Why old games are important

My ass is already gold-plated...with my ego!

You replay Halo vs. any other first person shooter, and you go wow! Thank god someone came up with a separate button for grenades. That adds a great new element to strategy, especially in Warhawk. A good strategy for killing another human being is too fire your rifle 'till your clip runs out, and then start lobbing grenades where you think the enemy will be in 2-3 seconds. Fabulous!

Arcanum, in comparison to Baldur's Gate 2, was great for the fact that not only is the space for things you can carry limited, but also the more you carry, the slower you go, and that difference is sometimes the difference between life and death...on the battlefield. Fast forward to Fallout 3 where (The following is taken from: http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=828),
"Not only is your inventory limited in size, but the bigger items like [the mini-nuke delivery system or Fatboy] will actually slow down your movement speed, putting you at a slight disadvantage in combat." This is lauded as a great new addition to RPGs everywhere, but Arcanum did it already. Actually, weight limits are built into the old D&D rules, I guess it's just been hard to implement in Video Games because it limits gameplay. It's slightly annoying in Arcanum, but there's an easy trick to fixing it early on. Ooh...I got that shit working again, and I kinda wanna replay it already. I got a great idea for a magic character.

The factional fights in Fallout 3 between the big corporation, super-mutants, and the Brotherhood of Steel sounds like some good old GTA2 "Respect is Everything" or the new militia vs. ummm...something else in MSG4.

Vagrant Story was great for its highly complex elements system whereby finding and exploiting enemy weaknesses was damn-near essential. Also, the game has a complex fuck-up-your weapon system, where you may take an hour to create the perfect piercing weapon (and slash or blunt too), but its badassery can sometimes overcome enemy strengths so you don't have to switch weapons every time you face a different enemy. Vagrant Story's also great for the fact that no one is good in the game. Even the main character kills his family. Or...I don't know...the line between good and evil is so hard to draw, yet you don't have Claire Danes or Christian Bale doing the voices for the character. You don't have gripping, edge-of-your-seat, badass cinema fights like the end of Dirge of Cerebrus (which was awful by the end, but very pretty) or many scenes in Army of Two. Vagrant story is, for the most part, cell-shaded, and blocky, but somehow, still pretty. I look at SSB: Brawl and think, "But, the details added make the characters look sinister, and the environments look threatening. I like the old, butter-face cuteness more." I look at 3d CG, and feel cheated by how little effort it takes to make, how removed it seems from human artistic ability. For this reason too, older games are better because in the old days, it took more of human ingenuity to communicate a story (Citizen Kane) rather than a computer mimicking life (Beowolf).

Older games can be more easily forgiven. Like 10 years after its release, Daikitana, in retrospect, isn't all that bad. New games have high levels of expectations, and, should deliver as so because they're much more expensive, for the most part. I doubt the original Super Mario RPG goes for less than $60 on ebay.

However, nostalgia is dangerous. Very few games have really cool looking artistic ingenuity. Older games are sometimes nowhere near as good as their contemporary counterparts. Goldeneye was great for its time, but the framerate, explosions that consume the screen, lack of variability, among other flaws make it pretty dated. The same can be said of Perfect Dark, although why no one else has given sims personalities like GrudgeBot and such is beyond me. That shit was very fun. Arcanum is great, but often glitches for strange reasons that sadden me. It also lacks the character development of games like Knight of the Old Republic or Mass Effect (which...um...actually I haven't played that much). Then again...in FFXII, which I should beat sometime, the characters are seen joking around with each other in cutscenes, which is cool, but those fuckers' personalities are shallow as shit. "Ohh...woe is me...my little kingdom...my fervent, extremist nationalism is so heart-breaking."

Finally, older games are important because ignorance of older games bothers me. Like considering the end of Fallout 2 dealt with a group trying to seize control of the US and reinstall the presidency, this comment is strange to me:
"[Fallout 1 &2's] storylines were set on the West Coast, while Fallout 3 has famously been moved to Washington, DC. Not only does that give the writers a chance to start over with a fresh storyline grounded in Fallout's familiar milieu, but it also lets them address questions that never came up in the original games. For instance, what's been going on in the nation's seat of power since the first bombs dropped? What happened to the governmental infrastructure? Is there even anyone left to govern? Hines says you'll explore the answers over the course of the game."

Not that anything will ever change. From one generation to the next us young folk experience the same things as if they were new to humanity. It's cyclical. The music of the '70s is forgotten, but then re-invigorated in dance rock in the 2000's. Zombie films and Hazard movies were popular in the 70s, and now seem to be on the rise again, not to mention the oodles of remakes that come out every year. The difference between the art we made now and then is, or I hope the difference is, that we tweak it. Our art is a constantly evolving process, slowly but surely being improved and twisted in new ways. You know, like the scientific method.

There is nothing new under the sun, but we can always repackage the old in a different way.

May Someone taste (g)reatly of your Ballin' pwn skillz,

L-I-L Beej