There was an overall storyline and ultimate goal to find your father's killer, but for the most part you could play with children, pet kittens, go on forklift races, hang out with the various townspeople, or play at the arcade to your heart's content. The game also played with the concept of the time of the day within the game playing an important role.
I'm sure that during the development cycle that was pressure to make a more fast‑paced game with more fighting and clearly labeled objectives. They could have easily turned this into a straightforward RPG or action game that would gain far more mainstream appeal, but Sega stuck to their guns. The result was one of the most boring games ever made. The world was huge and beautiful, but there wasn't enough to do. The idea of time passing throughout the day within the game was cool, but it resulted in a lot of waiting around for appointments with other characters. Making a game that imitates life was a pretty sweet idea, but the end product only succeeded in reminding gamers that their real lives suck and they didn't want to live through the misery of someone else's life too.
I appreciate what you tried to do, but including slow, plodding forklift races when I'm used to video games where you race in sports cars that top out at 200 mph is like daring me to hate your game.
Shenmue was a failure, but it opened the door for other developers to take the idea and refine it into something more enjoyable. A year later we had Grand Theft Auto III, arguably one of the greatest and most important games of the 21st century. Were the Shenmue development team not allowed to press forward with their mad vision and waste $70 million with their failure, gaming might not be the same today. If developers feel pressured to scale back the story and do something more traditional because that's what gamers are used to, we'll never see a world where video games can consistently match the emotional impact of movies.
Most gamers have incredibly fond memories of the old games they played when they were young. I know I do, but we can't let that nostalgia cloud this very simple fact: games kick way more ass now than they did in the 80's. I'll take Metal Gear Solid 4 over Contra in a heartbeat. I'll burn my copy of Final Fantasy 1 if it gets me a copy of Final Fantasy 13. Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox kicks the ever‑loving shit out of Ninja Gaiden for the NES. The change we're experiencing is good. Sometimes a new idea results in a bloated load of crap that makes us long for older games, but that new idea usually results in something way better when it's refined and improved. Don't be afraid of change, because games only continue to get better.
Electronic Gaming Monthly, my favorite video game magazine of all time, confirmed this opinion when they averaged the aggregate scores of their reviews from every year and found that 2007 was the clear winner. Old‑school gamers can wax nostalgic all they want about how the NES had more innovation in a single chip than the Xbox 360 does in its entire monstrous motherboard, but I'll always know that there is no place I would rather be than here.
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