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!
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