My World of Games

When I decided to relax a bit and watch the news programme on TV a couple of days ago, I suddenly felt the urge to turn on my Super Nintendo Entertainment System next to the telly and play a bit with it. But what game should I choose? I quickly checked through the modules I had: Aladdin, Super Mario Kart, Super Bomberman, Secret of Mana... no, these were too simple. I had loved them as a child, but by now I knew them by heart. Yoshi's Island, Terranigma, Super Metroid... and then I found it: Flashback. I had bought this module from a former classmate of mine, it must have been in 1996 or 1997, and I had hardly ever used it: a few games here and then, but I was far from having completed the game. So I took the challenge. And I felt the old spirit again: discovering a new world with its totally different rules.

After a while, I got to a passage I couldn't find a solution for at first. Although I finally solved it after several more attempts, I decided that I should check out the old video game magazines I had in my cellar. Not that I wouldn't be able to master the game without them, but maybe there were some useful hints. So after switching off the console, I went down to the dark cellar, scanned through the heaps of rudimentarily sorted zines, and found what I was looking for.

That night, I decided to read the whole zines I had fetched; and the fascination for 16-bit video gaming finally got me again.

Do you find this strange?

When the word "gamer" is used in a disk magazine, it usually has a derogatory meaning: A gamer is somebody who visits a party only to play Doom, Quake or another ego-shooter, who doesn't even take a glance at the bigscreen when a compo starts, who disturbs the others by constantly playing techno music using 100 mW loudspeakers, in short: An unwanted element at a scene happening. We display reservation, cold distance or even hostility towards the "game-lamers" and forget that most of us like to play a game from time to time, too, or at least got introduced into the world of computers by means of games.

In fact when I see the video games of today, I am mostly bored or even disgusted. These low-intelligence plots, bad level designs, ugly wannabe-realistic graphics and music with human voices aren't my taste. Today's video games seem to be either too realistic, too blunted-futuristic or too childish to me.

I've never felt any fascination for the ego-shooters that currently seem to be the leading genre. Wolfenstein 3D was ugly, brutal and tasteless. Doom and its sequels even make my head ache - I can't watch fast 3d animations from the first-person perspective with these vibrations that are supposed to simulate human steps without feeling sick after ten minutes.

I can't feel any enthusiasm for the current "top-games". But there are types of games I love. That's why I'm writing this article: to demonstrate that reducing gaming to Quake & consorts is a narrow-minded point of view and to show you my personal, subjective notion of good video gaming. Because video gaming has been an important part of my life since my childhood. And it means much, much more than playing games.

The pastry-board complex

My first computer was a C64. I got it at the age of 5, short before entering school. That was in the year 1989.

The C64 was the computer that introduced me to games. I especially remember Spider (if I'm not mistaken, this was my first computer game ever), Great Giana Sisters, Trapper and Cock-in; I guess these were my favourites. Cock-in was very frustrating: You played a cock, and your chick was about to hatch. As eggs are a very delicate meal for hedgehogs, snails and all sorts of enemies, you have to see to it that your unborn child wouldn't become some predator's breakfast. This posed minor problems to me. But whenever the chick saw the light of the day, it ran to the chickens' house, rang the bell, and my wife appeared and slapped me with what seemed to be a pastry-board. The computer subtracted the lives counter by one, and after the third level, the game was always over. I was not aware of having done anything wrong. Should I have entered the chickens' house before the chick? Maybe this would have solved the problem, but I'm no longer able to find that out.

Whatever, the C64 games didn't impress me that much anyway. Long loading times from disk, clumsy joystick, rather simple gameplay. Although I can't really understand now what fascinated me about it, in retrospect I think it was the Gameboy that really incensed my interest.

A console for watchmakers

Probably I asked my parents for a Gameboy because some people at school already had one, and I had occasionally played with them during the breaks. I remember they were rather sceptical about it at first due to the small greyscale display that might harm my eyes. I have this picture in my head that shows me and my father in an electronics store; he was looking for alternatives and proposed me to buy an Atari Lynx. This was a 16-bit handheld with colour display - a revolutionary piece of hardware at this time. But I had read in video gaming magazines that the games for it were crap; and testing a few Lynx games in the store, I was not fond of the idea to buy this console indeed: the games were too simple. I wanted to play the games I knew from school: Tetris, Super Mario Land, Kwirk. I persisted in demanding a Gameboy, and I got it.

I remember very well what attempts my parents made in order to prevent me from playing for longer than a few minutes because of their worries concerning my eyes. But I didn't let anyone stop me: A certain amount of time was necessary to get really immersed in the little magic worlds every game represented and explore them satisfactorily. Most of the games didn't even have a password mechanism back then, so it was necessary to finish them in one session, or you'd have to start at the first level again the next time, no matter how far you had got.

My father gave me a magnifying glass that is usually used by matchmakers. It was capable of quadruple enlargement, and you could fix it on your

head. Well, it was a nice piece of equipment, and it really made playing more enjoyable. It didn't prevent me from getting short-sighted, though.

The Turning Point

I've already mentioned it: video gaming magazines. I read my first mags in the early 90s. I think the first mag I got was ASM (Aktueller Software Markt), a magazine on computer games for all sorts of platforms, home computers as well as consoles. For some reason, I didn't like it. But then I got acquainted with Power Play, the only competing magazine in these days as far as I remember. This was the turning point, this was what changed my opinion of video gaming magazines.

I especially remember having loved issue 1/92: it contained a feature on all sorts of video game consoles, including a table in which their technical capabilities were compared: CPU frequency, RAM capacity, co-processors, number of buttons on the joypad, maximum capacity of game modules...

I fetched this issue very often and carefully studied it, that's why it soon became worn out. But not only did I know most of the technical data by heart soon, it also inspired me to invent fictional video game consoles myself. I remember having filled lots of DIN-A5 books with sketches and extensive descriptions, such as: "Clausisoft Mega Guy - CPU: 6502 with 66 MHz, RAM: 8 MBit, Maximum capacity of modules: 128 MBit, Number of joypad buttons: 30 (see sketch), Additional equipment: TV Tuner, Mouse, CD-ROM, Games: Mega Clausi 1, Mega Clausi 2, Alien Fight, Kik and Uiu in Outer Space, and 200 more."

Of course I also drew sketches of the games myself. At the beginning I mainly invented jump'n'run games similar to Mario, and I just outlined the level design. But with increasing complexity of the games I was acquainted with, the sketches became more complex. Soon I always had to write at least one full page of descriptions of the storyline and special items before I could start with the level design. In addition to that, I soon became especially fond of the level-bosses in j'n'r games. No wonder I also started placing especially nasty enemies at the end of every level and describing their movements in great detail.

Little time elapsed, and I spent more time inventing consoles, inventing games and reading video gaming magazines than actually playing games. In fact playing the actual games, even if they still represented some kind of magic to me, became a minor part of my hobby. During the breaks at school I played together with my classmates using our Gameboys and Game Gears, and on Friday a few of my friends were regularly coming for a gaming session that lasted the whole afternoon. But whenever I was alone, I preferred reading or being creative.

It also was the urge of finally implementing some of my ideas that made me start learning to code in 1991, at the age of eight years.

I wanna be a hedgehog!

But when I was sitting in front of a computer, it was usually a video game console, not my C64 or my Amiga 500 (which, if I remember right, I already had back then as well). This didn't change that fast, especially as in December 1991 I was presented with a Sega Mega Drive.

I remember exactly when my mother called me one cold day: "Get to the telephone, it's for you." It was my father, he was calling from a phone-booth and asked me whether I'd like to have a Mega Drive. For one moment, I was paralyzed. Wasn't it him who didn't like me spending time playing video games? But then I answered, yes.

Probably he had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to prevent me from playing, and having a console for which a TV screen could be used as the output device was the lesser evil in comparison to a Gameboy.

I remember that at first I had found it awkward to plug a console to a telly. After all, I was only accustomed to handhelds and computers which had their own screens. But I had already had the opportunity of testing a Mega Drive (if you're American, you may also know it as Genesis) in an electronics store, and I liked the feeling.

My first two games were Sonic the Hedgehog and Fantasia. I think Sonic was the standard game distributed with Mega Drives back then. I chose Fantasia as the second game because this had been the one I had tested in the store. In fact it's a rather bad game, but for me it was still fascinating back then.

We had a rather old, but very large TV screen back then with good loudspeakers. It was perfectly compatible with the Mega Drive, and the first time I played Sonic was a really unique experience. The music, the sound effect, the colours, the speed and the rather complex level design - the atmosphere was really fantastic. I felt a sort of "magic" I had never experienced before. I became hooked immediately.

The Sega Mega Drive remained my favourite console for a long time. Actually, if I ask myself which of my consoles I prefer now, the answer still is: my Mega Drive. It was a good piece of technology with a 8 MHz CPU, a 320x224 pixel resolution and 64 colours displayable at the same time, and there were a lot of different games available. Compared to Nintendo, the average quality of games available might have been a tad lower, as Sega was less selective at distributing licenses to development teams. But there were a few top-games no game for a Nintendo console could be compared to. To mention some examples: Landstalker, Shining Force, and the modules Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles which you could plug together and thus create a new game - an awesome idea!

A picnic with Super Mario

After the Mega Drive, I also bought (or, let's say, I had my parents buy) a Nintendo Entertainment System, just because of one game: Super Mario Bros. 3. It had had great reviews in all sorts of gaming magazines, and even Video Games, which used to be rather strict at rating in these days, had awarded it 95%. They praised it for huge complexity, innovative elements and fine level design with many hidden paths. I was not disappointed when I finally got to play it, on the contrary: While we were moving to a new house and my parents were busy loading the furnishings into a lorry, I was sitting in the center of the living room next to a red table on which my NES and the screen of my Amiga 500, which I was using as the display for the NES, were standing, exploring a magnificent world of 98 levels.

I remember having even taken my NES along when we left for holidays and playing with it in the garden, using an extension cable.

The irony to this story: Only something like a month after I got my NES, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was released. And two years later, Nintendo sold Super Mario All-Stars, a SNES module which included all the four Super Mario Bros. games that were released for NES.

Anyway, although I had bought the NES for playing Super Mario Bros. 3, this did not remain my only NES game. As NES games were no longer produced in those days, modules were sold for rather cheap money, and my parents thought to have found an economical way to satisfy my greed for video games.

But in fact I was not greedy: On the contrary, I was very selective. I chose a game only after reading as many previews and reviews on it as I could, and, if possible, testing it in a store or at a friend's. There have always been only a few games that were really satisfying me. Most of the cheap NES games my parents bought back then did not belong to this category. Therefore they had scarcely any choice but fulfilling my demands for the more expensive MD and - from winter 1992 on - SNES games as well.

When the PeeCee entered my life

It must have been around 1992 when we afforded our first PC, a rough-edged, grey AT equipped with a 80286 processor, 4 MByte of RAM and a harddisk with a capacity of 40 MByte. I think my father used it at first to digitalize some of his databases. I was very timid to use it at first because I feared that typing the wrong commands might destroy the machine. My father encouraged me, saying that the worst thing that might happen would be a crash, and then I'd just have to re-boot. But I was very well aware of the existence of harmful commands such as DEL and FORMAT, and for this reason I was very careful when I used the PC. Fortunately we had a Norton Commander like user interface - this made things much easier for a beginner.

Anyway, we didn't have a lot of games for the PC at first, so that probably was the main reason why I initially didn't spend a lot of time with it. One of the few games I remember from these days is Alleycat, a CGA-based kind-of-j'n'r. You played a tomcat who was deeply in love, and in order to make your dreams come true you had to enter a house through its windows and fulfill certain tasks, such as catching all mice hidden in a huge piece of Swiss cheese or dropping a glass with a goldfish from the table. Then you entered heaven seven and had to jump your way up to the lovely cat without being hit by Armor's arrows or pushed by one of the other tomcats. Once you completed this episode, the game started again at a higher level of difficulty. The idea was definitely nice, but the poor graphics and sound effects prevented the game from casting its spell over me.

The PC became important for me when I discovered QBasic and its advantages in comparison to the version of Basic used by the C64. The more serious-minded people among you may think that this was the step from playing to more serious computer activities. But even when I was already starting to program in Assembler and C, at the age of 12, I was very enthusiastic about video gaming and spending a great deal of time reading, inventing and playing.

Torn between textmode and the modern

For a long time, I was of the opinion that PC games couldn't compete with SNES and MD masterpieces. Probably this was because my sound equipment was poor (I just had a PC speaker) and I was mainly using shareware games - the atmosphere wasn't comparable to professional video games with great music. Yet some of the games by Apogee and Epic MegaGames were a lot of fun. I remember Secret Agent, Commander Keen, Jill in the Jungle and especially ZZT.

ZZT was a simple action-adventure by Tim Sweeny, running in 80x25 text-mode. The cool thing about it was the built-in editor, which allowed you to create new games using the ZZT engine yourself. It even featured a simple scripting language called ZZT-OOP. In this way it was possible to program intelligent behaviour of the non-person characters that appeared in the game, be they friends or foes.

I created three simple but complete adventure games using ZZT, and designing new ZZT levels became a sport in my school-class. It was really fun.

Yet before ZZT, I had bought Klik'n'Play as its makers had promised that it would enable everyone to make new games easily. But I had been very disappointed at the lame collision-detection routines and the absence of 2d scrolling. Moreover, it only worked under Windows, which was probably the worst platform for games back then.

Although ZZT was much simpler as regards its graphics and sound capabilities, it was much more suitable for my needs.

The only commercial PC games I bought in the early days were the Monkey Island saga and Day of the Tentacle, all of them by LucasArts. Adventure games were the dominating genre on PC back then. It seemed to me that apart from adventures, only flight simulations were available on the market. I

wasn't aware yet that a great commercial game already existed: Civilization...

In retrospect, Day of the Tentacle might be regarded as the transition between the classic and the modern era of PC gaming. It already had these weird graphics that now are a standard feature of every LucasArts game, it was not only shipped on 5.25" or 3.5" disks but also on CD-ROM, and the CD-ROM version featured professional-sounding music and human voices. Of course I had the 5.25" version, and as I just had a PC speaker, I didn't hear any music. But I wasn't aware of what I was missing until I experienced the CD-ROM version at a friend's.

My Long-Time Favourite: Shining Force II

It was in the year 1993 when my favourite gaming magazines (Gamers, Total! and Video Games) started their campaign for action adventures and role-playing games. The staffs kept complaining about the fact that many interesting games, including almost all RPGs, were only released in Japan, while the Americans and Europeans got to play only the primitive jump'n'runs, beat'em'ups and shoot'em'alls.

Indeed the situation was especially bad with respect to the Nintendo platforms. In Japan, there were many quality RPGs by Enix, Square and Capcom, such as Breath of Fire and the Final Fantasy saga. In Europe, by contrast, the only officially available games series that could be remotely compared with them was the Zelda saga; and Zelda was not a RPG, it was an action adventure. Although Zelda definitely had a fine fantasy-like atmosphere, it lacked almost all the characteristics of real role-playing games: controlling a whole 'party' instead of one character, upgrading the abilities of the individual characters by training them in battles, and being able to use powerful magic spells.

Zelda wasn't a RPG, it was an action adventure. But Europe even lacked action adventures for the Nintendo platform. This started to change in 1993 when Square released Mystic Quest for the Gameboy and Secret of Mana for the SNES.

Of course Sega had to react adequately and, although a complete RPG saga called Phantasy Star was already available in Europe for Sega platforms, a whole bunch of new projects were started: among other games Landstalker, Soleil, Story of Thor, and the Shining Force saga.

The Shining Force saga actually is the sequel to the early RPG Shining in the Darkness, one of the first games released for the Mega Drive (in 1990). But while Shining in the Darkness was a classic 3d dungeon RPG comparable to Might and Magic, Shining Force is a RPG-tactics mix. You initially control a small group of fantasy warriors and magicians that is going to grow to a large army in the course of the game. While the scenes in the towns in which you talk to the people and buy equipment are not much different from other console RPGs, Shining Force introduces a new battle system comparable to PC tactics games such as Battle Isle: You move the individual characters on a 2d playfield just like military units, considering the particular properties of the landscape, the formations of your enemies and the qualities of the individual characters.

Actually I bought Shining Force II by coincidence: I wanted to get Story of Thor, but it wasn't available at the store yet, and as I was keen on playing a new RPG, I chose Shining Force II instead. Despite its rather low-quality graphics and the highly repetitive sound during the battles, I liked it right from the beginning, especially because of the great variety of different fighting classes and the possibility to heavily influence some characters' development by means of hidden items.

Then, somehow I became hooked. I wanted to train my characters to the absolute perfection. This couldn't be called relaxation or fun any more, it was hours of boring, monotonous work. At least it wasn't a waste of time, as I used to watch the news programme or interesting films simultaneously. But in retrospect I cannot understand the reasons for my obsession. Maybe I could if I understood why the young kids of today are so addicted to catching and training their Pok�mon characters...

The Late Days

It must have been in summer 1995 when all the magic I thought to feel when playing games all of a sudden evapourated. It was a hot afternoon, I was busy with Super Mario All-Stars, and suddenly I had this thought: This is boring. Why am I wasting my precious time? Let's go out, benefit of the good weather and do something else. My head ached when I turned off the console, and I was kind of disoriented what to do next.

Sure, I had already encountered the limits of these fascinating, yet simple games before, and the spell had gradually worn off. But now all of a sudden video games seemed to be completely obsolete to me. What a great coincidence that I discovered the demoscene in the same summer, giving my computer life a new direction!

I started laughing at the video gaming magazines, or rather crying. Especially the level of my once favourite zine Gamers apparently was dwindling down like a bowl. Or was it just me?

No, in fact the video gaming scene really was in a crisis back then. The next generation of consoles was coming and heavily propagated. While Sega and the related game companies focused all its forces on the development of its new flagship Saturn, hardly any new games for the Mega Drive were released, and therefore the editors of the Sega magazines did not know what to report apart from constantly repeating the same facts about Saturn again and again. Besides, the last hardware upgrades for the Mega Drive - the Mega CD 2 drive and 32X, a module with a 32-bit processor and a couple of co-processors used by a few games such as Virtua Racing and the sequel to Sonic & Knuckles called Chaotix - proved to be a commercial disaster. It was the beginning of the end of Sega. The company that used to have the biggest share of the American video-game market and was at least second in the rest of the world became marginal - in 2000, short before the launch of Dreamcast, it had only 6% of the market-share.

Nintendo kept faith to its 16-bit SNES while Sega and their new competitor Sony had already launched their 32-bit systems. Thus Nintendo probably dominated the 16-bit market in these days even more than ever before, but apart from Super Metroid and Terranigma I fail to remember any release from these 'late days' that caught my interest.

Sony was a foreign power for me right from the beginning. Together with Sony a lot of other mainstream electronics companies, such as Time Warner, entered the video game market. I couldn't relate to them, I didn't like the style of the first games - too polygonized, too buggy 3d engines (clipping!), too weird and too stupid characters. Although renowned game companies such as Square, Capcom and Konami started developing for the Sony PlayStation later on, I never got to like this console.

Trusting the quality of Nintendo, I decided to buy a N64 when it came to Europe in Easter 1997. But did failed to revive my former fascination for video games. The characters in Super Mario 64 looked too much like what they were actually made of, that is polygons, and I disliked the concept of little levels in which you had to fulfill a couple of little tasks in order to enter the next.

Apart from Super Mario 64, I bought only two more games for this platform: Mario Kart 64 and Donkey Kong 64. Mario Kart 64 was a real disappointment. The feeling of acceleration was missing, as well as the intelligent course design and the fair gameplay of its great predecessor on SNES Super Mario Kart. While in Super Mario Kart you could have a great lead over the second if you were really good, the second and the third constantly keep appearing close behind you in Mario Kart 64, no matter what you were doing. The only thing that is better in the sequel is its battle mode. And regarding Donkey Kong 64, this game is definitely very complex and highly sophisticated from a developer's perspective. But it simply makes my head ache.

On PC I got acquainted with realtime "strategy" games. Despite they don't earn the name "strategy" because they are purely tactical, I enjoyed two of them quite much: WarCraft II and Z. WarCraft II mainly for its brilliant campaign editor - at school we exchanged self-made campaigns just like the ZZT games I've already mentioned -, and Z for its great hectic gameplay. Playing these games over the phone-line was very fun, although I did it only a few times as the telephone fees were pretty in Austria until 1997.

Maybe I've missed some good games - for instance I was told by many people that the Zelda edition for N64 was just awesome. But I don't care: I made experiences of different kinds in these days, in the diskmag and the demo scenes. And these experiences were definitely more interesting than any video game could ever be.

Aujourd'hui

Nowadays I don't read a single gaming magazine any more. With the new generation of video game consoles, a new generation of players and a generation of zines have appeared. No matter whether these zines are called like the ones I used to read in the early 90s or have new names, they are different from what I was accustomed to. Some of them have small children as their target-group, others grown-ups from the lower middle-class who know computers from the offices they're working in, and the majority is made for teenagers who think that they're cool and trendy by buying what the media tell them to consume. It is characteristic that Germany's tabloid for young people, Bravo, has launched a video gaming magazine, and the Mickey Mouse magazine features games reviews apart from comics and stupid jokes.

The magazines have become more superficial. The editors write for the masses, but instead of educating their readers, they simplify things - or perhaps they don't understand the matter themselves. Some of the game reviews sound as if copied from the producers' advertisements. The top of the iceberg is PC and PlayStation magazines which are only bought because of the game-demos on their cover CDs since even the greatest lamer realizes that their contents are crap. I could continue this rant until my fingers hurt, but let's stop this.

I still play from time to time. At school, we used to have a SNES equipped with Super Mario Kart and Super Bomberman until short ago, and there were tournaments in every break. Of course these games are just a matter of entertainment for us. None of us would think of them to be the entrance to a magic world nowadays.

However, there are still games which fascinate me - they are rare, but they exist. I've already mentioned one of them: Civilization. Having re-discovered it on the cover CD of a magazine a couple of years ago, I found it to be an interesting challenge one could play half an hour a day.

But when I got my hands at its more complex sequel Civilization II, I felt the old spirit again. A world of its own with its particular rules that asks you to make the most of it. By now I think to have found out the mechanisms necessary to create the perfect empire, but it's such a complex game that in order to master it at the highest level of difficulty, you have to take care of a lot of steps per round.

However, that's not the sense of Civilization. The urge to create the perfect empire is an obsession just as training the Shining Force battlers to the optimum. In reality games like Civilization are not about creating something perfect, but creating something new, totally new: a new world.

Final Words

This was a very personal article. You now know a lot more about me than before reading this - although I've by far not mentioned every single detail about my world of games.

The most important point about this article: I percept video games as special worlds of their own with their very own rules. Playing them may be a simple task, it is usually a matter of persistence and dexterity rather than an intellectual challenge indeed. But for me, video gaming is much more than playing: It is exploring and inventing worlds by means of fantasy. It is a creative task. Mastering a game is not an end in itself. It is only a means of amplifying your own fantasy.

Adok/Hugi - 10 Feb 2001