Hello and welcome to Nostalgia World this week. I’m taking a bit of a different direction this week, hence the fact that we’ve changed worlds and levels, and choosing not to review games, but to talk about something that is prevalent in a lot of older games, but seems to be tacked on at the end for most games nowadays. I refer, of course, to story. Story nowadays is seemingly seen as an addendum to most games, optional to the creation of a game, like whether you get a flamethrower or not as a useable weapon.
Some games don’t need a story. Music rhythm games, like the Guitar Hero series and the Rock Band series, don’t have a defined “story” in some iterations (other than work your way up to become a rock legend). That’s fine. I’m not going to complain about that, because that’s acceptable. However, some other games, like FPSes or suchlike, do need a story, and unfortunately, compared to retro games, most of the modern games seem to have a story tacked on at the end, as opposed to the story first and then developing a game around it. Which makes me sad.
Take, for example, Perfect Dark for the N64. Brilliant game, awesome multiplayer and a well-crafted singleplayer. The story may be somewhat ludicrous, but it fits the tone of the game well. Now take a game like, say, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. It is blatantly obvious that the story was added as an afterthought, because most people would be playing on the multiplayer aspect of it, and so, the single player was skimped on and rushed by the looks of things. They could have done amazing stuff with it, as well as making awesome multiplayer, but they apparently decided to lift the plot from a Tom Clancy novel virtually, and halfass it anyway
The guy who made this for me loves Modern Derpfare 2...
Halo Reach is a rare example of a game that actually does the story well nowadays, even if it does feel a bit rushed at times. I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, so I’ll be vague, but the deaths of some characters didn’t actually really matter that much to me because of the timing. Some bits were well done, like the first team-mate death being a heroic sacrifice, but then others felt a bit rushed. The rest of the story and how it progresses out is well done, but then, it’s a prequel to the first Halo game, which have always had interesting stories, if not well executed at times (Halo 2 and 3, I’m looking at you here).
If you take a look back in your old games library, you should see loads of games that have decent stories, or at least, stories that don’t feel tacked on at the end. The Final Fantasy series made itself from having massive, epic sprawling tales of romance, betrayal, death, redemption, bloody great big magic spells and seemingly limitless hairgel at times. The Legend of Zelda series, although it may be formulaic in its story at times, pulls it off really well at times. Majora’s Mask for example, has a living, breathing world that changes as the story progresses. The characters start off happy and everything being fine, and as time progresses, become more scared and unhappy and worried. It’s just the little things that make the story stand out. Likewise, with Banjo Kazooie or the Devil May Cry series, the plotlines may be clichéd at times, but they are done well.
DON'T LOOK IN ITS EYES FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
Although speaking of the Devil May Cry series, I do have a major qualm about it, and indeed, it seems to be a turning point in gaming. The problem I have is this: The story, and therefore, the game itself, is too short. I bought Devil May Cry cheaply in a sale in HMV about 6 months after it’d been released, simply because I thought the cover with Dante and his pistols looked kick-ass. I knew next-to-nothing about the game, apart from it was a hack’n’slash, and that it looked cool. So when I got home, I popped the disc into my PS2, and booted it up. This would have been around midday. At about 7 pm, I finished the game. I could have completed it quicker, had I not bothered to stop off and get most of the blue orbs along the way. I did it on normal mode, and I remember thinking to myself, “Is that it? I just completed it?”, which in essence, I had done. Oh, there were a few collectibles along the way that I’d missed, and a few extra, harder game modes which I later completed, but in essence, I’d completed my brand new game in a little under 7 hours.
Also known as Devil May Rock Your Balls Off
Hmm.
It’s from this point in time that I started to choose my games carefully, picking ones that I thought would give me hours of storytime and then hours of replayability afterwards, since at the time, I didn’t have online capabilities and all my friends lived in different towns, so it was a ballache trying to get to see each other as there wasn’t any public transport near my house due to my parents deciding to live in the middle of the countryside (still isn’t any public transport, come to think of it), and as I was in my mid-teens, I couldn’t drive. Some games I picked were a bit of a dud, like Halo 1 and 2, and others were awesome, like Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2, although as they’re Bioware games, they’re exempt as they almost always have amazingly written stories.
But to my growing horror, I noticed this rapidly increasing trend of having less story, and the story in it being quickly completed. I breezed through FFX in about half the time I did FF8, and I completed every Devil May Cry game on the day I bought it. Bioshock, me and a friend completed in a weekend, and we would have done it a lot sooner had I not ran out of energy and passed out halfway through. Halo Reach, me and two mates did on Legendary, the entire campaign, in 8 hours. Likewise with Lost Planet 2, me and three friends gathered at my place, and we sat down and completed it over the course of two days on hard mode. Because we are manly men. We could have done it faster, but we took breaks to kill each other in multiplayer and I also had to do stuff like walking the dogs and looking after the house in general. It took us about 10 or 12 hours to do it all, had we actually sat and played through the entire thing in one go.
Pew pew pew
I know that this is not a new trend. Some old games have a propensity for being completed quickly. The Resident Evil series used to reward speed runs by giving you weapons for getting through as fast as possible. So it’s not a new trend, but it has taken off in recent years, and taken off rapidly. Shenmue lasted an absolute age, and I used to look forward to coming home to carry on the story, because for me, it was like reading a few more chapters of a book. Likewise with most Final Fantasy games, I used to enjoy sitting down for hours, playing them, and then saving and quitting and KNOWING that I still had hours to go yet, if not days.
I haven’t had that feeling with many games lately. Mass Effect 2 is one of the most recent ones, and to a degree, the first Mass Effect. The storyline in them is rich and varied, and there’s never a sense of “Well, this looks exactly like the last time I did something like this” in ME2 that there was in Mass Effect 1, which is why I say that ME1 had the same thing as ME2 but only to a certain degree. After a while in ME1, in some of the side missions, it all started to feel a bit repetitive.
And all throughout the one base that crops up everywhere, only one sound was heard... "ENEMIES EVERYWHERE!"
Then there are some modern games that I like, but I’m not sure why. Left 4 Dead 2 is one of these. The storyline is basic, essentially being “survive the zombie apocalypse.”, and when I first played the demo for it, I was genuinely excited at times. There were new weapons, new characters, and new levels. However, whenever I play it now, I like some aspects of it, but I’m not sure why I put up with the rest. The overreliance on gauntlets, which at first was great because it was A New Thing and New Things are Usually Good, has now become boring and monotonous. I have to play it with friends, and usually muck around, injecting myself in game with 4 or 5 adrenalin shots in the hopes of achieving bullet time, whenever I get to a gauntlet now. Likewise, some of the level designs are boring and repetitive and the entire game has a very… samey feel to it.
However, put me in front of an old game, a retro game if you will, and I’ll usually be captivated for hours, by the sheer variety of stuff going on in a game. Ocarina of Time has you travelling back and forth through time, through gigantic fishes, volcanoes, desert wastelands, towns, forests, and suchlike. The variety of the scenery is impressive, and has a decent story to back it up, unlike, say, the plethora of World War 2 shooters, where I’m fairly sure that by now, I’ve actually killed more Nazis than the actual war claimed for itself. I’m also sure that I’ve killed all those Nazis in roughly the same four locations, a blown up town, Omaha beach, another blown up town, and a blown up town in the wintertime.
I have killed more bunny-hopping Nazis here than were actually present in WW2
Of course, not every retro game has a longer span, etc. When I die, I’m fairly certain I’m going to a hell where I will be forced to wander round Forest 1 from Phantasy Star Online for the rest of eternity, and it will be an absolute hell. Likewise, I’m sure there is a special hell where I wander round in a foggy wasteland like Turok 1. So not every old game is perfect. Just that they seemed to have a bigger reliance on story and level design than the games of today do. And that is why I’ve loved gaming for as long as I can remember. Because I can use it to get lost in new worlds, or old worlds that I’ve visited time and time before, and will continue to do so, because I enjoy stuff like that. That’s why I’m disheartened by the seeming reliance nowadays of having better, more realistic graphics that look like the world through a pot of coffee, and tiny arenas to shoot each other in the face, over and over.
