The Game Plan 08.17.07: The Lost Generation, Part 1

Posted by James McGee on 08.17.2007

I had to sit out during the entire Playstation/N64 era, so in this series, I'll do a little musing on how that may have shaped my perspective on video gaming today.

I believe I've mentioned this before, but I actually skipped an entire generation of video games. I was a huge gaming fan growing up—it was part of my identity in elementary and high-school—but the demands of college forced me to put aside my hobby. With time and money in short supply, there was simply nothing to do but hang up my controller and focus on more "important" things. But the love never left me, and so during grad-school, I conned myself into believing that I again had the time and money to dive back in. Boy, had things changed! Nintendo was struggling to keep up with Sony and Microsoft, and Sega had disappeared altogether (at least as a console-powerhouse). I had always kept an ear to the ground, and one of the many side-effects of being a geek is a ravenous appetite for information on my hobbies, so I've been able to educate myself on what I've missed. But there's no substitution for experience, and I missed a lot of experiences during my time away. What I'd like to do in this series of columns is just ponder those things that passed me by the first time around, and how that has affected my perspective on the world of gaming. This series may lean more toward musing than my other columns, but that's okay, because I'm James McGee, and here's The Game Plan.

One of the problems with skipping an entire generation of gaming is that I sometimes feel like I lose perspective on things. I'll play a game from the last generation that is supposed to be the bee's knees, only to find myself thinking "What's the big deal?" Other gamers assure me that, had I played those games "back in the day," when they were fresh, new, and innovative, I would have felt differently. I think there's some merit in considering the time period in which a piece of art is produced, but truly great art (and, yes, I consider games to be art) should be timeless. Like a great film, painting, or piece of music, you should be able to go back to a game a couple of decades later and say "Yeah, that still holds up. That deserves the hype." I just have a hard time giving older games a free pass when they're ugly and busted, when there are so many more games from the period that have stood the test of time.

Whenever I think of this phenomenon, the first game that immediately springs to mind is the original Tomb Raider. Lara Croft first rose to popularity right around the time that I drifted away from gaming, but even I could identify her at a glance—she was that much a cultural icon. She is usually listed right alongside Mario and Link as a character that helped usher video games into the third-dimension, yet when I finally got around to playing her inaugural adventure, I was severely let down. Where was the mind-blowing, industry-defining game I had heard so much about? The controls are clunky and imprecise to the point of madness. Thank the Maker that Lara automatically targets enemies on sight, because trying to fumble with aiming on top of simply moving her around might have driven me completely insane. When the whole crux of a game depends on traversing a series of elaborate environmental puzzles, you'd think simple controls like jumping would have been fine-tuned a little more. Methodical game play is fine, but agonizing for minutes at a time over a couple of jumps—all because it's hard to tell what direction your character is going to skip off to when you finally press the proper buttons—is a little ridiculous. The voice of nostalgia pipes in with "But for the time, it was the best that could be managed." Why, then, has the control scheme for The Legend of Zelda series remained virtually unchanged from the system established by Ocarina of Time (a rough contemporary of Tomb Raider)? You can argue that it's apples and oranges in terms of gameplay, but it seems to me if one developer (albeit Nintendo, the most revered developer in the world) can nail 3D controls out of the gate, arguing that Raider's flaws are "a product of the time" doesn't hold much water.

Not only is it hard to control Lara, but the places you're trying to get her to go aren't all that pretty. Although she looks decent enough by the graphic capabilities of the time, the environments she jumps, climbs, and swings around in…well, to say the game looked "dated" would be doing it a kindness. Folks, that game is ugly. I don't mean it lacks the advanced graphics of current-gen titles—that puppy is raunchy by the standards of its own generation. You have 3D environments with 2D textures that look like they were pasted on with Elmer's glue. Anybody remember seeing the sphinx for the first time? *shudder* Oh my, that was bad. One of the world's most awe-inspiring man-made wonders is reduced to a blocky monstrosity with what appears to be a picture of the real Sphinx's face pasted on a square head. Not only is it aesthetically reprehensible, but the muddy, slapped-on textures often make it difficult to discern which areas are accessible, what ledges you can hang on, etc. When graphics start being a detriment to actual gameplay, you have a problem. Again, I realize that many games from that time period don't hold up very well in the looks department. Developers were just getting a handle on animating characters and environments in a 3D world, after all. I'm not accusing Tomb Raider of being sloppy, but rather overly ambitious. Games like the original Resident Evil got around graphical shortcomings by creating pre-rendered backgrounds that looked pretty good, but didn't offer much in the way of interaction. On the other end of the spectrum, games like the aforementioned Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 opted for fully 3D environments with little in the way of texturing. Tomb Raider wanted it both ways, which is admirable, but sometimes you have to bow to your limitations. Given the type of game they were going for, the developers would have been better served focusing on environment over looks. Sure, that Sphinx would have still been blocky, but it wouldn't have been as unintentionally comical as what we're left with.

But, despite all my ranting to the contrary, I have to wonder if my opinions are simply the jaded views of a spoiled gamer. By the time I got to Tomb Raider, I had already played several games (Ico, Prince of Persia, and God of War among them) which owe a lot to Miss Croft. She was perhaps the first character that had to battle her surroundings more so than traditional enemies. Integrating environmental puzzles so fully into gameplay—a trend that I have particularly grown to love in games—would not exist had Tomb Raider never been released (or at least such games would still be in the awkward formative phase that I've lambasted Tomb Raider for in this column). Is it fair to judge this game so harshly just because I've grown accustomed to more polished games that have stood on the back of the original and refined its elements to perfection? There's still that nagging voice in the back of my mind that tells me a great game shouldn't be so tarnished by the passing of time, but would that voice be so persistent if I had experienced the fresh wonder of the game first-hand, in the moment, rather than simply hearing about it from others? There is definitely something to be said for that. Tomb Raider Anniversary recently updated Lady Croft's first adventure, and it strikes me as a rare example of a game that absolutely should be remade (ah, but that's a topic for another column). Advances in knowledge and technology could very likely have duplicated the experience everyone thought they were having all those years ago, and that developers sought to give them. Hopefully I'll get around to playing Anniversary sometime this generation before it, too, ends up loosing some of its luster.

I'm not sure if I'll get back on this subject next week or move on to something else, but I will definitely be revisiting this topic again, so keep an eye out for more tales from The Lost Generation.