Gaming in a foreign land

Alright, so it’s just the UK, but still. I’m only here for a few months, but I’ve run into my fair share of difficulties trying to keep up on my gaming habit. It’s strange to say, given that gaming is a habit some people struggle to break, but the less games are a part of my life, the less I feel like myself.

Yeah, Europe blows.

I’m still keeping up with industry chit-chat, writing semi-daily for Kombo and Gamezone. The NGP looks amazing – I don’t see how Sony could screw this one up, though of course I won’t put it past them. I even got to play the 3DS again this past weekend at one of the public events they’re holding throughout London. My friends and I stumbled across it at the hip kids-street fair they hold at Brick Lane every Sunday. The little thing hasn’t changed much, and while it’s impressive, I can’t help but be more excited by the possibilities of the NGP. I’ve never liked 3D that much anyway.

Speaking of 3D, I can’t believe 3D movies here cost £15 – that’s almost $25. Dates are expensive, and tangled was cute, but hardly worth it. What was I talking about? Oh yeah..

So for one thing, Steam only works intermittently. That’s not entirely Steam’s fault, as my Uni (Goldsmiths College) purposely blocks the ports that Steam requires to connect. If Steam allowed you to mess with its connection settings a little more, I might not have this problem, but it is what it is. In offline mode, my games, paltry as the selection is (I’m on a Mac, naturally), tend to freeze up every few minutes. Steam support seems mostly stumped on this issue, though their most recent solution may have actually done the trick.

So PC gaming is finicky at best. Bringing a console would have been pointless – there’s no TV in my dorm, and the wacky power outlets they use over here would have probably fried my already-stressed out Xbox 360. Lugging my original, 80-gig PS3 halfway around the world would have been ludicrous, and as for the Wii, well, who the hell plays Wii anymore?

That leaves my PSP, DS and iPhone. The DS has seen practically zero use, despite a friend kindly lending me her copy of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. I think the problem is that I’m just sick of the DS. I’m sick of the entire system. Flipping it open, the battery-draining sleep mode, my stupid scratched-up touch screen, dropping the stylus on the bus.. I just don’t feel like dealing with it anymore.

As for the iPhone, roaming is a bitch. It stays on airplane mode 100% of the time – I just can’t risk the charges if it decides to ignore my wishes and tries to send me my Words For Friends notifications or something. Mostly I just use it as an iPod now, and since most games tend to interrupt your music as soon as you start them up, I just don’t really play games on it anymore. I might, if there was a universal setting that prevented apps from pausing your music, but Apple apparently hasn’t thought of that yet.

So that leaves the PSP, which has seen the most use of any platform I have here. I’ve got a healthy library of games at my disposal: Birth by Sleep, Jeanne D’Arc (which has been on my pile of shame until now), Ghost of Sparta, and Persona 3 Portable. There’s a lot of variety there, though I think I’d be playing a lot more if I hadn’t brought Kingdom Hearts. I’ve been struggling to finish it for months, but it’s just such a stinking pile of crap.

I’ve actually got a pretty good metaphor for this: trying to be thrifty, I picked up a pint of Sainsbury’s (a general grocery store) brand scotch a few weeks ago. Imported Jim Beam and Jack Daniels are too expensive here, so I figured, why not? I filled up my flask and went to see a play (a normal day in the life of Mike Rougeau).

Do the math

But it turns out the stuff is awful – and my full flask has been sitting on a shelf, unused, for weeks. I can’t drink it, but I can’t bring myself to pour booze down the drain, either. The Sainsbury’s Scotch is preventing me from day-drinking – just like Birth by Sleep is preventing me from playing PSP. There are a lot of lessons to learn when you move to a foreign country.

I solved the flask problem by letting a friend drink all the scotch. Now I’ve got an empty vessel in which to pour whatever I want. I can’t exactly wait for someone else to finish Birth by Sleep for me, though. In fact, I may just write it off entirely so I can get to Jeanne and God of War – far superior games that I’d much rather be playing.

It’s frustrating to have to sit back and watch a  game like Dead Space 2 come and go while I twiddle my thumbs across Europe. There’s ads for it plastered all over the subway. I’ll also be missing the launch of the 3DS – another thing I can’t seem to get away from, yet won’t have access to until months after everyone else does. And as grateful as I am to have Steam on my Mac, the cross-platform library still blows. Left 4 Dead 2 and Deathspank are pretty much it. The first thing I’m doing when I get home (besides grabbing some In-N-Out) is firing up Demon’s Souls.

I do like to complain, but – and I’ll be honest here – there are worse places to be, and I know I’ll get to resume gaming soon.

There is no such thing as an overrated game

Ocarina of Time is the best game ever. Halo is the best game ever. Super Mario 64 is the best 3D platformer of all time. Final Fantasy VII is the greatest RPG ever made.

Wii Sports is overrated. The Wii is overrated. Ocarina of Time is overrated. And what’s so great about Halo, anyway? Goldeneye is better.

Goldeneye is so overrated. It sure hasn’t aged well. I can’t wait for the Wii remake – I just wish it was on a real console. Everyone knows the Wii is overrated.

Etc. Now, listen. I’ve got something to say.

No game has ever been the best game ever, in any category, ever. There is no best RPG, there is no best shooter, and there is no best motion controlled sports-themed mini game collection (OK, in that category Wii Sports might actually be the best, but only until Sony’s Move comes out).

Likewise (and it may be shocking to hear this), there are no overrated games. There are simply games that garner a lot of attention, people who hyperbolize about those games, and people who can’t understand, for the life of them, why.

But games that attract enough attention to in turn attract the attention of people who like to criticize games that attract a lot of attention – well, they attract that attention for a reason.

And, well, there are only so many reasons a game might attract attention. Some games are given undue attention by the media, like Grand Theft Auto. Some get attention because they’re either nearly perfect (Portal) or pieces of crap (Kane and Lynch); others do it by completely betraying people’s expectations, like Dark Void and Alpha Protocol.

There is another reason why some games get a lot of attention, though: when they do something new. It’s these games that occasion the most hype, homage and hyperbole, and they’re the ones most often written off as “overrated” by those who simply fail to understand their significance, often years later.

Super Mario 64 isn’t the best game ever, nor is it the best 3D game, the best platformer, the best 3D platformer, or even the best game starring Mario – but it sure as hell isn’t overrated.

For people my age, it’s sometimes hard to remember that at the time of Mario 64‘s release, the mustachioed one was already insanely popular. The side scrolling platformer thing was working. The dude practically saved US gaming in the 80s, and it took decades for the Western game industry to catch up with the Rising Sun in the East.

For Mario to make the jump (ha) to 3D was unnerving. No one knew what to expect, and plenty of people probably thought it would be the end of the chubby plumber’s glory days. For the game to be so damn good – that was revolutionary. The simple fact that players could walk forward, or backward, or left, or right, and that it was fun to do so, meant gaming would never be the same.

Halo: Combat Evolved is far from the best game ever, as are Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo: Reach (which I played to death last week – and yes, it’s an excellent game). Why all the hubbub, then?

Think about it; comparisons with Half-Life or Quake III: Arena or whatever else was popular on PC at the time are irrelevant. Half-Life fans weren’t buying Xboxes. The big black boxes were being purchased by gamers who had only recently been acquainted with the concept of the first person shooter. Goldeneye started the revolution on consoles, Perfect Dark bested it in every way, and then, a year and a half later, Halo sent millions of console shooter fans to the hospital with severe cases of bleeding from the eyes and ears.

The jump from Perfect Dark to Halo was, for many, many people, an indescribably awesome experience. Halo and the Xbox brought countless innovations to the console shooter: dual analog controls, recharging health, the two gun limit, the grenade button, vehicular combat, physics, a plot that made sense (more than that – the plot was compelling), ingenious A.I., huge environments, layer upon layer of strategy.. the list goes on.

Halo 2 sweetened the pot by adding online matchmaking, oiling the wheels of the Xbox Live experience, which until then had far too closely resembled the online play found on PCs. Halo 3 brought the trilogy to a satisfying conclusion, ODST was a moody spinoff, and Reach perfects the whole formula. People love Halo because it was different, new, and lovingly crafted.

If you still don’t get it, you’re not trying hard enough.

Final Fantasy VII, while rife with imperfections, inconsistencies and, in general, a whole lot of nonsense, brought RPGs to the Western hemisphere, among countless other accomplishments. Can the value of that gaming triumph really be quantified?

Wii Sports gained the attention of thousands – perhaps millions – of people who would have never given gaming a second glance. It may be trite at this point, but your mom and dad, girlfriend, and co-workers playing video games? That’s significant. It’s a huge deal. The Wii (and Wii Sports, which to many is synonymous with the system itself; “I’m so drunk, let’s play Wii!”) has generated more revenue for our thriving little hobby than anything, ever. If you’re wondering why Nintendo’s lineup right now is so incredible, you can start thanking Wii Sports for the very existence of Mario Galaxy 2, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Metroid: Other M, yada yada yada.

Yeah, I got over it after a month, too, but can you really call that legacy overrated?

Ocarina of Time ushered adventure gaming into the 3D era, much as Mario 64 did for 3D itself. Goldeneye was the first console shooter that was even worth anything at all, much less a challenging, engaging, diverse experience. And four player split screen multiplayer? Get out of town!

Petty squabbling and nitpicking aside, there are similar things to be said about any game that’s ever been called overrated. Games don’t warrant that kind of veneration for no reason, and calling classic games overrated comes off pretty ignorant. So next time you feel the urge to drop the O Bomb, try examining a game in the context of what it accomplished, rather than how your jaded gamer’s brain sees it now. We’ll all be better off.

Northeastern University Gamers Profile

I interviewed students at Northeastern University to find out what games they care about, what systems they play on, and what games they’re looking forward to playing in 2010. While you probably won’t be surprised by the answers I received from the fellas, the tiny sample of lady gamers I spoke with preferred one game, and one game only. All three major consoles received some love, but handheld gamers were seriously underrepresented. Finally, the most anticipated game of 2010 may just fulfill our “final fantasies” sometime next week. Chuckle. Check out the video:

I worked really hard on it, so maybe you could even leave a comment too! Thanks!

Special thanks to Kevin Kelly Kenkel for helping out so much with the filming, too!

“Perfect Dark” XBLA is coming

Perfect Dark XBLA is coming out soon (March 17 to be exact), and Worthplaying snagged an interview with The Klobb himself, creative director at Microsoft Game Studios Ken Lobb.

4 player splitscreen, Goldeneye's levels.. yes, that is Facility, I mean Felicity.. sigh

Back in the era of Goldeneye, Lobb was infamous for having the crappiest gun in the game, the Klobb, named after him. Using the thing felt like trying to kill Jaws with a stapler. Now, Lobb is overseeing the XBLA arcade version of Perfect Dark, the spiritual sequel to Goldeneye, and one of the best first person shooters ever made.

According to Lobb, Rare started out 11 months ago with a brand new engine, porting over the geometry and other core elements, while all the artistic elements- textures, character and gun models, skyboxes, etc.- have been completely redone. It runs in 1080p at 60fps with modern dual analog controls and full xbox live and achievement support, but what’s got me more excited than the new features is what’s made it over from the N64 version.

the new skyboxes and textures are beautiful, although Elvis and his Mayan brethren look scary as hell now

Four player splitscreen, co-op, counter-op and versus, and bots are all included, and- probably best of all- Goldeneye‘s entire arsenal (and 3 multiplayer maps) will be usable not only in campaign missions, but in multiplayer modes as well. The final cherry on top of Perfect Dark XBLA‘s massive, delicious win cupcake is that it will only cost 10 dollars. Yes. Am I the only one who’s more excited about this than God of War 3 and Final Fantasy 13 combined? Who even cares what else is coming out in March? Retro resurgence for the win!

Check out Worthplaying’s interview for the some seriously great info from The Klobb.

Images from http://www.rareware.com/games/pdarcade/images.html

“Vinyl Fantasy 7″: second video game/hip hop mashup album from Team Teamwork is awesome

Update: The links and the album stream are no longer working, because.. drum roll.. some douches issued Jacques a cease and desist. Apparently the letter was specifically in response to the mashup of M.O.P.’s song “Ante Up” and the battle theme from FF7, according to Gamepro, who once again have the scoop. So either someone representing M.O.P. or their label or someone from Square Enix finally took notice and decided it would be in their best interest to silence another talented, dedicated artist who was paying tribute to their work while at the same time attracting new fans to both rap and video game music. Nice job, assholes.

Anyone who wants the album (or his previous two, including “Ocarina of Rhyme”) can send me an email.

* * *

Previous combinations of hip hop and video games include Parappa the Rapper, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, and even more crappy, regrettable games. Thankfully, Team Teamwork’s mashups of game soundtracks and hip hop songs are a lot less insulting to both forms of expression.

duuuuun dun dun dun dun duuun dun dun

Though the name implies multiple mixers, Team Teamwork is in fact the sole work of Somerville resident Tim Jacques, a gaming and music enthusiast who was inspired to start mixing different genres of music by DJ Dangermouse’s 2004 “The Grey Album,” according to the Teamwork Tumblr.

Jacques mixed popular hip hop songs with Koji Kondo’s soundtrack from 1998 Nintendo 64 game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on last year’s “Ocarina of Rhyme.” For his latest album, the equally cleverly titled “Vinyl Fantasy 7,” songs from Jay-Z, Outkast, Ghostface Killah, Kool Keith and more are mixed with Nobuo Uematsu’s iconic soundtrack for 1997 Playstation hit Final Fantasy VII.

The soundtracks to Zelda and Final Fantasy games pack such a powerful punch full of nostalgia and childhood memories that I still listen to them pretty frequently, especially FF7. Teamwork’s albums treat the original material with a loving reverence, and the songs are matched up perfectly with hip hop beats and lyrics from some great rappers. “Vinyl Fantasy 7″ even features Tom Waits vocals for some reason, which is weird, but great.

you're welcome

Team Teamwork isn’t a one trick Epona, though. Jacques also released “The Good-ass Remixes: Volume 1,” an indie rock/hip hop mashup album a la Girl Talk,  in 2009. The dude is obviously talented as hell, and I’m already looking forward to the Mega Man album Jacques told Gamepro might be coming in the future.

Check out the interview for more from Jacques and download all three Team Teamwork albums, for FREE (or a donation of your choice), here.

Listen to “Vinyl Fantasy 7″ below. Every track is crazy good.