Retro Games

This past weekend, I was cruising www.ign.com, my go-to gaming site, when I came across their article about "The 100 Greatest NES Games" I sat and read through the entire article, about a two hour read. Throughout the article, I noticed a recurring theme: games were really hard, and many of them featured co-op mutli player (games like Ikari Warriors and Contra being notable mentions).This got me to thinking: are games these days as good as they were in the old days? Now before you start spouting off about graphics and particle effects, bump-mapping and the likes, I'm not speaking about them from a technical standpoint. I'm mean, more specifically, are games as fun as they used to be?

The focus today, it seems (as I type this, my girlfriend is playing Fallout 3, her current obsession) is on superior graphics and flashiness. I know that a lot of games do have some high "fun factors" and great stories, Fallout 3 being a prime example, but I notice that there's a lot of trash out there, too. Bethesda software's recent game, Wet, for example was, well... not good(Fallout, on the other hand, Bethesda's game from last year, is amazing in most aspects). I played the demo, and it felt stiff, repetitive and very under-produced.

I understand that this is a minority, but I can't help that feel that games were... better back then.

Look at an under-rated game of years past: Bionic Commando. In an era where the focus of most games was running and jumping, Capcom dared to remove the ability from the protagonist. You had to rely on his Bionic swinging arm to get around. Admittedly, at first, it is a little difficult. After fifteen minutes or so, I was swinging around levels like Spiderman with a gun. Another example is Battletoads. Battletoads has got to be one of the hardest games in the history of games. I've been playing that game since about 1991 (when there was a craze for anthropomorphic animals kicking ass) when it was released, and to this day I'm lucky if I can get past the third level without getting game over (seriously, check this game out. Its fun AND hard as hell). I actually remember an interview I read in a magazine some fifteen years ago where the producers admitted to making the game as devious as possible. You don't get games like that now. I recently saw an ad for a game called Badlands, and open ended first person shooter/adventure game for the Xbox360. A tagline in the article stated, "You are not hardcore enough for this game". I had to laugh a little bit, thinking back on games like Battletoads and Kid Icarus. Back then, you were either luck or insanely skilled to get to end of a game like that (keep in mind this was before emulators and save states and not including using games genie - no cheating!).

I once spent an entire summer playing StarTropics (the summer of 2001, actually. I was dirt poor) on my black and white TV. My buddy across the road had just got his PS2 and kept inviting me over to play. I would often decline, as I was too busy trying to beat a level near the end of the game.

See, this is my point. The old games of the NES sucked you in. Not because of their stellar graphics, but because of their focus on adventuring and fun.

I may have been young in the prime days of the NES, as it died out in 1994, and I was only eight then, but my earliest memory is basically that of an NES controller pad in my hand, playing Super Mario Bros. I remember the days before the net, when if you knew a secret in a game, you could impress your friends.

Overall, I just feels that games were more pure back then, more... fun. There's to much of a focus today on bloodshed and body count.