Basket Weaving, Orienteering, Tekken

by C.T. Hutt

When I read this week that the Cub Scouts were offering a new merit badge based on a young person’s skills as a video gamer I was floored. We are enthusiastic proponents of the video game medium, but even we will admit that there are limits to how far digital experiences should permeate our lives. Surely the Cub Scouts, an organization dedicated to teaching young people practical skills and encouraging them to explore the outdoors, is the wrong organization to promote the merits of an inherently indoor activity.

A quick glance at the Cub Scouts’ requirements for attaining the video game merit badge sheds some much needed light on the issue. Each required step necessary to attain this mark of recognition encourages young people to not just be gamers, but to be engaged gamers. The steps teach kids to budget their time, to pay attention to the game rating system, and most importantly to seek their parents advice on the suitability of a given title.

The Game Can Wait

by C.T. Hutt

My apologies to all for my recent absence; these last two weeks I’ve been snowbound in the District of Columbia, bedridden by a freakish bout of garbanzo dip food poisoning, and, most recently, wandering through the natural splendor of the Rocky Mountains. It is that most recent adventure that I write about today, but first a little back story.

When I was about six years old, my parents brought me to Denver for a business trip. After the meeting in the city, which I do not recall at all, we traveled up the steady climb of route 70 though the rough foothills and into the soaring heights of the Rocky Mountains. The drive through the twisting switchback roads into the Fraser Valley made an indelible imprint on my young mind. Being quite young at the time, and having read Tolkien’s The Hobbit through and through, I was enchanted. The mountains stretched from the valley floor and reached all the way to the clouds above, like the mountain pass of Caradhras. I had my original Game Boy and a few books with me, as I usually did while traveling, but during the whole ride I was unable to shift my gaze from the car window. To my young mind, the trip was a grand adventure. Surely, hidden among the tall pines and stony crags of these impossible megaliths lived all manner of goblins and dwarves. I will never forget the journey for two reasons: one being the fantastic views and otherworldly beauty of the mountains, the other being a crusty hot dog I ate at a road side diner along the way which caused me to vomit profusely for the rest of the trip.

You will be glad to know that my most recent trip went much more smoothly. While food poisoning was once again part of my adventure, thankfully I got it out of the way before I left. I will spare you the horrific details of my regurgitation escapade; suffice it to say I may never look at hummus the same way again. Thankfully, I overcame my illness in time and last week, more than two decades after my initial foray, I returned to Colorado. I was greeted at Denver international airport by my mother and our charter van which would take us and eight other souls up the very same route I had traversed in my youth to the Winter Park Ski resort nestled in the heart of Arapahoe National Park. As it happens I was seated next to a young man named Jerald, a child of six years who was visiting the mountains for the first time.

Jerald, I learned, came all the way from Louisiana and had never been skiing in his life, nor had he ever seen a snow storm. As I am sure you can imagine, I was very eager to see his reaction to the sights that had so impressed themselves on me. As our van began its steady climb through the foothills, I enthralled the other captive passengers with a discussion on my knowledge of topographic lift and federal policies relating to the preservation of national parks. Jerald had lots of questions, and I had lots of answers and was delighted to be making a new friend. I paused in my discourse, much to the relief of some, only to sneer as we passed by a certain diner and began to roll up the switchback roads to our final destination.

Without warning, a flurry of snow descended into the pass. I gazed about with awe as the images I had cherished since childhood were recalled in full force and made even more glorious with the addition of this natural wonder. An accident on the narrow roads ahead gave me the opportunity to exit the vehicle and take in the breathtaking spectacle in full panoramic. I now have new memories to augment the old and that alone made the trip worthwhile. However, when I returned to the van I was dismayed to find that Jerald was not even peering out the window. Instead he had turned his attention to Spongebob Squarepants: Atlantis Squarepantis developed by THQ for the Nintendo DS.

To my credit, I did not vocalize my displeasure to either Jerald or his oblivious parents. While I will remember my trip fondly, this one aspect of it struck me as being rather sad. Here a young person was afforded a chance to experience one of earth’s great wonders, but instead spent the time playing a game. It feels like something very important was missed, an opportunity which may never present itself again, and despite my enduring affection for the video gaming medium I feel that it played a part in this unfortunate event.

The great journeys of our lives, events which take us far outside our normal routines, are sacred things. They deserve no less than the full measure of our curiosity and attention because stepping into the great wide world expands our understanding of it and of ourselves; this is especially true for children. That being said, there are moments during the course of modern travel which are, again especially for children, dull and restless times. During the long waits at terminals, the endless stuffy confinement of flights, or the lengthy imprisonment of car rides, the human mind begs for some form of escape. Mobile game systems like the Nintendo DS or PlayStation Portable are convenient vehicles for such release, but to use them to the exclusion of an entire journey is a terrible shame.

The answer, as it is with so many problems, is a balance: a balance which adults must manage for themselves and for their children. I would no more deny a child a game system than I would a good book, but that doesn’t mean they should read all the time either. This is a world filled with wonderful sights and experiences both in the natural and digital worlds, and there is no reason a child of this modern age should grow up without experiencing both.

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.

Play by the Sword

By C.T. Hutt

When I was about five years old, my grandmother read me Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in its entirety. That very year, my older brother loaned me J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series when he was finished with them. I was hooked: as long as there was a chance of high adventure and sword play, I was willing to stick my nose into almost any book. My enthusiasm for swords and sword fighting was not limited to the literary world. Growing up on a farm, kids have to make their own fun and my brother and I did so in fine style. We spent entire summers hammering crude cross handles and makeshift shields out of scrap wood scavenged from the workshops and barns in the area. Our weapons made, we would battle for hours, smashing away at each other’s faux weapons until they broke or we were called in for dinner. We must have put my mother through no shortage of worry, but it was fun, some of the best fun I’ve ever had.

It is no surprise that video games were quick to tap into young peoples’ interest in medieval armaments and fantasy. The Legend of Zelda was a huge success, and with good cause. In its time, it had awesome graphics and brilliant game play. These qualities where all but lost to me at the time as I was much more concerned with the sheer awesomeness of not only getting to see a dragon on my TV screen, but getting to slay it with my own hands. Other titles like Ninja Gaiden and the first couple of Final Fantasy games also grabbed my attention early on. They were, after all, adventure stories involving swords, and that was enough for me. The 1987 release of Sid Meier’s Pirates! Included not only a sword fight mini-game but scurvy buccaneers as well; you better believe I played that game through a couple hundred times on my parents’ old Mac.

Flash forward to the late nineties, my cup runneth over. Innumerable RPGs littered the medium; the Samurai Showdown and Last Blade series made a splash in the fighting game scene, and strategy games like Warcraft put entire armies of blade-wielding minions at my disposal. Weapons were upgradable; some of them glowed with magical power, and some of the best RPG’s like Bioware’s Baldur's Gate even allowed you to build a character from the ground up to specialize in almost any conceivable armament. It was a golden age of the controller and the sword, yet still, I was not satisfied. I wanted more from the experience.

It’s not that any of these titles fell short of video game greatness; they just never quite hit swordplay greatness. The player hits a button or clicks a mouse and the avatar swings a sword, damage is then assigned with a numerical representation displayed in a health bar. It just wasn’t enough: guns are a point and click mechanism, hence the enormous successes of ever so many first person shooters, but swords are much more complex. A gun shoots in one direction at a time; the swing of a sword is a much more elegant piece of physics. Its lethality is not only based on where it hits its target, but how fast it is moving, and how much weight you’ve put behind it. I can certainly appreciate the difficulty of putting such considerations into programming language, but without them I feel that the medium hasn’t quite captured the experience yet.

There have been several notable exceptions. Square Soft’s 1998 release of Bushido Blade 2 made a big impression on me. It was not so different from most of the other early 3-D fighting games with two major exceptions: one, your characters were armed. Two, if you managed to score a good hit on the other player with your weapon, they died. Even between two skilled opponents, matches typically lasted less than fifteen seconds. Many people didn’t like this kind of pacing, but I thought it was brilliant. After all, in the real world, if someone slashes you with a katana, it tends to kill you. Also in 1998, the developers at Tantrum Entertainment released Die by the Sword, a platform adventure game where you controlled the actual movement of your avatar’s sword arm, allowing you to thrust, parry, and slice to your heart’s content. This was a brilliant addition to the game, but a difficult dynamic to master. Translating complex swordplay to the keyboard never quite panned out. Both of these titles fell by the wayside of video game deployment, but I felt they had important things to offer the medium.

In 2006, I watched demonstrations of the Nintendo Wii and felt a new glimmer of hope. Here was perhaps the greatest development in gaming since the turn of the millennium. With motion-sensitive controls our avatars now not only responded to the manipulations of buttons and joysticks but the movements of our bodies. A crucial gap between gamers and the worlds they explore had been bridged. Playing the original Wii Sports I couldn’t help but think: if this system lets me toss around a bowling ball, what’s to say it won’t let me swing a sword? The release of Zelda: Twilight Princess got me all aflutter, but the end result was something of a disappointment. Sure, you swing your arm and Link swings his sword, but only in a few different ways. So far, swordplay on the Wii hasn’t really come into its own. Developers haven’t yet put all of the pieces together.

Hope springs eternal. Red Steel 2 for the Nintendo Wii is due for release in the first quarter of 2010 and it promises to utilize the full potential of the Wii MotionPlus, which should help sword play feel more like sword play and less like hitting buttons. Until then I will just have to goad my brother into a stick fight when we get together for Thanksgiving.

Barefoot in the Snow, Uphill Both Ways

by C.T. Hutt

About a week ago I had the opportunity to replay Earthworm Jim. (For you young ‘uns out there, Earthworm Jim is a side-scrolling platform game released by Shiny Entertainment back in 1994.) Back in the day, when I was adorned with a stylish half-mullet and denim jacket, I rocked this game in a single weekend. Playing a week ago I was surprised to find two things: one, the humor and graphics for this title are still very enjoyable. Two, I had no ability to play it.

I wasn’t too surprised at first; the gameplay for older games is notoriously difficult. Still, there was a time during my tenure as a gamer when I was able to overcome these challenges. Have I lost my touch? Have I become so dependent on modern controls that I no longer have the skills? I beat Mike Tyson’s Punch-out for god sake, I threaded the needle in the bike level in Battletoads, I delivered to the entire neighborhood in Paperboy (more examples here); I was a champion I tell you, one of the best. Can it be that at twenty six I have already passed my gaming prime? The sad answer is probably yes. But there is no denying that it is not only me that has changed, it’s the medium as well. While this is hardly a great revelation, I believe there are really two significant evolutions in gaming that separate the difficulty of modern games from the difficulty of classic games.

Graphics

Looking at the mind-blowing graphics in a game like Uncharted 2, it’s astonishing to think that there was a time, so recently, when video games looked nothing like real life. Backgrounds were repetitive tiles and the color pallet of the environments was very slim. Avatars and the objects and enemies they interacted with were bizarre, abstract representations. Determining what a given item was and how it functioned in many classic games required a Rorschach like analysis.

What does this look like to you? A submarine? A lawnmower? A dog? Interesting, tell me about your mother.

The trial and error factor in classic games was half the difficulty. Even when the identity and functions of given objects were determined in classic games, the overall clumsiness of early systems made success or failure a question of a few pixels. Rudimentary graphics made mistakes on the part of the player easier in the same way that rudimentary hand grenades made it easier to blow oneself up.

Programming

Half-Life 2 is everything I’ve ever wanted from a first person shooter. Like most FPS games it involves a good deal of blasting a large number of baddies that have equivalent abilities to you. When Combine troopers shoot you, you get hurt. When you shoot them, they get hurt. There are a lot of them, and one of you, but if you play your cards right, you can blast your way to victory. It’s not a perfect match up, but it feels fair. No matter how bad a situation gets, you can always find your way out of it by out maneuvering or out thinking your opponents

In the classic side scrolling shooter Contra things are not so equitable. Enemy spawns are pre-set, but just random enough so that occasionally, in the constant flurry of bullets, fireballs, and pointy sticks your avatar will find themselves in a position where no amount jumping, ducking, or dodging will save you. Call it “extreme difficulty” if you want to, but I chalk up this kind of scenario to poor design.

Newer games have embraced a gentler learning curve than the classic games that I grew up on. Games that introduce challenge steadily, allowing the player to adapt along with the gameplay, have become the gold standard of the modern age of gaming. A few games had this right from the start: most notably, Super Mario Bros. and other early Nintendo titles showed a very forward-thinking design aesthetic and learning curve. But for the most part, games beat us to a pulp and we liked it, because that’s the way it was.

The classic games that I grew up on had many other limitations, but I would never slight their contribution to the medium. While I may have grown soft in my “old” age, I am continually impressed at how far interactive media has progressed. Programmers of classic games did the best they could with what they had, and while their games may be nearly impossible by today’s standards I do take a measure of pride that I got to play them in their heyday. I may not be able to tell my grandchildren that I fought in a great war or endured an economic depression (although we are pretty close), but I will be able to tell them that I was there at the very beginning of an artistic revolution.

Five Stars on a Song Your Mother Should Know

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

“I’ve seen enough things that should never have become art become art that this looks like a prime candidate to me if ever there was one. Rock ’n’ roll, or the Beatles, started as just sort of hillbilly music, just a passing phase, but now it’s revered as an art form because so much has been done in it. Same with comics, and I think same with video games.”

-Paul McCartney

I was raised, like many of my generation, on balanced meals and The Beatles. Even though they had stopped making music by the time I was born, they were of such great importance to my mother that a deep love of the band was passed on to me, which makes playing The Beatles: Rock Band a total joy.

There are some who claim that they don’t like The Beatles. To that I say: poppycock! The Beatles have such a large and varied library of songs and such a palatable sound that I find it hard to believe that anyone would reject them out of anything other than pointlessly hip iconoclasm. Whether one is a Beatles fan or not, it is hard to deny that The Beatles formed the foundation of pop and rock music today. So much of what we take for granted now, like verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus song structure and three minute singles for radio play, was set into place by The Beatles over their wildly successful career. They changed music. They made rock and roll popular across the universe.

This last week, The Beatles: Rock Band was released by Harmonix, the creators of the original Guitar Hero and Rock Band (the new Guitar Hero games are now made by rival company Neversoft). Unlike other music games focused on individual bands, The Beatles: Rock Band only uses tracks performed by the titular band, and does not include any covers or music inspired by the band. In opting for such a narrow focus, Harmonix beautifully reconstructs and mythologizes the career of The Beatles, from the Ed Sullivan Show to the final rooftop concert in London. The game provides plenty of material for new and old fans alike, through beautiful visual representations of songs, animated interludes, and unlockable secrets. By progressing through the game, players will find rarities like the 1963 Beatles Christmas Record or an early video of the band goofing around on a train during their first US tour. The love and care that has gone into the crafting of this game is abundantly clear. The people at Harmonix are incredible talents as well as enormous fans.

While The Beatles: Rock Band is primarily a beautiful tribute to a well-loved band, it is also designed to bridge the gap between two generations. The game explains itself to those unfamiliar with music games and their new controllers, even going so far as to include a sheet that explains how to hook up a console to the internet to download songs. The “Easy” mode of gameplay automatically makes it impossible to fail a given song, and it includes a training mode for the drums. In a way, much like The Beatles taught a generation about a new kind of music, The Beatles: Rock Band is now teaching them a new language, one familiar to those of us who have played music games before. I get the sense that video game fans the world over are hoping that this game will continue to bridge the gap between video games and popular culture, pushing the medium further into the mainstream.

When The Beatles first came onto the scene, they changed the world of music forever. Having risen in popularity throughout the 40s and 50s, Rock and roll was not a new genre, but when The Beatles rose to fame it was clear that rock and roll was a worldwide cultural phenomenon. Similarly, video games have been gaining traction in recent years, becoming more and more a part of popular culture. Does The Beatles: Rock Band do for video games what The Beatles did for music? With the music game genre losing some of its initial luster and sales, one can’t help but wonder whether The Beatles: Rock Band is the Ed Sullivan Show for video games as a whole, or the rooftop concert for the music game genre. The Beatles and video games have come a long way over the years. It’s good to see them come together, right now, and so spectacularly.

Batman: The Best Around

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

If my fifteen-year-old self had been asked to describe the ideal video game, I might have come up with something a lot like Batman: Arkham Asylum. It has all the elements a Batman game ought to have: crowd combat, stealth takedowns, even a little detective work. And it all works because the developers, Rocksteady, didn’t simply look to other games for their mechanics. Unlike in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which shamelessly apes God of War, Batman: Arkham Asylum uses unique mechanics and a by-the-comic-books approach to more accurately convey what it feels like to be Batman.

Combat has Batman whizzing from one opponent to the next, using timely button presses to counter incoming attacks, flip over the heads of opponents, and stun others. Even with a large number of thugs attacking, Batman is more than capable of holding his own. As it should be. When the enemies have guns, he takes a different approach. Sneaking around the room, swinging from a gargoyle to gargoyle, this is where the gameplay really shines. There’s no rote memorization of patrol patterns to learn here. Batman just watches until someone wanders off by themselves, and takes them down one by one. By the time there’s only one thug left, he’s panicked and his heart is racing, shooting at any noise he hears.

The plot of Batman: Arkham Asylum revolves around typical villainy by the Joker, made interesting mostly by the setting and clever use of Batman villains. How better to introduce a variety of Batman references and characters than by setting the game in the madhouse where all the Batman villains are kept? The island where Arkham Asylum sits is one of the big stars of the game, presenting a Metroid-esque level of exploration and discovery through the dark halls of the madhouse. And Joker isn’t the only member of the rogue’s gallery to make an appearance; Killer Croc, Harley Quinn and others show up, and my personal favorite Batman villain has some of the most surprising, incredible sequences in the game. I’d love to discuss them, but I wouldn’t want to spoil it.

My one complaint about the villainous cast is its relatively small size. While many villains have small cameos or references worked into the game, the asylum offers so many possibilities for villainous encounters that the absence of some major figures seems glaring. Then again, Batman villains spend about as much time broken out of Arkham as they do in it, so maybe they’re just saving a crew for the sequel.

There are some very clever touches done to make some video game clichés work in the Batman universe. The collectible items in the game, for example, are all riddles or objects left by the Riddler. Not only does it make sense for the Riddler to want to leave strange puzzles and clues all over the island, they even serve a purpose, both in experience gained to go towards a variety of skills and upgrades, and the ultimate goal of apprehending the Riddler. What is normally a tired means of extending gameplay is thus turned into something that actually makes the player feel like Batman.

The fifteen-year-old version of me would have called this game the greatest of all time. Over the years, I’ve come to look for more from my games than just a good time and some great mechanics, and I realize that my affection for the Batman character likely clouds my judgment. But Rocksteady have done something truly impressive here: they’ve created a game that accurately portrays the character, aesthetic and world of a superhero, and while the game has some issues (I agree that the final boss sequence is pretty silly), there are no faults glaring enough to spoil the experience. While the bar was not set incredibly high (superhero games are typically quite awful), they’ve easily made the best superhero game of all time. And for several days this past weekend, I felt like I was fifteen again, having a great time being Batman, just like I’ve always wanted. Hopefully this game will sell well, showing video game developers everywhere that when the superheroes we love are finally given the treatment they deserve, critics and gamers alike are thrilled.

Dearly Bereaved

By C.T. Hutt

We are gathered here today to pay our respects to the dearly departed American arcade. In a generation defined by its lightning adaptation to new and wonderful technologies, let us take a moment to remember and mourn the passing of an era, and the demise of one more nostalgic piece of our collective childhoods. Fare thee well, American arcade, you will be missed.

Let’s reflect on some of the good times we shared. Why, when I was but a lad I distinctly remember the food court in my local mall. There, nestled between the Arby’s and the Orange Julius, a neon passage opened into a world where, for a brief few moments, young gamers could immerse themselves in any number of fantastic realms. After hastily scarfing down my fast food lunch I would beg my parents for quarters so that I might enter that wonderful door and join my peers in gaming bliss. I remember the resigned look on my mother’s face as she fished out coins from her purse and put them into my eager hands. It was a look of bemused confusion; she was happy to see me eager and excited about my hobby, but bewildered as to why I sought so desperately to spend time in the digital cacophony of those electronic coliseums.

My fare in hand, I would dash away, through the gate and into the heart of what was then the pinnacle of gamerdom. Flush with cash, my choices were varied: I could be a knight in King Arthur’s court, a combatant in an inter-dimensional fighting tournament, a star ship pilot, anything. The siren call of the toys behind the glass of the ticket exchange counter often tempted me toward less traditional gaming fare such as ski-ball or whack-a-gator, but my true calling was the shooters. Lethal Enforcer, Jurassic Park, Time Crisis, Area 51, Revolution X, and of course House of the Dead, I ruled them all. No matter what the scenario the game presented I always pretended I was a steely eyed Clint Eastwood.

In addition to the games, the arcade was home to some interesting characters: the surly ex-con janitor, Mr. Untouchable at the Mortal Kombat controls, the hyper kid who gave lots of uninvited advice, and so many more. The person that really stands out in my memory is the manager/childbouncer. This curmudgeonly individual had actually found himself a career where he could boss kids around for most of the day. When your supply of quarters was exhausted it didn’t take long before his gaze started to follow you around the room. This was especially true if you did what I used to do and went searching through the coin return slots in the various machines in hopes of finding one more quarter.

What was it about the arcade experience that dragged me in there time and time again? Was it the access to better graphics and game play? Was it simply the over-stimulation of neon signs, Technicolor carpeting, and blaring sound effects? It’s probably some combination of all of those things, but as I look back on those experiences I like to think that it all meant something more. While video games were created in the early 70’s it wasn’t until we, the children of the eighties, began to take an interest that they really took off. The arcades were the birthplace of video gaming; without the profits generated by those brick and mortar coin receptacles modern gaming would not exist in the form we know it today. I like to think that even though I was too young to understand why, I went to the arcades because they represented something that belonged to me, to us, to our generation.

But all things must pass. The screen doors have rolled down for the last time at many arcades in the United States. The pin ball machines are in disrepair, the whack-a-gators gather dust, and the screens are silent. Gaming has moved on, out of the food courts and strip malls and into our homes. As each new generation of console brings a greater palate of sights and sounds to our living rooms, names like Neo-Geo and Midway fade from memory. It was a natural progression, but it still feels strangely sad to see arcades slip away. While they may have been designed to overwhelm our senses and drain us of our hard-won pocket change, I for one will always think back on them fondly, as shining doors to an exciting new world.