The Red Circle

By Rusty Bickel

Everyone remembers that first Christmas or birthday when they got their first gaming system. They remember the first time that they set up that NES, Sega or in my case SNES and popped in their first video game. These are memories that every true gamer remembers. It seemed like as soon as Super Mario Bros. was released people started arguing which was better – the newest games to the market, or the classics from which they came from. The whole new school, old school argument in video games is, in my opinion, a very highly regarded topic with proponents on both sides making valid points and neither side budging. It is my opinion though that ALMOST NO GAMES (some classics are classics and there isn’t any arguing that) from the last ten years or even last year can hold up to the latest and greatest that is offered today.

Everyone remembers their first game just as everyone remembers the first game they played on Playstation, playstation 2, playstation 3. The first time that they dinged 60 or the first time they got that all amazing invisibility cloak. It is just another point on a gamers timeline. People defending the old school front often preach on how much filler has been added to games just to make them “look pretty”, how much of the “true” gaming experence has been lost because of publishers trying to make one topic appeal to everyone. This is actually true in the purest sense but thats nothing to blame current games on.

Publishers make games that will sell (wether or not thats a good thing is an entirely different argument) but they know that a game will sell because YOU, the end user, showed them a trend in video games. As a whole though this entire argument can be summed up into one most important statement: If Nintendo had the technology to make the game look like Halo ODST when designing the original Super Mario Brothers, do you still think they would have made a side scrolling 8-bit platformer…?

Hell no. The problem is not that old school games are more pure, its that they HAD to make the story and game-play mechanics good because they wouldn’t sell otherwise. Nowadays people can buy a game that may not have the best idea but still come away satisfied because of the overall experience that they got from that game. This includes cut scenes and Wii-mote flailing mini-games, and you know what – that’s okay! People play video games for the experience. And it has been proven time and time again that you don’t need to have a graphics rich game in order for it to be amazing. However at the same time the games like this always offer up something new and innovative that make the game great without spending millions on a thirty second FMV.

This is becoming increasingly harder to do as more and more games come out. So of course old school games were viewed as amazing at the time because there was nothing that they could be compared to. Having said all this I want everyone to know that there are games that I don’t think can ever be replaced. Final Fantasy 7, for example. But that’s not 100% because the game was the most amazing thing ever. It’s because to me that game is about going to my aunt’s house and playing it on her Playstation. It’s about for the first time in my life crying at a video game because I had become SO attached to a character. That game is a part of my childhood and will never be replaced. not because of how it affected the video game industry but rather how it affected my life. And it was all because how the new, wicked graphics of that era made me connect with the experience.

And that’s all that matters.

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