The Geek Beat: RETRObituary January 2015

Welcome to The RetrObituary!

Written by DC @vertigoDC with Shaune Gilbert @shaune_gilbert

A monthly look back into gaming’s hallowed past!

The medium of gaming is a relatively young one when compared to its more illustrious and established older cousins – you know… movies and music, comic books and renaissance painting (all of which I think were invented around 1961 by Stan Lee), but considering it’s been around for such a short time it’s endured a tumultuous history. Yet somewhat improbably it has risen to the zenith of the popular culture mountain, dwarfing the other mediums by making piles more money, a bit like that small kid that you picked on at school suddenly getting bigger and kicking you so hard in the junk whilst the whole playground watched that you actually regurgitated one of your own man-potatoes.

Not that that ever happened I hope, but the playground analogy is apt because when you get to a certain vintage like the creators of this blog it seems that you can no longer navigate through the once-proud utopia that is the internet (I always think of the web now as something less like The Grid in Tron and more akin to Hill Valley in Back to the Future Part II) without stumbling across some of today’s millennial yoof locked into some sort of fanboy flame war. You know the drill: arguing about the framerate differences between the Playstation and Xbox in the latest CoD whilst exchanging violent hostilities about each other’s sexualities.

Now call The Geek Beat old-fashioned if you must but in my day you didn’t get verbally abused by someone from another country over the insurmountable vastness of cyberspace - I mean, what’s the point in that? When I was a youngling if some other kid was calling you gay he’d be chasing you across a playground filled with unfriendly eyes, swinging his metal bike lock around his head like Chain from Yie Are Kung Fu.

Just your average day at a British comprehensive school.

Whilst I was running in terror I always found this kind of ironic. Calling another boy gay whilst you are running after him seems illogical but hey - looking back and knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have taken it so personally anyway – many gay people have an amazing fashion sense, great grooming skills –  way beyond my means (hence The Geek Beat’s straightness) meaning that if I could go back in time I’d be telling my eleven year old self to take it as a compliment and yeah, go with that neck scarf because accessories are the cornerstone of any good outfit.

But I digress. 

My original point was meant to be that this younger generation work themselves up into a frenzy, slating each other’s respective systems about infinitesimally small matters such as an extra few frames per second (whilst swearing blood feuds against each other’s families) without stopping and taking the time to appreciate how far the medium has come and how slight the differences in the current gen really are. I mean it’s true, right? I own both a PS4 and an Xbox One and they’re so similar in function and form that they could be twins.

So the point of this monthly blog is to go back and look at the evolution of the medium over time; to celebrate a time when the differences were real  – when defending your system’s honour was a back-to-the-wall dogfight because your friend’s console was internet-capable and yours wasn’t – or going back further, theirs had twice as many colours as yours (like, sixteen!).   

Same game. Different Instagram filters.

Not like today when the major point of difference is that one console looks like it has a greater affinity for pies than the other:

Looking at you Xbox.

So there you go; now you know what this blog is trying to do – let’s get to it. As it’s a monthly effort, we thought we’d look at games released in that particular month going back in five-year increments. 

So here we go:

2010

The January of five years ago saw a seminal release: Mass Effect 2 by Bioware  was a major needle-mover and took their tried and tested RPG formula which had developed from Baldur’s Gate through Knights of The Old Republic and Jade Empire (any chance of a sequel on that front Bioware?) and evolved into the original Mass Effect, a 2007 galaxy-spanning, action RPG that introduced us to Commander Shepherd and the dizzying intricacies of his ever-progressing character arc, a deep and tactical loot and loadout system, a whole galaxy to… wait was that an alien nipple!? I swear that was at the very least a shadow of an alien nipple!

It was a mesmerising experience (the game dude - not the nipple or rather the game and the nipple if we’re being honest) and for most gamers, Mass Effect 2 did a great job of taking the great bits about its predecessor and creating something altogether better. From the thrilling opening set-piece aboard a Normandy under heavy fire to missions that ranged far across the cosmos to assemble a sort of intergalactic A-Team at the behest of a mysterious figurehead of a shadowy organisation who was kind of like Cancer Man from The X –Files, this blockbuster sequel was bigger and better in every way – the combat mechanics were slicker and it wasn’t just the gameplay that was smoother either; in this sequel Commander Shepherd began to give Kirk a run for his money as the Casanova of the Spaceways. I think I’d left a mini-Shepherd in at least three ports after my first playthrough and I wasn’t even trying.

Okay. I was.

Yep. Told you.

The game was a critical smash, outscoring the first game with a Metacritic score of 92 compared to the previous title’s 89 and earning platitudes from all corners. If I’m completely honest, I actually preferred the first game: I preferred running the Mako around alien worlds to that stupid planet-scanning mini-game (I use the term game very loosely there) and the story pacing felt stilted – I spent ages assembling my team to get on with the plot before realising that actually was the plot, but in this case I was definitely in the minority. 

It’s arguable that the game’s legacy is sadly tarred a tad, not just by the controversy of its successor, Mass Effect 3’s climactic scenes which turned a trilogy of complex branching choices into something resembling rock, paper, scissors, but also by the fact that this game marked a significant shift by Bioware towards the action element of the action RPG. I’m not saying this is a bad thing: the cover and shooting system noticeably improved from the first game; they brought back ammo clips to replace the cooldown system which added a visceral tactility to the firefights – more problematic perhaps was the path that this led the developers down: They’d push the action envelope further with the release of Dragon Age II the following year which released to an underwhelming critical response, in part for that very reason and there is a sizeable portion of fans out there still who bemoan Bioware’s decision to court the mainstream to the detriment of the tactical depth that had previously defined their releases. Having said that, the er… effect upon the masses of Mass Effect 2 cannot be denied and it remains a much-loved classic to this day.  

Honourable Mentions: Bayonetta (PS3, Xbox 360), Darksiders (PS3, Xbox 360)

2005

Ten years ago this month saw the release of a title that would have a seismic impact upon the gaming landscape – indeed, an impact that is still being felt today. Resident Evil 4 was a literal game-changer, not just for Resi as a series, but for the gaming industry as a whole. The approach of the earlier games which consisted of three-dimensional character models constructed in front of higher resolution backgrounds was jettisoned and along with it, its woeful ‘tank’ control system that allowed you to rotate and move-but of course not at the same time! In my hazy recollection, the dual combination of fear when you first encountered a licker in say, Resi 2 combined with that control scheme was a cunningly designed way to coerce you into doing stupid stuff, just like characters in horror movies. The amount of times that I’d run straight towards a shuffling horde of groaning undead when I meant to fire my gun or maybe run crotch first into a doorframe whilst a mutant dog leaped towards me to zombie-hump my face was… well, it happened a lot.

Resident Evil 4 changed all of this.

It didn’t come easily apparently. Several iterations of the game were created before it appeared in the form we now recognise. (One of which ended up evolving into Devil May Cry) Ultimately though, the repositioning of the camera to the over-the-shoulder angle and a move into full 3D proved to be the stroke of genius that would redefine the franchise. So many games since have aped this configuration, some epic in their own right: The Gears of War franchise; the Batman Arkham trilogy; even the upcoming PS4 shooter The Order: 1886 looks like it draws heavily from the Capcom classic’s DNA; if the highly-anticipated 2015 triple-A exclusive is a clone army then Resi 4 is definitely its Jango Fett genetic godfather. Which then I suppose makes Operation Racoon City the Jar-Jar Binks of the series.

It wasn’t just the improved viewpoint and controls that made this such an iconic release; the setting also redefined the rules of the Resident Evil universe – for the first time you weren’t facing mindless zombies shuffling absently towards you… these were humans, mutated yes but Los Ganados, (The Cattle) these sullen, threatening inhabitants of an unspecified European backwater village were full to the brim with violence and hatred for Leon S. Kennedy, our hero with the impossibly floppy hair.

Now he could pull off a neck scarf.

It wasn’t just that they hated your character and wanted to violently murder him in increasingly gruesome ways that separated them from the hordes of shambling undead from the previous games – these were no mere zombies shuffling along with little more purpose than to sample the culinary delights offered by your cerebral cortex; these were people, mutated yes, but people all the same: their scope for sadism was far beyond that of mindless creatures – they were malevolent – and they could be oh-so clever. Resi 4 forced you to think far more tactically than ever before. There were herds to be thinned and shepherded; ranged enemies to consider and then – just when you thought you had it all under control, you’d hear the gut-coiling rip of the chainsaw…

As recently as 2013, EDGE magazine went back and retrospectively awarded the sublime Nintendo GameCube version of the game a ten – recognising it as a game that strove for perfection and came very close to attaining it. However, like Mass Effect 2, an argument can be made that the mark Resident Evil 4 left on the series it isn’t entirely positive. Many argue that the transformation into full 3D moved the series away from its horror roots and too far into standard shooter territory… and perhaps they’re right: Resident Evil 5 and 6 followed and critical appreciation for the series started to melt away in tandem with the scares. Still, the legacy of Resi 4 is still felt today: You can’t walk into The Tower in Destiny on a weekend without running into Xur, Agent of the Nine and not crack a wistful smile in memory of the best damn shopkeeper in all of video games history. Let’s hear it for Merchant!

Which one is Merchant? And where does he get those wonderful toys?

Honourable Mentions: The Punisher (PS2, Xbox, PC), The Getaway: Black Monday (PS2)

2000

Go back to the turn of the millennium and you’re faced with a crop of games that released in January, several of which could be the one to talk about in this spot. However, The Geek Beat hadn’t played any of them (2000 was a busy year for us – we spent most of the year cloistered away, fervently praying whilst whipping ourselves bloody with a cat-o-nine tails in the frenzied hope that our suffering would somehow miraculously erase the evils that Star Wars Episode I had wrought upon us the previous summer. (To this day we still bear those scars.) So, to get up to speed we fired up the emulator and started cracking skulls with 2005’s Marvel Vs Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes on the original PlayStation. Having had some experience with 1995’s Marvel Super Heroes we knew what to expect: large, brightly coloured sprites dominated the scene and zipped about speedily, accompanied by an array of crunchy combat sounds and funky speech. It was pretty mesmerising actually and took me back to a bygone era where the arcade machine still stood proudly atop the video game food chain and how sometimes - when talking about an excellent port onto home computers we used to mouth the phrase ‘arcade-perfect’ in hushed, awed tones as some kind of reverent platitude – the kind of thing you’d say if you were opening The Ark of the Covenant. Right before it sucked your face off.   

Marvel Vs Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes gained favourable reviews at the time; it was the fifth game by Capcom to use the Marvel license (although only the third ‘Vs’ game – the first two just utilised Marvel characters alone) and the first to make use of characters from the wider Capcom stable rather than rely solely on their premier franchise, Street Fighter II. Although Ryu, Chun Li and Zangief still  made the cut, the rest of the developer’s roster was filled out by characters not previously seen in a straight up one V. one fighting game: Mega Man, Strider and Captain Commando to name but a few. But these new characters, they brought the pain, man – watching lil’ Mega Man take on The Hulk, a character literally twice his size aided only by his wits and loyal robo-dog companion Rush (Part Dog. Part Robot. All Awesome!) is truly a sight to behold.   

Despite being the fifth entry in the series, MvC: CotSH didn’t rest on its laurels either and is credited with introducing key new elements into the genre such as the ability to briefly control both of the fighters on your team at the same time (although this feature wasn’t included in the PS1 port). The plot was pretty standard fare… something about Professor X and Magneto merging into one supervillain named Onslaught. Presumably his superpower would be something to do with making video game writers run out of ideas and go with the most obvious, banal plot imaginable - who knows?

Does it Cap? Does it really?

The game itself went on to spawn several sequels and also earned a port onto the PS3 and Xbox 360 back in 2012 via PSN and Xbox Live. So yay for inter-franchise crossovers; personally I can’t wait until we see God of War: Guitar Hero. (Feel free to insert your own joke about Kratos wielding an ‘axe’ here. The Geek Beat is rising above that one.)

Honourable Mentions: The Sims (PC), WWF Royal Rumble (Dreamcast), Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (Dreamcast), Gran Turismo 2 (PS1)

1995

First of all, the name Micro Machines is not referring to some sort of inner-space nano-technology. It is in fact referring to the kid’s tiny toy cars that were very popular in the 80’s and 90’s. You’ve probably seen them in the classic 1990 movie Home Alone where a cute Macaulay Culkin devilishly places a group of them at the bottom of the stairs – just one aspect of the Gauntlet of Death created by the young sociopath to terrorise the hapless Wet Bandits, breaking their bodies before starting on their minds. (The waterboarding scene from the movie’s climax was removed to secure its PG certification). Remember now? 

The game itself is a top-down racing game hat was released on a number of platforms, including the Nintendo Gameboy version, which launched twenty years ago this very month. There are eleven characters to choose from for your player, apparently all with their own characteristics and driving skills although that never seemed to be the case to me. Spider, Mike, Walter and a host of others were ripe for selection, although Spider was usually the pick of the bunch – with his leather jacket, quiffed hair and shades, he was a James Dean-esque vision of cool; and just like the fifties movie icon, he crashed. A lot. In fact everyone did. Crashing in Micro Machines was fun and unless you really learned the tracks you were doomed to repeatedly plummet to the far-below floor in a Wile E. Coyote style-fall. 

The good old days.

As for the vehicles there were nine, each one tailored to a distinct track: jeeps on the breakfast table was a memorable one, the tracks were marked out with cereal, waffles, (we know they’re versatile!) beans I think, and spilt milk (at least I hope it was milk!) although it was hard to tell on the Gameboy. 

Other tracks included sports cars in the classroom on top of desks with pencils, erasers, rulers for bridges and jumps that occurred from you flying off folders, I believe. Dropping off the edge of the desk to your doom could rob you of victory and the respawns seemed to take forever. Racing the Formula One cars along the pool table was one of The Geek Beat’s personal favourites, dodging balls, chalk and cues at breakneck speeds. (I remember riding on the ridge of the table and falling into the pockets many a time.) The Mega Drive version of the game included two controller ports built into the cartridge allowing four-way pad support; furthermore two of the tracks (including the pool table allowed for each pad to control two cars, (one via the D-pad, the other via the buttons) for eight player mayhem. Oddly enough, the Gameboy version didn’t possess eight-player functionality although to this day I’m at a loss to explain why.

  

The novel approach to course design continued with powerboats in the bathtub; helicopters (with terrible control) set in the garden; tanks that rumbled through the bedroom facing obstacles like chessboards although you could fire the tank’s turret by pressing both buttons together which was great for multiplayer. 

There was also the rufftrux: like the jeeps, but twice the size, they’d rough up your back garden (that’s not a euphemism). This was a bonus stage and was played without opponents.  

The Geek Beat just replayed this game for the purposes of this blog and we have to say it’s still a load of fun. The top-down view and novel tracks made us smile thinking back to when we played this game first time around. The simplicity of the controls and craziness of the courses made this a classic in our eyes.

Honourable Mentions: Prince of Persia 2 (PC), Mickey Mouse and the Legend (Castle) of Illusion (GameGear)

1990

A quarter of a century ago this month, we welcomed in the nineties. The excesses of the eighties slowly faded into memory and as the decade crept on we dug in and nervously awaited the coming of the millennium bug when (according to uninformed journalists everywhere), computers everywhere would be unable to process a simple number change from ’99 to ’00, possible resulting in Skynet coming online and triggering the extermination of humanity. Unfortunately we never got to experience a post-Judgement Day lifestyle where we’d fire laser canons at T-800 terminators so instead my friends and I played laser tag. Usually on our neighbour's roofs. The gaming landscape shifted considerably and early in the decade we saw a move away from 8-bit systems and instead towards the fourth generation of gaming – we’d gather in the playground around someone’s battered copy of C&VG, looking at the new systems’ offerings, salivating at the huge sprites, our tiny minds blown apart by such technical accomplishments as parallax scrolling and the SNES’s Mode 7. There were scant few releases in January 1990 though – Duck Tales released on the original NES to good reviews and the having recently run the game via an emulator ourselves, The Geek Beat can confirm that it’s a pleasing enough platformer – although we weren’t quite up the same speed as retro gamer and YouTuber brisulph who can speedrun the entire game in just over nine minutes.

We don’t know either.

This was Disney’s first full collaboration with Capcom and was interesting for a few reasons, the main one being the level of creative control that the Mouse House demanded from the Japanese game developer. Alterations demanded by Disney included changing the inscriptions on the Transylvanian coffins from crucifixes to RIP and changing the power ups from hamburgers to ice cream – Disney was presumably afraid of upsetting the all-powerful Christian Cow Lobby Group there. Why is The Geek Beat deigning to fill your head with this seemingly trivial nonsense? Well, firstly because it illustrates the iron grip that Disney exerts to this day over their intellectual property and secondly? Because it’s a perfect excuse to watch this.

Honourable Mentions: River City Ransom (NES), Die Hard (Commodore 64, PC)

1985

Thirty years ago this month saw the arcade launch of a game that would go on to largely define the fighting genre - laying down the blueprint for the previously reviewed Marvel Vs. Capcom, Street Fighter II and every other wannabe that followed Ryu and co. (The Geek Beat and buddies always had a soft spot for World Heroes. Remember that one?). Along with 1984’s Karate Champ, Yie Are Kung Fu (which I played to death on my 128k Spectrum +2) is widely considered to be responsible for establishing the conventions of the fighting genre. Although Karate Champ was the first to establish such familiar tropes as the three round structure, and training bonus stages, the combatants in the game were generic protagonists with little to no features to tell them apart. It was like making a ground-breaking kung-fu movie and then realising you’d forgotten to cast a star, which kind of sounds like the exact opposite of The Expendables approach to filmmaking, doesn’t it?

This is where Yie Are Kung Fu came in.

In Yie Are Kung Fu, every fighter was a rock star. Well that’s not strictly true – but each combatant was individualised - characterised with a name, costume and move set that was unique to them. Most of the characters even wielded individual weapons (and were named unimaginatively after them.)

  I wonder how Pole paid his way through college?

1987’s Street Fighter learned from this approach (as recently explored in Ryan Lambie’s excellent Games That Nobody Talks About Anymore feature over at Den of Geek) and created a plethora of individual characters for Ryu (the only playable character in singles mode) to battle. To some degree the characters in Steet Fighter also reflected their nationality as well which allowed the game creators to introduce the concept of a global fighting tournament, adding a dash of glamour to the proceedings – for example, your first very first fight was in dear old Blighty where you battled a giant punk rocker (It was the 80s) who’d try to headbutt you. (Oh, the stereotypes; I’m surprised Ryu wasn’t invited for a cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches with the Queen afterwards.) Street Fighter II of course would go on to refine this process of characterisation and create such a range of colourful individuals so iconic that they’re still going strong today.

But what of Yie Are Kung Fu? Its legacy in shaping the modern fighting genre is assured and yet the game itself only spawned one sequel before vanishing – although not entirely without a trace: Oolong, the game’s central character has popped up from time to time as an easter egg in a range of Konami products and there are rumours that Konami’s Martial Champion, (one of the countless pretenders to Street Fighter II’s throne in the early nineties) had actually started out life as a rebooted Yie Are Kung Fu 2, primarily because it used the same high, middle, low attack system and featured opponents with weapons.

Whether gone forever or merely lying dormant awaiting the call for a triumphant return to arms like some 8-bit, black-belt King Arthur, it’s hard not to feel a little sad for the fate of this important link in the evolution of the genre. As Sam Garboo at Hardcoregaming101 writes in his hugely informative review of the game’s legacy:

‘Among the big traditional arcade game manufacturers in Japan, nearly everyone has their own famous long-running fighting game series. Capcom's Street Fighter, SNK's King of Fighters, Sega's Virtua Fighter and Namco's Tekken all used to be important status symbols and moneymaking machines in the 1990s. All Konami ever sent into competition, however, was a handful of quickly forgotten one-offs like Dragoon Might, Deadly Arts, Rakuga Kids or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters. Yet a long time ago, Konami beat all these competitors to the punch with Yie Ar Kung-Fu.’

Nicely put. At least I’ll always have my Speccy version.

Honourable Mentions: Knight Lore (Amstrad CPC), Ice Climber (NES)

1980

To say that the following game had a big impact on the future of the industry is the biggest understatement since Houston said they had a “problem.” Thirty-five years ago this month, Space Invaders launched on the Atari 2600 and it brought gaming to the masses, changing the face of the industry forever. Well – for a couple of years at least until a half-finished E.T launched (also for the 2600) at Christmas 1982 and (along with a few other factors) undid all of its good work, resulting in the great North American video game crash. The subsequent fallout removed Atari as a power player from console production for evermore. (Don’t even go there with the Jaguar) but it would go on to release the amazing Atari ST home computer a few years later. Weird though right? The industry being both made and then almost unmade by games concerning extra-terrestrials? Perhaps a twisted analogue for the existence of humanity? Look to the skies people!

Anyway, I’ve slightly overstated things. It was the 1978 arcade version of Space Invaders that really got the industry moving and kicked off the golden age of arcades. At one point, the game was so popular in Japan that a national shortage of the 100-yen coin was attributed to the game being more addictive than a hit of Walter White’s finest; apparently it caused everyone to play it so often that the entire country ran out of currency and had to adopt a bartering system where twelve chickens equalled a single turn on the Space Invader cabinet. Or something like that. Okay, pretty much all of that is an egregious mix of hyperbole and urban legend but the facts remain: Two years after launch, Space Invaders had grossed over 2 billion dollars – and that’s in 1982 money – by today’s standards that would amount to ninety-three gazillion bucks! And that was just from the arcades!

The Atari port was well received upon release and as was previously mentioned, was largely responsible for the huge upsurge in sales of the console. The game itself (like you don’t know!) has you controlling a small ship charged with defending the planet from the titular invaders. They attack in waves, moving horizontally across the screen, allowing you the time to blast them whilst ducking behind what was the original cover mechanic to avoid enemy fire. Although these alien menaces had managed to develop the technology to cross the galaxy en route to invading us, it was pretty fortuitous for us that they’d somehow never stumbled across the concept of vertical take off and landing – otherwise we’d all be speaking Space Invader by now. Assuming that their own homeworld’s defences were organised along the same principles, we could have probably conquered them with a couple of Harrier Jump Jets, Airwolf and maybe Harrison Ford and his trusty rescue ‘copter.

They coming right for us!! Oh, no… wait. They’re actually not.

The legacy that the game leaves behind is arguably the greatest one in all of video games: In many ways Space Invaders has become an analogue for video games as an entire medium, as well as appearing regularly throughout mainstream pop culture to this very day. The Geek Beat’s very first video gaming memory was actually being sat down by my dad when I was knee-high to a badger in front of his wooden-panelled Atari unit and playing Space Invaders with wide eyes. Thirty years later and still I'm playing.

So thank you Atari.

Thanks for reading folks. The Geek Beat's RetrObituary will return next month but The Geek Beat will be back next week with more content. In the meantime if you need a retro fix, check some of the fine sites hyperlinked above or check out Retro Asylum’s excellent fortnightly podcast. 

But whatever you do, definitely follow DC and The Geek Beat on Twitter @vertigoDC for exclusive content. It'll do him the world of good, it really will. He only has 12 followers. What are you waiting for? Go on!