The Way We Play

by C.T. Hutt

The very first console I ever played was my neighbor’s Atari; the controllers for it were little more than simple joysticks with a pause button in the corner. The original NES found its way into my home within the year and came equipped with standard blocky controllers which left my tiny hands stinging with gamers’ arthritis. Even in those days crazy peripherals abounded. The original NES Power glove was almost completely ineffectual, but undeniably cool looking, in an eighties sort of way. Long before the Wii Fit came onto the scene, gamers were sweating bullets in front of their televisions with the Nintendo Power Pad which was little more than a Twister mat attached to a television.

The SNES controller was a similar beast to its predecessor, only there were more buttons and the edges were mercifully rounded. I got so much mileage out of that console that I actually wore out the buttons on several controllers. In hindsight, I should have kept them and had them bronzed; they would be a fine memorial to my gaming tenure.

While Nintendo was my favored console early in my gaming career, many of the other name-brand consoles followed a similar development path. As time wore on, controllers became increasingly complex and ergonomic. Vast improvements in graphics and programming technology, coupled with a growing consumer base, pushed developers to create controllers which offered superior interactivity and choice. Initially, this simply meant adding more buttons, but that was poised to change.

When the Nintendo 64 dropped into the world back in 1996 (yes, it really has been that long), everything changed. 3-D games where no longer a theoretical experiment for developers, almost overnight they had become the standard. The medium had added an entirely new dimension to itself and our controllers had to evolve in turn. Now we needed controls which not only manipulated where our avatars went and what they did but ones which altered our perspective on the action. The N64 Rumble Pac add-on brought an additional connection between the digital world and ours.

The Playstation 2 Dual shock controller lead the way toward the adoption of the now popular double joysick multi-button controller configuration we see in all major consoles. Wireless controls have also become an industry standard, further removing us from the umbilical cords of systems past. Rather than sit inert in our hands, modern controllers, shake and pulse in sync with actions taking place in the game, some have built-in speakers for more immersive sound effects, and peripheral devices of every description litter the shelves of gaming stores.

Never content with the status quo, we now have controllers (notably for the Wii) which react to body movement rather than merely the manipulation of levers and buttons. Sony is developing similar controls for the PS3 and Microsoft has been creating a great deal of press surrounding project Natal, a devise which removes hand held controls entirely and tracks our body movements instead. The market for video games has never been larger and the developers and distributors of controllers are surging forward to capture our attention with their next great innovations. Responding to the ever growing desire for greater interactivity, they are creating systems that will allow us to control digital worlds with our very bodies and minds, and all of this progress has happened in less than thirty years. Just imagine what kinds of controllers we will be using thirty years in the future.

Defending the Re-release

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

There’s a long list of games that came out in 2009 that weren’t considered for any game of the year awards: God of War, Final Fantasy VII, and Metroid Prime among them. They’re all fantastic games, and deserving of praise, but this year wasn’t their first on store shelves. Instead of the hot new release, these games were resurrected for new consoles, offering a glimpse into video game history.

The re-release is often disparaged as a shameless cash-in on a publisher’s back catalog, but releases like God of War Collection and Metroid Prime Trilogy are more than mere products of greed. Video game re-releases allow gamers to experience the history of video games without buying older consoles or hunting down rare cartridges. At their best, a re-release offers more than the original did, whether that be updated graphics and gameplay or insight into the development of the game. Perhaps in the future, this will become something akin to the Criterion Collection for film: definitive remasters of classic games, prized for their quality and reverence to the source material.

The other appeal of re-releasing older games is giving a whole new audience a chance to experience them. As someone who only recently became invested in console gaming, this can be a very powerful motivator.

I never owned a Playstation 2, one of the most popular consoles of all time. I played some of the games, but always at a friend’s house. I held out on the Playstation 3 for a long time as well, but it wasn’t Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, or Uncharted 2: Among Thieves that finally got me to buy the system. I considered the Playstation 3 useless after backwards compatibility was removed. It was the announcement of the God of War Collection that changed my mind. Finding out that I could play these missed games told me that Sony had something resembling a plan to deliver that fantastic Playstation 2 content. Don’t get me wrong, the other games were appealing, but God of War Collection gave me hope that I would one day be able to play Shadow of the Colossus for less than a hundred dollars and an extra black box under my television.

I would consider my Xbox 360 considerably less valuable if I couldn’t play Jade Empire or Psychonauts on it, and the fact that I can play Super Metroid, Earthworm Jim and Beyond Good and Evil on the Nintendo Wii doubles the amount of time I spend with the supposedly casual device. This generation of consoles has been the first to really, thoroughly embrace the history of video games as much as their future. I think that Square Enix should probably be focusing more of their efforts on new games than they are on bringing every Final Fantasy ever made to the Nintendo DS, but I don’t mind companies taking some time to make fantastic old games available to us. And I still want that Playstation 3 re-make of Final Fantasy VII while we’re at it.

It hit me while I was playing God of War, marveling at some of the great design decisions and the intricate, incredible dungeon of the Temple of Pandora. It was new and familiar at the same time, and I could see how it spawned a whole category of action games at the same time as it drew on Zelda to create one of the most complicated dungeons I'd ever seen. I wondered how it was that I’d never played it before, and gloried in the fact that I finally could. God of War is a piece of video game history now, and while it may not be a long history, there are plenty of games worth revisiting.