No Boredom for Me!!

From the outset, we have been taught to be very objective in terms of the games we see, either actually playing them or even something as little as watching an advert for a new game. The coices we make about the games we buy are generally based on their content, but it helps to know a little more than just 'whether it's any good'.

Initially, we were encouraged to backtrack on specific games (of our choice), to look at its predecessors and link them in terms of inspiration and style. These different genres have mostly got fairly deep roots in the annals of computer games history, which is something often taken for granted by your average casual gamer. This aspect of the course encouraged me to look for patterns in games development, and I noticed, through this, that their were many different 'fads' in computer games history. These fads, be it Survival Horror in the late 90's to early 2000's or even the 2d beat-em-up years made famous by Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, have shaped the way we buy and play games now.
As well as the history of a game itself, we also looked into the developers behind them, and to see if their are any common themes there. The article I wrote earlier on Peter Moline really did emphasise the fact that certain people are good at certain types of games, and looking through Milieu’s history it seems apparent that you can sometimes tell who made a game by its style. This is something that I had never really thought of before, so it was good to be able to consider games more than in terms of the machine they are on of the company behind them.
The way computer games are developed and sold has also changed largely since the birth of mainstream gaming, and it is surprising how unpredictably the household-name computer company started. To use the word 'simple' would be unfair, but the most surprising part for me was the fact that Atari tested Pong in a pub using a cardboard and wooden box containing a TV set! When coupled with the troubles involved in licensing Tetris from the Soviet Union, it seems the more popular gaming becomes, the more closely guarded the new innovations are.

As well as touching on the attitudes of gamers themselves, our studies moved also towards the topic of games in the media, more particularly the increase in the number of violent computer games. There have been many publicised reports of how games can help, or hinder the progress of society and it was interesting to see how the two sides of the argument come to blows, its a Catch 22 point as both sides have a logical argument. Whilst I feel me as unable to solve the riddle of right or wrong, it certainly opened my eyes to the either eventuality. Perhaps the most astounding thing is not whether it’s right or wrong, but more the fact that a computer game can cause that much uproar. The onset of violence and gore in games shows how games are now marketed as much towards adult gamers as they were at first marketed to children, and poignantly shows the consequences that merging two different generations can cause.

We were also educated on specific history in terms of older gaming and one of my earlier posts will show a review of the PC Engine - I pioneer of sorts from the early nineties. This, I felt, encouraged me to explore older avenues of games and since that particular post I have been playing on FlashBack and Chrono Trigger more than any of my other more modern games. We definitely learned to be more objective as to possible reasons for the failure of systems such as the aforementioned PC Engine.

We did review a fair few games as well, and as we were educated on what to look for I felt that my reviewing abilities became much more sophisticated and informed. As part of this structure I was required to highlight the nouns, verbs and gaming 'rules' or 'conventions' that are mentioned in reviews and this served the highlight just how involved computer gaming is, at least in terms of the way they are described. I reviewed two genres, Resident Evil in Survival Horror and Blood/FarCry for the First Person Shooter genre.
I also reviewed various online gaming networks, most recently being MUSH games. This I feel shows how the increasing functionality and overall popularity of the internet is going to impact the future of gaming trends. The games I looked at were so basic they could have been written 20 years ago, but are still popular today and are paving the way for the most recent gaming trend - online access.

Overall, Games History and Context has taught me about how computer games have risen to fame, and how they have changed in the process. Through applying the trends and attitudes of past development companies, and their markets, we can see how development of the industry is likely to change in the future too. Fashion repeats itself more in the world of gaming that its patrons would like to think. We are in an age where mobile phone games like Snake 2 and companies like 3 mobile phones focus heavily on games for their products. This trend is similar to the way games were marketed in the early 80's, basic ideas for (comparatively) basic technology.
The industry is looking for inspiration in its 'elite' section i.e. the major console companies and these innovations can only get better as technology increases with it. However it can be argued that sophisticated technology can make developers lose sight of the overall reason people play their games - for fun. Rise of the Robots was one of the most widely publicised games of its time, and I read a review of it at the time that gave it 9%. There are countless other examples, and there is a lot more technology available now than then.
Only by looking into the past, can we see the future.

MUDS


An MUD stands for Multi User Dungeon, which is a form of fantasy role-play similar in theme as the Lord fo the Rings and even Warhammer. They typically have monsters like trolls, orcs werewolves and various other ethereal and make-believe creatures. A good MUD will have many users connected to a server at once, who can then interact by ways of chat-room style text strings.
The MUD is almost always text-based, requiring the character to type the required action into a DOS-style command prompt. The first MUD was created in 1975 by James Crowther, who based his game on a caving trip he had enjoyed. This game was called Colossal Cave Adventure.

Blood Wars

The MUD i have had a (brief) go at is called BloodWars, which is a textual depiction of the time-old fight between Werewolves and Vampires.
Entering your information is simple enough, give yourself a name and apssword, choose your allegiance (werewolf or vampire) and finally choose your sex and you're away.

The game gives you a few tips such as basic commands, but you are largely left to scour the 'help commands' before you really feel like your getting anywhere. The first problem i seemed to have was that once i had put in my password, the text i typed in didn't actually appear on the screen. That aside, the game seemed fairly easy to get to grips with and before i knew it i was flying through the various areas.
Despite its text limitation the game has some good ASCII art for logos and so on, as is seen in the images i have posted here. Even a little ASCII map comes up each time you move, and you have to type in 'North, South', etc to move you little X marker.

Each time something happens in the game, such as a rabbit moving around or a new player entering an area, it is announced in real0time. This means that, although i didn't get to fight anyone, i would have really had to test my typing skills in order to win.

When you consider that perhaps the driving force behind all computer games companies is their budget, it's almost amusing to think that probably the most famous game of all time, Pong, was created with a budget of $500 and a few white lies (Nolan Bushnell convinced one of his head programmers to join the Atari company saying it was subsidised by the government!). From the Pong arcade machines successful cleanup in a local pub to 100 machines p/day on the construction line, the computer games industry's foundations were built on very little - but the real worth is obviously in ideas. Ideas for games flooded the arcades with titles like Asteroids (Atari's take on Space Invaders, mentioned later) and even Donkey Kong the massively popular adversary of Mario, then called 'jumpman'.
Unfortunately, ideas are only as valuable as their creator makes them, and a copyright theft lawsuit chased Bushnell in the form of Ralph Baer - he had patented a strikingly similar version of the tennis version years beforehand.
The amount of money that was to be made in computer games had become apparant in the years preceding this trial, and set a trend for aggressive battle to cling on the these basic ideas. Atari released the first (successful) computer games console, the VCS, in 1977. Prior to this date, DAvid Crane a former Atari programemr and designer, had left Atari to start his own company - Activision. Activision fought in court with Atari for around 2 years to earn the right to make games for the VCS alone.
So ideas in the computer games industry by this bought were being snapped up, the majority of early video games such as Pacman and Space Invaders were made from very basic ideas - the novelty of playing an electronically sophisticated game was enough to sell the idea. Scores of games manufacturers and developers sprouted up from everywhere.
However in 1983, from a combination of bad press realting to truancy and a flood of poor-quality games. Personal Computers such as the Commodore 64 harnessed this bad press to sell more of their 'educational' machines and further pushed computer games into disrepute.
On the otehr hand, out of this PC age, the Oliver Twins and the DArling brothers, two sets of teenagers, used the Commodore machines and their like to create more and more games. These young boys would go on the make millions of dollars for their ideas and skills, and the youth of the eighties formed companies like Codemasters and Ocean.
Tthe console market was still in its feldgling years by the time the Video Game Crash of 1983 happened, because a mere 3 yrs after the toy companies cast off games as being a 'passing fad', the Nintendo Entertainment System was released, a machine we all remember from childhood (or early adulthood!) no doubt.
This machine brought with it the likes of Mario, Link and Kirby to the awed eyes of the worlds youth, and resurrected consoles and home computer games into peoples lives.

Peter Molyneux was born in 1960 in Guildford, Surrey and has been the mbrains behind many of the best selling PC and console games for over 15 years. His forte seems to be the popular 'top-down, control the little people' point of view, categorised as 'god games'. The core mechanic of these type of game was touched upon at the very start of our course, and that would be a basic queu system, certain things need to be done in the proper order and you have to manage the ay these things happen to optimise the results.

Populous was the first game to be developed by Molyneux, though he played the slightly lesser role of designer and programmer (at least lesser when compared to more recent titles like Dungeon Keeper and Theme Park where he was project leader). Populous was developed by Bullfrog, a company which is also (perhaps through Molyneux) renowned for its creation of many god games and with Molyneux being behind most of them!
Populous won several accolades since its 1989 release, such as Best Military or Strategy Computer Game of 1990 and 1990 Computer Game of the Year. In short, the character controls people in the form of a deity who can perform miracles, shape the landscape and generally influence them to do their bidding. It was released across a variety of then-popular platforms such as the Amiga, PC Engine and even the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.
More recently, the popular Lionhead Studios game, Black and White has been cited by Molyneux as 'the spiritual descendant of Populous'.

Slightly less divine, but still similar games at least in orientation, have been released under Bullfrog and Molyneux's partnership, Syndicate being an example. This enjoyed most of its popularity on the PC, but i can fondly remember this game from the early days of the Super Nintendo. The Syndicate engine was used for some time, with later games like Hooligans by Hip Games, though enjoyed more notoriety than popularity (because it was rubbish).

(ABOVE LEFT) Theme Park (ABOVERIGHT) Syndicate

The next brainchild was, in my opinion, the biggest or at least the most well-remembered game of the 1990's - Theme Park. Here we give every kid (and some adults) there ultimate dream on a plate - create and manage your very own Theme Park. The usual, top-down isometric view was used, and had various levels of difficulty (mainly increasingly difficult customers!) and additional technology to keep up with the demands of the punters. options rangin from how much effort your mechanics make to keep the rides in good order, right through to how much fat you put in your burgers gave the player the feeling of truly controlling the park and giving an unrivalled satisfaction to player who succeeds.
Theme Park spawned a couple of sequels, Theme Hospitalbeing one, which followed the same megalo-maniacal streak with similar dark humour at every turn, thought this time with 2 1/2D graphics to boot.

After 1997's Dungeon Keeper (in my view, another Theme Park spin-off involving the management of a disconcertingly cute rendition of Hell) Molyneux left Bullfrog to form his own company, Lionhead Studios. Whilst having few titles under their belt, 2001's Black and White really made an impact on a fickle games market, just when the First Person Shooter was starting to take over.

(ABOVE LEFT) Dungeon Keeper (ABOVE RIGHT) Black and White

Basically stemmed from Populous as aforementioned, Black and White involves polaying a 'hand' and creating a world for the people who worship you. You have a physical presence on the world as well, in the form of a creature such as a tiger or an orang-utan. The player will control

when the people pray, perform miracls (like rains for the crops) and turn nasty when people lose belief (sending a pig soaring across the sky into the sea always gets those atheists back in line!). Depending on the course of your actions, you will either by a fear-inspiring, hell, fire and brimstone type of god, or a benevolent healer and creator. Black and White spawned a sequel in 2005 based on the aftermath, your created religion has been left without a guide and have started to differ in their opinions. As a result, wars ensue (hmmm there's a moral here too!)and only your creature is left as a relic of your creative/destrcutive hand.

I suppose the only real comparison that can be made to Molyneux would be Maxis, and namely its creator Will Wright. The god game idea was inspired ( but yet to be defined), by SimCity the Commodore 64 creation in 1987.

Maxis, in brief, enjoyed little comparable long term succes in the 1990's. However, Maxis really pulled it out of the bag with The Sims, a virtual family that has been acknowledged as the most successful game of all time!

(ABOVE LEFT) Sim City (ABOVE RIGHT) The Sims
With the amount of expansion packs and extra discs available for it, there is no surprise there then!

In 2004 the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame accepted Molyneux, placing him in the annals of history alongside Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo,Trip Hawkins, creator of Electronic Arts and the aforementioned Will Wright.
Later that year he was given an OBE in the New Years Honours list.
More recently, Microsoft purchased Lionhead Studios as art of its Microsoft Game Studios section in April 2006 and productions by Molyneux seem to be being kept top secret, though we can be sure to the funding now available to him and his team, there is much more to come.

// posted by PashionConscious @ 11:56 PM 0 comments

The PC Engine was released in 1987 by NEC, a large information-technology company who make everything from super-computers to Mobile Phones. around the same time a Nintendo's Game Boy and NES systems were in full swing and not long before the SNES and Mega Drive Dominated the computer games industry too and had a fair stab at it. The brightly coloured graphics of its games and the relatively high level animation was at the time ground-breaking and led to many major releases on this title. As mentioned in the title it was also the first console to use CD's.
I have reviewed a few games here that i have played. Given my 5 minute demo time on the emulator i used i didn't really have the chance to really get to grips with some of the more likeable titles I tested so i chose the simplest games, with the quickest learning curve;

HUDSON SOFT

Hudson was created in 1973 by Yuji and Hiroshi Kudo, and they were lucky enough to be the first company to create and market games in Japan. They were also the first 3rd Party games supplier for Nintendo, and helped create the PC Engines most famous games and technologies, by creating the first CD-ROm games for consoles as well.

BOMBERMAN, 1991

Bomberman is an institution in itself, and has been released on nearly all the major platforms of the nineties. Basically the idea is to use bombs to detonate blocks in the sort of lattice-shaped room you are entered into. The bombs are also intended to be used to detonate enemies too, and even yourself unless you have your wits about you. Various powerups to increase then number of bombs available to you and the strength or blast radius appear, all by destroying blocks.
Bomberman really shines in its two-player mode, which in later releases extended the action to up to four players with the ability to throw bombs over walls and even steal powerups and status abilities.

CHEW MAN-FU, 1990

This is a very obviously Japanese designed puzzle game that seems to borrow elements from the previously mentioned Bomberman games, the action (?) being placed in a static square room and your character moving around it.
The goal of the game is totally different however, you have to grab different coloured orbs and moved them onto the corresponding covered squares. There are enemies present you will attack you, and there can be engaged by either squashing them between orbs or kicking the orbs at them. A particularly clever aspect of this game is its similarity to Pac-Man in that if an enemy comes up behind you, you are particularly vulnerable. You can't turn round when holding an orb and so you actually have to perform a sort of three-point turn in a corridor entrance.

KEITH COURAGE IN ALPHA ZONES, 1989

This game is an American title that is very similar to The Battle of Olympus on the NES. So similar in fact that they are almost the same game, with a few different differences.
The bulk of the action is a Zelda 2 style 2D - platform slasher, with your basic sword, jump and duck abilities and the option of entering rooms and warp portals. When entering said rooms, the characters speak to the various friendlies inside, involving buying weapons, items and health power-ups.
The bizarre thing happens when you enter a portal and turn into a large robot! Armed once again with just a sword, and engaging much bigger but still un-necessarily difficult
enemies.
I found this game needlessly difficult to be honest, the enemies apear from nowhere and the control responses are very slow. To be fair, i couldn't get very far in this game due to my time limit, but i have completed Battle of Olympus so I know what sort of stuff to expect.

SEGA

Sega was originally founded in California as Standard Games, desinging arcade games for
Americna Military Servicemen. They later became Sega and were massively popular with arcade-goers. Their big break came with 1989's Mega DRive (aka Genesis) which batteld with Nintendo's Super Famicon (SNES) for over eight years for console supremacy.
Sega have now been reduced to making software for other consoles and formats, due to their recently unsuccessful efforts in the next generation console market.
However, Sonic the Hedgehog will never be forgotten.

2) FANTASY ZONE, 1986 (SEGA), 1989 (NEC AVENUE)


Fantasy Zone is a sort of Cute-Em-Up game similar to R-Type in that it is a side scrolling shoot-em-up. The bad guys aren't particularly menacing and there is little actual crazed blasting involved and so has more of a puzzley feel to it. Of course there are the arbitrary power-ups to get different guns (albeit for a limited period) and status such as invincibility, but nothing particularly interesting.
The main difference between this game and others similar to it, is the ability to switch direction from left to right and control the direction you travel, and therefore change the enemies you engage. This adds a different dimension to the side-scrolling shoot-em-up but i felt in this title it just made it more frustrating, you can't move backwards and fire (it'll just make you turn your back on the enemy you want to shoot)

VICTOR MUSICAL INDUSTRIES (aka Victore Interactive Software)

This little known company were primarily a music company (as implied by their name) and have been occasionally branching out under the name Victor Interactive with famous titles such as Super James Bond on the SNES and even assisted int he development of the first FIFA international on the SNES also. They have created some lesser-known title on the Sega Dreamcast and even as recently as the SOny PS2, but have yet to make a significant impact on the games market (hence their lack of presence on the internet).

VEIGUES TACTICAL GLADIATOR, 1990

This is another side-scrolling shoot-em-up with a few nice touches I felt. Firstly it appears to be one of the first and few side-scrollers that don't involve spaceships (as such), but rather a large robot. Also instead of flying up and down the screen, the character runs around the screen, and has a power-assisted jump. Your two forms of attack are a forward firing gun and and a blast punch close-range attack.
The problem i mentioned in Fantasy Zone, above, was that the option to change directions led to difficulty properly manoeuvering the screen. This problem is addressed in Veigues, but not necessarily solved. You can move forwards and backwards, and by pressing down you can change the direction of fire. However just couldn't seem to get my head round this and constantly kept turning my back on enemies by accident again - maybe I should leave the guns to the real heroes.
Also there didn't appear to be an option to shoot down, or even duck (hence the constant spinning on the spot due to my instinctive pressing-down motions) and so i found my self getting jumped by spaceships under my feet.

2004's FarCry saw a new development in First Person Shooters in terms of the dynamics of the genre. Take an ordinary tourist, steal his girlfriend and steal away to tropical island to continue your evil genetic experiments. Simple.

Whilst most FPS titles have placed you attacking evil super-enemies in insane blast-away confrontations, blasting shotguns in their faces in a blood-splattered mess, FarCry delivers a lot more finesse and style than any before it.

Titles such as Doom III, Quake and Unreal have often relied on fairly simple mechanics to please the FPS fan, long corridors and space-station style environments, large guns and larger foes. FarCry takes a different approach, trading in futuristic space-ware for lush, jungle environments (with the occasional command centre with all the trimmings) and losing the super-weapons in favour of (for the most part) ordinary real-life weapons

(ABOVE) Some of the scenery in FarCry is genuinely beautiful, the scenes thems are brutal

The enemies you are squared up against are ordinary merc-style hired gunmen, though they are decidedly more observant and clever than your typical goon. Included in your on-screen display is (a first for FPS) a monitor that shows how, among other things, how alert the enemy are to your presence, similar to stealth-style games. However the element of stealth isn't that significant, enemies still have to be killed with standard 3 in the chest or 1 in the head marksmanship.

The firepower you are up against takes more of a touch on realism too, a few bullets is enough to end your adventure unless protected by armor.
To aid you in your acquisition you have binoculars to identify the enemy around you through electro-tags they all wear for identification, and they then appear on your stealth-o-meter in the corner. This element shows off one of my favourite features in the game - the seemingly inifinite draw-distance in the game. You can see enemies that are so far away that you can't see them at all without the use of binocular vision.

(ABOVE) The binocular vision is used to identify and 'mark' potential targets

Despite that, your weapons have very long range too and weapons such as your trusty M4 Carbine can shoot enemies so far away that the appear only as pixels, and when playing an earlier level I managed to accidentally shoot someone so far away it took 10 minutes of running to get him (this was totally by accident i will admit).

The aiming system in this game is also physically accurate, the four pointers around the crosshair approach or retract depending on your aiming poisiton and how fast you are moving - if you are lying down in the undergrowth your shot will be almost 100% accurate, running backwards from some guards holding fire will mean many bullets miss the target. Also to make your shots even more accurate you can hold right-click to 'zoom' on your target and hold your weapon up to eye level and aim more accurately. As aforementioned, there are three firing positions - standing, crouching and prone. Standing is obviously best for running and movement, but less so for accuracy. Crouching is about average, and obviously lying prone makes it harder to move and easier to aim.

Blood was one of the first FPS games i owned, before i found my 'niche' so to speak in 3rd person adventure games. I don't really like the way FPS's have gone recently, except for FarCry but there's a reason i can't discuss that :)

This game uses the Duke Nukem Build engine for its graphics and rendering, and follows the standard 'W,A,S,D and mouse' controls (not mandatory, but highly recommended and functional in this way), and was released in 1997 by Monolith.

In keeping with my horror theme mentioned earlier, this was the first FPS to actually approach the true 'classic' horro theme, with hanuted houses and scary ghosties and long-leggetty beasties all over the shop, and a suitable macabre storyline to plot.
Basically your character, Caleb, have been decived by a demon (and the help of its handmaidnes) into following his cult, then slain with the rest of the cult for some unkown reason. 100 years on and Caleb rises from his grave and wants revenge. With your help, he will get it. At least i count it as revenge; this is one of the most nasty games of its time and adds a much more unusual feel to a very popular genre.


(ABOVE) Caleb is one of the most sinister looking 'heroes' of his time.

Instead of your standard 'pistol, shotgun, machine gun then laser' upgrade routine, Blood employs somewhat more realistic tools of the trade. Instead of grenades we have dynamite, instead of a flame thrower we have a simple aerosol can and a Zippo! There is a standard pistol (that can be angled to the side for that 'gangsta' feel) and probably the most creative, the Voodoo Doll. Yes, stab it in front of an enemy and they will know about it.

This gives the game a much more rustic feel, as you can relate better to the weapons involved because chances are you have actually seen them, as opposed to looking at them and thinking 'thats big, what does it do?'. Also there are different fire modes that can dispose of enemies quicker, but at greater cost to ammunition or accuracy meaning that marksmanship tactics are encouraged, as well as overpowering and positioning your character.

(ABOVE) Enemies ignite and run around screaming 'It burns!! It burns!!'

The plot thickens pleasnatly throughout, and the levels are organised well and have all the characteristics of your gothic horror movie, dangling lights and looming stiarcases, freaky fair-ground and spooky castles. Couple that with the extreme gore and the agressive frenzied enemy attacks (and they DO get you eventually) makes for a solid and rather disturbing FPS experience.

There is little improvement available for this title, I feel it took advantage of the gaming world rather well, in terms of innovation, technological capabilities and creativity. A sequel, Blood 2, was released in later 1998 in full 3D. I have yet to play this other than a brief demo and would be interested to see how they have improved on this title. However, 8 years later and no sign of a sequel, i doubt it was anything significant.