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For many of us who are over the age of 20 we fondly remember our first gaming experiences on the old Atari 2600 or the new-fangled Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). In those days game programmers were limited to 8-bit blocks that were arranged to loosely resemble some sort of object or creature and we had to use our imaginations to fill in the blanks. I fondly remember spending copious amounts of time in front of my old TV playing Dark Chambers and Joust on my Atari and such favorites as Tetris and Super Mario Brothers 3 on my old NES. I loved these games not for their cheesy graphics and sounds, but because the programmers made them engaging and fun to play. These days, graphics are in danger of reaching the uncanny valley because they are so good. But not all of them are really that fun to play.
Back in the era of 8-bit consoles (and one may extend this to the 16-bit Super Nintendo era as well) games seemed to draw me in more than modern games do. Whether it is hours spend exploring the Ice Cave in Final Fantasy or just trying to get to level 15 in Tetris, games had me hooked. While Mario may have been a slightly man-shaped blob on the screen, many of us have to admit to spending hours in front of our NES trying to get him to level 8 to take down Bowser. I have yet to find a game in the last 5 years that has captivated me as much.
Not only was the game play on a whole different level than today, games back then were HARD. If you messed up you would see the dreaded GAME OVER on your screen. Generally speaking, that was it, you were done, thanks for playing, start over. These games did not hold your hand, did not give you an option to make it easier, they were there to beat you down until they managed to forge you into a game playing genius able to beat the game in less than 3 hours. And then when you beat the game, you started over again because there was always some way you could improve your performance from last time.
These games were before the introduction of the cut scene. If there was plot your character would stand there while villain would go into an exposition of why they wanted revenge on you or why they were the only person able to rule the world, blah blah blah. Even with this primitive precursor to the cut scene, it felt like a lot of these games had rich stories that were memorable.
Games these days just don’t seem to be as good overall as games from the Atari to SNES (arguably the golden age of games) eras. Game technology has improved immensely since then with regards to input devices, graphics, sound, and animations. But in so doing it feels like we have lost something on the way. When critics review games the first category is almost always Graphics. A game can be made or broken just on how it looks, not how it plays.
To me this is sad. I would prefer a game that looked horrible but had a fantastic story or some game mechanic that was fun. A lot of indie games have started going this route. One game I played recently, Space Pirates And Zombies (SPAZ), looked on par with an Xbox live game, but I ended up playing it until 4am because I lost track of time. In this respect, I think indie games will start taking over the industry because they are able to focus on what made those older games so great, gameplay and story.
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