Here Comes a New Challenger!

by Marcello Goldberger

Hello Internet!

I'm a native Washingtonian with a mind for pop-culture and media and a major in cinema studies. My lifelong loves are film, comic books, and of course video games. I live hard. I dork hard. I will be contributing to the site primarily as the audio/video producer. Press Pause to Reflect will be wielding podcasts and videos like they were Link's Master Sword and Hylian Shield.

I started gaming as a wee lad and show no signs of stopping. I have owned in my lifetime, console-wise, a NES, Sega Genesis, Playstation, Nintendo 64, PS2, Gamecube, Wii and PS3. On the portable front I have owned a Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advanced SP, DS lite and I hope to acquire a PSP for my forthcoming birthday. You know, that is a lot of gaming systems when you stack it up like that. Sweet!

I spent the formative years of my gaming life being primarily a lover of platformers, especially Sonic 1, 2, 3, & Knuckles. When I visited my friend who had a SNES I was introduced to the epic majesty of the RPG and spent much of my teenage years Final Fantasy-ing it up. RPGs and my love of film and comics have made me crave a strong story and characterization from games more than anything else. As I've grown, my tastes have matured a bit and I'll basically play anything that offers an interesting experience. I am always game for a solid beat-em-up like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden or puzzler like Braid or Portal. I'll play fighters but nothing gets me more pumped than playing co-op with some friends. As far as I'm concerned video games have always been a social experience and the rise in online multiplayer and a dedicated presence online has done nothing but enhance that a hundred-fold.

I'm digging into this blog because I find that there is a distinctive lack of focused critical discourse on video games in general. While there are, of course, plenty of people doing good work out there on the nets I think the more maturely we present ourselves as a group and the more willing we are to critically examine the games that we are playing, the easier it will be to make the industry grow up along with us. Hopefully with the modern tools of blogging, podcasts, and videos we can help gaming move that much further forward.

Video games, I challenge you!

Start Screen

by C.T. Hutt

Greetings readers,

I’m C.T. Hutt, a Washington professional, aspiring writer, and, like my colleagues, lifelong aficionado of video games. Let me preface my introduction by saying that this manner of commentary is long overdue. While many out there in the literary world shake with trepidation over the implications of Amazon’s new gadget the Kindle 2 I’d like to point out that this doohickey is just one of many steps toward a new and exciting literary world. However, this path was not started in the golden age of the internet, no, it all began a long time ago.

Let me take you all the way back. In the beginning, there was Pong. Two little white pixel bars and a bouncing square that changed the world. Players would maneuver their bar so as to knock the square off the screen on their opponent’s side. Doing so gained a player points, satisfying both the early gamers’ need to gloat at an opponent’s failing and the bizarre evolutionary adaptation that makes people fascinated by rising numbers. For a long time, the reward of points was enough to keep arcade jockeys dropping quarters into slots across the globe. Driven to gaming by a lack of social graces and athletic ability, having more points than the next set of initials was all the first gamers could aspire to. The industry responded to their needs, providing them with new and creative ways to feed their addiction to big shiny numbers. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Frogger, Pac Man (who was not a man but merely a shape) and so many other variations, all were designed on the basic premise that getting points was a good thing. Then along came the plumber who dared to upset the balance. In 1981, just two years before yours truly hit the scene, Shigeru Miyamoto’s famous protagonist said to the world “Itsa me Mario!”

Here was something all together new, a video game character that looked like a person, a tiny blockular person, but a person. Gamers now found themselves in control of another human being (sort of). As the first actual character in the video gaming world, Mario needed some kind of motivation to get off his lazy plumber ass and do something. From his attire, it was clear that Mario was of good lower class working stock, not the kind of deviant who would be satisfied spending time running after points. Then we met the princess, helpless captive of an antisocial simian, Donkey Kong. A title wave of new dimensions hit the gaming scene. Now we had animosity, revenge, fear, triumph, betrayal, love, and the entire pallet of the human experience to motivate our digital avatars, video games had become stories.

As momentous as this epiphany was, writing in video games has been one of the slowest aspects of the experience to evolve. Indeed, even on the sleek animal that is our current standard of game, story remains a freakishly underdeveloped limb; still necessary for survival, but often a glaring flaw in otherwise excellent games.

I will be reviewing the stories of video games, taking particular note of excellent specimens and stinking failures in all categories.

Hit Reset

Hi there! Like Daniel, I was introduced to gaming with Mario and Duck Hunt at a friend’s house. Unlike Daniel – and, likely, most people reading this – I failed entirely to grasp Mario’s reasonably simple controls: I held the controller in my hand and behaved in a way that I hoped Mario would emulate, eschewing buttons in favor of full body performance art. When I wanted Mario to run, I’d jog in place; when I wanted him to jump, I’d jump. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the basic conceit assumed by Mario (and nearly every game to follow), which is to say, I couldn’t translate athletic feats into appropriate combinations of buttons. I’m glad we weren’t playing Tekken. It would’ve been ugly. My tastes have evolved since then, while my skills, sadly, have remained more or less unchanged. I am a kind of remarkable canary in the gaming mines – I am sent in to new games to discover new and exciting methods by which a character can be murdered. Zelda 64 was the first game that really drove home my inability to perform basic virtual functions: using a joystick to “walk” in a straight line became an integral part of gaming, and I could not muster enough coordination to do anything but weave and bob like a drunken tourist in search of his hostel. Lava was a hazard, as were cliffs, and enemies requiring “speed” or “accuracy” or “doing anything while running” became impossible obstacles. So now, I appreciate the quality of many new games – Left 4 Dead is stunningly addictive, and everything I’ve seen of Mass Effect has impressed me – but I really only play games consistently if they require a minimum of digital dexterity. The Civilization series holds a special place in my heart, as do traditional Japanese RPGs. Portal was incredible, but watching me play it was like being trapped in a theatre showing a snuff film on a loop. Anyway, I’ll be writing my take on being bad at good games, which I hope will serve as both warning and entertainment to gamers with hardcore tastes and casual skills. Want to know where you’ll die – repeatedly – in the newest Metal Gear? Want to find out when friendly fire isn’t so friendly? Ever wondered why a rocket launcher isn’t considered a “melee” weapon? I’m your man! So let’s hit reset and try again!

New Game +

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Let's all raise our glasses to the start of something new! We've all been playing and thinking about video games since we were wee things, and we've decided that those thoughts are often worth sharing and discussing. Here's hoping you all agree.

As for me, I got my start in gaming by going over to a friend's house after school to play with his Nintendo. We took turns on Mario and Duck Hunt, until he got a Super Nintendo and proceeded to thrash me at Street Fighter over and over again. I now greatly prefer co-operative gaming to competitive, and I'm sure that this traumatic memory has something to do with it.

My first gaming machine was a computer, and I played adventure games for years: King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory. I went on lots of quests. I later played Zelda and started in on Final Fantasy and other Japanese RPGs (more quests!). In college, I even ran quests on a Neverwinter Nights persistent world. One could say quests loom large in my legend.

The first Half-Life was my gateway shooter.

And just to give you a sense of my current tastes, here are my top five games of the last few years:

1. Portal
2. Braid
3. Bioshock
4. Half-Life 2: Episode 2
5. Fallout 3

I've also been catching up on the back catalog of awesome, and would put Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil and Eternal Darkness on that list if I wasn't so woefully behind the curve on them. I buy pretty much every game BioWare puts out. I am ashamed to admit that I have yet to finish Shadow of the Colossus. This will be remedied!

This is my New Game +, since I have done a lot of levelling up on the way to where I am now, but there's still a lot I want to accomplish, and a few alternate endings that have yet to be seen. But enough about me! There are more contributors to introduce, and then we'll really get down to the nitty-gritty.

Welcome to Press Pause to Reflect. Let's take our time, and think about what we play.