What do "old schoolers" really want of modern gaming?

Some people (especially newer generations) see the old school gamer as a group of grouchy old dudes (or dudettes) who live with nostalgia glasses permanently attached to their eyes. Because of this misconception and after studying how some classic games resonate with gamers more than their modern counterparts, I have decided to post my findings on this case. Get prepared to know what an old school gamer really thinks and what we really want in modern gaming.

This simple and small Chrono Cross town has more substance that many big "open world" worlds.

1) Complex simplicity:

Take the term "complex simplicity" as the base for all the future items on this list. We know that most people think that classic games (90's until mid 00's) are all about complexity with their sophisticated systems and the lack of visual ques, but it is quite the opposite. The truth is that classic games were a lot simpler where it mattered. While games in previous eras had things that made them look complex, in reality they were really relaxing and could be played with an easy going attitude without feeling that the developers are taking you by the hand or pulling your arm through the whole game.

For example, many classic games were very linear, but somehow they were designed to feel like anything but linear. I have been playing some classics like Chrono Cross, Dark Cloud, Blood Omen, Legacy of Kain, Terranigma among some others and while I know for a fact that they are linear games, they feel as deep as any multi-million open world modern production. This happens because old games presented more content with less levels of stress. So instead of raining dull chores on us, we moved through the story in a relaxed way and we welcomed any change of pace that was interesting enough without implying that we had to completely go out of our way or make some change that would completely take us out of the mood we had until that moment. Of course, this is not the only aspect of simplicity that applies in this situation as there are others like...

The Yakuza series is an example where less realism = tons of fun.

2) Less realism, more suspension of disbelief:

I am not stating that the next Call of Duty game needs to have magic on it or anything like that. What I mean with less realism applies to games where suspension of disbelief is more important than making the game similar to the real world in terms of the overall fun factor of the game. For example, weapons that break too quickly, unnecessary hunger and thirst mechanics (unless the game's focus is survival), forcing the player to wait or be idle for no reason other than the developers telling us to and time constraints (not to be mistaken for time limits) are some of the things that really dampens any gaming experience if they are forced fed on us.

Most of the time all we want is to play and enjoy the game world without some heavy chore on our backs. Why? Because that gives us extra time to learn and master other things like the complex systems of old that some people complain about. We prefer to challenge our own minds than have a simple inconvenience for the whole duration of the game. This is more rewarding and fun in many ways and marks the difference between feeling challenged and feeling annoyed.

A salute for the times where Konami was good.

3) Games that can be serious, but are not serious about it.

Everybody likes a nice storyline that we can take seriously for a while, be it because we are emotionally invested in the game or because the plot itself is just too good. What seems to be a turn off for old schoolers are stories that can be serious and good, but take a game flow approach that is even more serious than the storyline itself, thus becoming too rigid for its own good.

Take for example Metal Gear vs Splinter Cell. There was a time where these two franchises were bitter rivals, but in the end Metal Gear came on top, mostly because of one reason. While Metal Gear kept a game flow that relaxed its serious story and made it even more enjoyable than it already was, Splinter Cell (after Pandora's Tomorrow) went for a serious/serious approach and that basically ruined it. The reason why the first 3 Splinter Cell games were so good, was because the player could do all sorts of fun things with the stealth mechanics and that made the game to be a lot more enjoyable. Sadly, later on they decided to remove all that in favor of some straight forward linearity and that broke the game.

Repeat with me: Backtracking is good! 

4)  Freedom without sacrificing substance

Any of you who that are 25 years old or older can remember the times where in the first Resident Evil we walked from what was supposed to be the end of the game back through the garden house and into the mansion in order to get the two Mo-Disks we needed and found out that the place was not safe anymore because new monsters were now prowling in it. That little example is enough to explain what freedom without sacrificing substance means. We could move basically through the whole game world without feeling pushed or forced to proceed and the story and focus of the game was kept intact (no generic stuff or excessive recycling of resources). This is why those games felt like 40 hour experiences even if they had 14 hours of gameplay at best.

Berseria is awesome, but Vesperia was the last handcrafted "Tales of" game.

5) Handcrafted game worlds

Have you ever got the feeling that the world in which you move when playing a game feels a little too structured? Roads go here, walls go there and everything seems sanitized and as organized as a set of Tetris pieces. That is good enough for dungeon crawlers or rogue rpg games where the structure is the game itself, but for games that are trying to make you believe that you are playing in a lush and detailed environment, seen this kind of thing is quite disappointing.

Why is this so disappointing? Because it give us a message that says that the game was made with a cheap approach and that most of what they did was cut corners. This feels bad, especially when the game in question is supposed to be a comeback of a beloved series (Star Ocean I am looking at you) and it kind of insults our intelligence because it implies that we will buy anything as long as it has the name of a franchise we love.

On the other hand when a "detailed" game world feels too structured and generic it really eats away any enthusiasm that we had when we started playing and anybody with a basic knowledge of how videogame logic works will immediately notice when the great big world we were sold on is not that good.

In summary:

All that we old schoolers want can be summarized in these 5 things and they are really not that hard to do. They are feats of game design that have been lost in time and we need to get back. Luckily for us, games like the ones we have been getting on this semester (Jan-May 2017) are getting back to these good practices, so not all hope is lost. Let us thrive for quality and have gaming become what it used to be while in harmony with the latest advances in technology.

15 annoyances that gamers of the 90's still remember

Today I am going to go a little retro on the blog and make a list of those annoyances that we gamers in the 90's had to go through, but are completely unknown by anybody who is too young to remember. There is a lot of talk about how good gaming was in that decade, but not everything was sugar coated for us, so let's begin.

1. Living in the years when videogames became very unpopular with parents in America. This happened in the early 90's and it meant that a lot of times we were forced to play less than we wanted to and when we did play we were heavily criticized because we were "going to do bad at school", "suffer mind problems or epileptic attacks", "playing videogames that came from the devil" or just because "those things used too much electricity".

2. Been a broke (or too young to work) gamer and having to buy cheap discarded disc based games at video clubs. It was really a gamble where we had to bet 5 to 15 dollars in favor of the game actually working when we put it on our console. Sometimes it paid off, some times it didn't (and as far as I know, there were no returns).

3. Buying a game because the cover and description looked nice (information was scarce), only to find out that it was a piece of crap. In other cases it would be a good game, but one that could be finished in just a couple hours, which also felt like wasted money (I'm looking at you D!)

4. Been unable to buy a newly released game and spend months going to the video club each week to see if that sole copy of the game was available for rent.

5. Having your parents bring you a new game as a surprise, hear them boasting about how expensive it was, only to find out that is was a crappy game. You had to pretend you were having the time of your life so you were not considered an ungrateful brat.

6. Calling a gaming tips line (because some of us didn't knew about the concept of payed calls at the time) and then been scolded when a buffed up phone bill arrived.

7. Pre-ordering a game, wait for it to release, go to the store on release day and find out that the UPS (or Fedex, I don't remember) hadn't delivered the orders yet so you would have to wait for hours or just go home (which wasn't an option if you weren't old enough to drive and depended on others). This is the only thing where the standardized Tuesday release date of these times work to our advantage.

8. Having your console's internal battery go dead and be forced to go to the clock screen each and every time you turned it on (Sega Saturn owners can relate).

9. Hearing a dumb rumor about doing something incredible with your console (like using the extension sockets on a console to play games from another) and waste hours trying to do it (don't blame us, most of us were gullible kids at the time and internet was limited if not non-existent for us).

10. Trying to surf the web on a Sega Saturn or Dreamcast browser because you didn't had a computer yet. Yep, browsing on 56k modem with a browser that had an outdated Javascript version in it, fun right?

11. Been all pumped up playing a stage in a game (cartridge based), then having somebody stumble upon the gamepad's cord. Now your game graphics are all glitched and you have to hold on to dear life, hoping that when the screen changes the problem goes away and you can keep playing without having to restart the console.

12. When you had to do a lot of networking in order to borrow games so you could play them. It was sort of like bartering in ancient times because if you didn't had a game that the other person was interested in you were screwed. Also visiting a neighbor or just calling him/her out just because you wanted to borrow a game was not fun at all.

13. Been clueless about what was happening in the industry (magazines did not had it all covered) and having your hype crushed by unexpected delays, changes to the game or in the worst case scenario, the game been cancelled.

14. Renting a game that you couldn't understand (remember, most of us 90's gamers were kids at the time) and having to rely on trial and error if the video club wouldn't let you change it. (I love all rpg games now, but my first experience as a kid was Shadowgate (NES) and it was horrible to say the least).

15. Playing a disc based game that skips all over in the cinematic scenes because the disc was slightly scratched at the wrong part, you could play the game, but could not see the video cutscenes which sucked at a time where the reason you passed the stages was to see the shiny graphically polished videos.

The real reason why old school gamers are not so hyped about modern games

Hey folks, I wasn't going to write today (just after Christmas), but while playing Dark Cloud (the PS4 version) I realized that all this time I have been analyzing and ranting about the old school vs new school topic in a very superficial way. First, I am going to shoot down all my own misconceptions and then I'm going to explain my new point of view on this subject, so let's get busy and start this up. Keep in mind that the phrases that are bold and underlined will serve their purpose on the final explanation.

Warning: This article came a little longer that I expected so I hope you like reading

Yes, it is incomplete, but it takes a while to get to the end.

Misconception #1: Modern games are smaller in scope.

This one has been going around my head for a while now. Some gamers say that modern videogames have become smaller in scope, but the advent of open world and sandbox games beg to differ. The truth is that if we take some exceptions out of the equation, games seem to be getting bigger, for example Metal Gear Solid V even in its incomplete state is still bigger than the previous installments. Now let's be clear about something. Modern games have become bigger and have more stuff to do, but bigger isn't always better, keep that in mind.

Once again glued to a game that has the same simplicity as some of the modern ones.

Misconception #2: Modern games are too simple.

In order to debunk this failed hypothesis, I had to look back at some of the games that are considered classics. Take Dark Cloud for example. The premise of that game is really really simple and although the game is really good, it is basically a dungeon crawler that tried to have a Legend of Zelda vibe (Sony even dared to call it "The Legend of Zelda Killer" at the time). It is quite safe to say that if it weren't for the re-building towns element and the interesting weapon system it had, the game would had passed under the radar at the time and to be frank, the first time I saw it I wasn't so moved by it, mostly because I was accustomed to other types of JRPG and was not into their simpler brethren called dungeon crawlers. What I mean by all this is that modern games are not necessarily simpler in nature when compared to old school classics, so that means that simplicity is not the problem, but the overdoing of simplistic ideas.

Sometimes it is just obvious, but oh well...Keep reading.

Misconception #3: Modern games always hold you by the hand.

This one is half true, but only on certain games and some limited aspects. Don't get me wrong, I am pretty much against games becoming casual oriented, but I have to admit that many technical fixes that have come to pass are really good. From been able to skip cutscenes, smarter save game schemes, been able to continue from more reasonable points when losing (avoiding having to repeat all the story cutscenes and build up) are nice fixes that eliminate some of the annoyances that we used to suffer in the past. The problem begins when developers try to fix what it's not broken.

Repetitive is one thing, but zombified in front of the screen is another.

Misconception #4: Modern games are mindless.

This one is one of those complaints that gets repeated over and over again over an old school vs new school argument, but if we take a look at the classic games we still enjoy and defend so much, we can see that this statement crumbles beneath its own weight. Many of the games we see as "heralds of a better era" can be pretty complex, but also many of them are quite mindless. In fact, some of them actually rely in the repetition of actions (like grinding) and design patterns that follow a loop, which are things that we mostly blame on the modern era, but were there from the very beginning. Now with that out of the way we can state that the level of "mindless gameplay" is not a defining factor and that the real issue is how they handle that mindlessness, because a game can be monotonous and fun, but only if doesn't make it a vain and pointless process.

What we old school gamers really think then?

That is a question that has a really simple answer and while it may look as if I am criticizing my own way of thinking as a gamer, believe me I am not, as this is perfectly o.k. and I even encourage it so bear with me. The real thing about us old schoolers vs modern gaming is just one thing...

We don't want to compromise our gaming experience

You may be asking yourself what I meant by "compromise" so I will explain. By "compromise our gaming experience" I meant having unwanted mandatory changes that feel like baggage in the mind of any old schooler who values a simple, but solid gaming session. For example:

• We sometimes resent and classify a certain game element as unnecessary because it becomes a hassle and it feels like it's been force fed to us. 

• On other occasions we see how the developers took a familiar sense of simplicity and exaggerated it exponentially to a point where we feel like we wasted money on the game. 

• At some points we may even feel that all of our efforts in a game have no real value because we are only catering to a network structure that aims to keep us playing for years (mmorpgs don't count for this statement) making it all feel like a chore or like a mobile game on steroids. 

• Last but not least, we sometimes feel like a game tried to be so big and open that each objective feels like a mile away with a path filled with pointless filler content. It's like having to go to the grocery store to get some supplies, but having to talk and do some favors to each of your neighbors before you finally get to the place you wanted to go on the first place. Some games do really good at this, but then companies start to imitate the trend and quality is lost. This serves to prove that not every game is meant to have an open world. 

For us, some modern elements that have become standards are just extra weight that we don't need. We feel that resources could be put to a better use and that we should go back to having games that are dualistic in nature (main game + extra stuff) rather than a merge of "one size fits all" features. Some modern games still do the right thing, but many don't, and we don't understand why they become hits in the gaming scene. It is quite complex to say this, but although we were raised with old school games, we feel like we are actually regressing to the days of Atari instead of the modern gaming perfection we expected. Maybe this is because most of us were raised in the 90's so we didn't lived those rudimentary gaming days in the 70's/early 80's so our school of thought is in the middle of gaming history (for the time being).

This is the gaming industry as it stands today (minus a few exceptions)

In summary, we just don't want to compromise our gaming experience for the sake of others (mostly the game publishers out there). We don't think that the gaming scene has changed so much from the days of old, but we feel like it is out of balance and 100% profit oriented instead of been something that really caters to everyone (they use that phrase a lot these days, but we all know that most of the time it is not true).

Now that all the explanation has ended, tell me what you think. Is this is the real reason why old schoolers are skeptic about the future? Is it selfishness or only a set of high quality standards? Is our gaming taste just too expensive to make? Reading about your thoughts on this subject would be awesome.

Elements Of An Superb J-RPG Experience

Some may call them a "dated formula" others would say "its too much reading", but if you make an Japanese style rpg with the correct set of elements, you have a great chance of turning skeptics into believers. Up until now the genre has been slowly making a comeback with a great variety of games (especially on the PS3 and PSVITA), but we still don't have that insane masterpiece that becomes a legendary game to remember. This is why today we are going to see which are the small details that would help create such a j-rpg experience. Of course a game doesn't necessarily needs to have every single one of the things you will see today, but at least some of them would do the trick.

You could find all sorts of stuff on the Star Ocean 2 world map like characters and
new towns that were not part of the main plot.

Scaled world maps that feel alive
Examples: Old Final Fantasy games, Star Ocean 2, Wild Arms series,"Tales of" series.

Nowadays this kind of approach to a world map has been reduced to menus or stretched to open world settings, but neither of those modern styles have been able to capture what an j-rpg world map used to be. For one thing, a scaled map is faster to navigate, but keeps a good balance between going between places and possible side events. This kind of style also makes it simpler for the developer to put extra stuff in there, just so it doesn't become a monotonous walk from town to town. This is the kind of world map where everything goes, be it extra dungeons, towns and places that are not part of the story, strange happenings while on the road, meeting new characters, following side stories. It is a rich part of the j-rpg genre that has been oversimplified in favor of shorter development cycles.

General Spiriel from Shinning Force 3 is still a fan favorite of the whole series.

Generals, admired warriors, mysterious but cool characters
Examples: General Spiriel (Shinning Force 3), Raven (Tales of Vesperia), Dias Flac (Star Ocean 2).

This is a staple of the whole genre and one of the reasons because of which j-rpg games became famous in the first place. It is obvious that some villains are considered the coolest characters in the genre, but that kind of thing is quite predictable. Where the cool character aspect really shines is when the player has somebody to admire, both because of his actions and might in battle. It is the kind of character that creates an atmosphere of confidence without looking too benevolent and it can be even better when games treat the topic of war and two great generals face each other in battle. This is what separates an rpg where "a couple kids save the world" from something more serious, engaging and overall more exciting.

Most people I know hate this at the beginning only to love it on the long run.

Fun inventory/equipment/skill systems
Examples: Materia system (Final Fantasy), Weapon modification (Parasite Eve), Dragon enhancements (Panzer Dragoon Saga)

This is one aspect of j-rpg games that not everybody loves, but if there is something that we have to accept, it is that once you learn to use one of this systems and figure out a way to use it to your advantage, it becomes natural and fun. These kinds of things do have a learning curve, so the very first moments will be kind of confusing until you get the hang of it. So after the initial annoying process there is a great chance that you will end up feeling empowered as you play with all sorts of items, equipment, skills and game rules. Here is where you get creative and start to make a strategy that doesn't always involve grinding and leveling.

You help this guy with his rock concert and he may join you.

Side Stories
Examples: Fort Condor (Final Fantasy VII), Getting Bowman (Star Ocean 2), Branching Paths (Vanguard Bandits). Getting various characters to join you (Chrono Cross), Finding characters before their time of death (Valkyrie Profile).

This aspect has been tried over and over again in the American Rpg genre, but they haven't gotten to a point where it doesn't feel generic in nature. Most people think that this can only be done in completely open environments, but Japanese Rpg games in the past managed to pull this off while keeping their story oriented focus. For example Star Ocean 2 had extra characters that you had to go out of your way to meet them, help them with their problems and get them to join (not to mention that the game had more than 50  different endings). Other games like Chrono Cross had really good side stories that you had to play in order to get secret characters to join you and Final Fantasy 7 had several activities that developed while following their very enjoyable side plots. So now that we know that, we can see why this was one of the things that made the genre to be so popular in the 90's.

This scene evoked really strong feelings of nostalgia, friendship and our hopes and dreams vs real life.

Good usage of mood and atmosphere 
Examples: Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy, Koudelka, Vagrant Story, Wild Arms, Baten Kaitos

This one is really important because it is the thing that keeps us glued to an rpg game in the first place. If the game is capable to cater and activate your own feelings and emotions while you play, then it has succeeded in instantly making you a fan.This is the kind of feeling we got from scenes like Cloud and Tifa talking about their "broken promises" and childhood memories, the relaxing "mystical" atmosphere that Chrono Cross had in all of their places, the kind of surreal mood that Baten Kaitos had with its mix of magic and technology and even the wild west vibe that Wild Arms is known for. All of these games had an extremely good mix of visuals, music, plot and characters that became something more than just reading dialogues, it became something that catered to our sensibilities and made us care about what was happening in the game.

With all things discussed, the bottom line is that Japanese Rpg games need to look back into the little details that made them big in the past and capitalize on them on our modern era. We can have the best graphics ever and the most detailed environments, but if they don't hit us where it counts we will lose interest. This is not your classic argument about turn based battles or any of that game aspects that many old school rpg gamers talk about. This is more about keeping the art in rpg games and move it up a notch with our current technology instead of relying on limitations and half baked ideas.

A non-objective take into old school gaming

Hello folks. Up until now, I have been trying to be as objective as possible when I treat anything related to old school vs current gaming, but today I think I will go with something a little out of the ordinary and write a little more freely, just as a treat for all of the old school gamers out there. Don't get me wrong, I love many of the games that the previous and current generation have given us, but my criteria about what games are good and what games are legendary is still rooted to my old school background (especially from the 90s up to the early 00s), so now let me share with you some of my thoughts.

Details, details, details...

The first thing I must mention in this old school extravaganza is that I miss all the detail that getting a new game use to give us. With the lack of reliable internet in the 90's and a limited selection of information up to the middle 00's, buying a new game was sort of an adventure within itself. This gave a lesson to gamers at the time on how to use their imagination and intuition to fill the blank spaces that games had (because of technical issues and/or lack of technology). This attention to detail was fed by pretty much everything in sight, from clever game descriptions on magazines/catalogs, awesome looking television adverts, posters, sweepstakes, excellent box art, superb game manual content (like comics strips, detailed explanations, etc) and of course a game presentation that was hellbent on getting us interested in the game's storyline.

If you weren't alive at the time, this is how most trailers used to look like back then... 

(Be aware that this creative trailer is very recent).

Nowadays we have a lot of easy access to websites, blogs and videos that feed us with all sorts of information which is awesome, but feels somehow different. You see, back in the old school days, players received information in the same way that you could get drenched while running outside on a rainy day (raindrops = information). Now on our present times, the rain of information doesn't fall on us because we actually live in the rain cloud, which can sometimes make us feel a little overwhelmed. This overflow of information dampens our ability to use our imagination in order to cause our own hype and to get immersed in the game way before it releases because we are confronted with so many digested opinions that we start taking things for granted. We are not allowed to see games with the illusion of a kid anymore and this is not because we are older, but because there is no space for it on the current gaming market. Now speaking of such market...

It was that simple...

Convenience and simpler social gaming.

Back then, from the moment you got a gaming gem on your hands, you knew that you had plenty of time to finish it before the next big thing got into stores. We used to have the luxury of been able to just sit there and play without worrying about trends or what our friends were playing. In the end, any group of gamers would just get together and talk about what games they were playing (sometimes ending in a borrowed game fest), rather than been in the constant struggle of trying to be in the same page (playing the same game, because of its online feature). Be aware of the fact that I love playing online, but it sometimes feel like games are been thrown at us at a machine gun's pace and this puts us in a tight spot where we have to choose between finishing that game we were playing or just jump ahead to the newest online experience with the rest of your friends. Its a personal satisfaction vs social gaming war that can sometimes affect our gaming experience.

Chaotic, but fun game releases.

From high school and up until halfway through college, my friends and I experienced what I used to call "gaming road trips". This kind of thing happened because game releases were kind of random, rather than controlled by the standardized schedule we have now. Many times, our gaming group was not aware that X game was going to be released, so once we got that piece of information we rushed to the cyber cafe to see what was is all about and if we liked it, we made a road trip to the nearest video game store (which at the time was a 40 minute drive because of heavy traffic) and get the game. The cool part is that sometimes we didn't just went directly to our homes in order to play, but kept on going on our little road trip, which really fed our sense of expectation up to a point where we woke up very early on the next day and basically played till we dropped. That type of experience is kind of hard to replicate on our present day when most games and updates are released on Tuesdays (except for Nintendo who does it on Fridays). It just doesn't provoke the same excitement as it used to because it feels a little too structured for the old school gamer mindset as the random factor is taken away from the equation. Some of my friends tell me that I have to understand that this is done in order to make it easier for retailers, but I still believe that it was better in the past.

A pristine online gaming scene.

This one is really important because this is one of the main things that has changed. I remember that back at the day I played a lot of MMORPGs and online games that were either legitimately free to play or just a pay to play experience. This doesn't mean that micro-transactions were not existent at the time because they did exist, especially on free to play games. That free to play business model of the past was based on a different kind of payment-reward system where the "merchandise" in question was basically special equipment that made your character look cool, items that gave some little extra conveniences like moving a bit faster, items that temporarily boosted your stats/skills/crafting/experience points and stuff like that.

This whole argument can be summarized in the following way. If you had the dough you could get your hands into some nice treasures, but even if you had those awesome angel/devil wings on your back, had a special pet/mount with you and a skin for your armor that made you look like you were some kind of final boss, you still had to work your way up or else you would be just another cool looking noob. There was no easy way up and progress within the game was way slower than it is now, but once you got to play the game you could go through everything without skipping parts or having to pay for content that was already in the game. This made for online games that had stronger communities which looked for one another in a full online game experience that was not involved into any pay to win schemes.

Believe it or not, this "opening doors" effect became a whole argument when the HD version of the Resident Evil remake was launched on PS4 and Xbox One.

Games were not criticized using boring raw logic.

At the time, one of the things that made gaming to be so special was that it was a hobby that did not took itself seriously. We could have the wackiest of game characters, stories that felt like they were written by someone who was doing acid and we just didn't care at all. In that day and age, we as gamers saw fiction for what it was and we didn't felt the need to force logic into it. We went through the "opening doors" loading screens of Resident Evil, played as a magical jester that flew through your very own dreams in Nights, spent hours trying to solve the piano keys puzzle in Silent Hill, ran through an island trapping monkeys in Ape Escape, destroyed each other using weaponized cars in Twisted Metal, walked through virtual worlds without a single clue of what to do next on Myst and so on without even flinching. For us, each and every one of those game worlds had their own kind of beauty so we fully appreciated each of them.

Nowadays gaming criticism has become softer in what needs to be scrutinized and stricter with things that are not important. I've read and heard complaints about a character that looks "too unrealistic", cutscenes that are "too slow", stories that are too "farfetched" or "weird" and the list goes on. I really think that critics should stop this because games are supposed to be a ticket out of reality itself and not a carbon copy of it (at least until we manage to make a holo-deck or something). Game criticism is a good and necessary thing, but we need to point our guns to the things that really matter like game content, game design, shady practices and stop picking on trivialities.

Wrapping things up

To end this little mind to the past that I have taken you through, I must say that I believe in change and I do understand that things evolve over time. What I don't understand is why sometimes (like in the case of gaming) the people behind such a strong industry insist on eliminating the good things even though those good things still represent good profits. Taking the cheap-ass way may work for a while, but ultimately, small details like the ones previously mentioned are the criteria that separates common games from extraordinary ones and little by little gamers are waking up to the fact that gaming could be a lot better than what it is now and that we need to go back to thinking that improvement comes by adding, not subtracting.

Have a great day/night people, game on!

5 Cool Aspects About Gaming That Are Fading Away

Gaming is a hobby that involves a lot of cool things that that enhance your enjoyment as a gamer be it by yourself or with a bunch of friends. It all seems awesome until you realize that many of those enhancers have been lost in this day and age due to an ever changing market and society. Today we are going to see 5 of them so without further ado, lets get to them.

1) Epic long term collective gaming campaigns:

Most of us are probably able to remember the times when a group of friends got hooked with a game and spent a very long time religiously playing and basically making it part of their lives. You may be thinking about mmorpgs, but it doesn't have to be limited to those kinds of games. For example, back in the 16 bit era, all the kids in the neighborhood where I live (myself as a kid included) got hooked with several games through very long time periods. Games like Super Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Phantasy Star IV, Zombies Ate My Neighbors were some of those titles that managed to keep everybody playing and sharing ideas, all with the goal of beating the game and/or unlocking its secrets. At the time it was sort of special to receive a visit from one of your friends early on a Saturday morning because they finally figured out how to beat a stage or where to find that secret treasure, a special experience that later on was well converted into online gaming. Of course we weren't stuck with playing the same game 100% of our time, but our main one always remained at the top of our list for months and months.

Nowadays it is all different. Ask yourself when was the last time you and your friends (or contacts) dedicated themselves to a certain game for a period longer than let's say 3 weeks. In this day and age, games are released so close to one another that just when you started to get hooked to one game, everybody changes to another, breaking all cohesion in a matter of hours. This happens because when we see a bunch of new games all released at once (especially since they chose Tuesday to be standard day for game releases) we tend to want to try them all and in the end choose one to keep on playing. What happens after that is that in all the commotion of who is playing what, there is a great chance that you and your friends will end up hooked to different games so that means that you will not be sharing so much play time as you used to. This is unless you can convince others to come play the same game with you, but that seems sort of unnatural because playing one game while been hooked with another is not that fun.

This is Juste Belmont from Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (2002). At that time
everybody saw him as an awesome looking character, but this same character today may be
labeled as "weird", "unrealistic" or "pale dude that looks like a woman".

2) Content Relativity

Another thing to remember were the times when anything in a game was plausible. There were no boundaries between what looked "too much like a cartoon" and what looked "realistic". A long time ago, a game character or game world could be cool in whatever form they used to show it and things like surrealism, emotion and even wackiness were welcomed with open arms. Things were so simple back then, that characters and game worlds came in just two flavors, awesome or lame.

Nowadays is all about nitpicking. The mainstream gaming community has too many people that have big prejudices against certain types of game content. For them anime style characters are "weird",  a skinny hero with long hair is "emo" and other times they classify characters and environments as "not having enough realism". It is also worth noting how characters now are labeled as if they were real human beings. Stuff like "that character looks too (insert race, nationality or physical characteristic)" or the occasional "omg that is so prejudiced" are the kind of attitudes that are dominant right now, even though they are a sign of disrespect for the artists who are behind a game, especially when the vision behind the art is justified by either the story or game elements. We have to once again learn to see fiction for what it is and not mix it up with reality in such a negative way. This changes the whole ball game for those of us who see that aspect of gaming as something simple and makes us feel left out when gaming companies decide to appeal to the nitpickers.

3) Convenient Releases
Once upon a time, games were released on different days without a specific pattern. At some times they would coincide, but in most cases game releases used to be all over and such randomness was good for us gamers. There was also a trend of favoring weekend game releases (a thing that Nintendo still does) which was perfect for anybody who had responsibilities like school, college or work. Had you even been through the experience of been at college/school and finding out that some game you were interested about has released that very same day? Most of the time that piece of information turned a normal routine afternoon into a road trip and that was part of the beauty within all the chaos of the game release schedules of old.

In our present day we as gamers are plagued by a game release standard that is good for retailers, but horrible for us consumers. Most games and updates are released on Tuesdays while a very small group of new releases are unleashed to the public on other days (like Nintendo releasing their games on Fridays and some companies that release on Sundays in special occasions). This puts a lot of pressure on us and makes the whole world of gaming a lot less comfortable.

4) Gaming been something separate from real life and society.
It may be a little difficult for some gamers (especially younger generations) to believe, but there was a point in time where gaming had nothing to do with real life problems. Censors existed back then just like they do now and extremely violent games were indeed a topic of discussion, but there was no real emphasis in things like political correctness or protesting because some aspect of a game resembles a social flaw from real life. Back then, a game was just a completely fictional world, an escape from our daily routines and not something to judge based on your opinion on how society should be. People enjoyed games without mixing it up all with things like sexism, misogyny, racism, profiling and bad stuff like that. Things were a lot simple because we as gamers didn't need any of those complications and we were a lot happier without all the unnecessary controversy.

Nowadays the whole gaming world has become a social battlefield where every game is heavily scrutinized in the search for anything that might "offend" someone. This has gone so far, that even when a game is just announced and still months from been released, if it has even one "offensive" indication (regardless of how dull the argument is) the outrage starts and heads begin to roll as the so called "activists" start spreading the same hate they so much claim to be against.

5) Fun fan boy wars
Fanboyism is something that is hated now, but it used to be quite fun in the past. The reason for this is that fan boys of the past battled with facts rather than just saying "boo hoo your platform sucks". From the 16 bit wars up to the Dreamcast vs PS2 showdown, battles were fought, won and lost, but they were very far from been a whine-fest. When 2 gamers started an argument about two or more different platforms most of the people who were witnessing it actually learned something because facts and strong arguments were used in the crossfire and each side understood which were their strengths and weaknesses. There was no "meh" attitude and best of all, there were no labels or personal insults, making a "fan boy" discussion to be just a smart discussion between two or more people with a biased opinion.

Nowadays the closest we will get to those smart discussions is seen pictures comparing a game between two platforms without even taking into account the technicalities that can cause those difficulties and the hurdles that the developers had to go through in order to make the game. It almost seems as if the gaming media itself is helping cause these whine-fests in order to receive more visits and clicks. Sadly no matter how heated a modern fan boy conversation gets, it is very unlikely to learn anything other than clever ways to whine or how to ruin a sarcastic remark by been a poor snub.

The Gamertologist Bottom Line:
These 5 gaming aspects are just a few of the whole lot of things that we are slowly losing as gamers. You may see all this as a nostalgic mind trip, but believe me when I tell you that this is more about how comfortable, simple and convenient the gaming world used to be in the past, supported by facts rather than by nostalgic thoughts. Do we have a chance to stop all this and get back the things that we have lost? I leave that for you to judge.

Some Gaming Concepts That Just Didn't Work

Innovation has always been a hard endeavor in the world of technology and gaming tech is not an exception. Through the many years that have passed since the first video game was ever made, we have seen a lot of fads that have come and gone. In this world we live in there is always a person with a lot of money and all sorts of "kind of cool" ideas, but not every one of those ideas gets realized to its full potential as some concepts either fail in the process or die before they can even exist. Following that lane of thought we are going to see some of those "high end" concepts in gaming that tried to be something awesome, but couldn't.

1) The Arcade Experience at Home

Time: Late 80's - Early 90's  

Reason for failure: Was too expensive for the common customer.

Back in the late 80's and through the 90's that thing we call arcades were the pinnacle of gaming. Anybody could get a simplified port for any of the game consoles existing at the time, but nothing was as smooth, good looking and over the top as the arcade games themselves. At this time, some people thought that the best way to go was to bring the arcade experience to our homes regardless of the cost and that was a big mistake. Yeah, the economy wasn't as bad as it is now, but nobody was going to break their wallets over expensive video game hardware that came with a limited library of games that were not that easy to find.

Take for instance the home version of the Neo Geo console or AES (Advanced Entertainment System). Releasing in 1990, it was an attempt to bring the arcade experience to our living rooms in a time where it was indeed a big thing. The performance of this console was excellent and the hottest SNK games were available for it, but it had only one problem and that problem was that in order to have the console you had to dish out $650 and an extra $100 - $300 for each game. That in today's money is the equivalent of $1,141 for the console and $175 to $526 for each game. Before becoming a home console, the AES could only be rented and it was mostly available to hotels or high profile customers. This means that SNK had no plans to re-engineer the console in order to make it cheaper and because of that it just ended been a dream machine that was too expensive for the common gamer to have.

Another example would be the Konix Multisystem. This one instead of trying to be a home console, it opted to be the arcade itself inside your living room. It was some sort of "arcade cabinet" that resembled the ones found in the arcades for games like Afterburner. It has a neat looking chair with all sorts of stuff attached to it and it promised great looking home console games with the added value of the arcade experience that was so famous at the time. This one was never released because the manufacture costs for it were so high, that the price tag would had been something almost impossible for the consumer.

2) Photo-realistic Gaming (the poor man's version)

Time: Early 90's  

Reason for failure: The "games" were in fact crappy movies with sad excuses for gameplay.

On our modern days we can see some games that show how far we have advanced in the graphics department, but while many of these games feature excellent visuals, we still have a little more time ahead of us before reaching photo-realistic graphics. Now, back at the early 90's Sega had other idea which was taking the games into the movie rather than taking the movie into the game. At the time, most of what we had seen on gaming visuals was limited to sprites and drawn backgrounds so they must have thought that changing that to movie style visuals would make such an impact that they would quickly become kings of the hill.

It all looked good in paper until you played the games and realized that you were watching a low quality B movie with certain parts where you could shoot stuff or had to press a certain button combination (quick time events). After the Sega CD was released, the first emphasis it had was on those kinds of "interactive movies" and while a small handful of those games got to a cult classic status, most of them just flopped. Taking the easy way into photo-realism in gaming was never going to work and it still wouldn't work even if we tried it with the technology of our present time.

3) The First Virtual Reality Attempts on Gaming
Time: The 90's
Reason for failure: Bad implementation or devices just been cheap gimmicks.

Since the beginning of the current console generation we have been hearing a lot about virtual reality headsets. Be it the Oculus Rift or Project Morpheus, these new devices promise to give us that VR experience that others have failed in the past. In fact, half-baked attempts at creating a virtual reality were the reason why VR was basically abandoned until now. Some people may argue that the technology needed to pull this off was still not there, but if you think a little about that point in time, you can see that first person shooters already existed and were pretty popular with the hardcore crowd along with other genres that had games that could work on a virtual reality environment. They just had a bad choice for games and/or hardware and that botched their attempt on VR.

The biggest example of this is the Virtual Boy. Nintendo tried to make something interesting in order to keep the fans at bay until the Nintendo 64 was ready to release, but made it all wrong and paid the price for it. At first their idea was brilliant, futuristic looking and hype inducing, but when gamers began to see what the Virtual Boy was really about the whole thing went "bomb om"! The games were in red and black instead of color, most of the game concepts were anything but virtual reality and the device itself had no ergonomics or aesthetics at all. All of this made caused the Virtual Boy to be a failure and a stain on virtual reality gaming.

Other people also tried to make similar devices like the dreaded R-Zone which was a butchered version of the Virtual Boy that consisted of a Tiger Electronics game running in red and black over a piece of plastic an inch or so away from one of your eyes. Other devices just tried to simulate VR by putting a normal game very close to your eyes like the Viktormaxx Stuntmaster or just trying some desperate old school 3D effect on an uncomfortable headset or googles like the Sega 3D Glasses.

Wrapping it up

Like it was said at the beginning of this article, Innovation is hard and it is a path that became the final resting place for many products, but these early attempts to try new things did not went in vain. Nowadays we have systems that emulate the feeling of the arcades pretty easily (even if you want to make you own cabinet, you can and it is not that expensive), gaming graphics have slowly evolved into something that almost resembles the real world (check how the Fox engine looks on the PT game demo) and virtual reality now has a fighting chance with the creation of new VR head sets that are showing lots of potential. Who knows what kinds of new crazy concepts will come at our present time. Maybe some of them will fail, but we can't rest assured that as long as we keep advancing we will always get there sooner or later.

3 Reasons Why the Old School Era was Not Always Perfect

It is very possible that you have heard the term "old school gaming" or are an "old school gamer" yourself. If you are one of those who were raised on previous gaming eras like the 8-16-32 bit eras, consider this one a nostalgia trip, but if you are younger than that you will learn today that old school gamers were not always the "privileged kids" that years of the nostalgia trip of others would make you believe. Sure, we had awesome games that had very high quality standards in terms of game design and content, but there were some details that from a kid or teen perspective will sound as if those times were the dark ages of gaming. Let's see some of those things that prevented those times from been perfect.

Note: Take into account that these reasons apply mostly to people that lived through the old school days from the late 80's and 90's either as a kid or a teenager.

We still have some of that annoying anti-gaming stuff, but if you lived on the retro days, you know it was way worse.

Video games had a worst reputation than now and we got the worst part of it.

In our present day, there is a big deal of controversy surrounding some games and sometimes even getting to ridiculous lengths when narrow-minded people fail to distinguish the difference between fiction and reality. Now, back at the old school times, the controversy wasn't just about some games, but about the whole industry itself. We as kids had to endure all the anti-gaming propaganda of the late 80's and early 90's when the whole concept of video games was considered the enemy of students and electric service bills. Kids on those times had to settle with restricted gaming hours often playing just a few per week (mostly on weekends), extreme social criticism of anything that looked remotely violent in a game and the false notion that the gaming consoles of the time were power hogs that beefed up the bill. This meant that even if we had great games, many of us were not having enough time to play them all. This went on at least until we were older and our parents stopped making these draconian rules based on the bad rep that games were having at the time.

There was a flood of misleading products way worse than on these times.

There are good products, crappy products and crappy products advertised as if they were the holy grail of consumer entertainment. On our present time we have a weapon against those "holy grail" products and that weapon is the internet. Now picture those days when the net was not a common thing and all we had as kids/teens was the TV, magazines and word of mouth. We had to separate the treasures from the trash in wave after wave of presumptuous advertising (especially on the holiday season) where hardware companies were basically telling us that their product was the most revolutionary thing ever. If you don't believe it, go watch some retro 1990 game peripheral adverts on you tube. These over the top adverts put our imaginations on overload mode so we ran to our parents and begged them to waste some money in useless stuff or desperately try to save the money ourselves. We had so much self-made faith in these kinds of things that the disappointments became really bad, to the point that up to this day most of us have lost all trust in advertising which is kind of a good thing, but it was a piece of wisdom that didn't come cheap.

The truth for many old school gamers back in the day,  getting to the games dollar by dollar.

There weren't many special deals on stores.

Nowadays we have a lot of deals coming from different stores retailer and not, but back at the day if you wanted to get a new release, you had to pay the full price hands down almost without any kind of deal or compensation. Shell out the 50+ dollars and get the game. That was pretty much it, without any special bargain offer, boosted trade in value or pre-order bonus. So back then we had parents that thought that gaming was going to make us flunk all classes and no incentive for them to buy you the games or make it easier for us to get them by ourselves. This meant that many times we had to save our lunch money and/or become some sort of slave on the house in order to get the money for a new game. The other option was to wait a couple years until the game landed at a bargain bin on any game or toy store, but most of the time we preferred to go the distance instead of waiting. Specials deals and stuff came up halfway through the 32 bit era, but by that time most of us were old enough to get our own game money or we could just borrow them from a friend since that era was well known for the game borrowing networks that were made by friends, neighbors, etc. If you want a figure of how hard it was to get a game check this out. A game that costed 50 dollars on the old school era would cost 87.80 on these days. Now imagine been a jobless kid or teen shelling almost 90 bucks for each game today (or asking your parents to do so), without the advantage of special deals.

Old school certified.

Wrapping things up

These 3 reasons really wrap up the whole concept as they intertwine between each other. Don't get me wrong I was raised through the 8 to 32 bit eras and I loved any minute of it, but it is interesting to get a little insight on how difficult it was to be a gamer back then if you were not rich or at least lucky. Erroneous "social" notions about games limited our playing time, we lost precious time/money with hardware that was useless and when we wanted to get a game we had to either beg to our parents or really work (taking the word "work" quite loosely here because most of us just were kids or teens by the time) in order to get the games we wanted. How did we managed to have so much fun at those times you ask? Maybe we did the best we could with what we had and that is why we enjoyed it so much.

Sources/Links:
The Inflation Calculator

Is the real evolution of gaming sleeping in the past?

At least 10 - 15 years ago, one could easily tell that every gamer was really hopeful about what was to come in the future as the end of a great gaming era was near. It is understandable that many people (especially younger gamers) would say that games back then had bad controls, primitive attempts at 3D graphics, awkward animations and similar faults, but on its core it was a very advanced phase in gaming history ruled by game design and story writing, meaning that for 50 dollars those video game aspects brought you some deep and compelling experiences that are still legendary up to this day. The problem is that somewhere along the way, everything that had been built up to that moment was just forgotten and replaced with half-baked practices. Don't get the wrong impression, gaming on this day and age is still great, but calling it an "evolution" is a little off, considering many of the things that were left behind and here are some of them.

Sad situation that happens even to the most famous of designers.

Freedom of design

The backbone of any video game is its design, it is something similar to making the layout of a stage on paper, drawing some platforms, some power ups, enemies and there you go, you have your own stage. Of course game design in the industry is not that simple, but it is as important as it has ever been. What happens with game design nowadays is that it should had stayed as it was, free. Writers and game designers make the hell of a team when they can work their ideas on a hassle-free environment, without somebody telling them that their ideas cannot be used because of some "market issue". For the writer it becomes very hard to come up with focused material if his/her ideas get blocked by the people upstairs. As for the designer itself, the time constraints, market trends and resource limitations have diminished what once was the biggest process in the making of a game and turned it in to an over-simplified version of itself.

 The making of Silent Hill 2

If you watch some "making of" documentaries about some older games, you can see how much creativity the developers poured into their projects when left loose with their creation.  These creative liberties are something that should had kept going in order for a real gaming evolution, as the creative minds would had met modern technology and would had been able to make wonders. There are some occasions in today's industry where games are designed as they should be, but you will have to look around a little in order to find them as it is not longer the rule, but the exception.

Cutscenes vs game play. Which one you prefer?

Freedom to the player

Once upon a time, seen a cutscene or CGI video was something that was seen mostly as a reward. It was that small moment you had when you saw the story line advancing along with some eye candy, all in cinematic fashion. It was the graphic artist moment to shine and we all loved it. The problem right now is that sometimes if feels like some long cutscenes should had been game play instead. At other times a "quick time event" is all that it takes to ruin the game mood and leave you feeling like you should had played through that situation instead of pressing some button combination. 

Things like these take freedom away from the player, making the game shorter and throwing away some of the thrills that would otherwise be challenging and fun. It is as if they sometimes borrow things from the "on-rails" game play style to save some time or just try too hard to make it look like a Hollywood movie. As time passes there should be more game play and not less, that is one important thing in any game that claims to be part of the gaming evolution.

Censorship should not be part of our modern world.

Freedom from cultural limitations and censorship

Cultural limitations have always existed, that cannot be denied, but for some time it seemed as if the line that divide games developed in different countries was blurring. Foreign games were trending in the west as well as American games were doing good in other places in the world regardless of topic or style. This train of cultural diversity in gaming was up and picking speed until censorship got tighter and it made it grind to a crawl. Now every game that is ready to be released suffers intense scrutiny that looks into the smallest of details in order to classify them as "not appropriate" for certain cultures. 

The acceptance of fiction for what it is has become something that the censors refuse to accept and this causes problems when a game tries to get a localization process. Along with censorship, another cultural problem is profiling. Marketing people have created this "rule" that basically profiles each region of the world and embed them to certain types of games and themes. This is also something that was at the verge of dying off, but made a comeback and (sadly for us) it is stronger than ever. It is hard to understand why haven't we parted ways with those things. Many other markets in the world have adapted to globalization, so why haven't the gaming industry done so?

The angry super "hardcore" gamer strikes again...

Freedom from ourselves

The consumer is a great part of what drives an industry and the gaming scene (that's us) is doing a poor job at it, even if it isn't entirely our fault. There was a time when a gamer's only concern was playing games and sharing experiences. At that time social networks weren't as popular, we relied a lot on magazines and word of mouth and all the tools we had as video game fans were simple, but at the same time a gamer was just a gamer, which helped to sustain an industry that was tailor made for us as gamers. Yeah, there were fan boy wars and things like that, but the community was not divided in niches, hardcore, casuals, "gamer wannabes", "real gamers", "dude bro gamers", "geeky gamers", "frikis" (in Spanish), "hipster gamers" and other labels that just seemed to turn it all into a game of factions, which gave game companies an incentive to divide the market as well and just give more attention to the "faction" that seems stronger instead of just the simple task of making games regardless of groups.

We as the consumers, got led by the marketing people into believing that we were all separated into groups, entirely working to their advantage instead of ours. Before that, they did not had a clear view of the market so that forced them to remain at a high level of quality at all times, but now they can just lay back and do whatever they want, following the easy money because they know what is trending and what is not. It is very unlikely for this to happen, but for a real gaming evolution to occur, we need to go back to been as single unit, gamers. This way we can throw a little fog of war in to the market and recover some of the advantage we had.

If some of these characters have stood the test of time, other things must as well.

Wrapping it up

In conclusion, the real gaming evolution is all about making the gaming industry to be pro gamer again. It is the return of different things that we used to have a long time ago. It is the freedom of the past + the technology of today which equals a leap in gaming that we haven't seen for a long while. Graphics get better, systems become more powerful, but the core of the gaming industry is what needs to take some things from the past in order to really move forward, anything less than that is just a new version of the same thing.