PIXELS OR DEATH

The year was 1996.  Bill Clinton was just finishing his first term as President.  I was oohing and aaahing over the brand new Nintendo 64, and the equally impressive Super Mario 64.  Starcraft was still a year away.  And development began on Duke Nukem Forever. 

15 years, 2 United States Presidents, and 2 generations of consoles later, Duke Nukem Forever finally emerged.  But instead of a game with 15 years of development time behind it, a game which should have been combed over so many times that it should have been perfect, we instead were treated to a slapdash, archaic mess that seems like it only begrudginly accepts the current generation of video game development.  Duke Nukem is a game that’s very much situated in the 90’s - it’s irreverent for the sake of it, and the shooter mechanics have been done (and done much better) by other games.  The sexism and chest-thumping machismo that was viewed as ”hardcore” in the 90’s is now borderline offensive today.  There was literally no reason for this game to see the light of day, and yet $60 later, here we sit.

Actual Duke Nukem Forever screenshot, circa 1996

To be fair to Gearbox, this article is not a review of Duke Nukem Forever (thankfully).  I’m merely using that game as a notable example to highlight an issue that underpins much of gaming today.  Was Duke Forever bought up by hoardes of 12 year old fans, eager for the next big shooter to fill the gap between Call of Duty: Modern Warfare iterations?  Maybe some, but Duke’s primary audience was people who played older Duke Nukem games.  In fact, the developers were aware of this, and shamelessly promoted it as such.  At the end of the day, Duke is a product of devs and publishers cashing in on our nostalgia as gamers.

Despite the recent “casual gamer revolution”, the large majority of gamers are people like me who have been playing games for most of their lives.  While as an adult, games are a legitimate form of media (and I swear, I only play games now for research purposes…right), as a child, the games you play take on a magical quality.  As a 7 year old, you’re totally blown away by every little detail of your games, from using the feather cape to soar across levels in Super Mario World to trouncing M. Bison with a fierce shoryuken in Street Fighter II.  It’s not that the games were better when you were a child (although lets face it - the 8 and 16-bit eras are home to some badass games), we just remember them so damn fondly that nothing we’ve played since can compare.

It seems like developers have been leveraging this gamer nostalgia as a strategy.  Rather than create new games to innovate and redefine the gaming formula, common practice is to simply emulate the old way of doing things.  Thus, instead of actually having to make better games, companies can just recreate the games we played as kids, and by extension, recreate that same feeling of joy.  It’s a cheap tactic - instead of gaming innovation, we get lazy game-making that tries to sell games based on history rather than content. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these older games aren’t great, and that they don’t deserve to be played, even today.  I’m just saying that developers are forcing us to keep replaying them, at the expense of developing new, exciting content - and that’s the part I have a problem with.  This is the mentality that brought Duke Nukem Forever out, against everyone’s better judgement, on the Xbox 360 for $60.  It’s the driving force behind pretty much everything having to do with the Nintendo 3DS - their killer apps are ports from the Nintendo 64 era - games we can play online for FREE.  And they’re being sold to us, along with a $250 handheld, AND in lieu of any really exciting new games (Kid Icarus: Uprising notwithstanding), in the name of cashing in on our fond memories.  Simply put, it’s lazy game design that is geared towards taking advantage of fan loyalty.

Come on, Nintendo…

Every time you play a game that’s positioned as a “throwback”, or “preserving that classic gameplay we all know and love”, or play any Mario or Zelda game ever for that matter, it’s the nostalgia market taking advantage of the fond childhood memories you have of a game from when you were a kid, and dishing that back to you at a huge retail markup - it’s Freudian warfare.  And the worst part is, if we’re not careful, if the nostalgia intake isn’t carefully regulated, if we take too much too soon, it can actually damage these cherished gaming memories.  

Playing a game featuring rehashed mechanics from decade-old games in the name of nostalgia may seem like fun when you’re brought back to your childhood glory days playing Donkey Kong Country, but the fact of the matter is, games age.  Sometimes poorly.  There’s a reason they “don’t make them like they used to”, and part of that reason is that the way they used to be was rife with problems of their own. From glitchy controls to uninspired (or sometimes objectively stupid) level design, as game development grew, these little kinks that were always present, but glossed over in our over-idealized memories were ironed out to the point where we totally forgot they were there. And sometimes, game genres just lose their relevance.  As much as I loved playing Sonic games as a kid, it simply is not a game that translates well today.  Not only is cramming remakes and reboots and reshashes down my throat annoying me today, but worse, it’s pointing out all the flaws in my favorite games that I had blissfully forgotten.  Sure, these games were massively successful when I was a kid, but for the sake of both the game and my childhood memories, developers need to understand that sometimes it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

I’m not saying that old games are bad and should never be played, and I’m not saying that remakes should never happen.  It’s just important to understand why a game is being remade, and to assess if the series would really benefit from a throwback, or if it’s just a developer trying to cash in on an emotional connection with their older fans.  In the case of Duke Nukem Forever, it’s almost certainly the latter.  What developers don’t realize is that we’re not stupid - it was abundantly clear that Duke Forever was a bad game, weakly held together by the memory of a formerly popular franchise that has no place in the modern world.  And it saddens me to say, but remaking Duke was actually detrimental to the series as a whole, as when the nostalgia wears off you realize exactly what you’re looking at.  I would have much preferred to remember Duke as the strapping, virile badass hero that he was - not run into him years later at a high school reunion and realize he’s turned into a cranky, badly aging alcoholic with a kiddie porn problem.

Patrick Lindsey is a Toronto-based writer for Pixels or Death.  He can be found on Twitter @HanFreakinSolo, or by email at patrickwlindsey@gmail.com

July 7 is a day that means little to most citizens of the world.  But since this is a videogame site, it should mean something to some of you.  That’s right - 7/7, affectionately known as “Bungie Day” is today.  In the spirit of the season, here’s a roundup of all the cool shit Bungie has to share.

Bungie Aerospace

You’ve heard about it for weeks now - is it a game?  A spin-off corporation?  Has Bungie broken into the CBW market?  Sort of all of the above, actually.

In a recent press release, Bungie Aerospace is a “venture” to connect mobile and social games developers with the Bungie.net platform and community to help them better create and market their games.  Bungie has broken away from Microsoft and are totally “indie” again, and it looks like they’re taking that seriously.  Either that or they’re trying to build SkyNet.  If you’ve ever dreamed of hammering out something sweet for iPhone or Facebook, or just want to give Bungie’s page some more hits, check out the full press release.

Bungie Day Steak-Off

Hungry for steak, but strapped for cash?  Hop on to Halo: Reach today.  Bungie will have a team duking it out with the Halo community ‘round the clock.  Beat them by 20 or more points and earn yourself a “steaktacular” medal and they’ll actually send you a steak as a nice little brofist.  Sharpen your skills as well as your steak knives, because this is only happening TODAY (midnight - midnight PST).  Details and shit here.

I’m curious to see if this trend of making good on in-game medals continues - I’d hate to see what they do when you earn a “killing spree”.

Video Games.  It’s right there in the title - games.  With any game comes the promise of success, but simultaneously the threat of failure - you can either win, or lose.  Yet for some reason in video games this failure has become almost universally synonymous with death.  From Mario all the way up through Call of Duty, most games embody their challenges in a mortal struggle, where we aren’t simply solving puzzles, but fighting for our very lives.  Our failures are repeatedly (and often viscerally) shoved down our throats in a plethora of grisly character deaths, from PacMan innocently dissolving away to the blood orgy we’ve grown familiar with in games like Gears of War.  But why do games use death as the most popular way to communicate failure?  And why have games taken such a casual, almost humorous approach to not only death, but brutal death in recent years?  Is this just a massive case of trend setting and following, or is there something deeper beneath the surface here?

Death in games is so common and pervasive that saying “I died” is synonymous with saying “I fucked up” or “I failed” - even in games where death isn’t a consequence.  Think of Tetris for example - there’s no character to guide, and therefore no indication that there’s any mortal danger.  It’s not like if those blocks pile to the top of the screen they’re going to cap one of your family members - and yet we all do it.  When the screen fills up we all say (or have said at one point) “I died.”  It’s not that we’re just a culture of fatalists, it’s that we’re gamers.  We like video games because they provide us with a competitive challenge, even if the only challenger is the scoreboard.  

Strikes mortal fear into you, doesn’t it?

As I said before, if it’s a game it means you either win or you lose; success or failure - there’s no middle ground in gaming, and we crave that dichotomy.  There are a few games like Chime or Ilo Milo where there’s no “failure” per se, there’s just a lack of success, but for the most part the split is evident.  It’s what drives us to play that one extra level, to strive for just 1000 more points.  The concept of death is final enough to be the ultimate motivator.  Few consequences are as severe as death (even imagined or perceived or ‘player’ death) - thus it gives you a personal connection to your game and drives you to compete harder.  On the flipside of that, it sweetens the reward as well.  If failure is associated with “death” (again, even perceived or ‘player’ death), then to achieve victory entails victory over death - any game would be hard pressed to provide you with a sweeter reward.  Put simply, competing and winning with ‘death’ as a consequence makes you enjoy your victory all the more.  Cuz let’s face it - otherwise you’re just stacking freaking blocks.

But what about the treatment that death is given in games?  The argument could be made that with death so prevalent in games today we as gamers are being desensitized to this otherwise poignant facet of life.  A brief overview of some popular games and how death is handled in them reveals that there may be more to popular games than mindless bloodbaths.  

Death is scary.  It’s an almost universal truth that as humans, our drive for self-preservation causes us to fear (or at the very least avoid) death.  However, our games provide us with a way to thumb our noses at this scary cosmic finality.  Games like Gears of War are over the top with their portrayal of gore and death, almost to the point of being comical.  This pseudo-cartoony treatment of death and gore goes beyond being fear inducing and moves through the other side into the ridiculous.  The effect is that we are no longer repulsed by the notion of being chainsawed in half, instead we laugh at it - by extension we are laughing at death itself, and some of the initial human scariness melts away.  

Similarly, the Portal 2 co-op features overly exaggerated death scenes between Atlas and P-Body, the 2 robot protagonists.  When one of them falls into a pit of sludge, we as players are treated to an overly-dramatized, histrionic death scene (which is made all the more ridiculous by the fact that the die-ees are robots) - when watching this, one can’t help but chuckle.  By adding this element of Charlie Chaplin style humor to the death scenes, Valve has taken the sting out of failure and the negative association out of death.  In this way, gamers are encouraged not to fear death, but instead embrace it as a part of life - the same way that death in Portal 2 shouldn’t be feared, but embraced as part of the overall game experience.

In contrast, horror games like the Dead Space series take an opposite approach.  Rather than try to function as a means to understand and overcome our fear of death, they play on the latent fears that are already there, and amplify them.  In Dead Space, when the player dies, we are treated to a protracted death scene, all 10-15 seconds long, and all very gruesome, of Isaac being killed by Necromorphs in a variety of horrifying ways.  Where as Portal 2’s death scenes were animated and comical, the death scenes in Dead Space are horrifying - they are gory and visceral and make you genuinely uncomfortable to watch.  This, coupled with the fact that the death scenes are so long, serves to make death a consequence for the player to avoid.  Both by making the death scenes so gruesome, and by drawing them out for as long as they do (thus making us wait longer than we’d like to begin playing again), Visceral is telling us that death is a bad thing.  We should fight to avoid it at all costs, and if we fail, this is our consequence.

For as much flak as they take from angry parents, the Halo and Call of Duty franchises deal with death in their own ways as well.  As competitive first person shooters, they are literally giving the player power over death.  The object of these games is, after all, to win by killing the enemy or enemies before they get you.  This is the most direct way of overcoming fear of death - direct, unadulterated, NRA-style empowerment.  If a thing can be mastered, it need not be feared.  Of course that’s not to say Modern Warfare is turning us all into potential serial killers, as there’s a sort of Hobbesian balance in play.  In an FPS, each player is given equal power over death.  Sure, I can seek you out to kill you, but in so doing I am putting myself at risk of being killed by you.  The respawn timer is the game’s way of telling us we overstepped our bounds, and death at the hands of our enemies is punishment for our hubris.  While we are being trained to overcome our fear of death, we are simultaneously being taught to respect it and its consequences.

Hobbes is telling you to play nice

Because of the nature of death, we inherently lack any sort of real understanding of it.  Over the eons humans have tried various coping mechanisms, from religion to nihilism, and in the 21st century we’re now trying video games.  As an interactive medium, we may have devised a way to get closer to a psychological truce with death than ever before.  Rated M for ‘Mature’, of course.

Patrick Lindsey is a Toronto-based writer for Pixels or Death.  He can be found on Twitter @HanFreakinSolo, or by email at patrickwlindsey@gmail.com.  

This past weekend was the finale of everyone’s favorite show featuring gratuitous decapitations, incest, and sexy redheaded prostitutes - no, not American Idol, Game of Thrones on HBO!  And because dominating both the world of fantasy novels and now popular TV series is not enough, a game is now officially in the works. 

An official website went up a few weeks ago, and while details are sparse, thus far it is definitely a strategy game.  In the overwhelmingly complicated spirit of the Song of Ice and Fire series, this game certainly doesn’t look like it’s for lightweights - think Civilization instead of Halo Wars. 

The game is called Game of Thrones: Genesis, and it follows the thousand years of history leading up to the novels.  There are 8 major houses as playable factions, with heroes randing from Aegon the conqueror (and presumably his freaking dragons), to everyone’s favorite tragic hero Ned Stark.

While so far it looks like only PC gamers will get to dance with dragons (oooh hardcore nerd cred FTW), more details will likely crop up over the next little while.  For now though, just watch the trailer and geek out, cuz like, there’s swords and shit.

Patrick Lindsey is a Toronto-based writer for Pixels or Death.  He can be found on Twitter; @HanFreakinSolo, or emailed at patrickwlindsey@gmail.com.

By Adam Harshberger

Adam Harshberger is the founder of Pixels or Death. He currently resides in Columbus, Ohio and can be reached via email at aharshberger (at) gmail (dot) com. Read his personal blog at http://adamharshberger.tumblr.com

And thus, cheap games excite me. That being said, Rift is $9.99 this weekend. It’s a good, if cookie-cutter thoroughly modern themepark MMO. I wrote a review of it for CPUGamer a few months back.

It was also the first (and only, sadly) game I got for free as a “games journalist”. That needs to happen more.

Haha get it - it’s a bad pun.  Because it’s the middle of the month.

Moving on…I understand that occasionally it seems like there’s a lot of hate flying around the pages of Pixels or Death, accompianied by hair-pulling, swearing, and a bit of crying (what?).  It’s enough to lead our readers to wonder “what do these guys like?”  Well, in an attempt to answer that question I bring you Midterm Selections - where I fill you in on a handful of the games I happen to be playing, and tell you about how awesome I think they are.  Get ready to feel the love…

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes (XBLA)
I played this to death on the DS, and I was ecstatic to see it randomly ported to XBLA one day.  In a nutshell, think Dr. Mario meets Magic: The Gathering, though in reality this game is so much more.  Yes, it’s a puzzler at its core, but it’s got enough strategy, RPG elements, levelling, and gear (oh god how I love gear) to make me totally geek out.  

If you’ve ever wondered how a game that consists largely of pattern recognition and color matching could ever be fun, this is it.  The way to make pattern recognition and color matching fun is to pit you against someone else who’s doing it at the same time, and to turn it into a battle for your very life.  Don’t let the adorable little sprites fool you - they’re bloodthirsty little fuckers, and if you’re not careful with your army you’ll end up a snack for a purple zombie.

Magic: The Gathering 2012 (XBLA)
Dirty secret time: I’m a big fan of Magic: The Gathering.  Porting it to Xbox just means that now I can play whenever I want, without getting rejected and humiliated by my friends when I ask them to play.

Simply put, if you hate Magic or TCGs in general, then chances are you won’t be dying to play this, but if you like the game, or have been curious to try it out this is a great way to play.  As an anal retentive micro-manager I’d prefer a bit more deck customization, but for 800 MS points this is a great little find.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords (PC)
That’s right - a game so awesome it has 2 colons in its title.  Star Wars + RPG = instant hotness for me, so I try and play a KOTOR game every couple years or so just to revel in its glory.  The fact that it’s one of the few Star Wars iterations that Lucas hasn’t raped yet sure helps too.

That’s this months er…workload.  It’s a slow month, so it’s all arcade titles and old games for me.  Check ‘em out if you haven’t already, and feel free to share some of your favorites with us for massive street cred. 

I’m calling it: if this Harry Potter MMORPG thing turns out to be a real MMORPG and not some weird social network mini-game clusterfuck, then we might have a WoW killer on our hands.

Not only is the Potter-verse uncannily well suited for an MMO (conspiracy!), but the fans of the game are legion and rabid. And they’re young. Young people like games. I can feel it in my bones. Before long, the MMORPG-sphere is going to be flush with people yelling nonsense, looking for their own personal Hermione and roleplaying very moody, “dark” teenage characters.

Do the developers of this game that doesn’t actually exist have the balls to make it a full-fledged virtual world? I’m merely a moderate Pothead, and even I think getting to run about the places Rowling created would be awesome. It is also opens the door for more thorough exploration of the setting -something I’m still curious to see. I can also see the PotterMMO being a glorified chat room that traps its player in Hogwarts to only play mini-games and be perpetual adolescents - and that would suck.