Know Your Roots

In my review for Mission Impossible on Blowin' Out the Cartridge I mentioned that 3D games on the Nintendo 64, or from any console of the generation didn't age well. It's true they didn't, but I thought about it for a while. Why single out that generation of consoles? Did SNES games age any better? What about NES? Are Xbox or Playstation 2 games still looking good? I know when I played Pirates - The Legend of Black Kat on Xbox I remember thinking how poorly some of the graphics had aged, it's not as bad as some of the earlier systems... but give it five years and it might be.

But surely graphics aren't what makes a game great. To make a game great takes many things: story, graphics, character development, there's a wide variety of things that have to come together to make a truly great game. Graphics are just one part of that.

But they're also an important part. If they released Mass Effect on Xbox360 as well as Nintendo 64, the same game but with the graphical capability that each could handle which would you play? They have the exact same story, the exact same characters... one just looks awful. Of course you're going to play the one that looks the best. It would be stupid not to. But would it hurt the story to play it on something with the graphics of the N64? I would think so. We're very visual animals, there are little nuances that we may not notice with bad graphics. The raising of an eyebrow, a slight change in demeanor, a glance of the eyes, things that can all mean something that just can't be shown on the Nintendo 64.

So where does that leave SNES, NES, Genesis, Etc.? Pretty much in the same boat... though I will say slightly better off for one reason, for me at least. They're different then what we see now. On the 32bit, 64 bit and beyond consoles you pretty much had the same games we're playing now. Sure there's been some big leaps and bounds but games are essentially similar. We have very few true 2D games now (except on things like Xbox Arcade) so games on 8 bit and 16 bit games are visually different. I don't look at an SNES game and think how horrible the graphics look, because I have nothing to compare them to currently. On the other hand I look at 3D first person shooter on the Nintendo 64 and compare it any number of first person shooters on any of the current systems... they can't even begin to hold up. Though that may just be me. Part of that may be nostalgia talking, but I honestly think there's at least some truth to it as well.

I've played a lot of video games in my life. I'm twenty eight years old and I would say I've been playing video games for at least twenty three years of those. Everything from the Commodore 64 to the Sega Game Gear to the Xbox360. Different genres, different consoles, different games. I've spent countless hours playing games, but one thing I've come to realize is that generally, newer is better. It doesn't mean old is bad, it just means that we're making leaps in bounds in technology and what we can do in video games. And that's a good thing.

If I had to come up with ten of my favorite games my guess would be that it would be split with about 70% being new games and 30% being old games. There are some great old games, but there's some phenomenal games that came out in the last three or four years... and even more games to look forward to in the future.

So what am I getting at here? Well as the blog title says, know your roots.

A few years back you saw this slogan on t-shirts and hats, usually with an NES controller.

I liked it, but I didn't think it applied to me. To me it was meant for the kids who you usually saw wearing it. The kids who were about ten years younger then me, the ones who might have caught the tail end of the SNES but most likely their first system was probably the N64 or the PS1. To me they weren't really my roots though. They were what I grew up playing. My roots were things like Pong and other very early video games, games I didn't really have a chance to play growing up.

Know your roots. I thought it was cool. We had kids who were going back and playing games that were made before they were born. Awesome games that I grew up playing... but is it necessary to know your roots? I know my roots. They're boring. I bought an Atari TV plug-in console a while back. Sure the games are fun... for about ten minutes. Then you move on to the next one. Asteroid can only be so entertaining. It's not something I'm going to spend the entire day playing.

So why should it be different for younger gamers. Should it be?

Sure, NES and SNES games might be more entertaining then Asteroid, but can they compare to games now... especially if you're looking at them with fresh eyes. We're not talking about nostalgia here. We're talking about games that these people have never played and have no connection to. We're talking about the difference between Legend of Zelda and Twilight Princess. It's a huge difference. Can you compare them?

I wouldn't think so.

In playing all the video games I own I've come across a few games that are considered classics, but that I've never played or haven't played in years and don't remember. Generally, I think they're pretty average, if not bad. Phantasy Star may have been the greatest game ever for you when you were young and playing it on your Sega Master System... but now its age and flaws shine through. I never played it as a kid. It's just another RPG to me. One that I didn't feel was very good. Though I'm sure there are tons of people who would argue with me.

Give a kid who has never played Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past that game. Do you think he's going to have the same feelings that I have for it? I rank it as one of my favorite games of all time. I remember where I was the first time I played it. I remember being in awe watching the three gold triangles come in from the corners of the screen to form the triforce. I remember that was the first time I had seen anything that looked that good and cool. And the rain at the first! The rain and the thunder! It was so immersive! It was so amazing!

Think that kid is going to feel the same way? Nope. He's not. Hell, he might not even like the game. Maybe he just got done with Twilight Princess. This is going to look archaic to him. Why isn't link in 3D riding a horse.

And frankly I couldn't blame him. At the end of the day it's a good possibility that Twilight Princess is a better game than Link to the Past. I don't see it because it's hard to look past how much I love Link to the Past.

I follow quite a few video game forums, because I'm a huge video game nerd. People remember consoles and games with heavy nostalgia... generally the console and games you first played, or the consoles and games you grew up with. There's people who are probably eight or ten years younger than me who remember the Nintendo 64 as the greatest console ever. I owned one, I used to love playing it but I don't look at it with the same fondness as I do the NES or SNES. Those were my first consoles. Those were the golden days for me. And there's kids now who will probably look at the Wii with the fondness that I look at the NES. It's all generational.

Should that kid with the Wii play the NES to try and get what I'm talking about? Is there a reason to? Why should he? At twelve I didn't run out and buy Pong so I could get to know my roots, and if I had I probably would have thought it was boring. Why should these kids run out and buy an NES?

I've heard it hundreds of times. The NES was amazing! It had so many great games! The SNES was great, remember all the phenomenal games it had? You know what you never hear? The NES was amazing! It had quite a few games I really remember enjoying and hundreds of really crappy games I never played or don't remember.

I'll give you hint, most major systems had quite a few really awesome games... but the rest, the majority, were either average or horrible. For every Legend of Zelda there was a Yo! Noid!. For every Final Fantasy III there was Shaq-Fu. Trust me, there's a lot more average or bad games for your favorite system then there are good ones. Unless your favorite system is the Jaguar 64, then your favorite system just has all awful games... but I guarantee that someone out there loves the Jaguar because they remember loving Iron Soldier as a kid.

I'm all for kids trying out games from my childhood. If they like them, great. If not, I can totally understand. But this bullshit nostalgia of "Oh my God, games were so much better when I was a kid!" is just that, bullshit nostalgia.

I've learned that in replaying my collection for Blowin' Out the Cartridge. A lot of the games I loved just didn't hold up... but up until I played them again I would have said the complete opposite. If you had asked me April 7th, 2010 what I thought of Goldeneye I would have told how fun it was, how I remember playing with all my friends, how fondly I remember it.... and I still would. All those are true. It was really fun and I do remember playing it split screen with all my friends. Now there's just a footnote. It's aged horribly, it controls like crap, I didn't have fun replaying it, and in games nowadays I often don't have to think in my head "Is that a wall or a bad guy... I can't tell."

Play the games you enjoy. Try new things if you want, if you enjoy them great, if not keep trying or go back to what you know you enjoy. Video games are meant for your enjoyment. They're meant for YOUR enjoyment. Play what you like, not what you think you should have to play as some sort of bullshit right of passage.

Squid.