The nostalgic things that I miss about gaming

No rants, or major opinions this time, nor any listing stuff. Just some personal chat about gaming, and some bits of the gaming culture that I've missed. Nostalgia gets us all, and as time changes, we either adapt or get left behind. Here are some things that I do miss though. And after I'm done, you can post some cool nostalgic things you miss about gaming.

Cheat codes:

Yeah cheat codes. It's not just about cheating to play, I actually forced a personal policy where I had to beat the game once or get super stuck before punching in even silly codes. However codes could add replay value. They could actually influence my entire decision on games, and how I played them. For example, Star wars Battlefront was fun, but if I punched in the "no AI" cheat which could be toggled and disable spawning, I could wage a no respawn war and see who won through pure battle. It was also a blast playing with infinite ammo, especially back in the era where crazy guns was the standard. I don't know what really happened to them. It was likely the idea of trophies/achievement, and how nobody wanted a cheater winning them, however this is kind of invalid as the very few games that have cheats will have a disabled trophy mode. I guess the devs just decided to stop supporting it to the public, or possibly patch it out of games after they've used cheats to test stuff. One article I read even suggests that cheats were intended for the official journalists, and now they get a separate copy with cheats versus the public copy without cheats. Well whatever it is, It is a feature that I miss, and one that was always fun to goof around with once you played the game normally. It also kind of defeats this idea of casualizing everything, because if someone wanted to play a game that was too hard, cheats solved it. I beat the entire starcraft campaign with them because I honestly just suck at RTS games, yet I loved starcraft.


Jam pack, and demo discs:

Well this obviously died. I mean c'mon, we have digital demos for games now that you can get for free. However, back in the PS1 and 2 era you could get discs from magazines, stores, and bundles that contained 10-20 demos and some trailers. It's kind of how gaming publicity spread before everybody used the internet in the PS1 days, and it was also just a ton of fun to punch through each demo, even if a game wasn't your type. Back in these eras, I was also very young and didn't have much choice in my game library (most of the games I played were my dads, rentals, or games that we somehow stumbled upon in some luck). I think this was also around the time where the house rule was no videogames on weekdays. So having the time to play a disc full of so much variety in quick sample bursts was kind of awesome from my perspective. Just something that'll live on as one of the nicer small things of older gaming.


No influence:

I like the internet. Mostly because of the vast storage of knowledge and perspective, but secondly because of gaming. However they both combine to make a big chunk of the awesome gaming culture with reviews, forums, and interviews. You can even search up the cult following of an underdog game, something that I seriously need considering I play plenty of games that nobody really talks about. However, I didn't discover most of this until I was in middle school. I first found out about forums when I was watching some cool Worms 4 videos on youtube, and found the forums upon trying to learn how to mod. I wanted my super sheep to be a controllable flying UFO, and my air strikes to leave trails of flames. However after the amazing forums, then the leap to gaming journalism, you tend to wonder about the impact they leave on you. Don't get me wrong, I love all of this, but it's a gift/curse situation. I kind of miss the days when it was just me, my console, and a disc. No reviews to tell me how crappy the framerate or camera was, no feedback forums with whiny people who make up most of their complaints, and nobody telling me what was what. It was all about my thoughts based on personal interaction, and what I made of it. This was a truly relaxed and lenient time for gaming. We all get influenced in some way shape or form when we surf the net. And I love it, I love opinion, and I love the spread of word, and a fluid community. Otherwise, I wouldn't be putting hours and hours into a blog (that I'm sure no one is reading, but I don't care, it's fun). However sometimes I think we need the type of break from it that we can't really get. We get told that our game has some error that never crossed our minds, and now we see that error and remember all the criticisms when we play it. We think more critically because we see how that works, and now we can recommend games better, but we're also thinking (and evaluating) more about details that we didn't originally care about. For example, I didn't even know what framerate was until reviews came along and marked almost every awesome game down for bad framerate as though they had a speed gun for it. Sometimes it's just nice to remember the time when something like a spongebob game could be fun instead of thinking "Do I really want to play a cartoon tie-in game from some kids network?". Or you're looking at that shelf of games in the store, something catches your eye, and instead of trusting your insticts and trying to enjoy a new game you pass it by as "well metacritic gave it a 40, so it must not be worth it". Y'know the influence can be a good and bad thing. Your original mind and child-like innocence can be replaced with the distrust and criticism from "the real world" once you start getting into the whole internet scene with gaming. So I kind of miss the era when I had that pure mindset of just sitting down with a game and seeing what it was about.

5 things we have to start realizing about gaming

Today I'm going to go over some odd things I've been thinking about concerning the gamer crowd. There are some things that I think need to be recognized, or realized a bit more. I could be wrong, but here using my experience, opinions, and knowledge I'd like to discuss these 5 things.

#1) A lot of the "good times" and legends live on only through nostalgia

Look, look!! A game that is only fun in your memories!

We're all victims of nostalgic ignorance. We just refuse to admit it, or just haven't lived long enough to have it happen yet. However a lot of our games are dated. Lets face it, we enjoy our amazing games starting at child hood, and at some point we move on and life is good. However games change, and some of us are hard at accepting it. And there always are valid complaints about modern gaming, we can't ignore that, but neither can we ignore the problems of the games we often defend or look up to as a role model for what gaming should be. I will eventually use my own nostalgic memories as an example, but first lets start with a more obvious example of what I'm talking about: retro gamers. These guys will tell you all about how amazing gaming was in its infant days back when pac-man dominated, or how much fun the platformers were. Often they love making fun of how easy games these days are, how bad the industry is for flooding us with nonstop shooters, and how fun has gone extinct in exchange for gore, graphics, and multiplayer. But really lets take a look at their golden age, and a breakdown of all their complaints. This age had Mario. okay great! Even today that game is fun. Same for pac-man, and even donkey kong. But they are the exception rather than the rule. There are websites now that can host these atari, NES, and others like they were flash games. You can scroll down the list, and find about 4 genres: Fighting, sidescrolling platformer, RPG (JRPG by today's classification), and a few puzzlers. You could also throw in "other" for Metal gear, starfox, and a couple of others that tried their best to come up with innovation in an era that had around 1-4 buttons and a D-pad. The fighters were all the same button mashers where you just threw a punch, and a kick through a few stages, while platformers were all mario clones that were either broken to a lauging point, or too cheap and tough for the average person to play. These two genres by far overwhelmed the puzzles, RPGs, and any of those not fitting in a category. Not only was this era worse at over saturation than we are with FPS, but considering how limited the buttons, design teams, and overall tech was, there was almost no room to actually be different. Okay, so at least the piles of platformers, and fighters were challenging, right? Well yes, but I can't find this to be a compliment. When you have no save files, no serious control, and part of your gameplay is often who can spam more missiles on screen, you're going to find way more frustration than the type of good sportsmanship challenge you're thinking about. I'm sure some people  did enjoy the challenges of this era, but saving was done for a reason, and lets not forgot that giving the player more freedom (like through more controls, content, and paths) will make it easier but also more entertaining as it lowers the risk of running yourself into a cheap and stuck situation. Be reasonable, many just don't wont the type of "challenge" the retro age had. As for the complaint that games past the 90s just aren't fun... you're kidding me. You just have no taste if all you can call fun is stuck on games that can't even surpass the flash games that I can play on newgrounds. It is nostalgia. The entire retro gamer group lives off of nostalgia. It is living off of the memories of fun you had when you first picked up your NES, or atari. You remember how impressive it was at that time. You remember the value of simplicity. It is nostalgia.

Well, I'm not just talking about retro gamers. This applies to myself as well. One of the reasons I rant about modern shooters (instead of just playing unreal tournament, duke nukem, or turok constantly) is because I want some of the new touches to mix with the old. The older "golden age" of FPS games had its downsides. Power ups could ruin some games, undeveloped space marine plots were complained about as much as russian/terrorist enemies are now, and casual shooters didn't even exist which left out a big crowd that wanted to enjoy the genre more than they could. Sometimes I talk about older FPS with more credit than they always deserve. Lets take turok for example. Turok had great moments, but its story was strange, the controls were amazingly bad (good for its time though), and the dated engine left the levels pretty bare or boring at times. Devs at this time didn't honestly call their games corridor shooters like it was a badge of honor, it was called that because the tech usually forced them to make you go through a lot of hallways and close up monster bashing. Likewise, the enemies back then were often fun to fight in varieties because they had almost no AI. Basic guys were push overs, then you had chargers, big brutes, mini-bosses, and such specialties because they could not have good enough AI to handle anything but one special form. You couldn't have duck and cover enemies, or enemies who would choose when to run and when to shoot. Sometimes the AI was barley even walking, and could get stuck on walls. The enemies were almost always entirely based on their attack type, and a trigger point that the player would cross. A lot of the time when I speak proudly about these games, it's because of nostalgia. That doesn't mean all my points are forfeit. We still need a variety, and some games could use the health packs, and enemies that go beyond grunts with guns. However we don't need to duplicate everything that the older games did. A lot of the fun is nostalgia, and the truth is that the games I often point at are dated with certain flaws that should be avoided.

Now some games, classics, and "golden age" references still hold. Metal Gear Solid will always be an entertaining series,  so will that famous zelda 64 game, the original mario bros is still great to play, and certain traits from games of all eras deserve a chance in this changed one. For example we should have some more basic platformers, and we do deserve more variety in our shooters, but overall we shouldn't get carried away with what the modern games are missing as a lot of our memories of what was better, is the nostalgia talking.

#2) Graphics are a comparison issue

Graphics lovers will only love the improvement until a 3rd comparison comes along.

Remember how bad the graphics are back in the PS1 days? All blocky, pixels, and plenty of flat polygons. Then the PS2 era came along, and... wow, people actually liked these visuals? And I can't believe the wii. Oh, but the PS3, and 360 are Amazing! Look at all that detail, and HD perfection! Some of this is even running on 1080p. Well, at least that's what you would think until the PC fan comes in and gives you a bunch of stats about how crappy your consoles are. I guess you could almost say those techy numbers his PC can run have spoiled him... or you could look in the mirror and realize it's the same for you! Graphics are a comparison issue. The less people see "the future" of graphics, the more satisfied they'll be with what they have. It's always been that way, even if we can point to details about graphics that suck. I can talk about how bad the blocky graphics are, but really I was fine with it at the time I was playing those games, and I was even amazed at some of them. Even within a single console generation, you can see this effect taking place. Halo 3 will look amazing until you see the improvements in halo reach, then you can never look at halo 3 the same way. An even more obvious example would be a game like lair, legendary, haze, or half-life 2 compared to a more recent game like MW3, skyrim, etc. The graphics change with special little features in between releases like particles, glows, and textures. All of these eventually add up, but until you see them you usually stay impressed with whatever set the standard previously. Some people wont be happy until we get photo realism, but unless you're one of them there should be no reason to be upset with the current graphics. So lets honestly stop worrying about graphics, and how "bad" the older consoles look. They were just fine until a new shiny toy got your eye. Graphics will always keep outdoing themselves until it reaches reality level. No need to be perfectionists about it, or worry too much. I'd be more worried about the price that the future graphics will cost really.

#3) Casual gamers are NOT stupid

"Rated S for stupid" Said wannabe hardcore gamers.

Now this just bugs me. It gives hardcore gamers a bad name, and it's making the game site comments look like immoral, out of touch, bullies. I get on the internet and read about how Bioware games, killzone 3, Call of duty, angry birds, and basically anything else that isn't as challenging as dark souls is made or catering towards "stupid casual gamers" who aren't tough enough to handle a real game. The whole hardcore and casual gamer thing has severely lost its definition in today's gaming. Well really it never had a serious definition, and some people refuse to accept any classification beyond "gamer", but honestly just like defining love, religion, and spirit, there are guidelines and borders that will tell you what a casual/hardcore gamer is NOT. The hardcore gamer is NOT someone who strictly plays the toughest games available and sees everything else as kiddy toys. Likewise casuals are not stupid unless the individual is. Casual is a way of classifying people who want simple, easy, convenient, and "pick up" types of gameplay. A game like call of duty is casual because of some of its mechanics, like tiny health. The small health makes it simple and quick to get kills, ending the long battles to lower health count which usually requires the use of tricks and proper guns you get from mastering the game, or knowing when to run. Call of duty isn't doing it for stupid people, it's doing it for people who want quick and cheap thrills, or those who feel like they just don't have the time to study their way into the game. And yes, the game still takes some skill, just not as much as the non-casual. Likewise others started to do the same thing with their future installments. Does this make people mad? Hell yes it does. Not everybody wants the entire gaming industry to start pumping out games that have few or no learning curves. But that's not a reason to sit their and associate casual gamers with stupidity. Sometimes it's good to sit down on a coffee break, pull out angry birds, and enjoy it. They aren't doing it because they're too stupid to play bigger games, they do it because they simply don't have the time or desire to pursue after all of the bigger stuff. Casual gamers are often barely gamers. They play games like a hobby when they get all bored, or have some of their friends over for the latest dancing game. This isn't about their sanity, and intelligence on comprehending a game. It's about their interests. That's also why a lot of the actual hardcore gamers also play casual games. It's not out of stupidity, it is because sometimes they want some simple joys instead of cramming hours into a game to progress.

#4) We need to acknowledge and respect those who are trying!

No need to write a story, you'll only get trolled on.

Ever heard of brink? If you did from the comment section, it sucks completely. Pass it by as garbage. How about Killzone3, and bulletstorm? Mixed comments on the gameplay, but you'll always find a comment saying the stories sucked. No wonder our FPS market is in bad shape, the people fixing the flaws are the one being blamed more while others just get by with an ok stamp. Brink was a game that failed critically, but mostly for its lack of levels and modes as well as unstable bugs and lag. What it got right, and many critics have put this in sight, is that it tried to stand out. It gave us different combat, customization options, and an improved team work feel. Will the average comment or forum thread say that? Nope, that game got a 5/10 it sucked. instantly the comments on reviews, and forums were full of flaming trolls who acted like they had predicted a tragic fall since the first announcement. Now the story for killzone3? Look up its development. over an hour of cut scenes, great actors, movie grade story writers, a timeline of fictional history to work with, and yet somehow after digging through comments and opinions on the story you'll see "it sucked". Same with bulletstorm, and that even got punished on a critic level somehow. I know killzone3 and bulletstorm weren't amazing revolutions in story making, and they didn't cater to our every whim, but are we really going to sit here and slap them in the face for trying? Everybody else is just throwing terrorists, and "epic scenes" in their games and calling it done, with some even avoiding cut scenes. Yet these guys get by us with weak stories without much blame just because it's normal? guys can we please stop for a second and appreciate the attempts? Even black ops somehow got some story haters... why? What is there to hate about the obvious progress? Because you found one hole, or you didn't care much for one character? We don't need a metal gear solid or half-life game to come along every time we want a good story. I'd far rather praise a revenge adventure that gives me strange characters like bulletstorm than sit through a story where the characters hardly have any name or recognition past a voice and a mask or hair style like most games. We should just be a bit more grateful for some of the games that are trying to fix problems, even if they don't fix them all the way. Progress is progress. When we realize the attempts of progress, and stop bashing the games that try to avoid the negative standards, then maybe we can move the standards higher.


#5) The gaming advancements aren't that stupid or gimmicky

Gimmick or the future?

A lot of people are getting tired of the common trolling haters. We see call of duty haters, just randomly hating COD while secretly buying it and making the people who actually dislike it or critique it, look bad. For every one now, we have another making fun of them or fussing at them. Then you have people who just hate on each others consoles, which sparks up the horrible fanboy wars that we all hate. Hell, we still have people who blindly bash on halo.... even after that hate fad died out. why is anyone still acting like calling it "gaylo" is still cool? But there is one form of ignorant hatred that still gets away quite often, and.that's the crowd that calls everything that they don't like a gimmick. Touch screen, motion controls, microphones, graphics, 3D, your entire wii and kinect library and all sorts of other next-gen tech are as gimmicky as your light up toothbrush according to these haters. We need to realize that these haters are either over exaggerating by an great amount, or are just flat out wrong.

 First thing is that we must understand a gimmick, otherwise we're just throwing a fancy word around that we heard about. A gimmick is a marketing tool where you have something that looks special, but it in fact does nothing to help or can just get in your way. It often looks flashy, and gets the attention of easily excitable people. Again, the light up tooth brush is the perfect example of a gimmick as it is a tacked on feature that almost cannot help you in any way shape or form. It is literally flashy just to say "I'm different, buy me". Now look up at the picture, and you'll see the wii steering wheel. Maybe the plastic wheel itself can be argued as gimmicky (I disagree as it helps tremendously compared to steering with a gamecube or standard wii remote), but what it symbolizes is an innovation. People like this step up closer to VR or simulation. It's nice to have a cool option to steer your car around with a controller balancing in your hands. It's not some crap slapped one to make your kids buy it, it actually improves and adds a feature to some already fun games. Calling it a gimmick is like calling your bed pillow a gimmick. No you don't have to have it, but you want it, and it does help. It's a step forward. Is the PS3 blu ray a gimmick? No it is used along with the game, and can add some cool stuff as well as gives you the feature to watch amazing movies. Without it there would be a few more multi-disc games, and less features thrown on for the PS3. is the internet browser a gimmick? Yes actually. We have those on everything now, and often it runs way better than the slapped on console version. The browser is there just to say "look, I'm a special feature, buy me!".

The gimmicks come in with the individual games usually. In Killzone 2 you had a few areas where you were asked to just randomly operate stuff with the sixaxis. Why? Well because it just wanted to throw in the motion controls. There were motion controls done right with sniping that added to challenge and realism, but the rest of the motion controls were just gimmicks. A lot of wii games that are sold as party games, and kiddy games often have gimmicky parts where you're pointlessly swinging the remote around for the heck of it. Those are gimmicks, but features and advancements will change gaming with or without your support. There are people who abuse them, but there have always been bad cash-ins and bad games that specialize in stupid gimmicks.

Why reviews aren't the best judge

                          Honestly, how can you figure out anything from this?

Reviews have become a big part of gaming as the media for games has grown. There are around 100 sites by now that do reviews, recommendations, and editorials for video games. Almost every one of these sites have comments that are mixed with fanboys, trolls, and the regular gamers talking about the game or the review, often bashing or defending something. This is where you get to witness the dramatic gasps over the decent 7/10 scores, the fanboys trying to start a duel (even on a 3rd party multi-platform game), and comments about how the review was the sole decision maker in a purchase. It's actually kind of funny how these reviews became a big deal. However, it's necessary, since we spend so much money towards these game, and must at all times have a referee pointing at the good ones and shunning the bad ones, right? Well... not really. In this post, I'm going to give my two cents on why reviews can't be considered the make/break decision, and other good topics concerning the way reviews work.

Well first off, if  you're reading this blog you know I do reviews myself. So the idea that I'd demote the value of a game review would seem odd, or like blatant hypocrisy. Honestly that's not the case, as I enjoy making reviews and looking at them from that view point. But as a gamer, my review scores never suggest my actual value for them. If you asked me which shooter I prefered more, section 8: prejudice versus Call of duty modern warfare 2, I would likely hesitate and decide based on the mood I'm in. For a bunch of unlocking and level grinding with a good variety of modes and a better campaign, I'd pick MW2. For anything else, I'd choose Section 8. But my review scores would make it an obvious decision, right? MW2 got like an 8 or 9, while section 8 was held back in several categories, so it's obviously MW2. Nope. Section 8 fails a lot more on a review scale, but doesn't begin to phase on a common gamer scale. A real gamer measures his game by the entertainment value, and how you personally enjoyed it. I'd honestly laugh if you let your entertainment value diminish because the graphics could have been flashier, or because you thought the game's texture pop-ins were ruining your fun. Pop-ins, and flashy graphics cause a change in value when it comes to a review. They don't (or shouldn't) matter for a gamer's taste. Also (and I know this is going a bit off topic), take note you quick review defenders, this is why a review is not an "opinion". It is an evaluation of everything, including tech aspects and the fun factor (often based on the common preference instead of a quick opinion). If reviews were just opinion, you'd see games getting a lot more flat 0's, 5's, and 10's. I'd be giving killzone an instant 10, tell you how amazing it is in the tone of a young kid celebrating christmas, and then leave you with a "BUY IT IF YOU HAVE ANY TASTE!" recommendation. But no, there are tech aspects to go over, features to cover and rate, and you must cover the amount of effort put into every big detail of the game. It's not as simple as asking some random guy whether or not the game was fun.

Okay, back on subject: This is why looking at a 7, and scoffing at the game or review is a big internet wide mistake. The 7 could be brought on by a bad story, horrible glitches (that might have already gotten patched), or simply the reviewer dragging on about a small negative aspect too much, like a bad camera or how he didn't like where the sprint button was placed. You have to read it, the determin the value based on what you wanted from the game. If starhawk got a 7 because its story was trash, who the hell honestly cares? Anyone who was every hyped for starhawk for the right reasons knows that the story wasn't going to be good, and they'll shun the review that decided to chop off 3 points for the story. The sad thing is that there will always be that guy who sits there moaning "well I was going to buy this, but a 7 sucks so... bye". Not only is a 7 a good score, but it's missing the point of gaming if you just point at a 7 in shame all day. One of my favorite games on an entire genre got a 7 recently, and as I read the review I shrugged off everything negative because it just didn't matter, and the critic was making a big deal over nothing in some cases. The score doesn't make or break the game, and neither does the total review.

I guess it's a bit weird to talk about it this late into the post, but the question that inspired it was during an article about naughty bear 2. A comment said "Why would this game get a sequel, it got like all 3/10s! so stupid". Well I answered it pretty much with the above. But further more, I decided to talk about how the reviews these days are just out of touch with many gamers. It's like the silent majority rule. You can find a bunch of people commenting about how they agree with a review (without the game even being released yet), you can find a bunch of haters for a popular game, and you can also find a game with bad sales getting sky high reviews. The game that seems universally hated is getting a sequel because it actually has a fanbase that bought it, and enjoyed it. You can find nasty scores for popular games, but they are still popular games. And you can find good reviews for bad selling games, because it didn't do a good job appealing to the market. The answer to all of this lies in the fact that reviews aren't the same as the gamers. This case is even more obvious when we look at movie critics. Everybody loves a movie, each person likes it for their own reasons. Meanwhile the critics always look for the actor/actress's record instead of their character, they will always describe the action or suspense in 3 sentences or less no matter how much of the movie it makes up, and it will always spend portions trying to pit it up against another film for no reason at all. The only worthy thing in a review of a movie is the plot evaluation, and even that can fall short. You can't get the sense of action, humor, or emotion from a wall of text describing it to you. The case with gaming isn't exactly like this, but it is close. Naughty bear is getting a 2nd chance because it has an audience, just a rather quiet one that you wont find in reviews or followers of those reviews. Likewise people will raise pitchforks and torches up to some high reviews, because it can't cover the reasons why they hate it. You can continue to give god of war, call of duty, and mario their sky high scores, but there will be people out there sick of them with reasons beyond the critic's comprehension.

Again, I'm not saying reviews are useless, or bad. I'm just saying that they don't deserve the credit or high chair that they have been placed on, often with people thinking it decides a game's fate. The review can't measure the amount of fun that you'll probably have. They are there to classify your concerns on how good the graphics are, the recommended audience, and to tell you the length or if it was released unpolished. They will not tell what the best experience in the game was, they will give you the memories that playing the game could bring, they will not catch you off guard with a plot twist, and they can only describe the gameplay to you. These are things that you'll have to judge yourself, and you are completely missing out on these things if you only trust a review. Yes it can help you decide based on the length, or if you wanted to know the rules of a mode. But they cannot give you the experience. This is why I scoff at the bad reviews for Naughty bear, Turok evolution, Killzone 1, and the few bad reviews of starhawk. This is also why I also don't always agree with the super review scores that COD, or dragon age get. Ironically I would probably give them similar scores though, but that's because the review is different than the quick opinion. I can't take points off of COD for some of the small tweaks that I don't agree with, nor can I give Dragon age a bad score for it's terrible universe. I treat them as games that stand an equal chance for their genre and purpose, and take points off as I go through negative facts or gameplay mechanics that would generally be found as annoying or fun threatening. Opinions are given, but they are restricted to a certain level and get stated more off to the sides than to the score.

On a final note, I will say that I will make an adjustment to my style of review to sort of help the judgment. I will give off an extra score that is titled "Fun factor", and it will be a score that does NOT count as part of the overall view, and get the points based off of the experience and fun that I had instead of tech aspects and such getting in the way. So something like Dragon's dogma would get a 10 on the fun factor, but it would be kept seperate from the likely 7/10 score that it would probably receive. It may have a quick summary of how I reached that score. Like I said, it wont count with the total score and will be on its own. It's like a second voice that separates from the super analyses critic perspective that makes up the bulk of a review. It's still not something to weight on for your purchase, but it gives you an idea of how much fun you can have without considering the silly and insignificant stuff that a review has to cover.