During some recent conversations with fellow gamers I came to realise something that surprised me somewhat. Before I begin let’s put some context into this, there is a common conversation among fans of anything which revolves around the very simple premise, what’s your top 5 best X, where X is the thing of which you are a fan. Obviously, given my nature as a gamer, our X was video games. In a group of people aged roughly 18-30 (yours truly being 22 at time of writing) not one of us had more than 2 games from the last 10 years in our lists. Incidentally my own consists of, in no particular order: Final Fantasy VII, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, StarCraft 2, Sonic The Hedgehog 2 and Deus Ex. A quick internet search will show that (with the exception of SC2) all of these are from 2000 or earlier and this was, like I said, a very common occurrence.
Somewhere along the way games designers have lost the plot somewhat it seems. Why are all these games from earlier in life so much better than the stuff that gets released these days? At first I considered it as a purely nostalgic root, however this was shut down by the fact that some people I’ve spoken to played these sorts of games later in life, long after they were first released and certainly after they’ve played more recent games. So with what seemed to be the obvious reason immediately debunked I had to consider it more deeply.
What I came to in my deliberations isn’t particularly profound or amazing, just what appears to be a simple fact. Games were just better back then. Sure the graphics look pretty awful for the majority nowadays but if you examine the games on merits of gameplay and story, the two main categories by which any game should really be judged, they are so far ahead of what is produced now that it’s simply embarrassing. I have yet to experience any other game that has a story so perfectly told as Final Fantasy VII, to be introduced to characters I genuinely care about or with an antagonist with whom you can sympathise, understand and like as a character. Sephiroth is, and I won’t take any arguments here, the greatest video game antagonist of all time. These days it seems that villains have to be the sorts of things that power armoured meat heads can pump a shit-ton of ammo into before eventually collapsing full of bullet holes or exploding an impressive but ultimately unsatisfying explosion.
Games developers today seem more interested in making games that look astounding, and to give credit where credit is due, they are pushing the limits of what I ever thought would be possible. I remember my mind being blown by how awesome Super Mario 64 looked, then the Final Fantasy VIII cut scenes demolished what was left. Little did I know that a decade later those would be in game graphics. Unfortunately in doing this they’ve lost track of what makes games such a powerful medium. What movie gives you the chance to BE the hero? Which books allow YOU to control the very events of a complicated story? Games can go so much deeper than any other story telling method and this is why it saddens me that Call of Duty is so fucking popular. They had a go at a clever story, it didn’t work guys, it was convoluted, stupid and mildly predictable, oh and it was about 6 hours long. It seems that if you want to make a successful game you just need to put it in a first person view, stick a machine gun in someone’s hand and put them in what is essentially a corridor, a curvy and well textured corridor, with the instructions of ‘shoot everyone and get to the other end.’ This is all well and good for a little while but I find myself tiring of it very quickly and returning back to the classics desperate for something with substance.
I want to stress at this point that I’m not just hating on modern games as a nostalgic RPG fanboy (though I am one). There are a ton of games that have been released in much more recent times that are fantastic, innovative and fun to play. Fallout 3 for example devoured an incredibly large portion of my life and Portal was ridiculously good despite being possibly the shortest game I’ve ever played. What I’m getting at here is that good games do shine through the sea of mediocrity that plagues modern consoles; it’s just that they don’t shine quite so brightly as the super novaeic brilliance of their forefathers. This has made me feel rather old but you know what, sod it I don’t care, I’m going to keep playing the classics and hoping that one day a new game will reach the heights that they currently occupy, now if you’ll excuse me there’s some kids I need to tell to get off my front lawn.
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