Personal gaming history

I was born in 1990, one year after the end of communism  in Poland. So, as you can guess, the entertainment at that time was on a low level and I doubt there was anything that could’ve been called a ‘game industry’. Of course I was too young to care anyway. Fortunately, a few years later the situation in Poland got a bit better and I could enjoy my first video game. It was a cheap Gameboy imitation but it had about a few hundreds built-in games! Well, at least it supposed to… but the fact was that there was about 6-8 different games and multiplicity of their slightly changed variations. Although, it didn’t stop me from having some great fun with it.

Now, the next game is quite significant. In mid 90s economic situation in Poland still wasn’t great and I cannot recall anyone I knew owning original NES. However, if you ask anyone my age from Poland if they know what Pegasus game is I bet they will nod with a smile on their faces. Basically it was quite cheap NES substitute you could get on markets. Most versions came with two controllers, a light gun and 100 in 1 cartridge. But, just like with original NES, you could buy many additional games. Spending many hours playing games like Mario, Contra and Mortal Kombat is one of my most vivid memories of my early childhood.

At the age of 8 I was heavily impressed by one of my mate’s new toy – PC. I asked my parents for one they said I will get it as my first Holy Communion gift. When they enquiried what game I would like to get with it I couldn’t recall the title of one I saw at my friend’s (it was Doom), and I just said ‘one where you can see only a hand with a gun and you shoot monsters’. So I got Half-Life.    

It was the first PC game I’ve ever played and it also became one of my all times favourites. Well, at the age of 8 I was shitting my pants while playing it, but still... it was great! I remember, back then I believed it looked photorealistic. Beside of HL I was playing every game that came on cd with polish gaming magazine: CD-Action. The most memorable were games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, MechWarrior and Heroes of Might and Magic III (I still love it).

A few years later I got PlayStation and I spent many hours playing Tekken 3 and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, however I still preferred PC gaming. I kept exploring Half-Life world with the original game extensions: Opposing Force and Blue Shift.

When I was 12 one of my friends asked my ‘hey, you like fantasy books and movies, why don’t you play any RPG games?’ and I was like ‘I don’t like strategic games’. It took him quite a while to persuade me to try and play Baldur’s Gate. But I’ll be in his debt to the end of my life, as it’s become my no.1 favourite game. Although it’s 15 years old, in my opinion, it has two things that many modern games lack: absorbing plot and likeable characters.

It also encouraged me to try out other RPG series like Icewind Dale and Fallout. Even though they both were really good I felt like they were missing something. In the search for that thing I found about traditional, paper-based RPG games like Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer. For me, as they take place in my imagination, they are beter than any video game.

Obviously it doesn’t mean that I totally neglected virtual gaming. For many nights I was sucked in to the worlds of games like The Elders Scrolls: Morrowind and Fable. As a fan of series I couldn’t stop playing Half-Life 2 when it finally was released. There were many other games but I will mention only two most significant for me.

The first one is Shadow of The Colossus. I don’t remember how I find out about this game, but when I did I purchased PlayStation 2 just for this game only. And I don’t regret a penny. I wish they release sequel/reboot for X-box…

The other game is The Witcher. Not because it’s polish game, but because it’s based on one of my favourites book series – the Witcher Saga. I have to admit that CD Project did great job with visualization of characters and places from the book. The Witcher 2 was even beter and I can’t wait for the next episode.

It would be too boring to talk about ALL games I’ve played so I will finish here. I just hope that some day I will add to the list a game with my name in credits.

New Game Journalism

I guess I am not the most suitable person to write about game journalism because I don’t have much to do with it. I don’t buy games magazines and I very rarely visit games related websites. There are a few reasons for that but most of them come down to fact that – as I wrote in my first entry in this blog – I’m a casual gamer. I do not fancy paying £6-8 for a magazine to read about games that I’ll probably never play.

 Sure, someone could argue that I could read them anyway, because who knows, maybe I’d like some review and I would like to give the game a try? But here comes to play second reason why I don’t read reviews – they tend not to focus on qualities that I value in games. I don’t care too much whether game has brilliant graphics or gives us a wide range of weapons etc… For example – I didn’t choose to play The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings because most of gaming portals/magazines scored it 9/10 nor because critics prised its combat mechanics, customization and environments… I played it because it was based on one of my favourite books and I wanted to get the feel of the world that I imagined while reading Andrzej Sapkowski’s novel. 

For me the most important questions were: ‘is it a good representation of The Witcher universe?’ and ‘does it capture the mood of the books?’ Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, none of the reviews that I found while working on my presentation project did answered these questions. I encountered the same problem when I was interested in buying Star Wars: The Force unleashed game. As a fan of the movie I was curious how the game relates to the George Lucas saga and does it have the ambience of the galaxy far, far away, however, most of the reviews focused on graphics and on possibility of throwing things at the enemies. And that’s why I think the new game journalism is something really interesting. As I was reading through articles from Guardian’s ‘Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism’ I found that non of them focused on the technical aspects of games and instead of saying what you can do they rather said how it feels to do it. My reaction to Ian ‘Always Black’ Shanahan’s article ‘Bow, Nigger’, where he describes the situation that happened to him while playing Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast was ‘Oh my god! That’s exactly how I remember this game! That was awesome!’ and it did make me want to play this game again! 

And that is what a good review should do in my opinion. It should help you to decide if you want to play the game or not. Because if game gets 3/10 in some magazine it means nothing more but ‘person who reviewed this game didn’t like it’. And who cares? For me it still can be the most amazing game in the world!  In NGJ there’s no scores ranking. It does not say ‘you should/shouldn’t play this game because…’ Instead, it focuses on the experience of playing particular game. I believe it’s great way of writing about games and if gaming magazines would featured that kind of reviews I would pay this £6-8 to buy it.

Links:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=62798

http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-new-games-journalism/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_journalism