Sunday 13 May 2012

Hulk Out


As annoying as they are, maybe PC gamers are right. If console gamers are so obsessed with graphics and power, why the hell are we bothering with consoles at all? I mean, I don’t want to have to rob a bank to afford the hardware that is going to run Crysis, rob a shop maybe, but that’s besides the point. Consoles may be, like your mother, cheap and cheerful, but I think we’re excited about them for the same reason we’re excited about watching people pulling planes with their teeth, or smashing their head through tens of blocks of concrete. It’s all about what they can do with the little they have. Story of my life.
For a Wii Game
Wii gamers are all about making do. When they say ‘it’s not about the graphics’ they’re bloody right, because it can’t be. It’s two gamecubes duct taped together, it’s ten Sega Saturns melted down into 1, whatever way you spin it, it’s shit.

 [Mario's Rim-Lit adventure]
When Super Mario Galaxy came out it put a spell on me. PC gamers were probably spluttering with laughter all over their energy drink coated keyboards, quipping “welcome to 1997 Nintendo”, while I stood there convinced this was the most beautiful game ever. And it was… For a Wii Game. That sentence is a phenomenon, it’s a reflex. But I also think it’s (and for many other reasons) why the Wii does so well. It’s nice to be surprised. On the reverse, the demise of more powerful consoles like PS3 and PSP can be partly be attributed to being all mouth and no trousers.
Rest In PSP
You didn’t buy a PSP. If you did, you didn’t play it you scoundrel. Don’t worry, we’re all hypocritical bastards. We all demand the next console generation, teasing these naïve, vulnerable console companies with our excited E3 reactions to their tech demo’s of billion-poly rotating heads, only to stand them when they put a handheld supercomputer on the shelves at Game (for those of you who don’t know, Game used to be a British videogame retailer that American Corporation EA Games killed off). PSP was a failure. It was 3 times more powerful and not much more expensive than the DS. It could play PS2 games. The butt-fuck ugly DS was sticking to 2D, terrified of sticking stripping off to bare It’s N64 under body and stick it’s toe into the 3d water. But we loved it. Metroid Prime hunters? A fuzzy, crunchy looking shooter which I had to strap a ‘shoe’ to my thumb to play which made my DS almost bursting into flames to render. all while Coded Arms and SOCOM were a walk in the park on PSP.
How could I get excited about the PSP, if I already know what it’s capable of? I saw what the PS2 could do, so where’s the surprise? In a way, it was too powerful for it’s on good.

[PSP's tearjerkingly awesome announcement at E3. My favourite trailer of all time. As a Nintendo fanboy, I didn't want to believe my eyes]
Portable gaming’s woeful lack of power has always been exciting to me. I wasn’t even a twinkle in my dads eye in the early 80’s so I missed all of the 4 coloured 2D shit on Spectrums, and Commodores and others consoles that they released weekly. Those were the golden years, the Space Race toward 3D, so for me handhelds were the chance to see that all again.
Home consoles are established and predicable now, but handhelds are still where we like to mess about, hack, homebrew. I bought utter pieces of shit and got really lost in tech demo games in the Gameboy years. I frothed at the mouth about Alone in The Dark on Gameboy colour; 3d Characters in ‘beautifully’ rendered 2D backgrounds. Mode 7 racing game GT Advance, which I even told my peers at the time ‘Mom, look! Gran Turismo on Gameboy! Look Mom, oh you don’t even care”. 
GBA’s Back Track was an absolute piece-of-shit Doom clone with one environment style rolled out to 10 shitty levels. The world and its enemies popped up a whopping 3 feet from your face, shot you and wandered back out into the darkness. Hard done by this, I’d spend hours fondling my way around walls to find my bearings for a chance to shoot them in the disgusting cardboard cut-out face. Shit game, great tech.
 [Top Left: Alone In the Dark GBC, Bottom Left: GT Advance, Centre: V Rally 3, Top Right: The unreleased Resident Evil 2 Advance, Bottom Right: Metroid Prime Hunters DS]
By the end of the GBA’s life I was obsessed with the Raylight’s Blue Roses engine, Gameboys’ shot at 3D. Wing Commander and resident Resident Evil 2 could be squeezed from this dying handheld, one was panned, the other was canned, and in the end V Rally 3 was the only solid game to release using this tech, and I cried tears of joy revelling in it’s ability to draw a road 3 feet infront and 3 feet behind my car, all which I could watch from both interior and exterior views of my car. There didn’t need to be a next console, just more of this, and when 3rd party launch titles such as Ridge Racer hit DS, all of this pushing felt wasted.
Vita, you may be powerful but don’t show us what the PS3 already has.
First In, Last Out

There’s 2 kinds of titles you remember. Launch Titles and End Titles and most of the greats fall into these categories. Launch titles like Halo, Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid, Wii Sports (you heard) and End Titles like Resident Evil 4, Shadow of The Colossus. We’re keen to be surprised by a huge jump between hardware, and in the end, the mastery of it.
Predictably, Shadow Of The Colossus is my favourite game ever. It’s easy to angrily ask why because It’s old, and a bit pretentious, But I had so many first’s with her. My first faked High Dynamic lighting, my first levels-that-had-levels-in-them-that-moved-around-and-I-moved-on, My first Motion Blur, and my first beautiful 2D to 3D environment streaming. Its old hat, but I remember reading this tome on how Team Ico had created tech to fake every aspect of what next gen consoles would one day have and carelessly waste.
[A real holy-fucking-shit moment for videogames]
It’s the game engine that you have to admire, but is rarely touted unless you’re Gears of War or Battlefield 3. Tech programmers have a saying “If life gives you lemons, squeeze as much CPU buffer out of them and reduce the draw calls”. A couple of years ago I sat across from two ancient bedroom programmer types that did real game development, like, made an entire game, boxed it and sold it themselves. They’d spout some really programmer anecdotes. “well, I don’t mean to speak boastfully, but on the spectrum, I managed to get a sprite that used 4 colours”… “four you say? Try six!”, and they’ll probably be annoyed just reading  the inaccuracy of this. One time I heard how one chap managed to squeeze a 4 disk game onto 3 disks to save the publisher literally millions, where as a game designer I get to piss those savings up the wall.
You can own a supercar but it’s going nowhere without the best engine you can buy, and as developers I think it’s important to be the Ayerton Senna’s of these machines and push them to their limits if we want our games to be truly, lastingly memorable.

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