Archive for the ‘Games’ Category
Twenty Years of Gaming
Over the past few days, I’ve been pondering the major role games have played in my life. I write a lot of reviews on games, but I don’t often talk about them in their social, personal, or intellectual contexts. It’s easy to forget that games aren’t just pastimes, they have the ability to shape and change lives. I would never have met people like Alex, my wife Katt, Tim, Scott, Greg, and countless others without them! With that in mind, I proudly present my Twenty Years of Gaming and all the people, places, and events that came along with them.
It’s been about twenty years since my brother Ryan and I got our first video game system: an original Nintendo Entertainment System with the Duck Hunt/Super Mario Bros. cartridge and two controllers. I can remember afternoons spent playing cooperative Mario Bros. with my Dad (switching off every level) and crashing my car repeatedly in Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat with Ryan. (Maybe I shouldn’t have spent all of my upgrade money on engine power and boosts.)
That little 8-bit system fostered a love of video games in my siblings and I that continues to this day. My brother is graduating with a BS in Interactive Media and Game Design from WPI. My sister and I talked the other day about Dragon Age characters on her Xbox 360. Katt and I even had a gaming theme at our wedding. With that in mind, I thought I’d run through some of my favorite titles from the past two decades — those that really resonated with me because of their stories, gameplay, or events they ushered in to my life.
The Early Years
After the NES and Super Mario Bros., the first thing that comes to mind is a game that was hosted on Prodigy’s internet service (and later standalone on PC) back in the late 80s/early 90s…
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
Carmen Sandiego was the first video game I can remember playing on a computer way back in 1990. I was 4 at the time and terrible with geography, but Carmen’s crazy capers (who steals the Indy 500?) kept me coming back for more.
Eagle Eye Mysteries and its follow-up, Eagle Eye Mysteries in London
Ah, Jennifer and Jake Eagle. My partners in crime-fighting! The characters and attention to detail are what made the Eagle Eye series great. The London-based sequel was particularly good, featuring cases that ramped up in difficulty and eventually all tied together story-wise. Armed with our trusty notebook, the Eagle twins and I solved cases ranging from animal theft to art forgery.
Just about everything in the Super Solvers series
That includes Treasure Mountain, Treasure Mathstorm, Treasure Cove, Spellbound, and (my favorite) Gizmos and Gadgets. They might be a bit old (and firmly in the edutainment category), but they’re a great way to teach math, reading, and physics to a young audience. I certainly played them for hours on end (and was, many years later, somewhat disappointed to discover that you couldn’t technically ‘beat’ any of them — the little prizes you were awarded at the end doubled/tripled/etc. up after awhile). Nothing could beat the feeling I got when I built my go-kart in Gizmos and Gadgets with the fiberglass body and lapped Morty’s (the main antoganist od the series) box-shaped kart in the race.
Yep, the line-clearing, block filled puzzle game that’s made an appearance on just about everything with a screen. My first experience was with the one that shipped with the original Game Boy in 1989. I think I got my Game Boy in 1991 (it was awhile ago, my memory’s fuzzy), but I remember how excited I was to find that it came bundled with Tetris! My grandma still carries a Game Boy Pocket and a copy of it wherever she goes. She tells me it helps her pass the time while waiting in movie theaters. Unsurprisingly, her high scores are off the charts!
The Legend of Zelda series, but Link’s Awakening in particular
To this day, Link’s Awakening is my favorite game on the original Game Boy. I first spotted a classmate playing this during recess in 2nd grade and fell in love. I was over at his house for a sleepover and brought my Game Boy with me. I asked him if I could play it “for a bit” and promptly spent the entire night playing! With its 8 dungeons, tons of sidequests and items, and wonderfully varied scenery to boot, it’s a marvel even 17 years later. I mean, look at the size of this world map. This was in 1993 on a cartridge that held half a megabyte! The sheer scope of the game still amazes me — it was the first truly epic adventure I played on a handheld and continues to set the bar for RPG/adventure games to this day.
The Middle Years (and my first MMO)
Sometime in early 1995, we traded in our mostly-broken NES at FuncoLand (now more commonly known as GameStop) for $10. The guy behind the counter frowned as every game he put in to the system seems to be broken. Eventually, he pulled out the trash can, dumped the whole lot in, and said “Okay, you know what, I’ll give you $10 for the lot. It’s a steal.” We walked out with a shiny new Super Nintendo, two controllers, and copies of Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Thus began the SNES era in the Bedell household: a time of role-playing games, my first exposure to cooperative gaming, and lots and lots of Tetris Attack.
Today, my brother Ryan continues to jealously guard our collection of prized RPG cartridges (Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana among them), original controllers, and an SNES Jr (a late-model redesign we bought after our 1991-era model fried itself). I relive our console golden age with a hacked up Wii, an original controller, and one of RetroUSB’s SNES-to-Wii adapters.
I’ll start with my absolute favorite SNES game…
“Ryan, you can play this one with three people AT THE SAME TIME!” I was stunned to discover with Square’s Secret of Mana that RPG/adventure games weren’t just limited to a single player. Mana‘s cooperative gameplay was, for me, revolutionary. My brother, sister, and I often watched one another play through different titles, but for the very first time in our lives, we could play a console game together. For a trio of RPG lovers, Mana was heaven-in-a-cartridge. Weapons and magic that got better as you used them, an open world you could fly around (in MODE 7 pesudo-3D!), and a decent storyline — we were sold. Many hours of fun (and bickering about who got the fancy new helmet) ensued, and the game remains a family favorite to this day.
Two player racing with characters from Mario? Sign me up. Super Mario Kart was the second racing title we ever owned. Even with just two players, the Grand Prix racing and Battle modes were fantastic (I can see the red balloons popping now). It doesn’t look like much in 2010, but it was the only kart racer around at the time. When you think about it, the mechanics of the series haven’t changed much over the years. Those pesky heat-seeking red shells and banana peels are just as hazardous as ever! In fact, I saw a fellow with this bumper sticker just the other day…
Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds
(wow, it looks a lot better these days than it did 12 years back)
Oh boy. Where to begin with this one. Nexus was the very first massively multiplayer online game that my brother and I ever played — it was also one of the first to be released in the U.S., right around Ultima Online. Ryan and I beta-tested it through 1997, then begged my dad to front the $10/month/account fee so we could keep playing it for the majority of 1998 when it officially launched in the U.S. We even got some of our friends playing! It is responsible (along with me having no willpower) for:
- Convincing my parents to switch over from 56k dial-up with AOL to a 1 megabit broadband line from MediaOne (“We won’t tie up the phone anymore, mom!”)
- Me nearly flunking 7th grade (academically, it was my worst year of public school hands-down — I went from a solid A student to Cs in the span of 6 months)
- Me realizing that, perhaps, I should play certain games in moderation
- Improving my time-management skills!
Despite all of its negatives (both from a gameplay perspective and the fact that it completely sucked me in), Nexus opened the door to some great social experiences with Ultima Online and its free server community…
Another doozy that kept Ryan and I busy from 1998 to 2001. After deciding that we didn’t want to pay for another MMO to play, a friend of ours directed us to a player-hosted server called Lair of the Sorceress. It was there we met two individuals who would be a major part of our online lives for years to come: Wolverana from the great state of Texas and Nabisco from Canada. Wolv was a Game Master on the server, a sort of combination administrator/police officer/ who resolved disputes, put on events (more on that in a moment), and generally kept everything running smoothly. Nabisco was a friend-of-a-friend who loved Dungeons and Dragons and writing various modification and extra content for our little server. He started an online D&D group that brought many hours of monster slaying and adventure
A few rounds of drama later, and Wolv had started her own server running off a little 3 megabit cable line in Austin, TX. Ryan and I took advantage of the low population and UO’s awesome open-world “do anything” gameplay to start our first guild: the Obsidian Artificers. Ryan’s incredible powers of wizardry and mining ability combined with my fencing and blacksmithing skills made us a force of benevolence (and sometime mischief) in the world. There are too many tales to tell, but here are some of my favorite stories in one line apiece:
- Founding outposts across the land and stocking them with supplies for players in need (way over the maximum number of buildings two players could put down)
- Holding a complete monopoly on magically-enhanced armor and giving it away for free
- The day we had our first Player vs. Player arena tournament (Ryan cast Flamestrike on every participant and fried them in a single hit, myself included, taking the victory)
- The day we founded Irondale, the first player town on the server (I had a restaurant!)
- The great explosion, when Ryan spent an entire afternoon covering the city in exploding potions and then set one off by accident
- The great pirate invasion (we hired every pirate mercenary in Moonglow, a pirate haven in the middle of the sea, then brought them to town by boat. It crashed the server.)
Needless to say, we had a great time.
Blizzard’s epics: Diablo and StarCraft
Ryan and I had just received our first personal computers in December 1998: Dell XPS T500s with 500MHz Pentium III processors, 6GB hard disks, and a Voodoo 3 graphics card apiece. Through the magic of telephone-wire networking, Dad managed to get an IPX LAN up and running at home (later, we would actually pipe Ethernet around the house and run a real TCP/IP network). The network multiplayer possibilities were endless! Blizzard’s Diablo and StarCraft had recently been released, and they were the first (and only, for quite some time) games we ever played on our new computers.
Because we shared a desk, we had to stick a large piece of poster-board in-between our monitors whenever we played StarCraft games against each other. I peeked all the time and to this day, I have never won a StarCraft match against my brother. Diablo was cooperative (which was much better), and many rainy afternoons were spent crushing the minions of Hell beneath our bootheels. Ryan’s barbarian and my sorcerer did a fair job of squishing any evil that came our way.
The Last Decade: 2000-2010
These last few titles have a special place in my heart because I spent most of my time playing them with the people I love. Many a Thanksgiving in East Burke, VT was spent playing…
The ‘spiritual sequel’ to Goldeneye (at least in terms of multiplayer), Perfect Dark was the best multiplayer shooter on the Nintendo 64…even if it required a special RAM Expansion pack and ran at 15 frames per second on a good day. Even with its engine bringing the N64 to its knees, Perfect Dark was an incredible experience. There was nothing quite like having my brother, sister, and friends all playing at once with four computer-controlled bots making things even more hairy. The stat tracking (I am, according to the game, a grenade magnet) and the ability to tweak gametypes (hate the Laptop Gun? Get rid of it! Love Nanite Bombs? Play an entire round with them as the only weapon!) only made a great game better.
Although it feels a bit dated now, there’s a high definition remake available on Xbox Live Arcade.
Another Thanksgiving classic. Joe, my brother, sister, and I once played through the entirety of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy in a 17 hour marathon. 100% completion. We never played it again after that, but it was the first ‘marathon’ gaming session I had ever done. I don’t think anything has come close to the 17 hours-in-one-day mark since.
A college staple, especially freshman year. Super Smash Bros. Melee was the mortar that cemented my friendship with Tim and Scott (second from the left and last in the row, respectively). Every Friday and Saturday night we would head up to Scott’s room on the 4th floor of my dorm at Bentley, break out the sodas, and play Smash until our thumbs were sore. On occasion, we’d head over to Brandeis with other members of the BSGO and play with the CGX members too.
I met the Disgruntled Cookies (although at the time they were the “Uber-noober Battle Group” or UNBU) playing Team Fortress 2. Although we don’t play much of it anymore, the community often plays titles like Heroes of Newerth together. We even exchange Christmas cards during the holidays.
Yep, six years later and my shaman is still alive and kicking. WoW and I have something of a history together. I started playing in the beta in September 2004, introduced it to a number of friends (and my wife), and have been playing it off-and-on ever since. We’ve played with folks from all over the world, and even (at one point) went down to visit some guildmates in nearby Connecticut. There were the 9pm to 2am raids on the weekends in college, hours spent fighting off the opposing faction in Battlegrounds, and talks about family over Ventrillo. Server swaps and character transfers, rerolls and respecs. A thousand and one tales of our adventures in Azeroth. In short, WoW’s story is a long one best saved for another day. It’s a tale I plan on telling eventually though!
And there you have it my friends, 20 years of gaming. I may have played a lot of games in my day (our Nintendo DS library is 48 titles strong), but these selections will always hold a place in my heart!
Catching Them All Again
Say what you will about the abundance of crappy merchandise and a television series that degraded rapidly in quality, but the core Pokemon games (not the spin-offs) have been nothing short of excellent.
When I was twelve years old on September 30th, 1998, Nintendo introduced me to a role-playing game the likes of which I had never seen before: Pokemon Blue for the original Game Boy. Those 150 pixelated monsters gave my brother, sister, and I hours of fun battling, trading, and leveling. Every few years, the company would introduce new features and more monsters until it became apparent that they were “missing” (sales/exposure-wise) a generation of gamers who had never played the originals. Then the remakes started. Nintendo looks at them as a way to introduce new gamers to the older entries in the series. For me, it’s more about reliving the “golden years” of playing the games with my siblings.
Enter the latest entries in the 4th Generation of Pokemon games: Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver for the Nintendo DS.
Remakes of my favorite entries in the series, Pokemon Gold and Silver, the DS editions add most of the “next generation” technical improvements seen in Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum (wireless trading over the Global Trading System, WiFi battles, etc.) while keeping the setting and story from the original titles. Oh, and there’s the bundled Pokewalker accessory.
This handy little pedometer has become the best ‘gimmick’ I’ve seen from Nintendo in ages. By making use of the device’s built-in IR port, you can offload Pokemon on to the Pokewalker. Each step you take makes the monster inside a bit stronger, and every 10 steps or so generates a Watt. You can spend Watts on the Pokewalker itself to use the Poke Radar (allowing you to catch monsters specific to the route you’re walking on) or the Dowsing Machine (a sort of ‘find the item’ game that lets you obtain various medicines and power-ups). Any monsters or items you get will transfer back in to the game when you return from a stroll. Alternatively, you can transfer the Watts back to the DS cartridge without spending them. When you hit certain totals, you open up new routes to walk your Pokemon on. Each route has different items to find and different Pokemon to catch. To make things even more interesting, Pokewalkers can ‘connect’ to each other to share data — every person you connect with each day earns you an item.
Thanks for putting Skinner’s research to good use again, Nintendo.
In all seriousness though, if you like the Pokemon series, you won’t go wrong with the latest remakes. If you’ve never played, try to forget about all of the marketing and merchandise and give it a shot. You might be surprised!
Munchkin
Munchkin, a card-based tabletop game by Steve Jackson, bills itself as “a tasteless parody game which brings the essence of the dungeon crawling experience – without all that messy roleplaying!” Mocking Dungeons and Dragons and various other tabletop RPGs, Munchkin is all about kicking down dungeon doors, grabbing as much treasure as possible, and backstabbing your “allies” along the way. It’s an extremely entertaining card game, and manages to keep itself fresh with periodic “expansion” releases that add new dungeon and treasure cards.
The basic premise of the game is pretty simple. Everyone starts at level 1. The object of the game is to reach level 10 before anyone else does. You do this by fighting monsters and playing various cards that allow you to instantly increase your level by one. Each turn, you pull a card off of the “door” deck. If it’s a monster, you get a chance to fight it. To beat a monster, your level needs to be higher than the one listed on its card. But wait! How are you supposed to slay a level 20 Plutonium Dragon when your maximum level (before you win) is 9? Treasure! Various bits of treasure add to your level for the purposes of slaying monsters. An Extremely Impressive Title(tm) and a Flaming Broadsword of Unfairness later, and your level 1 character is effectively level 7. Defeating a monster gets you a level and a number of treasures, drawn from a “treasure” deck.
This brings about an interesting issue. Since you start with no treasure and most things in the game are above level 1, how do you defeat anything? By asking other players for help! This usually won’t come free; someone might offer to help you, only to demand first pick of the loot. Managing your relationships with the other players is the crux of Munchkin; it’s hard to win without other people helping you, but only one person can stand triumphant at the end of the game. Deciding when to help someone and when to hinder them (there are plenty of cards you can use to make monsters stronger or make players weaker) plays a large role in whether you end up winning. Of course, there’s a healthy amount of luck too (as any collectible card game player can tell you). You never know when someone is going to use a Transferal Potion to swipe your game-winning victory over a Potted Plant out from under you (Greg can tell you more about that).
It takes about an hour to finish a game, and if the D&D fantasy theme doesn’t jive with you, there are various other Munchkin sets modeled after science fiction, pirates, and Lovecraft-ian horror (to name a few). If you have a few friends to play with, you’re sure to have an entertaining time!
Dungeon delvers
For the past five weeks, Katt, Greg, Scott, Tim, Ryan, and I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons on Friday nights. Ryan and I have played on and off for a number of years, starting with Second Edition and moving through 3.0 and 3.5 before arriving at our current campaign using the 4.0 ruleset. What I’ve noticed over the years is that the game has become much more accessible to a common audience. To really know how to play Second Edition D&D, you needed to have tables and rulebooks pretty much memorized. Arcane ways of displaying statistics (anyone remember 18/xx Strength scores?) and a really clunky combat system (THAC0? Negative armor class?) made it next to impossible to sit down and understand anything if you’d never played before.
Things got much better in 3.0 and 3.5, where the old systems were tossed out and rebuilt to be much easier to understand. Every action in the game turned in to a check; one would roll a d20 plus some sort of modifer based on your skills and stats). Keeping track of your abilities was still a pain though. How does one keep track of a power with “X uses per day” when the flow of time in the game world and the real world is so different?
4.0 fixed that problem, although the changes drew outcries from D&D “purists” that claimed the game had been “WoWified” (a derogatory reference to Blizzard Entertainment’s popular World of Warcraft). The game’s focus shifted to streamline things; instead of tracking individual powers, everything was reclassified as “at-will” (infinite uses), “encounter” (once per battle), or “daily” (once in between extended rests). In addition, the list of skills (formerly enormous) was pared down. Things like Spot and Listen (skills that few people took) were combined in to skills like Perception. Not only did this grant one’s character access to a larger range of skills, it made performing skill checks (comparing one’s ability to do something with its difficulty class, a number representing how hard it is to succeed at something) much easier.
So far, I’m enjoying the revised system immensely (as the one running the adventures!). It’s far easier to keep track of player and monster statuses in combat, and I don’t have to spend time running all sorts of confusing calculations just to see if Katt’s arrows hit the goblin in the corner of the room. My players seem to be enjoying it too; the less they have to focus on the “metagame” (keeping track of the game in order to play it), the more energy they can devote to thinking out their actions and role-playing their characters.
If you’ve played Dungeons and Dragons (or any other tabletop RPG), what sorts of experiences have you had between editions?