Stuff to See!

Fun and Games on Labor Day

Labor Day is a good time for kicking back and doing something you love, rather than spending many hours at your job.
I've wanted to broach this subject for a while, now: video games.
That's right. Video games. Aside from the internet, anyone in my age bracket has been witness to the proliferation of these addictive silicon goodies (are cds and DVDs silicon?). The video arcade has been with us to greater or lesser extent since 1971, I believe, with the release of Computer Space. Pong in 1974 brought the fad more into the mainstream, and Space Invaders in 1978 actually inspired a coin shortage in Japan. I suppose there were some people who never thought an exercise of hand eye coordination could be so addictive. Regardless, video games prospered (aside from the crash of 1983).
Naturally, video games started to creep into peoples' homes. From the Odyssey straight through to the Playstation 2/Xbox/Gamecube today, the industry has focused more and more acutely on the home gamer.
Growing up in the midst of this trend, I managed to get my hands on a number of the home video game systems, as well as spend hundreds of dollars, no doubt, at the local arcade. It all started with...

Atari 5200

The Atari 5200 was an interesting system. The console was about the size of a PC tower. It was a cartridge based system which specialized in more advanced translations of arcade games to the home environment, although there were a number of console-exclusive games. The main weakness of the system was its lack of compatibility with the wildly successful Atari 2600 that had, at the time, a huge installed user base with classics like Combat and Pitfall.
What most people would remember about the 5200 was the unorthodox controllers. The controllers resemble large wireless phones with a fully analog joystick and two sets of fire buttons toward the top. The controllers sported 12 digit keypads on top of which you could place custom overlays, depending on the game (not all game used them). The analog control stick did not reset itself to a neutral position, but it was still quite an achievement for the home system. The keypad allowed for some degree of sophistication in sports games, where you could choose from multiple plays/pitches/etc with the push of a button.
The system was also destroyed, basically, by the aforementioned crash of 1983, where the market was over saturated with software, most of it pretty lousy, and it collapsed under its own weight.
I had about a dozen games for the 5200. I remember playing most of them pretty often, but my favorites were Joust (the original deathmatch game), Galaxian (which I could play forever, pretending it was Galaga), the original Mario Brothers, and Pac Man. Aside from the retro appeal, I don't think I'd play any of those games today on that system (especially since I have all of them, and a couple thousand more, on MAME).

Nintendo Entertainment System

Without a doubt, THE system that brought the home video game industry back from the dead. Nintendo replaced Atari as the household name in 1985 or so. The system was so wildly successful that Mario would become more recognizable to children than Mickey Mouse. Everyone who was alive in the 80s knows Nintendo, even those who never owned the console. A library of somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 titles meant that the NES had a game or twelve for any taste.
I never had more than a dozen NES games at a time, although I've played roughly half of the existing titles, thanks to the Blockbusteresque rental phenomenon. My favorite of them all is probably Super Mario Brothers 3, which may just be the greatest 2-D platformer of all time. Certainly it was the best, or among the best, for the 8-bit era. But I never owned the game (despite an opportunity to pilfer a rental during an address change in 1991).
I could go on forever about the great games on this system, but others have done so, and done better, so I implore you to seek out the numerous NES archives available on the web.
Among the games I did own, two stand out: Super Mario Brothers (the archetypal platformer) and Final Fantasy. I played SMB to death back in the day, even after I'd beaten the game hundreds of times in every conceivable way. Somehow I never became aware of the minus world glitch I'd read about in more recent times. I could play it again today to kill a half hour or so and still enjoy it. Then there's Final Fantasy...
And then there's Final Fantasy. The first game I ever bought for myself, I rented FF 1 once upon a time and was hooked instantly. Despite the repetitive battles, despite the difficulty involved, I latched on to this game just as much as it latched on to me. My father didn't understand the appeal of walking around and fighting the same enemies over and over again. Can't say I blame him, but something about the game, whether it was the beauty of the soundtrack (which somehow shone through the primitive sound capabilities of the NES), or the feeling of satisfaction from conquering the Ice Cave (easily the most difficult dungeon in the game with possible competition coming from the Temple of Fiends Revisited, by which point your party was a bunch of gods, basically), I played that game through twice and knew that I barely scratched the surface, considering the 1296 possible combinations of parties available. I've since played it through a number of other times, whether on an emulator, or on the Playstation port released fairly recently. Although the PSX version is prettier and easier on the ears, too, the NES version is simply hardcore.
Bionic Commando stands out as well. It gave rise to the all-time great moniker "Joe's Crazy-Ass Machine Gun", coined by my friend Kam, to describe a supposed powerful weapon (if you believed the instruction manual) which was actually a piece of lukewarm crap. Then there's the Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man...the list goes on and on and on....I wouldn't mind finding a working NES and a bunch of games simply to have around, the emulation isn't half bad, either.

Turbografx-16

The what? I remember it well. My father had won a court settlement of some $2,000.00 or so and allocated 5% of it to me to spend as I would. For whatever reason, the TG-16 appealed to me. A few words about the system since it never took off in the US.
The TG-16 was about the size of a laptop computer. It had exactly one controller port (which killed it for me as a viable system). It also had an expansion area to attach a cd-rom player, which was roughly $300 or so at the time, but it bears the curious distinction of being the first home console that had the cd-rom option (at $300, I never had a chance at it). The games came on silicon-wafers that slid into a thin slot toward the right hand side of the console. I found the cartridge/card concept quite novel, since for the most part that's what lay within the rather bulky cartridges on every other system in one way or another.
The TG-16 failed miserably in America, and in short order I was sick of it. It had a couple outstanding games, but the only one I really liked was Bonk's Adventure. Bonk was cave boy with an enormous head, his primary weapon. The graphics were pretty sharp in an anime-inspired way, and the soundtrack was catchy. But it was also a very short game with little or no challenge to someone as seasoned in the art of playing video games as I was at the age of 14. The solitary controller port, which obligated an outlay of $40 minimum for two player action (for a multi-tap and a second controller) made competitive gaming nearly impossible.

Sega Genesis

Sega's second console was a beast! The 16-bit Genesis started blowing the NES out of the water around 1991 with the release of Sonic The Hedgehog. The system was very strong in sports and action titles, which made it a natural system to own if you had video game enthused friends as I did. Some sports game franchises which still stand strong today (Madden football, NHL Hockey) built their reputation on the Genesis.
For any video game enthusiast born in the 70s or early 80s, the war between Sega and Nintendo for the hearts of home gamers everywhere was never so close as when the Genesis duked it out with the 16-bit Super Nintendo. Sega didn't outright lose the war, but certainly didn't win it, either. The war migrated to other systems, where both Nintendo and Sega were brought to their knees by newcomer Sony, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Special credit goes to the Genesis for its fully functional port of Mortal Kombat, as opposed to the sanitized Nintendo port.
More than any other system, the Genesis lent itself to competitive play in my life. Oddly enough, I can't think of many great single-player experiences (aside from Sonic 1 and 2). This was, in part, because I drifted away from video games somewhat upon going to college. But the Genesis came with me, leading to hours on end of competition with NHL 94 and 96, as well as (to a lesser extent) Madden 94. The Genesis saw lots of action with NHL 94/96 alone through 1998.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

I picked up a Super Nintendo pretty late in the game, actually, buying the system and a few assorted cartridges in the late 90s, when other systems had long since attained supremacy. But I played an awful lot of SNES games prior to purchasing my own system. The first and foremost, the game which more than any other swung the pendulum toward Nintendo's 16-bit machine, was Street Fighter 2. Many people bought the system just to play that game alone, for good reason (I'll revisit this later). But there were many other great games that people still fondly remember today for exceptional play value, and by the time I bought my own, I'd found a way to get most of them for myself.
Even at this late stage, I can't decide whether I prefer Super Mario Kart or Super Metroid. There really doesn't have a be a choice, since both games could occupy discrete niches in one's collection. Given my preferences, I'd probably give a slight nod to Super Metroid if I had a gun pointed at my head, but Super Mario Kart's right there, too.
Super Mario Kart was probably the most enjoyable two-player game I've ever played. The simple premise (go kart racing with assorted amusing weaponry), and the simple play belie the inner complexity of the game. Hell, with a good player, or one who didn't mind losing at any rate, I could still play that game for hours at a time today. The fact that this game was so damn fun while being entirely harmless (no decapitations or explosions) is a credit to its brilliance. It was also quite challenging and fun for one player.
Super Metroid, in contrast, was an entirely one player affair, but what a game. From the spot on control, to the superb graphics, to the eerie and disconcerting soundtrack (those metroids make noises to set a man on edge), this game was absolutely brilliant. My first experience came in 1994 with the aforementioned Kam. He rented the game during my last time spending a night or more at his house. It helped that we played this game in the wee hours of the night at first, so that we could be intoxicated by its creepiness, but we didn't stop much. For nearly 48 hours straight (aside from bathroom breaks and occasional food and drink), we played this game. If our thumbs had started to bleed, we would have kept playing. If we went blind, we would have played by sound alone. If we were offered a choice between riches and playing Super Metroid...we would have taken the riches, and then played into our thirties, no doubt. Or so it seemed at the time.
What surprised both of us was that we couldn't beat the damn game in one bleary weekend. One or two key items (the gravity suit comes to mind) kept us from conquering the game, and the sad thing was that we only scratched the surface of what we could do with the main character Samus. Even today, people are still pushing this magnum opus to new limits of gameplay, utterly destroying any vestige of sequence or logic in the way the game is 'supposed' to be played. I still play it every so often today, although my SNES was stolen by burglars in mid 2000, thanks to the wonders of emulation. Given a chance, or sufficient incentive, I'd gladly pick up an SNES and Super Metroid alone.
I have to give a shout to Mario Paint, the first paint program sold on the home console market. The 'game' came with a mouse. Kam and I mastered most of its tools while attempting to create pornography, as horny 16 year olds will do given any hint of artistic expression. By the time I had my own system, I'd graduated to computer paint programs that left Mario Paint in the dust, but it was still quite a novel concept.

Sony Playstation

As a result of the aforementioned burglarization of my apartment, I felt a deep void in the video game arena. Since tracking down a working SNES and a semblance of my old library seemed too inconvenient, I plunked down $100 for a PSX and a copy of Mortal Kombat Trilogy (thanks, in part, to the appeal the Mortal Kombat series had for someone I was seeing at the time).
Sony was a newcomer to the video game wars, but quickly took the top spot from a dazed and confused Sega and Nintendo. The variety of software offerings for the 32-bit machine was as great or greater than either of the established giants. Sony succeeded in large part because their approach to development and licensing provided greater incentive for other companies to design games for the Sony platform. When all was said and done, Sony had about 70 million (!!) systems in peoples' homes. The installed user base and brand recognition practically ceded the next wave of system success to Sony's Playstation 2, since a new and growing generation of gamers were Playstation devotees every bit as much as I was an NES child. Nonetheless, the PSX had excellent software to go with sound business sense.
With the PSX still offering some new titles, I feel strange calling it a dead system, but so it is, for all intents and purposes. It lives on in the PS2 thanks to the (brilliant) backwards compatibility of the current system.
Without question my favorite PSX game is Final Fantasy 7. I've owned Final Fantasy Anthology (which packaged 5 and 6), Final Fantasy Origins (with 1 and 2), as well as the standalone 8 and 9, and I've played all of them. Although 7 was the first, lacking some of the extras 8 and 9 offer as well as being graphically inferior, I still find the story and the gameplay in 7 to be my favorite. Perhaps if I had encountered 8 first I would have preferred it, since a lot of my admiration for 7 is simply that it was the first 3-D Final Fantasy I'd played, but I still think that 7 would win out. 1, 2, 5, and 6 have nostalgia value. 9 was more of a remix of the themes offered throughout the whole series (although the ending battle seems stapled on to the plot to my eyes). 7 was new, but it was old as well.

Nintendo 64

Nintendo's last cartridge based offering (aside from the Game Boy/Game Boy Advance) combined the best of the new (graphics technology) with the worst of the old (limited storage space on the cartridge medium). The result, while successful in some circles, was a disappointment. I owned exactly one game for this beast, but what a game it is.
Super Mario 64 took the platform genre (jumping from level to level while avoiding enemy pixels) into the third dimension will a free-roaming adventure that is as archetypal and exceptional as the original Super Mario Brothers way back on the NES. Another of those games I'd play until my eyes and thumbs bled, this game was actually the catalyst for a near fistfight when I was a junior in college. Looking back on it, I'm kind of disappointed that we didn't come to blows.
Many other games have left Super Mario 64 in the dust in terms of almost every observable or quantifiable element. There is still something about being the first in a genre, though.
There actually were a number of other great games for the N64. However, the limitations of the medium and the uber-success of the PSX pretty much makes this console the last of its breed.

Sega Dreamcast

From the last of the old breed we come to the first of the new breed: video game consoles that can connect to the Internet. The Dreamcast, aside from having a 128 bit processor, also comes with its own modem. Although the online console gaming community has yet to approach the computer gaming community, the Dreamcast took a giant step in that direction. Still, the system failed, losing to the (at that point) antiquated PSX. I picked one up after a breakup with a girl, along with the only two games I ever owned: Sega Smash Pack (with 12 Sega Classics), and Soul Calibur.
The Sega Smash Pack is for dinosaurs like me who look back with fondness toward the old Genesis days (old, of course, being a relative term). I think I picked it up mostly for Altered Beast (which wasn't that good) and Streets of Rage 2 (which was one of the best multiplayer beat-em-ups ever). Playing 16-bit games on a 128-bit system didn't keep its appeal for long, though.
Soul Calibur may have been the best Dreamcast game, period. It was a better than arcade translation of the 3-D fighter of the same name. I'm not sure why adding weapons to a fighting game didn't really take off (Samurai Showdown for the Neo-Geo being the first I can remember), but it did with Soul Edge (later to become Soul Blade for the PSX, another great game), as well as its successor, Soul Calibur.
Unfortunately, as is the case with most fighting games, it takes two to tango. Soul Calibur was the latest casualty of my increasingly hermitic life. With other, more rewarding, single player opportunities, this truly worthy fighter just gathered dust.

Sony Playstation 2

The PS2 is another first, of a sort: first game console cum DVD player. It came out in late 2000 with an initial launch run that did not even come close to meeting the demand for consoles, which led to an increased desire for gamers to pick up the newest toy. As for myself, I bucked my life long trend of getting in later in the game, so to speak, and picked up my first (of two) PS2's in March 2001. The backward compatibility with the PSX was a stroke of genius, since I could pop in Twisted Metal: Black (a truly disturbed piece of gaming), or Final Fantasy 7, whichever suited my mood at the time. I could also take part in the DVD revolution without picking up a dedicated player, and indeed, the PS2 is a pretty good DVD player from what I can see.
And the games...there are some wonderful games. The aforementioned Twisted Metal: Black, takes an old idea (demolition derby) and crossbreeds it with something you can only find in the most depraved inmates of your local asylum (literally, since most of the characters hail from an insane asylum). The action is as intense for the single player as it is for groups of up to four (leaving aside the online iteration that I've little urge to experience). And the graphics, naturally, are amazing.
Then there are the two traditional Final Fantasy offerings (X and X-2). X-2 has the more engaging action of the two, X the meatier storyline and cast. I prefer X for those reasons, but X-2 is a pretty good play as well.
But the best, for me, is the Grand Theft Auto series. Crossing the strains of Super Mario 64-like exploration with not quite gratuitous graphic violence, adult themes, and spot on driving controls, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City may well be the most complete video games ever created. Sure, the violence and the themes may offend some who would prefer our world to be less seedy, but after all, they're only games. I don't go out into the world looking to kill cops and build my own crime syndicate, but give me a few hours with either game, and I can come away satisfied.
Only a lack of time has kept me from savoring this remarkable console to the fullest.

Nintendo Gamecube

Oddly enough, Nintendo's current offering doesn't take as much advantage of current technology as the PS2 or the Xbox (boo hiss Microsoft!!!). Still, there are a number of good games to play on Nintendo's little monster, especially considering that there is a peripheral device, the Game Boy Player, which essentially can make the Cube two systems in one almost as much as the PS2 with it's backward compatibility. For the moment, the only game I still have for the Cube is Metroid Prime, which is one of the best games I've ever played, marrying graphical and audio bliss to excellent control more so than any other next-generation offering I've experienced.
With the Game Boy Player, though, I'm able to treat my old-school sweet tooth as well. Sure, the graphics and sound are dated as far as TV-based games are concerned, but the best of the best are every bit as good as the best of the new offerings, for the most part.