Forced forward, or back?

And here we are, a month later and only introductory entries to show for it. That's some good bloggin', boys.

I've had ideas percolating on actual worthwhile topics to discuss in here, and once I get those ideas down in structured, word-sentence-paragraph form, they will be posted.

I finish up work two weeks from tomorrow, at that point I've promised myself I'd spend at least a week gaming, and writing about games, and reading the blogs of some folks I've been following on Twitter, and who have been posting in Michael Abbott's Vintage Game Club's foray into The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.

I've been playing through Majora's Mask along with the Club, and it's struck me that there's a certain type of game that can merit these sorts of playthrough - and it's those that have a worthwhile narrative. This might seem obvious, I guess, at first glance: no one can critically analyze a game like Pac-Man, or even Super Mario Bros. in this sort of way. I would argue that the original Zelda for the NES might be the cornerstone for the mature gaming experience.

In my mind, I put both the original Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda side by side as the quintessential starting points for my generation of gaming. The key difference between both games is the direction in which the gameplay propels you. In Super Mario Bros., you can only go forward, never back. For a wide-eyed, innocent child, it was easy to know where to go to find the Princess (the next castle); it was the getting there that was the challenge. Meanwhile, in The Legend of Zelda, you had no choice but to retrace your steps, constantly, in order to find the next task of your quest to rescue the princess. The challenge was figuring out what the heck you were supposed to do next. I remember as a seven year old, renting the original gold cartridge with my cousin, and being completely baffled. It was quite complicated, and for my inexperienced, platformer-trained mind, I got frustrated and annoyed with it, and ultimately tossed it aside.

Now, as an adult gamer, while I can still appreciate the appeal of a platformer ('Splosion Man has recently caught both my attention, as well as Clair's), newer games in the Zelda oeuvre have opened themselves up to me, along with other more complex and interesting narrative games. Just before the release of Twilight Princess, I replayed the original Zelda, and completed it, albeit with some aid from a few online sources. While it certainly lacks a more complete story than say, A Link to the Past, even, I had more of an interest in navigating the world of Hyrule, killing its baddies and solving its puzzles.

The Legend of Zelda set the tone for more complex games to follow, not only in its own franchise, but in others. As the series progressed, more focus was given to epic storylines and character development. While as a child, I enjoyed the hack 'n' slash adventure gameplay of A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, as an adult replaying Majora's Mask, I can now fully appreciate its depth and darkness of story and character. As I grew older, more mature games started to come to my attention, like Final Fantasy VI (or III as I played it on the Super Nintendo), and Chrono Trigger.

I'm not saying that RPGs of that nature, or other mature narrative games couldn't exist without Zelda. What I am saying is that before The Legend of Zelda, I can't really think of a console game that put forward more than that a very simple gameplay concept; eating pellets, jumping from level to level, or driving on an infinite highway. If there is, it simply did not have the impact that Zelda had, and still has (take Okami for a recent example) on video games. From that comparatively primitive 8-bit beginning, we now have games that can be discussed and debated over in a similar sort of way as novels or films. This appeals to the undying child in me that revels in a late night spent fighting through dungeons, and as an adult gamer, who revels in the a-ha! moments of narrative and thematic discovery.

If only I had the time now that I had as a child to sit down and actually finish some of the epic quests I've been starting. Oh, the responsibilities of adulthood.

- MarquisMark

To begin: where I'm from.

While Clair seems to have taken a scattershot approach to her introduction, I decided that I would begin on a more particular topic: my growth as a gamer. From my humble NES kid childhood to my avid gamer present, here's how I got to where I am today, from 5 to 25, from behind a controller.

I got my first console, a Nintendo, for Christmas when I was 5. I remember playing Mario/Duck Hunt that Christmas Day, then having my parents spring a gift on me later that night, under the guise of Santa having accidentally “dropped it behind the TV”. That gift was Super Mario Bros. 3.

I was a Nintendo kid. I had Nintendo bed sheets. I had a Super Mario Bros. backpack. I forget which year, but I know I’ve had a Mario birthday cake. I had a stack of about 10 games, and every Friday I would get McDonald’s and I’d go to the local video store to rent a game. I remember renting Mega Man 2 and having a bugger of a time with it – I couldn’t beat any bosses, but the fact that I had eight different levels to try instead of having to play level the same one over and over again kept me content. I remember renting Mike Tyson’s Punch Out and being forced to rematch King Hippo over and over again because I didn’t know to punch him in the godforsaken mouth.

I had a subscription to Nintendo Power for what must have been four or five years. I remember many a summer day playing outside, waiting (impatiently) to run and check the mail to see if the new issue had come. I loved re-reading old issues, learning about games I would never play, getting excited for new games and new systems, and finding out new secrets about my favourite games.

Eventually, I got a Super Nintendo, and I was a full-fledged gamer – I received games for every special occasion that presented the opportunity to receive games as a gift. The parents gave me a Game Boy for Christmas one year, after I borrowed my cousins and broke it. I finished A Link to the Past and I remember how my little heart pounded when I was fighting Ganon. Probably the same way it pounded when I was trying to finish Super Mario Kart on 150 cc: I used to play my own music and mute the sound, and you can imagine the absurdity of watching an intense young boy manipulating a controller furiously to the Chipmunks’ version of “You Keep Me Hanging On”.

My mom grew less and less amused as time went on, though. She’s always seen video games as children’s toys, and here I was growing into adolescence and all of a sudden I wanted a Nintendo 64. I was jealous when my friends got one for Christmas and I did not. I thought that that was it for me and console games, at least until I had my own income. At this point I had a good computer, and so I was downloading shareware games like Doom and WarCraft II to tide me over. At least a computer had other uses that merited me having one – it didn’t quite seem like a toy to my mother.

So, I puttered around on my computer until about four months later on my birthday when a well-placed lie about a math test grade permitted my parents to think enough of me to get me an N64 for me for my birthday in 1997. I eventually ‘fessed up, of course. And I didn’t know about the N64 until after I’d lied. I actually felt really bad about lying, afterwards. But my ill-gotten system came with the relatively new Mario Kart 64, so it was hard to feel guilty for too long.

I re-experienced the heart-pounding exhilaration of a Zelda game with Ocarina of Time – probably the only time I’ve ever delayed playing a game because I didn’t want it to end. I tore the shit out of the palm of my hand trying to win mini-games in Mario Party. I spent long hours playing NHL 99 tournaments with my friends at sleepovers. I chuckled heartily at the movie parodies in Conker’s Bad Fur Day. I rented games every weekend, just like before, until the lifespan of the N64 ended, and so did my time as a gamer, at least for a while.

And then, I didn’t get a GameCube, I remained ignorant of the PlayStation, and I don’t think Microsoft had even entered the gaming ring. If they did, it wasn’t really on my radar. I spent my early university years chasing girls instead of coins. I still played a few games on a newer computer we got for the house in 2003, a little GTA: Vice City, a little Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a little Morrowind. But most of my computer time was actually spent on MSN talking to friends or trying to impress potential lovers, and downloading obscene amounts of new music, as I finally had my own CD burner.

My old Game Boy finally just stopped working, and I convinced my mom to get me a Game Boy Advance by telling her it could play my old Game Boy games. While it wasn’t a console, per se, it let me get into Pokémon (for better or worse). I also had a small addiction to Mario Golf on the GBA – it was a surprisingly fun game, for what it was.

I played an Xbox for the first time at my friend Tracey’s. I remember playing Splinter Cell and Knights of the Old Republic on there, and I remember her trying to get my attention away from it to do other things. In fact, while I was in university, most of my gaming experiences took place at other people’s houses. My friend Grant had a GameCube, some of my other friends had a PlayStation 2. I played casually, but not often.

Time passed and eventually I ended up with a girlfriend that owned a GameCube, and, as a first in my life, I moved in with her. This allowed me to have permanent access to some games that I didn’t get a chance to play through when the GameCube was new – particularly Super Mario Sunshine (which I eventually finished) and The Legend of Zelda – The Wind Waker (which I never really did get very far into). I started buying my own games for it, and then she bought a DS, which entranced me.

I’d seen a friend of mine play a DS the year before, with its two screens and its touch pad, and I was intrigued. I played some of the mini-games from Mario 64 DS, and I enjoyed them, but figured I’d never own one, as I was well out of gaming territory by that time. Now, all of a sudden, here was one that I could play every day, if I wanted to. Eventually, my then-girlfriend gave me one for my birthday, along with Tetris DS, and that was it – that started me back down the road towards gaming again. I played Tetris obsessively, mainly online, and there was no stopping me. I would be up until 5 a.m. playing, as I did with Harvest Moon 64 years earlier.

Eventually our DSes became DS Lites, we got ourselves a puppy, and all of a sudden news of the Wii was reaching us. Motion controls? Old games available for download? A new Zelda game as a launch title? We were beyond psyched. I don’t think I’d ever been so anxious for a game system since I wanted a NES for Christmas when I was five years old. Yeah, seriously.

I was a kid again. I could hardly sleep the night before the Wii’s launch. We had one pre-ordered at Entertainment Centre (the only local official Nintendo dealer) and we woke up at the crack of dawn to get it. It hasn’t been replicated since, but I remember the awe I felt messing around with the Wii on that first day, playing around with Miis and Wii Sports. I had high expectations for the Wii – and it’s not really certain whether they were met, two and a half years later, but I remember how much my first time playing Wii Sports Tennis was like my first time ever playing Nintendo at my cousin’s house, when I couldn’t have been older than four years old. It boggled the mind.

When that relationship ended (she took the dog, so I got the Wii), I moved back home, and treated myself to an Xbox 360 out of the money I would have had to put towards rent. By this point, the internet had become a big part of my re-emerging obsession with video games, and reading blogs like Kotaku had me wondering how the other sides of the console war were living. With Guitar Hero II being released for the 360 within the next month, and my obsession with that game growing daily, it became something of a no-brainer.

Since then, I’ve also purchased a PS3, so what started as a childhood passion has come full circle to become, well, an adult passion, I guess. I’m a part of a generation that sees video games as more than just kid’s toys; they’re a viable medium of entertainment just the same as music and film. That being the case, though, I still get reproving looks from my mother when she looks at my growing collection of games. Ultimately, I know that I’m not the only adult who grew up playing games and still takes gaming seriously today.

Look, let me go back in there and face the peril: A Start.

I am unaware (see: confused) of how to begin such an endeavor (see: beginning this video game blog) so I will just jump right in there. Hello…everyone. Welcome to our video game blog. Ahem. Are you comfortable? Yes… indeed.

This idea came to my boyfriend Mark (MarquisMark) and myself after skimming through sites like Kotaku, The Brainy Gamer and Sexy Videogameland and thinking: “we also have thoughts… let us project them”.

We play games (or we like to think we play games) somewhat intellectually. We discuss and critique, debate and review between ourselves, and now, of course, for those who read this little blog. We look at everything from the merit and importance of story to how bitchingly thrilling it is to blow things up (see: heads, via Fallout 3). Basically we play all kinds of games, all across the board, and want to discuss them here. This blog will include our thoughts and reviews in form of videos, audio clips, pictures and text. If that sounds like it’s your cup of tea, you should stick around.

And now some little bits about me -

Games I am currently playing and have very recently finished:

I just finished playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice for All on the DS. I am also about to finish Chrono Trigger (I literally just beat Lavos and the game is on pause waiting for me to return), this being an all time favorite it’s my sixth time or so finishing it. I am currently playing Fallout 3 for the second time. I finished it first on the PS3, however this is before DLC was announced for PS3. So I acquired a copy for XBOX 360 and am now working my way across the wastes again. I have been playing Left 4 Dead and have been stalled in my play through of Oblivion. I believe my next game to tackle after I get a dent in Fallout is Portal and Bioshock, both games I have watched to completion, just not being the one behind the controller.

My favorite system of all time: SNES

My favorite games of all time:

Tetris (no “obviously you’re a girl” comments please)
Super Mario World
Starcraft
Chrono Trigger

What I’ll be writing about:

At the moment I am fairly Fallout obsessed, so I assume some of my first posts will be regarding aspects of the game that really stand out to me, as well as taking a look into some of, in my opinion, the more brilliant side quests, and their integrity. Other than that I’ll post my thoughts on any games I’m playing/replaying and perhaps do some reviews of old favorites.

If you have any comments, recommendations or questions feel free to get in touch with me. I’m really friendly, and am pretty much an open book.

Stay electric,
-clair