I had an epiphany about gaming yesterday. I was stuck at work, being paid a lot to do very little (the holiday period is good like that), and after we had exhausted showing off our meagre guitar talents (yes, that bored), somebody suggested a little Quake 3 action over the LAN.
After a little scrambling to figure out the best way to do this with three Linux boxen and two Windows machines, we stumbled upon OpenArena, which is a great cross-platform implementation of Q3. We were soon partying like it was 2000 again.
Anyway, the realisation I came to as I railed somebody from one of my favourite camping spots for the 10th time was that I hadn’t had as much FPS fun in ages. Sure, graphics and story and other things might have improved, but I seriously have had less fun combined with all three Halos, Gears of War and Doom 3 than I have across Quake 1, Quake 3, and Half-Life (and mods), Unreal (and its earlier sequels).
By no means am I near the top of the bunch. I mean, sure I can run rings around a newbie, but I was never dedicated enough to garner some of those advanced skills that come so natural to some players so as to appear somewhat godlike. But it’s still a lot more fun. The gameplay is free-flowing, over-the-top and a lot more funny than the depressing realism, grittiness, and grey palettes that seem to be infesting the genre at the moment.
I might be accused of indulging in a little nostalgia, but I don’t think so. I played for a good 3 hours before being forced to take a call, and would have kept going. It’s not that I’m an old fogey refusing to play the latest and greatest. I’ve tried a few, and they’re just not as fun.
What about you guys – do you stay on the bleeding edge, or prefer to hang on to the old classics?
I might go see if I can find my old Starcraft CD.
4 replies on “Going old-school”
Nah, I totally agree. FPSs are becoming too ‘by the numbers’ these days,and it has a lot to do with the ‘professionalisation’ of the gaming media. I mean, take Half Life 2. Great story, great graphics, great setting, TOTALLY underused engine and mediocre level design. Worth a solid 80%, but in the end not particularly better than HL1, from YEARS ago. Why then did the gaming media give it 97-100 per cent ratings? Why is it the top game of all time? THere are probably hundreds of reasosn, but a properly independant, intelligent gaming media would force game designers to stop just working on the gloss, and start delivering good gameplay as a starting point rather than an aside.
There’s an interesting thing with the “gaming media”. Most of the big sites (Gamespot, IGN, etc) are heavily driven by advertising revenue, and they often get big deals from the games publishers. More independent sites like Kotaku, Gamasutra and Giant Bomb (and the blogs of individual contributors like Leigh Alexander and Iroqois Pliskin) don’t have such an obvious editorial bias. I don’t frequent many gaming sites (being an Xbox-only gamer these days means I don’t need to read everything that comes out for the industry, but I always prefer the independent ones because they tend to avoid numerical ratings.
There is such a force of gaming journalists, but the problem is that they are only read by gaming enthusiasts, who are just a blip in the huge multi-million dollar market that is gaming. It’s the high-profile sites and magazines that can make or break a game, not the under-read but intelligent bloggers. At the end of the day, most people just buy the games that are being advertised and play them. They never visit websites, never read magazines. They’re only “gamers” while the PC/console is switched on (to borrow from a recent Penny Arcade post).
I can’t blame the majority for thinking that way. For them, it’s mindless entertainment. But I can get up on my soapbox and hope that one or two of my friends and family will think a little more about games by reading what I write here, and visiting the sites I link to.
I totally agree about depressing realism, which is why anything beyond {Amulet of Yendor|Moria|Nethack} is overkill.
Haha. That might be a bit overboard for me, but each unto their own. There are plenty of rogue-like games that are still actively maintained and extended, but I never could get into them. For my mind, they required too much reliance on rote learning in order to decipher the symbols. I’ve given them plenty of tries over the years, but never been able to get into them. The closest thing I ever did was get involved with some hack-n-slash MUDs. Do you still play MUDS, Glen?