Alrighty, so as you may have gathered by now I’m a pretty big fan of the music in some videogames, and I feel it’s often a vital part of completing the experience. This said, sometimes when you play a game a lot, the stuff in the game just gets so repetitive it’s crazy. Right now I’m playing a ton of Minecraft, working on a stupidly overambitious project, and I’ve been playing Daft Punk pretty much constantly while I do so.
This is a glorious idea and I clearly have to get in on it.
Back when I was a young teen, my mom got me Morrowind and System of a Down – Steal This Album on the same day, so I can’t listen to the latter without thinking of the former. They are inextricably linked for me.
Do you have any particular games and musicians who are linked for you? Any preferred artists for particular games or genres? Tell us in the comments about the music you listen to while gaming!
The debate about whether or not video games count as art is one that has been raging for quite some time among not just players themselves, but in certain academic and professional circles as well. Well, I’m pleased to announce that the Games-as-Art folk have now got a pretty big trump card in the way of a new change in the guidelines of the National Endowment of the Arts. Namely, the NEA now considers video games and other interactive games to be artistic projects eligible to receive federal funding.
In other words, the U.S. Government just said that video games can be art.
Pretty awesome if you ask me. I’ve always been in the art camp of this particular debate– maybe it’s because I consider myself to be a creative person and tend to see “art” in pretty much anything, but I honestly can’t quite grok how a medium that combines storytelling, visual art, architecture/graphic design, music, animation, and frequently scriptwriting and cinematography (in the form of cutscenes) to be anything but art of the highest order. But then, I suppose it’s all subjective, isn’t it? That’s how art works. It’s why you have people mounting broken toilet seats on a canvas and selling the result for millions of dollars (true story).
Perhaps, then, all the proof we needed about video games being art is the fact that people have been debating it for years.
Regardless, it does feel good to say “suck it Ebert” right about now.
Following on from Pike’s post I shall also provide some musings on the games I consider to be the very best. But unlike her, I shall actually deliver a list of five games! Just to briefly note that I’m not trying to say this is a definitive list of “best games ever” or something; just give that I’m most fond of and have a lot of personal regard for.
5) Final Fantasy X
Well, it’s always a toss-up between this and VII, but every time I play through FFX I find something else to love about it. This is, for my money, the best game Squaresoft/Square-Enix have ever put out. It is massive, richly detailed, I love all the characters in their own way (I didn’t used to like Yuna at all, but I’ve totally come to love and respect her as I really thought about her life and how she deals with everything), the battle system is immensely fun, and it’s got the best bonus content of any FF except, perhaps, XII, but then I don’t like XII so I’ve not seen much of that!
Also, blitzball is the best minigame ever.
I think most of all I love it because it’s so beautiful. Not in the purest sense of eye-melting graphics, but in the aesthetic sense. Not too many games have a South-east Asian style setting anyway, but FFX feels so hot and tropical, is so colorful, so thoroughly alive in every scene, that I can’t help but get completely sucked in. And this is not mentioning the soundtrack; I listen to this and I am transported to Spira, feeling the heat and the water, it’s so wonderful.
X-2 is great as well, I don’t care what anyone says.
4) X-Com
Ah, X-Com. You’ve heard Pike talk about this lately, and just think about what that means for a moment. A game that’s nearing 20 is more compelling to a new player than almost anything contemporary. Just so! X-Com is vast, ridiculous in scope, encompassing a global geostrategic component, base building, research, economic management, manufacturing, and of course the insanely deep, detailed, addictive tactical combat against the alien menace. Why so good? Like any classic, because it’s immersive. It sucks you in. You are the Commander, you have to simultaneously care about your troops and deal with it when they die in droves. You have to juggle a number of competing concerns, and the aliens will usually throw a wrench into your plans. It might be an isometric pixelfest today, but it’s still more engrossing, and often more terrifying, than anything that has come since.
Pictured: An actual nightmare. Not pictured: You, never sleeping comfortably again.
X-Com came out in 1994 and the game has probably never been improved upon. I own four separate copies (Along with two copies of TFTD and a copy of Apocalypse). I really can’t recommend it strongly enough to anyone who hasn’t played it. This is why we got into gaming: Experiences like this are what it’s all about.
3) Deus Ex
Games like to talk about having multiple and diverse solutions. They rarely do – This one does, and oh man does it ever show how short the rest of the industry falls in that regard. You can be Snake, you can be Dook, you can be a l33t haXX0r and turn the enemy’s guns and robots against them, all kinds of stuff. And all backed up by two separate, synergistic methods of advancement, namely experience points on one hand and nano-augmentation on the other. All wrapped up in the most delightful dystopia I’ve had the pleasure of setting foot in, reveling in every conspiracy theory you can imagine (Except birthers, because that didn’t exist in 1999, obviously).
If you think this is an exaggeration, you'd be wrong.
Yes, the graphics have aged badly and yes, the gunplay is a bit clunky, and yes, it has voice acting that can veer right into the comical. Not a single one of those things matter, because this game is how you make games, and the few flaws it has are completely overshadowed by the vastness of scale and ambition contained here.
2) Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
There’s no shortage of 4x games around, but if you’re listing the best, you’re probably going to talk about either Civilization or SMAC. There is a reason for this. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is the 4X game par excellence, the apex of the genre, not matched before or since. What makes it so great, I hear you ask? Where to begin. Name an aspect of videogames and SMAC does it brilliantly or better. The implementation of the gameplay, the mechanics, all of that stuff, is essentially unimpeachable. There is little realistic way to say it could be better except, perhaps, to say there could be more of it. What elevates SMAC from merely a brilliant game to an all-time classic and a brilliant experience is the atmosphere.
This game has quotes from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, all kinds of stuff. And these quotes are usually the less impressive ones. The really impressive quotes are the ones written for the game’s various faction leaders. Every time you research a tech you get a quote from someone, every time you build a wonder, and the first time you build any given building. The end result? A 4x game with stronger, more detailed characters, who undergo more evolution, than the best RPG. As things progress their opinions change; compare these two quotes from Sister Miriam Godwinson, leader of the Lord’s Believers faction.
“The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.”
“And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?”
Also there are cyborgs, which is extremely hot
The final enjoyable factor is that the game goes for the ‘high balance’ route. All factions can achieve a position of particular strength, often wildly divergent from each other, but they can all become immensely powerful. When you can wipe out continents you really feel like you’re in charge of a future society, not to mention gives a palpable sense of reward for building up your empire. It was an excellent design decision which goes somewhat unnoticed, but contributes a lot to the game.
1) Suikoden II
So there’s some predictable classics on this list. Nobody is surprised to see X-Com or SMAC on a “Top games list”. But what’s this? Soo-wee-ko-den? What’s that? It’s a Playstation JRPG. It’s the best game I’ve ever played.
Suikoden, now up to entry V (All are exceptional except for IV), is a game where you lead an army. You generally start out on the side of an empire, and the corruption of it is soon revealed. Willingly or not you are caught up in a revolution or war to oppose it, and end up being the leader of the army. Yes, as a JRPG it means teenagers end up leading tens of thousands of troops. Yes, it has essentially silent protagonists, which is usually an immense pet peeve of mine. No, there is essentially no way to diverge from the prescribed plot (Though there are more chances to do so in SII than in any other JRPG I can call to mind). And yet here it is, number one on my list, a game I replayed around Christmas and loved as much as ever.
It’s a little hard to really explain what I love about this game, but that’s sort of the point of this post, so I’ll do my best. It has charm. It has grandeur, but it keeps things believable. You’re not saving the world from an ancient evil that has recently awoken, you’re fighting for your country, usually by fighting on the side of your country’s historic enemies. And you fight people on the other side who believe in their country, or believe they have a duty to serve it at any rate, who are for the most part thoroughly human. Except Luca Blight, who is the only ‘Murderous lunatic’ villain I have ever seen who makes me feel anything other than derision.
Viktor and Flik - most severe badasses to ever kick ass.
There are 108 characters to recruit in each Suikoden, sometimes recurring from other games in the series. They all form part of an overarching story of the Suikoden world, a plot not yet all revealed, but one which is engrossing in the extreme. Every game has fascinating characters and locations, gorgeous visuals, and absolutely stunning music. Forget Nobuo Uematsu, forget Yasunori Mitsuda, Miki Higashino is an unsung genius. I don’t think anyone has ever made better videogame musicthan she has.
So I was thinking the other day, and thought it might be fun to do a post about some of my all-time favorite games. I mean, I talk about “OMG THIS GAME IS AWESOME, I LOVE THIS GAME” so often that I may as well have several dozen favorites, but I decided to challenge myself to narrow it down. This’ll be tough for me, but let’s see how it goes.
1. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
This is, hands down, my all-time favorite game of all time. Are there better games from a technical standpoint? Yes. But this game shall always hold a special place in my heart for being the first game that grabbed me both in terms of gameplay and story, and for showing me what video games can really do as a medium for both.
Genre-rise this is, as the name would suggest, an RPG. It was made by Square back when they were Squaresoft and still making games for Nintendo. They made it in between making Final Fantasies VI and VII, and it shows– the game and many of its little nuances (billions of unnecessary items or ridiculously superfluous magic spell animations, anyone?) have a very vintage Final Fantasy/Chrono Trigger feel.
The game combines this classic RPG gameplay with a need for almost rhythmic timing for button combos, and when you toss what was, at the time, the deepest storyline twelve-year-old Pike had ever seen before in a video game into the mix, you get a game that has really stood the test of time and hammered itself into my mind as a firm favorite.
Also, Geno. Best. Character. Ever.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Remember how Super Mario RPG did it for me by combining good gameplay with a good story? Yeah. This game did the exact same thing.
This entry on the list probably doesn’t come as a big surprise to anyone. There are plenty of people out there who didn’t like this game as much as most people did, but very few people will deny that this game had something going for it, something that captivated the better part of a generation.
About a year or so back I replayed the first half or so of this game and was pleased to see that it’s still just as captivating now as it was back then. And even those huge blocky polygons couldn’t change that.
3. StarCraft: Brood War
Longtime RTS players will frequently point to a Command & Conquer game or, more often than not, Age of Empires II as being the pinnacle of the genre. And you know what, those games were great. But for me, there is one king of RTS and that king is StarCraft.
I don’t know if there has ever been a strategy game where the races/factions were all so very different and yet so very balanced. If there is, I certainly haven’t played it.
StarCraft is sublime. Easy to learn, insanely difficult to master, with strategy layers that I swear are endless. I’d just play games over and over again, trying different strategies or trying to refine a previous one. Back in the day, I’d load this game up in the morning and play it until night. Twelve or thirteen hour StarCraft marathons were not a rare thing for me.
Funny bit of trivia for you though: I’ve never played through the story mode. I just played multiplayer or (more frequently) custom games against the AI.
(P.S. Yes, I also like StarCraft 2, but frankly I consider that game to mostly be just a graphical upgrade of the original StarCraft, with a couple new units tossed in for flavor. So the original gets my vote here.)
4. Civilization 4: Beyond the Sword
I know, I know. I’m super behind the times and didn’t start playing this until recently. And yet it’s already on my all-time favorite list. Biased? Nope. The game is just that good.
Yes, I was mad.
Let’s see, what’ve we got here. Nuanced strategy, a whole bunch of different ways to win each game, a crazy learning curve that will have you learning new things about the game months after you’ve started playing, a mix of history and humor, Gandhi nuking the stuffing out of you, and above all, fiendishly addictive gameplay. Yup. This is the best 4X game of all time. Every time I play it, I remember why I fell in love with it in the first place.
5. …uh, yeah, this one is up in the air.
Okay, you’ve got me. I have no idea how to narrow #5 down to just one game. I’ve got a bunch of candidates. Depending on mood, time of day, and the thickness of my current pair of Nostalgia Goggles, I’d go for Dig-Dug, Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario Bros. 3, Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye 007, Halo, Pokemon Gold, Final Fantasy VI, Metal Gear Solid, or The Oregon Trail. Or probably several others that I’m forgetting. One of these days I’ll sit down and figure out a definitive Number Five, but today is not that day.
Alrighty then! Your guys’ turn! Top five favorites?
So I’ve been playing a fair bit of Minecraft recently, it seems it has ‘clicked’ for me and whatever makes it work for others is working for me too. However, after spending a few days building my little settlement, an underwater tunnel, and a big lighthouse, I spawned a ton of TNT and blew it all to kingdom come.
All my screenshots have disappeared. I don't know where to or why. Have a Pony instead.
And it got me to thinking. I love management and builder games. I’ve put more hours into Sim City than you can imagine. When I was a kid I played so much Theme Park that I saw sprites from the game every time I closed my eyes. When I play an RTS, I am the turtler par excellence, I consolidate, husband, prepare carefully, build an impressive defense, and only then do I launch attacks (Which isn’t really the best way to fight a war but what are you going to do).
Yet at the same time I am delighted by destroying it all. I giggled gleefully as I watched my Minecraft stuff get destroyed; I click the natural disasters like a monomaniacal Bond villain in SimCity; I have been known to use superweapons on my OWN BASES if I’m not impressed by the size of the enemy’s and don’t feel nuking them would cause enough destruction. I don’t really understand where this comes from, but I have a suspicion it’s a major reason I love strategy games so much, as they tend to encompass both building and destroying. I am deeply satisfied by a construction job well done, a base laid out just so, a city which looks both believable and functional. And I’m equally satisfied by watching it all get blown to pieces. Even better, watching it get put back together afterwards! I love how countries can collapse and rebuild over decades in games like Europa Universalis III.
It does lead me to believe that the best game I could ever play would let you build a city like SimCity, then go down to street level like GTA and level the place with Red Faction: Guerrilla’s GeoMod 2.0 whilst calling in superweapons from the C&C series.
So. This game. Hearts of Iron 2. It’s a Grand Strategy game, which means it looks a little like this:
USS Enterprise? USS Enterprise.
There are two types of people in this world. Those who will look at this screenshot, raise an eyebrow, and slowly back away, and those who will look at this screenshot and promptly go something like this:
Have I mentioned that my Pony images folder is huge?
If you are one of the latter, then you have probably played this game already. If not… then you seriously need to look into it. Never has pushing tiny armies around a tiny map been so detailed and intricate. Also, that tech tree. That tech tree.
I also paid Robert Oppenheimer a buck sixty a day to discover experimental proof of the equivalence of mass and energy.
Anyways! I’ll refrain from delving into the details because there’s not a lot I can say about this game other than you should seriously look into it if you like strategy and history and micromanagement and geeking out over details.
And watch out for those Germans, they’ll stab you in the back when you least expect it! (…which I suppose makes sense, it being World War II and all…)
Before I launch into this post, let’s define “ragequit”. How about: quitting something in the heat of the moment, without putting much thought into it, because you are thoroughly and completely frustrated. Does that work?
Your anger fuels Pinkie Pie's giggles.
I don’t ragequit games very often. I mean, I quit mid-game a lot, sure. I’ll quit because I’ve been playing for a while and my mind is wandering; and sometimes I’ll quit because the game isn’t going my way and I can’t be bothered to spend a bunch of time changing it so it IS going my way– especially if I know I’m already proven and capable of doing this.
Quitting out of rage, though, is not a typical aspect of my gaming modus operandi.
…until recently.
X-Com. This game is hard. There is no mercy. There is no handholding. There is just your troops being shot in the head by an unseen alien the second they exit their ship.
I ragequit this game pretty much every time I play it. Then I go play something easier for a while. Like, you know, Hearts of Iron II.
You know your game is hard when a World War II era grand strategy game made by Paradox is easier.
…but then I go back and play X-Com again, because there’s something deliciously addictive about it and I just can’t help but wonder if maybe this time I’ll figure it out. I mean, if I keep trying, then eventually I might live for more than five minutes. Right?
There is a lot of talk in gaming, and has been for many years now, about realism. Realism is a holy grail, or at least a magical totem, something which developers are expected to strive for and gamers expected to appreciate.
But this reflexive attitude needs examination, because we actually don’t want realism at all. Or to be more precise, realism is only one path the getting what we really want, which is immersion. Realism has a couple of benefits compared to unrealism (Or perhaps more properly, non-realism), and I will come to those in a moment, but in my experience ‘realism’ is not in and of itself a recipe for a good game, and it may indeed be harmful to pursue it too far.
Let’s start with the benefits of realism though:
A) We have an unarguable, universal blueprint, in the form of… well, of reality. Realism, if pursued, is easier in at least the conceptual sense because we only have to look at the real world to see how things work. As an author I can confidently say that using reality as the basis for a novel is a lot easier than keeping track of all the unique rules you have invented for your universe! And moreover, because it is universal, everyone can see that something is realistic and doesn’t need to learn any new rules. (I know that Reality is Unrealistic but that’s not the point right now!)
B) Closely linked with the above, realism (If we assume it’s executed well) is very consistent and coherent. Cause and effect, relationships between objects and actions, all that stuff – reality is ultimately immersive.
That is what we’re really after – immersion.
This is the most immersive game ever. Fact.
But we don’t need realism for immersion, not by any stretch of the imagination. That’s why we have the term ‘suspension of disbelief’. We need coherence and consistency to be immersed – we need it to be realistic with reference to itself, not to our reality. To a large extent we are also talking about atmosphere, which is something occasionally ineffable. It’s a combination of mechanics, art (as opposed to graphics), sounds, music or its absence, and so forth. It does not require any particular degree of technical fidelity; Pike is plenty immersed in X-Com despite it being 20 years old and having pixels you can individually count. Immersion is not limited to games based in history, or to first-person shooters or any other given genre. Some of my most immersive games are sci-fi, like Deus Ex and X-Com, and tactical or strategy games, like Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.
Now, there are times when realism is desired. If you’re making a game about the Roman Empire, you should probably do some research, and I will simply refer you back to my post about why mods are great rather than go on a long rant about Rome: Total War, fantastic as it is. The more knowledgeable someone is about a topic the harder it is to suspend their disbelief – so the concessions made to playability over realism and accuracy can end up harming a game. Realistic games have their place – ArmA II is a great example of a game which takes a fairly realistic approach; in that video he scrambles around in the dark for five minutes before getting shot and killed by an enemy he hasn’t even seen. Fun? Absolutely! But I sure as hell wouldn’t want TimeSplitters to play like that! Plenty of immersive games aren’t realistic, but remain hugely engaging to the player.
Then again, that's a strikingly realistic rendition of excellent fashion.
And then again, immersion isn’t always what people want. Earth Defense Force 2017 is a shockingly lacking game in almost every sense – except for raw fun, which it is almost unmatched in. It is the quintessential B-game; bad graphics, voice acting that would make Barry Burton blush, questionable physics, and absolutely rollicking great fun from start to finish. Though I propound the capacity for games to be art, and encourage things in such a direction, not every game needs to be art. Not every movie needs to be Citizen Kane. Sometimes, Transformers is just more fun.
So in short, we have put the idea of realism up on a pedestal, when what we really want is immersion, which is a factor of coherence and consistency. Realism has a couple of benefits in that sense but any break from it will be easily noticed by the knowledgeable, making their disbelief even harder to suspend!
So, to turn this over to you, what games have you found most immersive and why? To what extent do you care about realism, if at all?
After having written up a post a few weeks back on how I didn’t “get” Minecraft, I, uh… went back and tried it again.
Now, first thing’s first. I played the free, in-browser “Classic” edition, because as it turns out, I can’t afford the actual game at this point. (When I first tried the downloadable game, waaaay back in the day, it was free and in Beta.) This version of the game is different from the real thing. There’s no creepers, no night-time, and no crafting. Just you and an unlimited number of different colored blocks.
…oddly enough, that made the game a lot more palatable for me. No longer having to worry about things like “OMG HURRY UP AND FIGURE THINGS OUT AND MAKE A SHELTER BEFORE NIGHT FALLS *panic panic*”, I was free to let my inner obsessive-compulsive demons happily make sure all my blocks were counted and lined up exactly right.
BEHOLD MY DERPY TEAL AND PURPLE MASTERPIECE. THE CEILING IS MADE OF GLASS.
So, there you have it. In what is possibly a textbook case of meeting games halfway, I played Minecraft for about a half hour last night, and I enjoyed it.
[Insert some sort of witticism here about purging my system with X-Com and/or the fact that my dear partner-in-crime Mister Adequate has also recently fallen to lure of crafting blocks. Seriously though, I got no sleep last night for the second time in a row and cannot currently brain good, so you’ll just have to pretend I wrote up a hilarious ending line here. Okay?]
Remember when Grand Theft Auto IV came out? Remember the massive critical acclaim, followed by increasing backlash on the part of players who deemed it too negative, too dour, too boring? Well I’ve been playing it again and I’ve rethought some of that, which I had largely subscribed to.
Let me be clear, I think GTA4 is a masterpiece either way. It’s vast, brilliant, important, and though the humor is a bit less stark, still has plenty of laughs. Now, I appreciate that those who loved San Andreas (i.e. those who played San Andreas) would possibly miss the craziness which that game became, especially in the endgame. Understandably so: Stealing jetpacks and airplanes was hilarious, and the antics of CJ (Especially when he was terrifically obese and dressed as a truck driver) were just insanely enjoyable. I still think San Andreas is the better game, and I think given the iterative return to craziness in The Lost and Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony, that Rockstar listened to the reaction from the public.
I'll have a number nine, a number nine large, a number six with extra sauce, a number seven, two number forty-fives, one wit' cheese, and a large soda.
But in replaying GTA4 I’ve been playing along with what it asks. I’ve been using the subway to get around, taking cab rides, going on mandates with friends, all that jazz. And it works. It really does. When I got into the mindset it really started to all click into place in a way which it hadn’t before, however much I had enjoyed it. Last night I was doing the mission The Snow Storm, where an attempt to retrieve a ridiculous amount of coke goes very south. I had an epic, massive chase across Algonquin (The game’s stand-in for Manhattan) which ended with me disappearing into the subway to avoid the cops. And when I rode that train across to Bohan (The Bronx), with the sun coming up and the city bathed in dawn light, with barely any health left, the bag of coke slung over my shoulder… I really felt the game in a way I hadn’t done before.
So to give this post a point beyond my own reflections, have there been any games which you have really had to adopt a particular mindset to fully enjoy? Anything where you’ve gone back with a new approach that really meets what the developers had in mind, and found it better? Or am I all alone here?
