The Videogame Solipsist: Video Games Or Video...Something Else??

With the release of Flower and Noby Noby Boy, and my recent purchase of a 360, I feel like I'm more immersed in the videogame arena again. Enough so that I'm musing on the distinction between things that are definitively "videogames" as we've always know them and new "kind of a videogame, but kind of not" things like the aforementioned two titles.

Flower, as seen above, is a "game" in which you exist inside the 'dream' of flowers inside someone's apartment, dreams in which you control a 'train' of flower petals that fly about fields setting off chains of color and sound by hitting other flowers and so forth. It's not a "videogame" in the traditional sense that we think of, though. I haven't played it but my impression has been it's more akin to interactive art. Perhaps it's better to say non-videogame interactive electronic entertainment. This is a fine distinction to make, I admit, and most of my thinking on the subject has to do with the problematic definition of what a "videogame" is, not to mention the even tougher definition of what a "game" is.
So I'm going to just come out and roughly define a game as something you can win or lose. There's some sort of 'goal' you're trying to obtain. In a fighting game, it's to beat your opponent or win the tournament. In a strategy game, it's to complete your mission objectives or conquer the world. In an arcade style game, it's to get as many points as possible before you run out of lives. These are all simplistic examples but they're what I mean when I say 'win' or 'lose.' Can you 'lose' at Flower?? Noby Noby Boy might be a better point of debate, as it seems to be just a "stretching, eating, and pooping simulator", to paraphrase a friend. There is gameplay to it, but it's the kind of game that sits on the border between "videogame" and "tech demo" or "videogame" and "interactive art"/" non-videogame interactive electronic entertainment." You can't really win or lose the game, though there is apparently some overarching thing about combining what you eat and how far you stretch with players across the world to get the titular character and an accomplice to other planets. Or something.

Flower and Noby Noby Boy exist somewhere in the space between the different types of videogames. There's simplistic videogames like, say, Pac Man in which the goal is to survive as long as possible/get a high score and there is no 'story' to speak of; actiony affair like Gears Of War which has some story and a bit more gameplay complexity; games like BioShock or Half-Life which primarily tell story through the gameplay and the game world; games like Metal Gear Solid 4, which are tell most of their story through long, involved, movie-like cutscenes. Of coure I'm leaving out co-operative or competitive multiplayer games, which have narratives of their own. Anyway, while there are many more examples and types of games that sit in between these, I feel like Noby Noby Boy and Flower take the medium to a different place in which there is very little "gameplay" and no standard "goal", no true "winning", and the story is either all up to the player to fill in or done in a minimalist, impressionistic way. For the sake of argument, Peggle has very little gameplay (you choose where a ball goes, to reduce it to its basic elements) yet I still think it's a videogame. SimCity has no standard "goal", there's no true "winning" to it and you only truly "lose" if you give up, yet I consider it a videogame. Finally, Shadow Of The Colossus tells its story in a minimalist, impressionistic way yet I absolutely would call it a videogame.
On the other hand, there's something like AudioSurf, which lets you use songs on your computer to make levels for a 'game.' This sort of concept was done earlier with Vib Ribbon, which never saw release in the U.S. And anyway, AudioSurf is more of a 'game' in the traditional sense. It's controlled like a racing game but the gameplay is more akin to a puzzle game in which you drive through colored blocks and try to match them together in the grid below your car. You can't really lose no matter how badly you do but there is some skill to it and you have a goal in mind--get the highest score possible on a certain song at a certain difficulty level. True, you can just use it as a semi-interactive visualizer in which you inhabit music and experience it visually as much as aurally--something that was also done before in a different way by Rez. I would certainly say AudioSurf is more of a game than the two PS3 games discussed above, but I don't think of it on the same level as, say, Fallout 3 or Killzone 2. Again, it's somewhere in the gray area between the different types of videogames.

I could make all sorts of mealy mouthed comments about how Flower, Noby Noby Boy, and AudioSurf are art games whereas Gears Of War isn't remotely an 'art' game, but this doesn't help define what they are. They're all technically "videogames" in the same way that Die Hard and Eraserhead are "movies." But movies are just something you watch even if the experience is different. There's more to "do" in Gears Of War, more "gameplay" so to speak. But should this be our basis for saying what is and what isn't a "videogame"?? Is the level of interactivity what determines it??

I'm not really sure. And I'm not sure my definition of a game as something that has a goal which can or can't be achieved helps us, either. This is one of those tricky things where lots of gray areas come into play and nothing can be easily divided into groups. Still, I wanted to point out how different Flower and Noby Noby Boy are and to compare/contrast them to other, more traditional "videogames." I would argue they're as much tech demos and interactive art installations as they are videogames. It's good to see the art form expanding in this way, growing more 'artistic' in one direction while other branches like Wii Sports and Rock Band bring the medium to people who never thought of themselves as "gamers." Maybe what we need isn't a new label for these type of games so much as a different way of approaching them from both a consumer and a critical standpoint: what they make you feel and think is more important that if you had fun or what you 'did.'

The Videogame Solipsist: Baldur's Gate I

Baldur's Gate(PC) 1998

In the mid to late 90s, I flirted with being even nerdier than I already was: Magic The Gathering and other 'collectible card games' became a short time obsession. In fact, I had subscribed to InQuest magazine and eventually tried forcing all of this on my friends. As if that wasn't enough, the same went for a starter kit of Dungeons & Dragons. I might have gotten my friends to try collectible card games once or twice, but the D&D kit never saw use beyond me reading the big manual over and over, messing with the figures included, and wishing I had friends who weren't jerks. Since I never had a girlfriend in high school without being a D&D and Magic playin' fool, I doubt it would've made much difference. And I think I would have really loved D&D because, hell, I'm a writer and I'm a good improviser. Plus I have a soft spot for anything fantasy. On a sidte note, one of friends was really into Warhammer, specifically the naval sort of Warhammer, so I don't know why he felt so 'above' my stuff. But I guess this is just nerdy kettles calling nerdy pots black.

Anyway, it was during this time that my family got a second, newer computer and I was getting fed up with my Nintendo 64. Thus I ended up going through a phase where I played a bunch of awesome PC games in about 3 months before I got back into console gaming again thanks to the Playstation I got for Christmas in 1998. With Half-Life 1 and Starcraft fresh in my memory--two games that revolutionized their respective genres--it seemed only appropriate that I would play Baldur's Gate in early '99, a game that similarly revolutionized PC RPGs after they had spent years wandering in the wilderness.

The original Baldur's Gate is one of those "classic" games that you can go back to now and find lots of flaws with. It's a matter of evolution in terms of game mechanics and graphics. Graphically, it hasn't aged badly, but it doesn't still look amazing, either. Mostly, I suppose, the flaws are with its gameplay, which tries to encompass too much in one game. To be a true D&D experience, it would need to allow for a wider range of options and character types. Even though you can go anywhere at any point in the game, theoretically, you're definitely guided down a linear series of stops. At the same time, you'll be hard pressed to finish the game if you don't make a character that's at least very good at combat. Baldur's Gate isn't as combat intensive as the dungeon hacky Icewind Dale games, but it's still more or less mandatory to beat the game. The Fallout games did a bit of a better job with this 'open ended character' idea; it wasn't easy to finish Fallout 1 or 2 with a non-combat character, but it was at least possible. This isn't the case for Baldur's Gate, but then again, that kind of play never interested me. I suppose the biggest problem with the game is that you would really need to know a lot about the D&D universe and rule system to understand most things without trial and error. The death mechanic and spell systems are very, very different from most other RPGs and without reading the impressively thick manual you would only find these things out too late. Even as familiar as I was with D&D, it took me awhile to get over the fact that Warrior types are incredibly basic and have no 'special' attacks. And the armor class thing has thankfully been finessed a bit in later rule revisions of D&D. THAC0?? Oh no!!
However, I'm not here to criticize Baldur's Gate. Sure, the future Bioware/Black Isle games would improve on nearly every aspect of this game--from the combat (the Icewind Dale series), the story/dialogue (Planescape: Torment), to the expansiveness of the world and number of options available to you (Baldur's Gate II)--but there's always something to be said for being first. To my knowledge, this was the first RPG that operated in real time but let you push the spacebar to 'pause' the action and issue commands on the fly. This made the game simultaneously more streamlined and more strategic than the average PC RPG. This 'real time' concept carried over into the non-combat elements of the game, meaning that Baldur's Gate had day/night cycles and changing weather. Unfortunately this tied in with the D&D mechanics of how you regained spells and replenished health, so you would have to stop every so often and 'rest', causing hours to pass in the process so that you would suddenly be in the dead of night and at a disadvantage (unless you had someone with infravision). Or you might have that annoying thing where you try to rest but random enemies interrupt your sleep, so your battered party has to fend off some foes with low health and/or spells. In which case you quickly learned to use (abuse??) the game's save/load system. And if you didn't rest, eventually your party members would complain incessantly and their abilities would suffer. This made the game more realistic but also more frustrating, too.
Though I never got far into the game, the story and characters were the first inkling most of us got of how brilliant Bioware/Black Isle's writers were. The first two Fallout games were out by this point but they were mostly just about the character you made; as they were set in post-nuclear war settings, you were alone for long stretches of time and the world was a lot of empty, moody expanses. Still, it all gets a bit complicated when you know that while Bioware wasn't involved with the Fallout series, Black Isle worked a bit on Baldur's Gate and solely developed later games using the Infinity Engine ( the engine made for Baldur's Gate) including the aforementioned Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale. At any rate, I was looking over a FAQ for this game yesterday and Baldur's Gate has way more characters than I remember, most of them with unique voice actors and personalities. The most memorable is, of course, the crazy Minsc, who has a hamster named Boo who he thinks is some kind of 'giant space hamster.' It'll be awhile before you forget his battle cry of "Go the eyes Boo, go for the eyes! Rarrrghhhhh!" The story, meanwhile, was a classic fantasy tale of the main character (who you create) trying to figure out his or her backstory set against the backdrop of bandit raids and an iron shortage in the Baldur's Gate/Sword Coast region. I think it eventually comes out that you're a spawn of one of the Gods or Demons of the D&D world, which is a pretty interesting plot twist.
Though the Fallout series got there first, Baldur's Gate set the precedent of Bioware games having moral choices and entirely different quests based on your actions. Of course this moral system is borrowed wholesale from the D&D 'alignment' system, but it arguably makes the first, best, and most consistent use of it in an adaptation of D&D to videogame. Depending on your alignment and the responses you give in dialogue, you can end up intimidating people, tricking them, insulting them, praising them, and much more. Not only did this go for NPCs, it went for your party, too. Depending on their alignment, the characters in your party might leave if they don't like your actions or how you're running things. There are also a few 'pairs' of characters, so if you, say, get rid of Jaheira or Khalid, the other will leave, too. If memory serves, you could even run into situations where your party members were so horrified/disappointed with your actions, they would leave and subsequently attack you. Speaking of killing: since I didn't play Fallout until later, this was also the first RPG I played where you could kill anyone you wanted in the game. Yes, this would call down the guards and eventually powerful bands of mercenaries and troops, but it was a really novel thing for the time.

I still have my complete box copy of Baldur's Gate and looking over the contents just now really puts me back in the mood and mindset of a younger version of me, incredibly excited to sit down with this game and go on an adventure. The Baldur's Gate series always struck a Lord Of The Rings-like balance of exploration, story/dialogue, and combat, and so whenever I think of classic RPGs--PC or console--it's usually what I'm thinking of. Looking back, the game has some flaws insofar as the gameplay is concerned--the difficulty varies wildly depending on your party and how you're playing the game, on top of the sudden curves already inherent to it because of the various assassins and 'boss' characters--and you'll need to do a lot of tweaking and modding to get it to run properly on today's computers. But I would argue that, for its time and for how its aged, Baldur's Gate is every bit as important and still incredible as its '98 brothers, Starcraft and Half-Life.

Just remember to gather your party before venturing forth.

The Videogame Solipsist: Gamecube

The most unique thing about the Nintendo Gamecube, at least in my corner of the world, was that it was the only console I can remember getting on launch day. Well, technically, my parents got it for me for Christmas and weren't clear on whether they picked it up on launch day or afterward. Either way, I was a Gamecube owner from as close to day one as I ever got, and so I had a first row seat for the ride that would follow. I've always thought of the Gamecube as the strangest console Nintendo ever put out, and so my thoughts and feelings on it are a jumble.

For starters, the first console of every generation I got since the days of the NES was always the loser in that console generation. Well, the Sega Genesis didn't lose to the SNES, but it could have had a good year or two more of life before Sega mishandled the poor thing, releasing useless add-ons like the Sega CD and 32X which ruined all good faith in the Sega name. During the next generation, I got a N64 first and though everyone I know owned one and loved it, the Playstation inarguably stomped it in terms of sales and number of great games on a consistent basis. The next generation, I got a Dreamcast, which was an amazing console with great games that died before its time. After its demise, I bet on the Gamecube, hoping Nintendo had learned their lessons. Within a year I had purchased a Playstation 2. Sigh...

Not that they didn't try. It's just that for every right step they took, they took another bad one. The Gamecube used discs instead of carts!! But they were proprietary discs. The Gamecube had actual RPGs!! But only a handful. The Gamecube had a decent launch line-up that consisted of more than two games!! But the Mario game was freaking Luigi's Mansion, which is not a Mario game at all. The Gamecube had cool multiplayer games!! But they hadn't made the leap to Internet play quite yet and were still stuck in the days of split screen while also adding the Gamecube-to-Gameboy-Advance cable debacle that was Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. Oh, Nintendo. The saddest thing about the Gamecube is that--though it was superior in every way--it sold less than the Nintendo 64. Probably because the Xbox captured the Goldeneye crowd with Halo on the Xbox, but whatever.

I keep looking at the release date for the Gamecube and I can't believe it. November 2001?? The reason this seems ridiculous to me is that the ten or so games I most associate with the system and the enjoyment I derived from it are spread out over a five year span. Roughly, that's two games a year, which might be enough for some people though not the sort of people you want to associate with. For as much as I remember loving the Gamecube, I think this had more to do with the fact that I ended up owning a Playstation 2 and Xbox at the same time. So when those two games a year came, I was able to hook my Gamecube back up and remember why Nintendo could be awesome. Those ten or so games, and my thoughts, follow.

1) Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader- I played the hell out of this game though I remember, just like its predecessor, I reached a certain point where it gets ball bustingly hard and I gave up. Still, every console launch needs a game to be somewhat decent and showcase both its graphics and the controller, and I think this game was the best case for owning a Gamecube at launch. No offense, Super Monkey Ball.

2) Super Smash Bros. Melee- Since this was and remains one of the best loved games for the Gamecube, I find it very demonstrative of how focused Nintendo had become on system launchs first and then slowly trickling one or two good games out a year after that. Melee has the distinction of being the most 'hardcore' of the Smash Bros. games, by which I mean people were able to take it seriously enough to have tournaments around it. In comparison to the first game or this year's Brawl, it's without a doubt the most 'technical' of the three. I liked Melee a lot though none of my friends played it, so my time with it was short lived.

3) Pikmin- The three games above were the only things I played on the Gamecube until Animal Crossing almost a year later. I should be talking about Pikmin right here, but to be frank I like the idea of Pikmin more than the game itself. I hate games with time limits and those with trial and error gameplay elements even more. Moreover, Pikmin is a good example of "it's a good game, but I don't care", an issue that is currently making me regret my Wii purchase. This is fundamental to Nintendo's console hardware. They may squeeze out two great games a year, but if you have no interest in playing said games, what good is it to own their systems?? Still, I give them a lot of credit for making a new IP and I'll be interested to see what the Wii-enhanced third entry in the series is like.

4) Super Mario Sunshine- I've never played this game. It always pissed me off that, instead of another great Mario game, they added in a gimmicky mechanic. Plus the whole 'summer' vibe of it was unspeakably lame, like someone released a summer expansion pack or ROM hack of Mario 64 with better graphics. I know this game sold like mad but it seemed to represent that Nintendo was taking risks at an ill-advised time in their history. Zelda: Wind Waker was a similar risk though it's my favorite Zelda, so...I got nothin'. If they were smart they would have done for the Gamecube what they ended up doing for the Wii: a mostly by-the-numbers-but-dark-and-serious-looking Zelda and a revolutionary Mario title.

5) Animal Crossing- Looking back, we should've seen this as the point where Nintendo began to go after a casual audience. You could make the argument that the Gamecube was their last attempt to win the hardcore back but they never had enough games during any one season to keep us loyal. Thus games like Animal Crossing, which was kind of like Nintendo's version of The Sims only a lot less freeform and way more time consuming. I'll never forget the moment I realized I would either have to constantly change the system's internal clock to see the cool events in the game OR base my life around it. "You mean I have to wake up at 7 a.m., real time, to enter this fishing tournament?? No thanks."

6) Metroid Prime- It was with Metroid Prime that I felt my investment in a Gamecube was worthwhile, since it was getting monumental review scores and everyone loved it. I never got all that far into the game because I couldn't get used to the controls. The general consensus seems to be that this was the best in the Prime series and so I find myself wishing they would port this to Wii and utilize the incredible motion control from Prime 3.

7) The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker- Despite its most glaring flaw--the infamous Triforce hunt toward the end of the game--everything about Wind Waker was genius. Along with Majora's Mask, it's the most unique Zelda game insofar as the world it creates as well as the pacing and flow of the game. I really can't stand Majora's Mask but I respect it for its world and the weird 'three day'/'time manipulation' pacing/flow. But I think Wind Waker did both better. It was a breath of fresh air but it was also a great game, too. In many ways Twilight Princess never interested me because it was too much like Ocarina of Time and did nothing truly 'new.' I realize that sailing around the world is basically just a different version of walking around the world on the ground/riding a horse, so Wind Waker wasn't truly 'new' either, but in terms of the actual gameplay 'feel' of traveling/exploring by ship, it's entirely different. Anyway, this ended up being my favorite Gamecube title, so take that for what it's worth.

8) Mario Kart: Double Dash!!- I never played this game because once I realized it and Super Mario Sunshine were imagination-less sequels to their N64 predecessors, I knew I didn't need to play them. Unless you have a lot of friends and don't want to play anything that requires real skill, you can skip every Mario Kart from here to Hell.

9) Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door- 2004 was the RPG year for the Gamecube, with a Paper Mario sequel alongside a Final Fantasy game and Tales of Symphonia. Unfortunately, the Final Fantasy game was a fucking mess that required four people, each with Gameboy Advances and Gamecube-to-GBA cables, to enjoy, while the Tales game was, in my estimation, incredibly overrated because it was one of the only exclusive RPGs for the system. But I digress. The Gamecube Paper Mario was pretty good even if I never beat it. It struck a better balance between platforming/action and RPG than the Wii sequel, at least.

10) Resident Evil 4- This was one of those times when a game came out of nowhere. Even reading previews for it, I expected RE4 to be nothing more than a slightly better looking but same old, same old entry in the series since all the others were. But, as it turned out, RE4 was completely awesome and went on to win Game of the Year from almost everybody. Though its best version is on the Wii, Resident Evil 4, along with Metroid Prime 1 and Smash Brothers Melee, was one of the best games for drawing in the hardcore crowd who looked at the purple Gamecube with its purse-like handle and scoffed.

11) Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance- I want to like the Fire Emblem series but I find them joyless to play. Yet again we see the problem with the Gamecube: there's this awesome strategy RPG for it but it's also the only one, so I guess you better like it otherwise you're shit out of luck. I give Nintendo credit for finally bringing this series over to the States but all it really did was make me realize I wasn't missing much all those years because a permanent death mechanic in a game with statistics and random elements makes me want to rip that tiny little disc out of my Gamecube and snap it in half. Keep in mind, too, that Path of Radiance came out in October of '05 and nothing of consequence came out for the rest of its lifespan. Unless you count Mario Party or Super Mario Strikers, in which case shame on you. You don't get any dessert.

My closing thoughts on the Gamecube?? It was a bizarre system for a bizarre time in Nintendo's life. The system itself is just odd--a cubic box with a carrying handle (really, Nintendo?? You think people just carry their consoles around without any kind of bag or case??) that ran what amounted to mini-DVDs and was played with a freakish controller. I mean, I still can't get used to that controller; it's like someone melted the remains of three other controllers together. More than all of that, the games were never what you expected, for better or worse: a Mario that was more of the same but with a gimmick, a Zelda that looked and felt totally different, a Resident Evil sequel that reinvented the series, a Final Fantasy that was focused on multiplayer (and non-online multiplayer at that), supposedly fun 'casual' games that were secretly complex and 'hardcore' (Mario Kart and Smash Bros.), and the first true Nintendo crossover casual game (Animal Crossing) along with their last true new hardcore IP (Pikmin). The TV commercials alone were a fascinating series of mistakes, making the system seem more 'hardcore' and 'artsy' than it really was before eventually switching to try to make it seem more casual and broadly appealing than it really was.

I have a lot of fondness for the thing, but it's a fondness tempered with sarcasm, irony, and cynicism. Bless you, Gamecube, you odd, odd thing.

The Videogame Solipsist: Dragon Quest IV

Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen (DS)

While the rest of the world is going crazy in anticipation of election results, I thought I would spend today's update escaping into the simple, charming fantasy world of Dragon Quest IV. Because to me, that's what good RPGs have always been: pure, escapist delight.

Games journalism has bloomed to include genuine critical discourse, and so a lot of it has had to do with history and context to help us understand how we've gotten here. Through venues like 1UP's Retronauts podcast and the exhaustive work of Hardcore Gaming 101, we've reached a better understand of videogames as both an entertainment medium and an artform. As a nerd who grew up loving RPGs even before they were popularized in 1997 by Final Fantasy VII, it's been fascinating to see the retro/critical collective fill in the gaps on the two biggest console RPG series's going: Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

Though things were even more sparse in Europe, America got both series in an odd fashion and missed several key titles in both. It was only in 2006 that we finally, officially, got every numbered entry in the main Final Fantasy series, while we've still yet to see Dragon Quest V and VI in the U.S. Thankfully, they are coming via the Nintendo DS in the next year or two.

The story of the Dragon Quest franchise, especially as it pertains to the U.S., has been better told elsewhere. Mainly I want to focus on the gap in America's view of the series. Growing up, I did play the first Dragon Quest game (released here as Dragon Warrior) and despite its age I thought it was an interesting game. I wasn't savvy enough to realize it had taken several years to be released here so I assumed its archaic-look and fool was purposeful. Besides, I didn't get around to playing it until I was currently obsessed with the Shining Force games on Genesis, so...

Like many people, then, I ignored the series, missing the American releases of II, III, and IV. Technically I suppose I didn't even know they existed since I didn't play the first one until around 1994, but...whatever. Sadly, Enix closed up shop in the U.S. after releasing a handful of terrible RPGs on the SNES and deciding Americans didn't like the genre. The next Dragon Quest we got would be VII, but I think it bears dwelling on the fact that the majority of this country never played DQ II, III, and IV so we didn't exactly know we were missing V and VI. VII, of course, did little to change our mind about the series: it was a SLOOOOWWW, archaic, and boring-ly translated jRPG. I think Shane Bettenhausen said it best on the Retronauts episode about the Dragon Quest series, that it was a mechanics heavy RPG with visuals that were an "abortion."

It's depressing that we re-entered the series with VII since it is, arguably, one of the weakest entries in the series. It would be like judging the Final Fantasy series by Final Fantasy II. The remainder of the Dragon Quest series was much more focused and had far better balance, pacing, and scenario writing. This is what I discovered with Dragon Quest VIII, along with most of the people who were interested in the series but passed on VII. And the more I've played of Dragon Quest IV, the more I understand why the Japanese are so crazy for this series. It's got nothing to do with ambitious (some would say, pretentious) storylines, bleeding-edge graphics, or ever changing gameplay systems like the Final Fantasy series and everything to do with sheer charisma and old fashioned story telling.

Dragon Quest IV is an incredible achievement, both in its original NES incarnation and now on the DS. The way you play the various 'chapters' before controlling the main hero character of the game is a fascinating concept that I wish more RPGs would have borrowed. In the game's most infamous and unique chapter, you play as a merchant trying to make money, flipping the tables on the entire RPG genre convention of shopkeepers. Now you play the normally anonymous shopkeeper while a succession of heroes (and maybe even some villains) comes in, makes their transaction, and leaves. At the same time, the chapters have little ties to the other characters therein, as well as overlapping areas of the game. In the second chapter, you visit some of the same areas you will, later, as the merchant, for instance, and when playing as the merchant you hear about the fighting tournament you participated in during the previous chapter. The only thing that comes close, as far as I remember, is the 'Trinity Sight' scenario system of Suikoden III (which is secretly one of the best PS2 RPGs). But that was played on a much larger and more ambitious scale. And it had duck-people. Aaaanyway...

Really, I love Dragon Quest IV (and by extension, VIII) for the aforementioned charm and old fashioned story telling. There's just something about the feel of the game, from the gorgeous 2D graphics to the animated-with-plenty-of-personality sprites to the phenomenal soundtrack and wonderfully retro sound effects to the imaginative and clever new translation...all of it works for me, plain and simple. The gameplay may not be ambitious, the battle system may not have as much depth as certain Final Fantasy titles, but that's OK. Nothing about Dragon Quest IV, in this day and age, is attempting to be revolutionary even if, for the time, it was an amazing game. The story line may be simplistic and cliched by today's standards, but you can boil almost anything down to the same few stories. Hero save the world, the end. The important thing it that it's told well, and Dragon Quest IV manages to do that.

I will confess that I was more excited to play Dragon Quest V and VI than IV mainly because they were the contemporaries of Final Fantasies IV, V, and VI, which are the console RPGs I most associate with moving the genre forward during the 16 bit era. From what I've read, they're just as charming as Dragon Quest IV but have deeper gameplay/character building systems, too. Yet in playing Dragon Quest IV, I've really come to appreciate it as its own entity as well as an important touchstone in the jRPG genre. I feel as though history has been re-written again. Final Fantasy IV is often touted as the point where story began to be emphasized in console RPGs while also being the first true "next gen" RPG...but Dragon Quest IV would be an even earlier example. It's not the story that it tells so much as how it's told; the characters and the scenario writing are miles beyond the characters and scenario writing of its then-contemporary Final Fantasy III. I suppose if we really wanted to split hairs, Phantasy Star I, which pre-dates both, had an ambitious story and characters even earlier...but whatever.

Dragon Quest IV is a really great game, and anyone interested in retconning the history of console RPGs as they think it happened should check it out.

The Videogame Solipsist: 32 and onward Halloween Edition

Silent Hill 3 (PS2)

Though I still think of the second entry in the series as the best, I also really liked Silent Hill 3. I know people seem to have problems with this game, largely stemming from its brevity and a somewhat irritating plot that ties in to the first game, but for my money, it's still damn good. The cold opening of the game, thrusting you into a haunted amusement park with no idea of what's going on, is pretty memorable. I played through the entire game in one day and haven't revisited it since, so I don't have much to say about it.

Silent Hill 2 (Xbox)

I went into this game in greater detail before, so I'll just link you to that. There ya go.

Resident Evil 4 (Wii)

Hate to repeat myself, but I also wrote about this game before. Here ya go.

Resident Evil 3 (Playstation)

Resident Evil 3 is kind of like the odd man out of the series, since the team who made the much loved second game went on directly to Resident Evil: Code Veronica (a game I've never played much of because it just seemed like more of the same) and another group worked on RE3, reportedly at the behest of the American arm of Capcom who saw dollar signs spin in their eyes like 1940s cartoon characters after the success of RE2. The mechanics of RE3 are a bit more action-y than the other pre-RE4 games, new additions which I never quite mastered because I could never time the 'dodge' or 'side step' correctly. The best part about this game was the Nemesis, pictured above, who followed you throughout the game, attacking you at what seemed to be random points, in the process creating a real sense of your character being hunted that no other game has given me. I think there were something like nine different times in the game you could fight him, and he represented an interesting risk vs. reward concept because you got good stuff off of him if you managed to down him. Anyway, RE3 is a good, overlooked survival horror game, and one who's more action-y gameplay inadvertantly spelled out the direction of the future of the series.

Resident Evil 2 (Playstation)

I really hope that someday the Resident Evil series gets back to the 'dual scenario' idea, because I loved the way, in RE2, you chose between two different characters who had wildly different plots through the game yet intersected at various points. Each character also had 'A' and 'B' scenarios, so if you played, say, Leon's scenario first, your actions in that playthrough would affect Claire's subsequent 'B' scenario. I must've play through RE2 at least three times fully, through each of the characters' scenarios. The only thing I don't like about this game anymore is the awkward tank controls. It's hard to go back once you've played RE4, which is admittedly designed around action and big set piece battles, and thus doesn't have the steady, deliberate tension building of RE 1 and 2. Speaking of...

Resident Evil (Gamecube)

I never got all that far in the original release of Resident Evil for Playstation, but the Gamecube remake was excellent. It's interesting to remember just how convoluted and difficult the first Resident Evil was: there's a lot of inventory juggling, backtracking, and frustrating combat to slog through. Though it is spooky and terrifying (the addition of those huge sharks in the remake was a brilliant touch), it's impossible for me to go back to RE1, remake or otherwise. Actually, it's a great game to watch playthroughs or speed runs of, mostly because it'll give you a good idea of how far the series (and survival horror) has come.

Half-Life (PC)

This one is debateable, since there are large portions of this game that are mainly shooting or puzzle solving. I would argue that there's something very survival horror-y about it nonetheless. You're in a government installation that gets invaded by cross dimensional aliens, who slowly kill everyone and make it as difficult as possible for you to escape not only them but the government forces sent in to clean up. You may not remember Half-Life 1 as a particularly scary game, but keep in mind that you're given a flashlight for a reason. Give the first few areas of the game another go and I think you might see what I mean.

Doom 3 (PC)

I'm in the minority on this, but I totally bought into the atmosphere and terror of Doom 3. I actually think it did the whole 'extradimensional creatures taking over a government lab' thing better than Half-Life, mostly because the demons are actively transforming the base rather than just showing up to kill people. I also love the Mars setting along with the whole backstory of artifacts and such on the planet, as well an extinct alien race. As with Half-Life, this one is debateable whether it's survival horror or not, though I would argue it's actually trying to be scary most of the time whereas Half-Life just happens to be by chance as much as design. Maybe the flashlight mechanic (borrowed from Half-Life??) was annoying and the constant monster closets were more 'jump' scares than anything....but I still liked Doom 3 a lot. It still belongs on a list of 'Halloween' games, y'know??

Aliens Vs. Predator (PC)

The original Aliens Vs. Predator for PC was pants-pissingly-scary to me. While playing as the tough Predator, the Aliens are merely creepy and annoying. While playing as the weaker Colonial Marine, they are nightmare inducing. I can't tell you how scary I thought this game was, since I was and remain a huge fan of the Alien film franchise and often had dreams about the creatures without the help of a game that let me experience them in first person. So, yeah. Nightmare inducing. Oddly, whenever I tried to play as the Alien, my PC's graphics card couldn't display its alternate vision mode correctly so I couldn't get past the second or third level. I felt like it was a purposeful middle finger from the universe, letting me know that I'll always be on the receiving end of Alien claws, double jaws, and screeches that make me curl up in a ball and hope my death is a quick one.

The 7th Guest (PC)

Myst delivered a new age of PC adventure games thanks to the CD format, games which were essentially a string of difficult logic puzzles stitched together with bad 3D prerendered graphics and poor quality video/audio. The 7th Guest was that only set in a haunted house. My sister and I never got far in the game, but still remember it fondly as one creepy ass game. The ghostly clown saying "want a balloon, kiddie?!" was a running joke between us for years, and I suspect if I went back now and played it, I would giggle at how archaic it is.

Anyway, Happy Halloween!!

The Videogame Solipsist: NES Halloween edition

(Note: I'm not going over every NES horror/monster game, just the ones I've played, in keeping with the theme of The Videogame Solipsist series)

Monster Party

This game bears the distinction of being probably the most bloody and horror-saturated NES game released in the U.S. The boxart has a group of classic movie monsters staring you down, albeit a bit more cartoony looking versions of them; the game itself doesn't have much to do with them so I suspect it was an attempt to American-ize the game. Actually, to tell you the truth I remember very little about this game except that the translation was appropriately bad and your baseball bat wielding character would sometimes turn into an ass kicking gargoyle. As seen above, halfway through the first level the scenery suddenly becomes more hell-ish and creepy. Which, now that I think about it, is kind of like a Silent Hill game. Here is a classic Flash Tub recreation of the awkward opening scene.

Castlevania (I, II, and III)

Castlevania I could be considered one of the first 'adult' games for the NES in that it wasn't edited or kiddied up for the American market. It was one of those games that, as a kid, you wanted to play because the older guys talked about it and it had vampires, mummies, demons, and other horror enemies in it. Sorta like how the first Mortal Kombat was considered 'cool' in its day for being 'mature' and bloody. Castlevania II is notorious for being badly designed and impossible to finish without a FAQ, but its problems have been covered better elsewhere. Meanwhile, Castlevania III is considered one of the best games in the series for its branching paths, multiple characters, and awesome music (though it's said the Japanese version has better music). I played the second Castlevania the most which probably explains why I didn't love the series until Symphony of the Night.

Rampage

Before I had a proper Godzilla game, I rented Rampage every so often and got out my frustrations on the buildings and humans therein. If I recall correctly, the NES version gave you infinite continues, though I also seem to recall that the game went on forever (or was just so long that it was too much to finish in one sitting). This series is forgettable because future entries were pretty much the same thing. While this mindless shallow gameplay worked in the 8 bit era, it didn't so much later on. Rampage holds the distinction of being one of the few NES games where you are, effectively, playing the bad guys and killing people instead of saving them.

Godzilla: Monster of Monsters/Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters

Oddly enough, the first Godzilla for NES was released at a time when the Godzilla series was mostly dormant in the U.S., coming out in the five year span between Godzilla 1985 and Godzilla Vs. Biolante. Not that the Godzilla series was ever a big deal in the States after the 70s, but whatever. The first Godzilla game was pretty unique: you moved Godzilla and Mothra around a hexagonal map, going through sidescrolling stages reminiscent of shoot-em-ups of the day when you landed on certain hexes. Eventually you had to contend with Godzilla film villains like Gigan and Mechagodzilla who were also moving around the map. Each 'map' represented a different planet and subsequently added more giant monsters to fight until you got to Planet X and had to fight through all the monsters to win. The game even had light RPG elements insofar as Godzilla and Mothra sometimes got stronger after battles with giant monsters. I played the crap out of this game and loved it at the time, though if I played it today I'm sure I would be frustrated due to the constant repetition of levels and bosses.

Meanwhile, the second Godzilla game for NES is a mess. It follows the NES rule of "second game in a series must be nothing like the first" as established by such sequels as Super Mario Brothers 2, Castlevania II, Final Fantasy II, Zelda 2, etc. In this case, the game is a turn based strategy affair in which you play as the military trying to fight off the giant monsters. Anyone who watches Godzilla movies knows that the military can't touch giant monsters and the game's difficulty is best described as appropriately-but-completely-un-fun. I only rented this game twice before giving up; it has that problem that some NES games do where it's too complicated for its own good and doesn't do a good enough job explaining its mechanics to the player. Especially if you're a little kid from the Midwest who just wants to see monsters destroy crap and fight each other.

Maniac Mansion

Admittedly, I never got more than 15 minutes into this game before turning it off or losing. However, it was the sort of thing one of your random neighbors or friends happened to own and it was unlike any other NES game you had ever played. A few years after playing Maniac Mansion my sister and I would get heavily into adventure games on the PC, a genre that arguably got its start with this game. I don't remember how the game played on the NES, given the lack of a mouse and limited set of buttons, but the infamous scene where you could microwave a hamster made up for it to my childish psyche. Of the games I've talked about in this post, it came the closest to establishing a creepy atmosphere. It felt a bit eerie and you never thought you were "safe", as if at any moment a creature might run into the room and eviscerate you.

The Videogame Solipsist: Shining Force I and II

I'm not really sure where I first heard of Shining Force. It's one of those games that, somehow, comes into your life and you feel like it's always been there. I want to say that I rented it from the local video store because I thought the screenshots on the back of the box looked like Zelda, but I don't particularly think they do now. I guess I had a vivid, deluded imagination as a kid.

Shining Force I was the first strategy RPG I ever played, though I didn't know what RPGs were and my only strategy in the game was to kill everything regardless of any pointless peril I was putting my characters in. It speaks volumes for the easiness of this game that I never bothered to level grind as a kid because I didn't understand the concept. I just knew that a lot of my people died in every battle, and once mages ran out of MP they were worthless as anything other than bait.
People talk a lot about how 2D games have more lasting aesthetics and appeal, and it's games like Shining Force that I think of when this comes up. Though 16 years old, the game still looks cool even if the sprites aren't up to the later standards of, say, Chrono Trigger or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. For its time, though, Shining Force had incredibly large and detailed in-battle cutscenes. The characters animated well, and besides, the game had that awesome, fun dialog/choice/menu system, with cool animated icons instead of simple "yes/no/item/attack/etc." options. Though Blizzard is rightfully praised for their brilliant interfaces and--frankly--awesome looking icons/menus, Shining Force was an early game that even as a kid and not a critic I could appreciate on that level.If there's a problem with the game--and this is something that's endemic to the second game as well--it's that, the further you got into the game, the harder it was to train up new recruits. Since characters join your party at pre-determined levels, and even if you aren't actively leveling instead of just playing, they'll always be behind your other characters. Some characters overcome this by being so outrageously badass you force yourself to use them (see Hanzou the Ninja, above) while others--like Bleu the Dragon--require hours of effort to baby them up to your level. I'm told that he and the other 'useless' characters, like Arthur the magic using Knight, become incredibly strong if given enough time, but honestly the game is easy enough that it's not worth it.

At some point, Shining Force II came out. This was back in a time when you weren't always following release dates or waiting for sequels, so one day I saw it at the video store and excitedly rented it for a weekend. It was everything I'd wanted out of a sequel--bigger, more characters, slightly better looking, and a more free roaming style than the original game. I even woke up early before going to church just so I could squeeze some more time in with it because I knew it had to go back on Monday.

For any number of reasons, I never bought Shining Force II or received it as a gift. I suppose it's mainly because my friend Dave and I rented it so often, praying that other people who had it in the meantime didn't erase our save, that we felt as though we already did own it. To my knowledge I never beat either Shining Force until I was older, though I do remember playing someone else's save for a bit and seeing the very late stages of the game, marveling at how insanely strong and godlike the player's party becomes later on.
The most significant addition to the game--and the one that I wish more games would borrow--was in how you could use items to promote your characters to new, different classes. In the original game, all your characters had a set promoted class they could become. Knights became Paladins, Warriors became Gladiators, Mages become Wizards, etc. But in Shining Force II, you could use certain items to allow different promoted classes: Knights could become Pegasus Knights, Warriors could become Barons, Mages could become Sorcerors, Priests could become Master Monks, and Archers could become Brass Gunners. With the exception of the latter, these 'secret' classes were flat out better than their 'standard' counterparts. With the addition of the absurdly strong Peter (see below), they made the game even easier than the original had been. To be fair, Shining Force II offered a difficulty selection, though from what I've read all it affects is the intelligence and ruthlessness of the enemy AI.
Shining Force II's only flaw is that it's broken. As in, easy to the point of laughable. Enemy AI aside, the characters you get in this game are ridiculously strong even without the 'hidden' promotions. Peter joins your party no matter what, and he often can turn the tide of even the game's most precarious battles all by himself. Moreover, the main character of the game (you name him, so I'm referring to him in the generic) is a monster. The main character of the original was no slouch, particularly when you got to the end game's powerful, unique swords, but in the sequel he even gets a lightning spell that puts his MP to some use other than casting Egress to escape battles. On top of all of this, you get Mithril throughout the game. I never knew this as a kid, because I never found the hidden village, but later in the game there's somewhere you can go to 'spend' the Mithril to get amazing new weapons. This seems to be determined randomly from a pool of set weapons based on the character asking for it, but by abusing save states or diligently saving/resetting over and over, you could outfit most of your party with the game's best weapons.

Though I actually have played Shining Force III, at the great expense of my friend Dave, it never really caught on with us. There's something about the original two games that feels timeless and fantastic. I think I can see why they've never made a true strategy RPG Shining Force title since the third, mainly because if you add anything more to the formula it makes things needlessly complicated. Shining Force I and II may be simplistic and easy compared to any of today's strategy RPGs, but I love them for it.

The Videogame Solipsist: Dreamcast

September 9, 1999 was one of those weird numerical dates in history. It seemed ripe for people putting more significance into it than they should--9 is a powerful number, after all, and if I knew anything about Numerology I could probably list off a bunch of "facts" about it. Anyway, the main thing I remember about the date is that MTV was having some kind of awards show (they were whores for the "9/9/99" thing) and the Sega Dreamcast was launching in North America. I think that just speaks to everything that made the Dreamcast unique. Who launches consoles in September, let alone on a unique numerical date??

With a remove of less than a decade, it's easy to get nostalgic and lovey-dovey about the Dreamcast. However, we forget how sketchy the whole thing was when it first came out. Sega had given up on the Saturn in the U.S. by 1998, ironically a time when most of its best games were coming out here. By the end of 1998, it had been released in Japan, and we were teased for nearly a year with the amazing screenshots pouring out of that country. Still, we were very hesitant to buy in to the Dreamcast, after having been confused or burned by the 32X, Sega CD, and Saturn.

So, while I wanted to point out that we had no reason to expect the Dreamcast would be good, in the end I, and many others, were proved wrong. Looking at the games list, the Dreamcast had utter classics in almost every genre, as well as doing things ahead of its time: the VMU memory cards, online multiplayer on a console, first console to support mouse and keyboard, and the first console to use voice chat via a microphone.

I didn't get a Dreamcast until around the time the Playstation 2 was launching. I remember there being this weird time where, in the holiday of 2000, I was concurrently playing Grandia II on my Dreamcast and Final Fantasy IX on my Playstation, and I got way more into Grandia II than I did FFIX, and it didn't make any sense to me. It may have been excitement about having a new console, but Grandia II had voices, which was something I hadn't seen in a RPG before, at least on console. At the same time, there were already a ton of great Dreamcast games to pick up, too: Power Stone 2, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, Virtua Tennis, Soul Calibur, Resident Evil: Code Veronica...I think if you look at the list of Dreamcast games that were released, you'll be shocked how many games you forgot and how many were released in 1999 or 2000.

This is to say nothing of 2001, which was simultaneously the peak and the beginning of the end for the Dreamcast. Let's start with the peak: Phantasy Star Online. It's the one game that immediately jumps to my mind as being what the Dreamcast was all about. I will never forget buying this game with some leftover holiday money, coming home, and getting lost in it for the rest of the day. Other than Diablo 1 and 2, I had never experienced anything like this. It was a dungeon crawler like that series, but with a Japanese RPG style and an amazing idea: free online play across regions. You could play with people across the world on it, and the game even had an innovative chat system that used symbols and a mechanic that allowed you to build sentences out of pieces that the game would translate across languages. For instance, you could make a macro that said "Help" or "Hello" or "Follow Me" and it would show up, properly, in whatever language the other people in your game were using. My fondest memory of this game was fighting a boss with three other people, one of whom was either French or French Canadian. Three of us died in the battle, and watched the last guy somehow manage to defeat the boss on his own while we cheered via the simple, translated phrases.

The writing was on the wall for the Dreamcast, however. The Playstation 2 simply commanded too much attention, and with its ability to cheaply play DVDs, it was hard to ignore for long. The games may not have been there, but by the end of 2001, they were. Things kept looking better and better for Sony while they got worse and worse for Sega. Microsoft had announced their entry into the videogames market with the Xbox, a system that largely felt like their take on the Dreamcast idea. Meanwhile, Nintendo announced the Gamecube, which promised to improve on many of the errors made during the N64 era. February 2002 saw the last official Dreamcast game in the U.S., NHL 2K2. Though the Dreamcast had a relatively healthy lifespan in Japan (like its predecessor, the Saturn) it barely lasted three years in the U.S. and effectively ruined Sega as a hardware brand. It would be their last system ever, though rumors pop up at least once a year that the company may step back in. However unlikely this is, with the increasing nostalgia and love for the Dreamcast, it may actually work the next time...

The Videogame Solipsist: Playstation

If the NES made strides toward turning videogames into a mainstream form of entertainment, and the Genesis tried to make videogames cool, then the Playstation was the system that combined these goals and succeeded at doing both. This success was due as much to the actions of Sony as it was the botched handling of the Saturn and the failure of Nintendo to see the future (or, given their continued reticence in the online arena, a failure to do anything about the future).

It's easy to forget that the dominance of the Playstation was neither assured nor rapid. Launched in the fall of 1995, the system really didn't start to see any great games until 1997, by which point it was more than a bit sobering to compare its game lists and upcoming releases to the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn. However, I don't think anyone was really 100% sure about the Playstation until that time. Though it had the massive Sony corporation backing it, almost everyone assumed that Nintendo would clean up in that generation just as they had before. As kids and/or young adults, we didn't have any idea of the background to what was happening: the expense of producing carts vs. the inexpensive Playstation CD format; the arrogance and unfriendliness of Nintendo to third party developers vs. Sony's open arms; the generally crap N64 hardware vs. the easy to program for and great design of the Playstation. Hindsight is 20/20, but I think we could be forgiven for blindly believing Nintendo's promises and being suspicious of Sony. As some have pointed out, this was the era of failed CD systems like 3DO and Sega CD, and the Playstation felt like more of the same.

By 1997, though, we all knew that the N64 was going to be Nintendo's ballgame and the Playstation had everything else you could possibly want. Everyone kept their N64 around for those--admittedly--brilliant first party Nintendo titles twice a year and spent the rest of the time focused on the Playstation. Which, as I just said, had everything else you could possibly want, including 'cool' mature titles like Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Final Fantasy VII. It even had things you never knew you wanted, like the cult classic Parappa the Rapper, a rhythm game that, one could argue, helped pave the way for the success of Guitar Hero in the U.S. Of course, the Playstation also had all the best racing games, sports games, action games, practically every RPG of that generation (if you didn't import Saturn titles, anyway), fighting games, stealth action (Metal Gear Solid, hello), and even some shoot-em-ups.

Bizarrely enough, all of my friends continued to drink the Nintendo cult Kool Aid during this era. I guess their own biological clock interest in videogames coincided with Nintendo, so they only needed two or three games a year. As for me, I jumped unto the Sony ship in the winter of 1998. After being unable to obtain a copy of Zelda: Ocarina of Time--the one and only game that I felt could satisfy what I wanted on the N64--I wandered over to the Playstation case in Target and I couldn't lie to myself anymore. I wanted a Playstation. Funnily enough, I didn't end up playing through Ocarina of Time until just before the release of Wind Waker on Gamecube, and I know that if I had managed to get a copy of Ocarina of Time, it would only have delayed my Playstation purchase for so long.

There are a handful of factors that made me want a Playstation--the cool factor, the relatively cheap(er) game prices, the variety of titles, the novelty of new gameplay experiences like Parappa or Metal Gear Solid--but the main one was RPGs. Though it runs neck and neck in my heart with the SNES for having both the most and best RPGs, there's no denying how much the Playstation did for popularizing and expanding the RPG market in the U.S. This is largely due to the success of Final Fantasy VII, but since the install base of the Playstation grew so large, companies like Atlus and Working Designs were willing to risk bringing obscure RPGs over because they could probably turn a profit. I know that I bought at least a few RPGs for each year the Playstation was active, and not all of those were Square titles. So it became a positive Catch 22: more people were buying RPGs because more RPGs were being released, and more RPGs were being released because more people were buying them.

Life during the Playstation era was good, but we all still had eyes out for the next batch of consoles. During 1998, we began to hear about Sega's next console, the Dreamcast, which would be released in the U.S. on Sept. 9, 1999. A little over a year later, the Playstation 2 was released, and about a year after that, the Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube would both hit shelves. Though the Playstation 1 era wasn't officially over until 2003, when Final Fantasy Origins (the last significant release by my reckoning) was released in the U.S., it only truly had us for a full 4 years (I'm counting 1997-2001 as the height of the PS1 era) before we started to move on. I kept buying and playing Playstation games, but in the holiday season of 2000 I got a Dreamcast, and a bit over a year later, I got a Playstation 2, at which point I traded in my Playstation due to the PS2's backwards compatibility.

In the end, one could just as easily make the argument that the original Playstation was the most significant console ever released as they could that the NES was. I still tend to bow to the NES, but I do have a lot of nostalgia and rose tinted memories of the Playstation. Though history has been continually less kind to the Nintendo 64 and its games (and the less said of Saturn in the U.S., the better), I would argue that the majority of PS1 games still hold up, and that's saying quite a lot in an industry that moves as fast as videogames.