A Personal Gaming History - Emma McConnellogue

Being a child of the 80’s I was lucky enough to be in on what’s affectionately coined the ‘Golden Age of Gaming’ and at 4 years old owned my first games console; The Sega Master System 2! It was something I took too immediately and my mother was forever saying “I wish I’d never bloody bought that thing! Go outside, it’s lovely!” to deaf ears as I encouraged Sonic The Hedgehog to speed roll through another wall and bounce to new heights collecting as many rings as possible, before inevitably landing on hidden spikes, and losing them all or similarly urging good old Alex Kidd to do my bidding . I was in love; with the 8 bit repetitive sounds, psychedelic colour pallets and whacky characters I had endless control over.

My best friend at the time, and next door neighbour,  happened to have the Nintendo Entertainment System, so after I’d discovered my love for all things computer game, we spent all day in one or the other’s house playing with Mario and his brother Luigi and their little sidekick Yoshi or Sonic and Tails taking on Dr Robotnik. In time Sega released their next gen console, the Sega Mega Drive and true to form my mum got me that and my best friend’s mum bought him the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

I then went through a number of years without owning either a computer or a console of my own though did play the Playstation, N64, PS2 and Xbox before getting my own Xbox 360 a couple of years ago and a laptop with which I started to play PC games. We now have a PS3 in our home as well as Nintendo DS.

The first game I ever played in my life was Alex Kidd in Miracle World and it was HARD (not like most games today!) Alex was killed in one hit from a bad guy, there was no save options and when you lost all 3 of your lives it was game over (unless you knew the cheat!) IT was a platformer primarily but featured a reasonable amount of roleplaying and strategy. The only move Alex had was punching (though could sometimes find items or purchase items that gave him range)and boss fights were unusual as there weren’t all that many but you played ‘rock, paper, scissors’ to beat them… To this DAY I can remember the bloody tune and find myself humming it as I type and now you will too!

It’s a toss-up between that and Teddy Boy being my most memorable games. Both were bright, had funky music and infinite play time hours. Teddy Boy had 100 levels + bonus rounds! The object of that game was to kill spawning monsters from dice and then collect them when they turned into little balls. If you didn’t they turned into time eating bugs and if you touched them you died. The levels were platform, looping, mazes which never ended.  Here’s an example level.

What makes these games memorable was probably the amount of hours I dedicated to completing them, the difficulty of both games, the music (!!) and quirky game-play.

Personally I’d like to see games return to this. Nowadays games are made easier and easier because of the ever increasing amount of moaning done by little twits who are way too spoilt and can’t be bothered to actually work hard to earn anything worthwhile. I find very little satisfaction in completing mainstream games these days and miss the none save systems and one hit kills and spending hours trying to jump the same gap over and over and over and over and…you get the point. Indie developers are where it’s at if you want games with a reasonable difficulty setting – Take Super Meat Boy for example!

I’m quite a fan of gesture based gaming and hope this continues as I believe it could be more immersive, even if it’s not quite at that stage right now. Some things it works really well for, like dance games, some sports; tennis, golf, bowling etc. Things like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are pretty cool as the peripherals are interesting and fun and are immersive, however, more action based games which have your character run around on rails whilst you use your hands to cast spells or open doors etc isn’t quite as immersive as it is trying to be.

I’m a massive fan of Role Playing Games. I love games like Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect series, Resident Evil and I’d love those games to include gesture based gameplay and 3D environments where you feel like you’re actually in the game with the characters – THAT would be immersive!

Computer Game History: 2000 – Present.

Modern gaming history to present introduces a number of interesting developments technologically and some steps backward into the 80’s with regards game clones saturating the market and publishing house problems.

In the last 10 years or so we’ve seen the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii all have their hour of glory and interesting features highlighted; Wii had a motion sensitive remote that began a revolution of gesture based gaming, the PS3 had a built in Blue-Ray Player and the Xbox 360 promoted an add-on HD disk drive. The Wii was different and offered original games where you have to move around with your whole body to play games such as; golf, tennis and bowling. This brought attention to the fact that gaming could be a method of keeping children and adults alike fit and active. Microsoft and Sony cottoned on to this success and shortly after brought their own versions of gesture based gaming technology to the market; Kinect for Xbox 360 and Move for the PS3. The Kinect is completely different from the Wii Remote in that it is a stationary device which scans your entire body whilst you play and projects your image on screen and the Move is a combination of the two: It’s a remote with an accelerometer which is then tracked by a stationary device known as the PSEye.

Another technological advancement is that of 3D gaming. This idea and implementation has been around since the late 80’s with specially coded games for the ‘Sega Master System’ and the use of 3D glasses; it wasn’t until relatively recently that it was revised and revived by NVidia 3D Vision followed by Nintendo into their handheld Nintendo DS systems; Nintendo 3DS.  The current problem with developing such technology for console systems is that consumers would need the 3D TV setups at home in order to view the games in 3D, which don’t seem to be all the popular at the moment and might never be…

Finally, technologically, I wanted to talk about the biggest step in gaming evolution; On Live. This is a mass audience, cloud-based, streaming, online gaming platform. It is essentially a delivery mechanism system that will allow consumers to have instant access to games on almost any “PC/Mac, Ipad or TV” – onlive.co.uk: Games on demand. Will there be a need for consoles in the future? Will streaming technology and server stability and structure be stable enough to deliver such a system without major lag issues, buffering and server crashes? The answers to these questions are apparently yes! Initial testing has had surprising results in its closed beta testing stages and appears to work as advertised. The revolutionary idea is that not only will consumers have instant access to triple A titles and more at their fingertips the technology is being dubbed as “future-proof”. This means that instead of the consumer having to update their systems and technology to stay up to date with games ever increasing demand for more power, the on-live system will be updated with new technology, more servers, more power, all at the back end. For this system you’re looking to pay a one of for controller(s) and possibly a small device to plug into a tv then a monthly subscription charge for the service. It’s said that additional charges may be incurred if a player decides to buy games to play frequently, but there will be free to play one-offs and free demos to try before you buy. Xbox Live could really suffer from this business model.

Each of these developments would mean any game developer in the industry, current or up-and-coming, would have certain considerations to make when developing in-game assets, particularly UI artists who have functionality and ease-of-use considerations to keep in mind when developing for gesture based gaming and 3D allows artists other areas to explore with regards spatial-awareness, depth of field and even some very creative UI work for those UI artists as well.

Although technology has advanced and allowed for some creative and innovative designs to break through and continue to evolve and enhance the consumers gaming experience there are still a number of issues within the industry that publishers and developers haven’t really learned from.

The most obvious of which is the number of cloned titles on the market today; Call of Duty being a prime example. Every release is the same game with a few tweaks and more recently recycling the same assets from the game before! We buy this? Apparently people do…Why? Mostly because people like “familiarity” and playing it safe. Publishing houses rake in a lot of cash for selling big franchises because they know they can sell them and refuse to take risks in case they don’t get back their investment plus profits. It’s a disgusting practice that’s beginning to stifle the creativity in big development teams. I mean, the consumer claims to want familiarity then when they get their Call of Duty 96 cry about how it didn’t live up to the last one and they might as well not have bothered…Confused yet? Operation Flashpoint Red River was Codemasters recent title, along with Bodycount, did so badly that Guildford Studio has closed and focusing solely on their racing teams. 

If the AAA title isn’t a short-term, instant success, it may as well be a failure to what Kieron Gillan called ‘money-men’. Games like Titan Quest have sold millions and millions of copies over a number of years, but the game isn’t well known or thought to be a great success because it wasn’t immediate, yet the people involved in the development of that game are still making money today from the sales.