Posts Tagged ‘200X’

The gaming audience has expanded in the last decade. From the pastime of children and cool/geek dads, games have widened their reach to embrace almost everyone. Whether it is annoying you with Mafia Wars invites on Facebook, or quietly playing Sudoku on an iPhone, the chances are each of your friends spends at least a small percentage of their life ‘gaming’ (even the sporty ones you think looks down their nose at you).

Casual gamers (or non-self identifying gamers) of course make up a vast proportion of the gaming populous, people who use social games as a mild distraction between emails at work. But the expansion of gaming’s acceptance isn’t limited to these ‘uncommitted’ groups. The children who used to play are now professional people and, contrary to the protestation’s of their mother, they never grew out of gaming.

See, everyone plays games.

As gamers aged their interests outside gaming diversified, and they wanted this reflected in their games. New genres emerged to appeal to these new demographics. Games designed to cater for ever facet of life could be found. Social, party and casual games all bought the hobby out of the bedroom and in to the public consciousness. Even traditional games started to see a change, with mature titles (in the literal sense of the word, not gore and oversized boobies) starting to gain visibility along with the stereotypical ‘kiddie’ diversions.

A mature development community, eager to stretch their creative legs, met this audience. From the big budget boxed titles to smaller downloadable titles, more variety and risks began to be seen in the topics games addressed.

Scattered among this wealth of new titles are products that it would be hard to clarify as games in the traditional sense of the word. While some have argued that they are games because you can ‘play’ them, I maintain that they are more akin to interactive art. Programs that allow artists to create playgrounds, allowing the audience to interact with their vision in a manner no other medium could.

The Path touched and amazed me.

Which brings me to my memory of the last decade, my discovery of The Path. I had intended to make my decade memories less recent but I find it hard to ignore the impact one 2009 title had on me. I have written extensively about it already, extolled the virtues of the game and its developers (Tale of Tales) at length on numerous sites. Yet still I feel a need to revisit it.

Perversely I am sure I have spent more time writing about The Path than I ever did playing it, but that is exactly why I am so impressed by it. Like any piece of art it stays with its viewer after the experience itself is finished. It inspires conversations and debates for me to this day and now informs my outlook on the medium. These statements are by no means exclusive to The Path, but while most ‘games’ just affect my view of gaming, The Path that directly challenged my views of art and the world before it tried to entertain me.

To further elaborate on The Path would be a disservice to the developer/artists at Tale of Tales. To ask you see their work, its fragility and innocence, is the best compliment I can pay them (even if you only try the demo). If you do, pay attention to your character when she idle, to the artefacts on screen as you move through the world, think about what they were trying to convey through every element of the design, and the story they wanted to tell. If you feel nothing, then it simply wasn’t a piece of art that spoke to you; there will be some that do, if you continue to keep an open mind about the titles you consume.

Every Day the Same Dream is another thought provoking game.

I had always though games were capable of being art but The Path was my first experience with something committed to the feeling and message the designer/artist wanted to produce. Since then I have delved deeper, learnt of other games that managed to be just as thought provoking (such as “Every day the same dream”), but The Path was my first and continues to hold a special place for me.

Reminiscing about the last decade seems to be all the rage at the moment. Arguments aside about the real starting date of the 201X’s it seems like a nice time to recount a few memories that have stood out to me since the calendar flipped from 1999 to 2000. As such through the rest of January I am going to write a few reminiscent posts about events in gaming and gaming culture that have stood out for me over the last ten years.

My love of the Resident Evil games should come as no surprise if you have been reading DoFuss for any length of time. Horror games now form the backbone of many of my articles, but it was back in 1996 (when the original Resident Evil hit Playstation) that the seeds of my passion were sown. I played it exhaustively from spring to autumn uncovering every inch of the zombie-infested mansion, and enjoyed every moment.

The beginnings of my passion.

Eight years later the release of Resident Evil 4 was growing near. By this stage I had already moved to Japan. My game time had reduced dramatically, in favour of copious drinking, and the majority of my playtime limited to handhelds. Resident Evil 4 though had earned a special place in my calendar (even if I was upset about the change in camera perspective).

As fate would have it I didn’t have to wait for release day to get my first taste of the game. A visit to the bookstore on the twenty-ninth of October 2004 revealed a Famitsu Capcom special with a demo disk tucked away inside its pages. I bought the magazine, emailed my roommates, cancelled my drinking plans, and rushed home.

I still have the magazine.

Talking about the game at this point would be superfluous, suffice to say it reenergised my beloved franchise with fantastic new gameplay and looked better than I had ever expected while doing so. But this isn’t what stood out about this experience for me. My recollections of the demo don’t revolve around the offerings on the disk, they revolve around the excitement everyone in the small apartment felt for the game.

My flatmates and I played the game for weeks, constantly one upping each other’s scores. We worked out the most efficient ways to collect gold, where to stand, when to hole up, and when to run. We found every item, unlocked the hidden machine gun and wrung ever-single moment of entertainment out of the twenty minute demo, finding new ways to challenge each other daily.

It is undeniable that the game itself gave me a lot of enjoyment, but the greater experience came from the competition within the flat. Our working hours meant we could rarely play together but the asynchronous play of our artificial challenges meant we could all share in the experience.

Peculiarly it was one of my most treasured single player series fuelled what may have been one of my fondest multiplayer experiences of the last ten years. Sadly this decade has seen competitive and co-operative play move into the online space with many developers abandoning local multiplayer support. I could make a grand statement about this being the of an era, or bemoan the new generation of gamers for shunning local multiplayer, but the fact is as an adult I would have not time for it anyway.

As close to perfect as I could have hoped.

So it is that I will continue to live in blissful memories of the past and blame my life style for the loss of this facet of gaming. I just hope Nintendo to keep face-to-face gaming alive for the next generation of gamers, because it would be a shame to loose it and it doesn’t look like anyone else will.

The full game Resident Evil 4? It was incredible.