Four.point.two of Five

4.2 Phantasy Star II

I was going to move on to number three, but then I remembered this saucy little cartridge who got her fingers into me and wouldn’t let me go for almost a year.

When Sega ruled the world and the Genesis was as ubiquitous as M.C. Hammer explaining how none of us were worthy of fondling “this” I was in college and had nothing of value save my gaming console and D&D books. I could have gotten along just fine without anything else, up to and including food, as long as my plastic molded master was hooked up to the giant 14″ color TV. (And the D&D books, I needed them to a degree that’s embarassing to recall.)

Into this strange bubble of self-sustaining geekery came Phantasy Star II. My very first RPG of note and the first long-term relationship of depth and constant exploration. With a game. The wiles of that electronic entertainment were many.

Fistfulls of characters to level up. Specialized weapons with specific strategic uses. Huge dungeons, unending monster encounters, and the need to farm mobs for cash in order to afford the best gear. Sensing familar themes? Days upon days were spent with the rounded black controller in my hands, wandering the lands of Mota and delving into its mysteries with my expanding group of adventurers. It was hard to choose between them but we could only be a party of four at a time. I would actually feel bad for a character if I hadn’t had them in the party for a while. They were my friends and I was…going a bit crazy, I suppose, but damn it was fun.

The odd thing is that this love of Phantasy Star II ruined me for RPGs. I was so enamored of her that nothing else could hold up to my ideal. When I found Phantasy Star III I was flush with excitment. But I couldn’t play more than a third of it before it was too painful to continue. They had attempted to improve the mechanics but instead ended up with a hulking mess. In comparison to II’s sleek and polished gameplay, PSIII was the ugly sister with a gladular disorder and club feet.

I was crushed and turned my back on not just Phantasy Star but on all RPGs. Because of PSIII I avoided Final Fantasy. Seriously. I still have only played one installment of that venerable series because my heart belonged to Phantasy Star and it had turned out to be a video-game-genetics dead end.

I have loved again (thank you Shadow Hearts: From the New World) but never as wholly or innocently. I no longer weep tears of sweet remembrance when thinking of my time with Phantasy Star II but I do get misty whenever I see the Genesis logo.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Old School
Related Posts: prima games podcast, the eighth prima podcast, the seventh prima games podcast, the sixth Prima games podcast, the fifth

Fourth of Five

4. Space Quest

In 1986 there was a chain of stores called Egghead Software. Boxes the size of dictionaries contained fistfuls of floppy discs that held the code for games that today could be played on a cell phone. A cell phone that had been dropped through a washing machine and been picked up by an electromagnet. It was a primitive era but there were at least four colors on the screen at one time and in that era such prismatic bounty was mind-blowing for a home computer game.

Sierra ruled the PC gaming world through Adventure Games. King’s Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, et al. Not quite RPGs, not at all side-scroller action games, Adventure Games involved collecting random items and using them in bizarre ways to make progress. Often these items would languish in your inventory for days before a use for them was found. Most nefariously, failure to use an item might not have blocked your progress but would cause major problems or even death later in the game.

Need to get past the laser grid? I hope you picked up the view shield glass from the spaceship crash. Want to get past the leprechaun guards? You’d better know how to play the fiddle you found in the woodcutter’s house. And if Larry is to avoid dying of a social disease his player must remember to make him use a condom with that escort (Seriously. If you didn’t wrap it Larry would wither and die several hours later. Be safe).

My friend Erik and I finagled my mom into buying Space Quest from Egghead on a Saturday afternoon. At two in the morning I gave up trying to get past Orat, the lizard beast. At four in the morning Erik woke me up to reveal that throwing the dehydrated water at the creature would make him blow up, clearing the way. By Sunday evening we still hadn’t gone back to sleep.

That was my first all-night gaming experience, often repeated in the years to come. And like my first girlfriend (Shannon? Anna?…hmmm…) I’ll never forget it.

I pine for new Quest-style games. They were odd-ball intellectual entertainment, puzzle solving with a twisted, Monty Python-esque logic that suited me. When I heard there was a new Leisure Suit Larry game coming out in 2004 I nearly wept with joy and cried hosannas to the Sierra gods. Unfortunately it wasn’t a quest game, just a bunch of twitch mini-games. I would have been crushed but for the fact that it is one of the most involved, funny, and amazingly well-written scripts ever created for a video game. The sheer volume of story and dialogue is staggering. But you didn’t collect debris in hopes that it would come in handy later.

Anyway. Space Quest. Totally rad.

And if you want to experience the fun of an adventure game, check out Peasant’s Quest. These guys created a nearly perfect Sierra Adv. Game satire.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Old School
Related Posts: prima games podcast, the eighth prima podcast, the seventh prima games podcast, the sixth Prima games podcast, the fifth

Fifth of Five

With the release of GTA IV there’s a new number one in town. As others before me have noted there’s no disagreement that the latest Liberty City scenario is a “10,” or whatever other top grade it can get.

Having been obsessed with a GTA title in the past this new round of hallelujahs got me thinking of the video games I’ve had love affairs with. Full blown, lack of sleep, loss of appetite, unhealthy pallor of the skin love affairs. I’d use the word obsession but it doesn’t really speak to the depth of emotion I had for these flickering pixels.

I’m not saying these are the best games in history, but they are the ones that sucked away my will, hurt my eyes, and tried to prove that the real world had less to offer me then their electronic realms.

So, here we go, the first entry is the fifth on my list. I’ll follow up with one a week. Building suspense and saving me from wracking my brains to figure out what I’m going to write every Thursday.

5. Asteroids, Atari 2600

OK. I suppose now I have to explain that I’m on the 40 side of 35. When this game was released in 1981 I was nine years old. There were no levels, no saves, and no real “end game.” You just shot space rocks with an arrowhead shaped “spaceship.” Big rocks, when shot, spawned numerous smaller rocks. Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty decent metaphor for cellular reproduction. But awkward sexual allusions aside, that was the whole of the game. Points were racked up and the eponymous asteroids just kept appearing for you to destroy.

The arrow design of your ship was in fact way more sophisticated then the “player” of other contemporary games. You could imagine that a spaceship would look like a sleek dart more easily than you could justify a square with a one way street sign being used to represent a brave knight.

I played that game as though my family’s well-being depended on it. Every day I’d spend a couple of hours making virtual gravel in 2D outer space. So much of my time, in fact, that I did reach the sort-of end of the game at least twice. I flipped the score.

I don’t know if there’s a modern example of this phenomenon. But back when Atari was the final word in home video game entertainment the games had a limit on the amount of points they could record. I’m sure the game programmer (I doubt there was such a thing as a “development team” in 1981) figured that no one would ever reach 1,000,000 points. No one would ever be able to survive the glowing rock menace long enough to make it that far. Their cleverly programmed granite killers would shatter the spaceship’s thin hull well before enough points were earned.

But I was one of those who made it. I watched with mounting glee as the numbers crawled up and up until, after hours and hours, 999,999 appeared and was quickly replaced with a big fat zero. Flipped the score.

It was my first real love and I’ll never forget Asteroids. Simple and repetitive, it still showed me a good time.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Old School
Related Posts: prima games podcast, the eighth prima podcast, the seventh prima games podcast, the sixth Prima games podcast, the fifth