Classic Sonic's Sustainability

With this year marking the release of both Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, a worrying trend seems to have stuck itself to new Sonic games; that of leveraging ‘classic’ imagery and sentiment as a crutch to stay relevant. This isn’t entirely new, but it is an unsustainable method that will only yield returns for so long before we get tired.

Sonic Mania looks like a wonderful throwback to a time gone past, and looks well worth playing – the reviews of the game agree with this point. But the problem is in the game’s premise rather than its execution. It is part of a growing number of ‘flashback’ titles that leverage a desire for Sonic to ‘go back to his roots’ (a cliché phrasing of modern Sonic criticism if ever there was one).

How sustainable is this idea, really? Between Sonic 4 episodes 1 and 2, Sonic Generations, Sonic Mania, Classic Sonic’s return in Sonic Forces, not to mention a huge number of re-releases on virtual console systems, how much longer can SEGA milk what’s left of gamer’s nostalgia before gamers get bored of this trend? We can only see remakes and re-releases of Green Hill Zone so many times before it will inevitably lose its charm.

The unfortunate fact is that despite major positive steps forward in the form of Sonic Colours and Generations, the series still evokes an image of Bambi on ice, with shaky foundations that look so horribly precarious it’s almost hard to watch as the series goes on.

In its struggle for an identity in modern times, Sonic’s leveraging of its classics may have been a successful experiment, with the appearance of Classic Sonic in Generations and Forces, but now the trend is quickly becoming a tired trope. It’s time for gamers’ favourite hedgehog to drop these crutches and run – after all, isn’t this what Sonic is best known for?

More than anything, SEGA needs to reinvent Sonic’s identity, perhaps by looking at current Sonic conventions and throwing them out of the window. The transition wouldn’t be painless; many fans cling dearly to their nostalgic love of the ‘classic’ Sonic series that ended in the 90’s. But it won’t be long before this love runs out and instead we groan every time we see SEGA march out Classic Sonic only to expose him to further indignity. Let Classic Sonic rest now, and perhaps nail the final coffin in Modern Sonic’s grave, and give us a true reinvention of the character and his conventions before he winds up stuck in that grave permanently. 

Condemned: The Criminal Origins of Modern Horror Gaming

Modern AAA horror is in a good place right now. Outlast, Resident Evil 7 and Alien Isolation are among some of the best first-person horror experiences that are out there on modern machines. It’s safe to say that the genre has experienced something of a revival since the dark, gloomy days of the Xbox 360.

In the generation prior, horror games seemed to fall by the wayside, in favour of more bombastic experiences. Everybody can remember the heavy action and set pieces of Resident Evil 5 and its much-maligned sequel. It was rare to find a popular horror game in the previous generation that wasn’t laced with a heavy dose of action to up the playability; even Alan Wake, one of the best horror-thrillers out there, was heavily based on action and the implausible gunplay of a novelist main character.

To find a relatively ‘true’ horror game, one would have had to turn to the indies to get their fix. We all remember last generation as being the one where Let’s Players really started to gather steam, and with this came the popularity of horror indie titles such as Slender: The Eight Pages. Because, let’s face it, the prospect of experiencing horror is made a lot more consumable by watching someone else suffer it and laughing at the comedy that arises from a good entertainer. It is in part thanks to Let’s Plays that we saw the popularity of good gaming horror arise, such as Amnesia and its sequel. As we moved to the current generation, there was a plentiful supply of horror games of all kinds, becoming somewhat of a mainstay genre for independent developers who all hoped that their game would be able to ride the coat-tails of a popular Let’s Player to becoming a sales success. Nowadays, even the AAA studios can’t help but stick their profitable noses in for a quick sniff of horror and we were treated to some new classics such as Alien Isolation and Resident Evil 7, which benefited not only from higher production values but also from lessons taught by the older indie titles on how to craft claustrophobic and terrifying games in first person with a gritty, horrifying surrounding environment.

Amidst all this, I realised that one game seems to have gone forgotten, and yet could largely be seen as a missing link between the poor, action shoot-em-up horror that we saw in the previous generation and the more carefully-crafted gems we are seeing today. Condemned: Criminal Origins was an excellent, early Xbox 360 game that seems to hold a lot of fitting comparisons to modern horror titles as they are even in the modern market.

While looking understandably dated as an early seventh-generation game, Condemned’s graphics is not without merit. Careful design went into the locales experienced in the game, which were gruesome and scary in their own right. Despite being traditionally cliché areas for a horror setting, such as abandoned department stores, dilapidated schools and the dark recesses of the subway, Condemned’s levels proved that sometimes clichés exist for a reason; there is something just horribly creepy about old, rotten mannequins in a quiet, desolate department store long since left to ruin.

The overall design of the game, however, is a masterclass in horror design, something that seems to inspire what I consider the scariest part of Resident Evil 7: the approach to Evelyn’s room. The knot in my stomach as I continued my slow pace into the darkness, that overwhelming feeling that I was going somewhere I really should not have been going shows just how masterful Resident Evil 7 can be in its quieter, more psychologically-scary moments. At the same time, Condemned is equally as inspired in just how it could make the player feel terrified of their own progress.

The devil here is in the details; the way that the ambient sounds seem to attack you from all sides; hearing a tin can drop onto the floor to your left, making you wonder whether a terrifying enemy was just out of your view, and at the same time dreading the inevitability of having to investigate the source of the sound. Condemned makes masterful use of this with the shadows in the game, using them to play with the player’s mind to create illusions of would-be murderers just around the corner. Many parallels here can be found between this and the Evelyn sequence; the bouncing of the ball from a location of screen, the rocking chair, the slow fading out of light until the player seems surrounded by a thick, impenetrable black fog. Both examples show expertise in making the player dread what they’re going to have to do to progress.

Where Condemned does better than most modern games, however, is in the late stages of the game. It is very rare that a horror game feels as scary at the last level as it does in the introduction, but here, Condemned surpasses Resident Evil 7, which was somewhat of a disappointment in its latter stages. I remember strongly that feeling of fear as I went about and investigated an abandoned house out in the sticks. There was this incredibly spooky feeling of claustrophobia as destroyed furniture blocked my progress, making me carefully plan my route. I never felt quite so unsafe as I did in that level (which soon branched off into a run through a farm area and some barns culminating in a strange boss fight), and it is to Condemned’s credit that my growing skill at the game never hit the point that I felt truly safe or even able to tackle what it was throwing at me. On the other hand, Resident Evil 7 suffers from being still at its core a game where a player picks up a gradually-more powerful arsenal and soon is able to face head-on the hordes shambling toward them.

An honourable mention goes to the minute-by-minute gameplay of Condemned. It is interesting to note that Condemned was a first-person atmospheric horror games long before their current popularity. This makes the comparison to modern games like Resident Evil 7 more striking. Guns are scarce and typically over-powered when used, making them invaluable to the game, but they are never the central focus. Instead, combat is focused on taking improvised weapons to the enemies you face, be they drug-addicted madmen or strange creatures impaled with metal rods. Investigation using a series of interesting tools forms a good mechanic, and serves to intensify the atmospherics of the locations in which the investigations themselves take place. There is one scene in a locker room which is particularly chilling, and many horror gamers that picked up Condemned will understand what I mean when I say this. Condemned is a quieter experience than the likes of Resident Evil 7 and Alien Isolation, and this only enhances the scariness of the title, allowing the narrative and the scares to really soak into the player.

Condemned: Criminal Origins represents a missing link between the decline of horror in the past generation and the current resurrection that we are seeing in the modern day. Although understandably dated, its comparisons hold up favourably to modern horror, and while its sequel was a big disappointment, the original game still deserves a lot of credit for being a potential inspiration for how to do horror right in the modern games industry.

Control the Controller: Rebuttal

Another day, another sad media opinion piece dragging the videogame market through the mud. This time it is the turn of The Star Online, which concludes: ‘Videogames are doing many children great harm. The many children in question constitute a significant number of boys in the up-and-coming generation. For these boys to become authentic men, they need to be rescued. They are not going to rescue themselves.’

One of the better videos on the topic of videogame addiction and the surrounding media hysteria surrounding it is by Extra Credits, shown here. The video is rightfully careful to discriminate addiction from compulsion, and importantly demonstrates why videogame ‘addiction’ as it is termed by the media is largely sensationalism. I think the most important part of the video to pay attention to is that addiction refers to the alteration of brain chemistry to create biological dependence on the substance, an effect commonly seen in truly harmful addictions such as nicotine and alcohol and to a lesser extent, caffeine. Addiction carries with it a horrifying stereotypical image; a violent man with poor hygiene performing desperate acts of crime to further fund his own habits, perhaps. This imagery is often wrong and unfair to those who suffer from addiction, which in itself is one way in which the article and wider media are largely wrong. Not only does such sensationalism harm gamers but it also harms those who suffer from addictions.

On the other hand, Extra Credits reports that videogames rather use the way in which brain chemistry works to create a rewarding system for the player. This is a correct identification, and possibly the main reason that we play videogames as a whole. However, this comes with a lot of issues regarding responsible use of the tools available to videogame developers, something which has sadly been lacking. Many of the big developers instead exploit compelling design in gaming for immoral reasons, in the most cynical of ways. More needs to be done from an industry perspective to tackle immorality in game design, and more pressure from the market will eventually lead to an improvement in this area.

More immediately, however, many of the assertions of the article are downright false and damaging. The way in which the writer paints game compulsion in children is offensive and harmful and not indicative of a healthy approach. This is a tough, negative approach to a problem. Blame is placed squarely on the videogames and they are identified in this article as the singular variable that is causing so much damage. The solution to the problem is to ‘confiscate the controller, smash it, and toss the pieces in a dumpster located at least ten miles from home – and do not ever, under any circumstances, allow one of these nefarious devices back in said household.’

This is, of course, a nuclear option. The complete withdrawal of videogames from a child’s life is an extreme course of action to take. Let’s face it, we live in a time where gaming is more visible than ever, and more accessible than ever. Either through mobile gaming, or through their own social networks, a child is going to be exposed to videogames. To tackle the underlying issue which is toxic videogame playing, a nuclear option is oftentimes going to do more harm than good unless in the most extreme of cases. Granted, where gaming becomes the square, central behavioural issue, some withdrawal of gaming privileges can, in a parenting sense, be a logical move to make. However, this is definitely where the facade of the article’s bias begins to fade; look at the terminology used. Games are described as ‘nefarious’. Evil, cunning things that are out to get you. This is the definite thing that games are not. Games are tools, and it is the misuse of these tools that are causing the problems.

On the other hand, Extra Credits has a great counter-strategy in the positive sense to combat toxic, compulsive gaming in young people. It correctly identifies that in a lot of these cases where videogames have become a harmful element of people’s lives, the main problem is mismanagement. Not just of the videogame as a tool, but a chronic mismanagement of that person’s life, either through a lack of real discipline or parental engagement. This is where I particularly like EC’s approach: it identifies the use of a positive mechanism by which to tackle and encourage videogame behaviour.

Too much is placed on the negative aspect of videogames. They’re addictive, they’re violent, mind-numbing. Not enough is placed on the positive ways in which we can use them. Through a good use of scheduling and the right encouragement and parental framework, games can be just another useful tool by which to raise your child. Instead of taking away, and engaging in destructive activities that only serve to cement one’s dominion over their child, Extra Credits instead encourages positive relationships with games.

Instead of throwing out the controller, pick it up, and use it as a point to engage with your child. Talk to them about games. It’s such an important part of your child’s life, and they would be thrilled to be able to have a meaningful conversation with their role models about it. Learn about gaming and learn about the right and wrong games for your child to play. Use this knowledge to push your children from the toxic parts of gaming into the kind of games that help them grow; the Minecrafts, the Zeldas, the Don’t Starves of the world. Ultimately, I think that Extra Credits approach is a lot more involved and a lot more realistic. We live in a world where videogames exist, and they are protected as free speech and as an art form. Not only that but videogames are a valuable medium that has developed a strong economy but also is a strong learning tool and culture in and of itself. To think that we can destroy people’s engagement with the medium is naive and destructive in and of itself. Instead of treating videogames like the enemy, the public should instead treat it like a tool, just like television and books.

The Star Online’s article may be sensationalism for the sake of clicks, or it may be a genuine piece of opinion. But it most certainly is harmful and encourages exactly the wrong kind of engagement with gaming, coming from a stark misunderstanding of what a videogame is. While there are massive issues underlying the cynical exploitation of videogame mechanisms, particularly in the mobile and microtransaction space, games are a tool that I will always firmly believe is a force for good. Not only that, but I am a strong proponent of the use of positive mechanisms instead of negative, and the use of engagement and knowledge will surely be far more effective in everyday circumstance than the use of force and oppression.

However, if there is an extreme case where videogames are causing genuine harm to a child, then professional help and a measured response is needed. A knee-jerk reaction informed by a sensationalist article will help nobody. Instead, seek professional help to come up with a measured response plan. It may be the case that videogame time for your child should be reduced or limited as much as possible, but the important thing here is developing an individual, measured plan. Just throwing away videogames is an expensive and damaging thing to do and treating them like the enemy is a more harmful plan in itself. Professional help exists and will undoubtedly assist parenting, but ultimately it is down to parenting strategy to decide a child’s fate, not a videogame’s.

The Games I Consider Unforgettable: Part Two

(This is part two of a two-part post, I just gushed too much about games! See part one here!)

Sonic the Hedgehog

Out of all of the items on my list, Sonic is my personal pick. That is not to under-rate the impact that the character has had on gamer culture over the decades; I myself have blogged about how he has come to represent 90’s culture to the point he has become a cultural cliché. But Sonic is my pick because he represents my introduction to gaming. The first moment I ever played a game was playing Sonic the Hedgehog for the Mega Drive.

(Video credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL3Mbi1g9IY)

The potential of gaming was apparent to me from the start. Ever since I played Sonic, I felt somewhat undersold by other media. I grew up much preferring to receive a game of a movie than the movie itself. I loved the sense that I could interact with worlds, and that was gaming’s biggest selling point to me. I needed to engage with the world in a practical sense and this was exactly what gaming, as an interactive medium, offered to me.

Sonic was a beautiful game, filled with colour and enjoyable. It offered everything that was classically ‘video-gamey’ within its package; the high score chasing, the nostalgic sounds, the collecting of rings, the secret levels where you could collect Chaos Emeralds, the jumping on enemies, and the boss battles, and last but not least, the central character himself running the show. As an introduction to gaming, I couldn’t think of anything that was better for me than Sonic, and I will always remember the numerous iconic moments of the first game; the opening notes of Green Hill Zone Act 1, the noise of Sonic’s jump, the terror of drowning in Labyrinthe Zone. For me, Sonic the Hedgehog was the video game that had it all.

Prison Architect

As my ‘post-Minecraft’ indie pick, it was a toss-up between this game, Don’t Starve, and Subnautica. However, what made Prison Architect win the day was the near-perfect tribute to Tycoon games of the past. I was someone who loved Theme Park and Theme Hospital, and what Prison Architect offered was a modern update of that familiar idea; management of some industry or service delivered with an almost-comic, yet decidedly ‘gamey’ twist.

(Video credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=325Ycb6oy5U)

Prison Architect, beyond that, is an excellent game, and one that even helped me to easier understand concepts used in a Forensic Psychology class that I had at university. It struck me, upon reading that class, just how accurately Prison Architect portrayed the current theories on prisoner needs and their reactions. The way that the game’s hidden depth demonstrated a fine attention to detail was astounding, not to mention just how powerful the building was in the game. Just like Minecraft, dedicated players could build anything they dreamed of, even using logic circuits. Prison Architect has an astonishing level of attention to detail in every little part of the game that you can think of, and I highly suggest watching the YouTube series of developer diaries to show just how thought-out every concept was in the game.

I will always remember Prison Architect for being an excellent and fun Tycoon-like game, that had a ton of depth and imagination behind almost every concept, as well as being just an amazing value proposition for the price that I paid compared to the hours of fun that I got back.

Honourable Picks:

I don’t have time to gush about every game that I consider to be unforgettable; this post has already gone on far too long as I have geeked out about so many games that I love. But even so, I feel that I have left out so many important games that have changed the way I look at gaming, or just were so damn good they left that big an impression. That shows just how amazing this medium is, and how much love I have for gaming in general! So, honourable mentions go to:

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: For being the game that introduced me to fantasy games, and RPG mechanics. Prior to this, I had avoided RPG as a genre and this game made me realise I was missing out.

Super Mario 64: I would have included this on the list, but I feel everything has been said about this game that could be said, and I can’t add anything to that discussion. I loved the sense of adventure in this game as my first introduction to Mario.

Sonic Adventure: As Sonic the Hedgehog was already a pick, I don’t feel that I could have gushed about this in a way that showed how significant Sonic was to my early gaming days. It was a memorable game that, even though it’s aged badly, was really fun in its time and a massive selling point for the Dreamcast.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2: While I truly do count this game as among the best I’ve ever played, I just don’t have enough enthusiasm for RTS as a genre to really count it as such a massive impact on me as other games have been. It is a wonderful game and I love playing with the Skirmish mode, it’s just omitted because the other games on this list meant that much to me.

What were some of your big memorable games that shaped the kind of gamer you are today? I have gushed for over 2000 words on this and I still feel that I could go on about these amazing experiences. I think that you can tell a lot about a person by what games they consider to be the most significant, so I feel like this has truly opened my heart and let you know about a big part of my life. Sorry for the huge post, but I really hope you find some value in this!

The Games I Consider Unforgettable: Part One

One of my previous blog posts was why I wanted to forget about a game (Pokémon) so that I could play it again for the first time. I figured that it would be good to do a follow up post about games that I find unforgettable, either because of the time of my life when I played them or because they represented such a significant shift that made them totally important to me as a gamer.

This list is, of course, going to be mostly just a few titles with a lot of overthinking between each one, as per my usual method. Of course, this is all from my own perspective; games, like any other media, do not exist in a cultural vacuum and suck in all kinds of associations, good or bad, of the world around them. Why don’t you let me know what games you find unforgettable? I want to test out my commenting system after all!

Minecraft

The first game that is on my list is also one of the most obvious. Minecraft is such a massive title, so many millions of gamers play it daily and it has made entire YouTube careers for some people. Minecraft is one of those titles that has totally threaded itself into the public consciousness, so much so that many would consider it more as a phenomenon than as an actual game. You may roll your eyes at reading this, as the block-building game is one of the most talked about, unavoidable things on the Internet, much to the annoyance of many, but that is exactly why its impact cannot be understated.

(Video credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLRwxgccZt0)

For me, however, Minecraft’s big impact predates it hitting the big public consciousness, and is less about the mainstream phenomena and more about the game itself and what it represented and came to represent. For me, Minecraft represented a shift that gaming needed.

Looking at the time before Minecraft was available to the public (2009, almost 8 years ago…), there was a big problem in gaming regarding creativity. Gamers everywhere were fatigued with Call of Duty rip-offs and generic FPS titles, and it felt like gaming was at risk of becoming stagnant. This video, released just a few years later, attempted to pull apart the reasoning behind this fatigue.

Minecraft certainly didn’t solve the issue of innovation in gaming; if it had, the video that I had linked wouldn’t have been made. However, it had started a trend towards innovation. Between all of the ‘me-too’ copies and survival games that came out trying to emulate the success of gaming’s newest darling, what Minecraft showed was that indie gaming was viable. Pre-Minecraft, yes there were a few indies, but not at the level that it is now. I think that Minecraft was the smoking gun that launched the rise of indie gaming to the level that it has gotten to now, for better or for worse.

Why else I won’t forget Minecraft as a game? That reason is simple; it is a good game. I loved it, the charm of the graphic design (again, a show of aesthetic over horsepower), the satisfying loop of mining and crafting, the music and the sense of doing something productive, turning what would otherwise be hours spent shooting monsters into hours spent making something, even if nobody got to see what I made, at least I made it. It was a paradigm shift in terms of the trend and in terms of the game, and I love it for that.

On top of that, Minecraft was enjoyable and relaxing. It was a game that understood that games can be played to unwind. For a long while, my go-to option when booting up a PC and trying to decide what game to play was to shrug my shoulders and play Minecraft until I made my choice. It had a very easy point of access.

For me, Minecraft represents gaming in its purest form; discovery, creativity, enjoyment and relaxation, and ultimately coming away feeling like you got something out of the whole experience. That is why I find it an unmissable, unforgettable game.

Halo: Combat Evolved

I spoke previously about Halo: CE as an excellent co-op split-screen title, and that is part of why it is on the list; the multiplayer aspect of the game has been some of the purest fun that I have had with other gamers, ever, and the maps are so memorable I still have the memory of how Blood Gulch looks in my mind’s eye to this day.

(Video credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6T5WHpKK-E)

But the second part on why I put it on this list is because of the time my Xbox 360 red-ringed; lacking a current-gen machine I was forced to play the original Halo on the original Xbox. However, that was where I discovered a love for the single player campaign. For the time, the graphics may not have been at the top of what the generation could offer, but the atmosphere, the use of colour, and the way the sound melded into the gameplay, rendered the experience one of the best I have ever had in a single player campaign. My favourite time in Halo will always be flying a Banshee across a snowbound crevasse at twilight.

Halo is on this list because it is overall a great game that is brilliantly made and designed, and while it isn’t particularly amazing or paradigm shifting as other games, it is still very worthy of praise for being just a good game.

Pokémon Red and Blue

The reason that I blogged about this being a game I want to forget is because this game is so unforgettable. That is a strange statement to say, but so much about the game was so iconic that the enjoyment of any Pokémon game is subject to criticisms of the game being formulaic. So much about the original Pokémon games were so memorable that they created a formula that was as instantly cliché as it was iconic, like the ‘I am your father’ moment of The Empire Strikes Back; if any other property attempted to do the same thing as Pokémon it would result in a lot of eye-rolls and derision, much like how any attempt to pull off a villain being a hero’s father in a film is incredibly difficult thanks to the fame of the given example. This is probably why it is difficult to find a Pokémon clone that truly captures the original’s magic.

(Video credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj8k9ajTe2g)

Pokémon was uniquely placed in the time that it was significant, and is so wrapped up in its time that it has been used as a descriptor for a generation of people. It is telling that one of the greatest fads of mobile gaming hit at just the right age to capture the generation that were the right age for it to become a fad on mobile. It may have been excellent marketing, but I think that there was something so magical about the first two games that I have already gushed about; the sense of adventure, of coming of age and becoming stronger, the strong relationships developed with the Pokémon themselves thanks to the design of the game, the collect-‘em-all gimmick along with creature variety so wide enough to make it vital, the music, the graphics, all of it was so uniquely Pokémon that it became a massive, significant part of many gamers’ lives, mine included.