I make a point of reading as many books about the history of computer & video games as possible. Most of them are pretty decent reads, well researched and historically accurate. But if there’s one alarming trend common to most, it’s the glaring omission of anything relating to the European (particularly the British) video game scene during the 1980s.

If you don’t believe me, pick up a copy of Steven L. Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games, turn to the index and try to find any mention of the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro or Amstrad CPC. Nope, I don’t see anything either. Now grab your copy of Vintage Games by Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton and do the same. Zippity-nilch. A bit strange given that these computers, along with the Commodore 64, dominated the British gaming scene for most the 1980s.

While it’s fair to say that neither of these machines found commercial success outside Europe (which I’m assuming is the main reason the annals of video game history appears to be ignoring them), it’s dangerous to overlook them as they made significant contributions to the video game industry and helped shape it into the one we’re familiar with today.

One of the most critically acclaimed developers for the ZX Spectrum were Ultimate Play the Game, responsible for the likes of Sabre Wulf, Knight Lore and Underwurlde. These days you know them better as Rare, who gave us Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye, Jet Force Gemini, Perfect Dark and Viva Piñata (amongst countless others). Without their early success on the ZX Spectrum it’s fair to say they wouldn’t be around today.

Meanwhile, the BBC Micro introduced us to Geoff Crammond and David Braben. Crammond gave us the highly successful Formula One Grand Prix series of racing simulators, while Braben is perhaps most famous for introducing Elite to the world (a game that’s 25 years old but still continues to be the yardstick by which all space combat/trading games are judged). His current studio, Frontier Developments, are currently working on The Outsider for Xbox 360, PS3 and Windows platforms.

As far as the existing video game history books are concerned, everything happened in either the USA or Japan. It’s all about Atari, Mattel, Nintendo and Sega, with a little bit of Commodore on the side. Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad rarely get a look in, which is a bit of a shame given the rather exceptional and unique games that appeared on those systems. To ignore the European contribution to video game history is to ignore the likes of The Last Ninja, Head Over Heels, Lords of Midnight, The Hobbit, Alien Breed, Manic Miner, Mercenary, Flashback, Paradroid, Elite, Revs, Knight Lore, The Pawn and hundreds of other critically acclaimed titles I could reel off without a pause for breath. All these titles directly influenced an entire generation of PC developers during the 1990s, who in turn influenced many of the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 developers working today.

I urge those writers responsible for the next batch of video game history books not to overlook the influence of the countless British/European developers responsible for so many great gaming experiences during the 1980s. Without their influence many of the contemporary classics you count as your favorites probably wouldn’t exist.

If you tuned into Retroblique a week or two ago, you’d have noticed my response to Blake Snow’s Top 5 Reasons Moderns Games Beat Retro Games article for MSNBC’s tech & gadgets blog. True to his word, Snow recently posted a similar article, this time offering his Top 5 Reasons Retro Games Beat Modern Games.

Well, here at Retroblique we’re no strangers to pedantry or arguing for argument’s sake, so without further ado here I go disagreeing with him again!

Retro Games Play Longer

“If retro games were a ‘king size’ candy bar, modern games would be the ‘fun size’ (aka lame) version. While both taste good, the latter seriously lacks longevity. This is one of the reasons gamers keep returning to retro games.”

I’d argue that the opposite generally tends to be true. When I fire up the likes of Sanxion, Paradroid or Rescue on Fractalus! on the C64, I’ll probably spend no more than half an hour in their company—maybe an hour or two if I’m determined to play them through to completion—before they’re placed back in the proverbial box (I actually play them on VICE these days). On the other hand, when I embark upon yet another play through of STALKER: The Shadow of Chernobyl, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots or BioShock, I’m hooked into a gaming session that will last considerably longer—and I’ll be playing it every day, without fail, for the next few weeks.

Still, it’s all swings and roundabouts really. Civilization, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Metroid are prime examples of retro titles with plenty of meat on the bone, while the likes of PixelJunk Eden, Flower and Geometry Wars are modern snack-sized titles.

Retro Games Are More Challenging

“In addition to containing more levels, retro video games are significantly harder to beat. As a result, the feeling of achievement is a lot greater after finishing a retro game than a modern one.”

Most games should, by definition, provide some degree of challenge.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that retro games are more challenging. They certainly provide their own specific style of challenges, mainly as a consequence of the limited technology. Unless you were playing a text adventure or role-playing game, opportunities to save your progress in many 8-bit titles were rare. You’d therefore be required to complete the game in a single sitting with a limited number of lives. Certainly a more significant challenge than a game in which you can save your position at any point and thus have a convenient rewind feature should you come a cropper.

Modern games acknowledge this crutch and adjust the challenge accordingly. Your typical narrative-driven action game will divide the challenge into a number of peaks and troughs, the former represented by intense action set pieces and the latter by slow periods of exploration, introspection and exposition. On console platforms these troughs are often populated by save points. As the gamer begins to climb a peak, the difficulty typically rises, to such an extent that they’ll often fail and need to try climbing that peak several times.

Pluck a NES gamer from the 1980s, sit him down in front of Half-Life 2: Episode Two and ask him to save the White Forest base—on the hardest difficulty level—and chances are he’ll be reduced to a nervous wreck. (If you look at the Steam stats for Episode Two, you’ll see that fewer than 50% of people completed that challenge.)

However, it is true to say that modern games are, by default, a little easier to play than their retro counterparts. Contemporary developers have a much bigger casual gaming audience to consider. Today’s “normal” difficulty mode is yesterday’s “easy”. I’ve known many veteran gamers who complain about today’s games being a bit too easy, only for them to admit that they stuck with the “normal” difficulty mode (or, in some cases, actually started on “easy”). Personally, I always fire up a game in the highest difficulty mode from the outset. It’s the only way I can be guaranteed a significant challenge.

In short, today’s games can be as difficult as you want them to be. Even if you find the hardest difficulty level to be pretty easy going, you can always impose your own set of restrictions, such as forgoing the ability to save your position. In fact, a whole bunch of people are doing just that at the moment with Far Cry 2 and writing up their experiences.

Retro Games Are More Straightforward

“Pong’s objective is simple yet elegant: Avoid missing ball for high score. That I can understand. What I don’t understand is some convoluted revenge plot taking place across three continents and involving 50 unrelated sub missions — a complex task that plagues far too many modern games.”

It’s hard to disagree here, although that straightforwardness is a double-edged sword. Not every modern gamer wants a “straightforward” experience. Some gamers thrive on a non-linear experience with multiple strands of narrative. For the prices we’re paying for our games these days, you’re damn right I want more than a repetitive side-scroller with a simple “save the princess” narrative. I want my Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, Ken Levine and Warren Spector epics that take weeks/months to complete, not some wam-bam-thank-you-ma’am tiddler that shows me everything it has to offer within the first five minutes of play.

Retro Games Are More Durable

“Modern video games hardware is great and all, but today’s consoles break like nobody’s business. Retro gaming hardware, on the other hand, is known for its resilience. Remember what it was like to throw a controller at a wall without fear of it breaking?”

I can’t say I ever needed to resort to throwing a controller at the wall, but I guess Blake Snow’s mileage varies.

I’ve been rather fortunate in that I’ve rarely suffered any significant hardware glitches during my many years as a gamer. I do, however, remember many idiosyncrasies associated with older consoles and computers. The ZX-81’s 16K RAM pack remained awfully sensitive to things like breathing and mayflies sneezing half a mile away. There merest hint of a whisper would dislodge the RAM pack from its socket and cause you to lose all your data. The ZX Spectrum’s joystick extension port didn’t fare much better. One accidental prod of the squishboard would be enough to instigate a crash, which was never much fun when you were a goal up with a minute of full-time remaining at the end of a Match Day marathon.

The catalogue of disasters doesn’t end there. The Atari VCS and Mattel Intellivision’s cartridge slots would become clogged with dust and goodness knows what else over the years, requiring the dependable Blow Method™ to get your games loading up in the first place. Oh yes, talking of loading: remember having to adjust the volume on your cassette players in order to get many BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum games loading properly?

If anything, my modern consoles have been a lot more durable. My PSX, N64 and GBC are still alive and kicking after more than 12 years of use. Likewise, my Dreamcast and GameCube are perfectly healthy. Haven’t had a single problem with my PS3. I’ve built my own PCs over the last 10 years and, with the exception of a video card that was DOA, no problems there either—despite running Windows! I’d take all that over wonky Sinclair connectors, sensitive cartridge slots and cassette players requiring fine volume tuning any day of the week.

Retro Games Are More Creative

“You would think the inferior technology of retro games might dampen creativity. Wrong! In many ways, modern technology often hinders imagination, as developers get complacent with the tools at their disposal.”

Unimaginative games are hardly restricted to the 21st century. For every annual update of Tiger Madden’s NBHFL there’s a third class Space Invaders clone. For every World War II-themed first person shooter there’s a… well, World War II-themed top-down shooter. And don’t get me started on the endless procession of atrocious movie tie-ins, all of which were the same side-scrolling action platformer, albeit with vaguely different sprites. (Yes, Ocean/Imagine/US Gold. I’d be looking at you lot if you were all still around today.)

You only have to look at the likes of Shadow of the Colossus, Photopia, Portal, DEFCON, Galatea, STALKER: The Shadow of Chernobyl, BioShock and Professor Layton and the Curious Village to see that there’s an abundance of creativity within the gaming industry. With homebrew, retro remakes, special editions and rereleased classics in addition to all the modern games out there, there’s about three decades worth of gaming history and creative diversity at every gamer’s fingertips. Would you really forfeit all that for the much narrower choice presented by yesteryear?

Who Wins? Modern or Retro?

While I’ve taken apart Blake Snow’s articles purely for fun, he’s come under fire elsewhere for his two apparently contradictory posts. But those taking a more aggressive stance against him are missing the point. Snow’s not attempting to suggest that one generation of games is better than the other. Every era has its classics and barrel scrapers, its Shigeru Miyamotos and Derek Smarts, its Sensible Soccers and World Cup Carnivals.

Young gamers with no experience of anything further back than the PS2 and Xbox undoubtedly find it difficult to appreciate titles on older systems. The language, logic and semantics of video games have changed significantly over the years and only a few of us have been lucky enough to walk that evolutionary path in its entirety. It goes without saying that someone brought up on a steady diet of 8-bit gaming experiences is going to find it easier to continue engaging with them today. What must also be considered is that older games lean more towards the abstract, whereas modern games lean more towards the figurative. Just look at North Atlantic Convoy Raider, Lords of Midnight, UMS: The Universal Military Simulator and Medieval II: Total War for examples of how military strategy games can sit on very different points along that abstract/figurative line.

If you favor a more figurative approach to gaming, then a sudden shift to the abstract side of things can be bewildering to the point of frustration and resentment. But it works both ways too—there are numerous account of old school gamers, some of whom haven’t owned a computer or console since the 8-bit days, picking up a PS3 or Xbox 360 only to be overwhelmed by control methods, disorientated by the spatial awareness required by a third dimension and generally alarmed at the bombastic assault of noise and color.

As a gamer, you create your own comfort zone. As long as you’re happy within its confines, all is well with the universe. But if you haven’t already done so, consider stepping outside that comfort zone once in a while. Old school gamers holding on to your 8-bit ideals: try a modern game. You hip and trendy youngsters: play something that came out before you were born. You might just like what you see.

Related posts:

1. Modern vs Retro (MSNBC Lays Down the Smack)
2. Things to Come

Leaving aside the irony that MSNBC’s article eschews the beautiful, ‘old-fashioned’ simplicity of presenting itself on a single page, in favor of a thoroughly ‘modern’ yet terribly awkward multi-page layout (one page per paragraph!), let’s address each of their points in turn and fight the good fight for retro gaming!

Modern Games Are Cheaper

“The cost of a console game in the mid-1980s and early 1990s? Often $50 or more. The cost of a console game launched in recent years (like “Super Mario Galaxy” pictured above)? $50. In some cases, modern games are even priced between $30 and $40. Although still more expensive than movies and music, and despite a $10 “high definition” tax for select Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games, retail video games are more affordable than ever.”

Here’s how it went down the UK. A typical full price ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 game on cassette, during the mid-1980s, would set you back £7.99. Adjust for inflation via the retail price index, this gives a 2009 retail value of about £16.99. A new PS3/Xbox 360 game currently carries a retail price of £49.99.

If we turn the clock back to 1998, full price PlayStation and PC games cost £29.99. Once again, if we adjust for inflation via the retail price index, we get something which we’ll round up to £39.99.

We won’t go into the budget game price points of the late 1980s, which typically ranged from £1.99 – £4.99, suffice to say that they still work out cheaper than their modern budget counterparts.

In the United States, however, games typically had a relatively higher price point. While your average 8-bit gamer in the UK played his games on cassette, US gamers with home computers more commonly used a floppy disk drive and thus their games, on average, were a little more expensive. Also, let’s not forget that during the 80s the US, European and Japanese game markets were a lot more self-contained. You’d get imports criss-crossing the Atlantic and Pacific, but publishers pretty much stuck to their own territory and thus the price points would more accurately reflect their home country’s economy. It’s fair to say that over the last ten years or so, games have become a lot cheaper in the US than they have in the UK. (We’ll save the “rip-off Britain tax” argument for another day!)

Having said all that, the video game industry is substantially bigger now than it was during the 80s and 90s. We also now have online retailers who are able to pass the savings of their low cost operations on to consumers, which means it’s almost always cheaper to buy games from them rather than a bricks & mortar store. (And cheaper still if you’re prepared to wait about 6 months for the inevitable price drop.)

Modern Games Have Better Multiplayer Features

“Over the past five years, there has been a resurgence in party, cooperative, and massively multiplayer games. What’s more, online gaming against “live” opponents is practically standard now.”

Okay, I’ll give them this one. The 1980s definition of “multiplayer” would generally involve between 2-4 players taking it in turns to embark upon their own single player experience. We’d eventually see games offering a simultaneous multiplayer experience, such as Bubble Bobble or Gauntlet, but they’re still a far cry from today’s 32-player deathmatch brawls or substantially larger MMORPGs.

What I will say, however, is that the modern multiplayer experience does tend to physically distance players from one another, to such an extent that in some games you couldn’t necessarily tell the difference between a server full of human players and a server full of AI bots. Headsets and the ability to type at insane speeds aside, the modern multiplayer experience can feel a little cold and clinical. People are generally more interested in gameplay dynamics than they are in social interaction.

This is a far cry from the 1980s, where you and a bunch of school mates would gather to show off your gaming skills to one another, devise your own methods of competition, smack talk while games loaded, flip through the latest gaming magazines and discuss the contents therein, etc. It always made me laugh when early video game critics described the hobby as a very lonely, solitary experience. For me it was the complete opposite, where the weekends, school holidays and even the gaps between daily homework assignments were filled by three or four of us getting together to share our gaming experiences with one another. I’ll take that multiplayer experience over a game of Counterstrike any day of the week.

Modern Games Have Better Controls

“In their nascent years, video games often had only a joystick and a single button to dictate play. Fun but not ideal. In their adolescent years, games often required that a player consult the instruction manual to learn complex button presses. Fun but, again, not ideal. Today, there are more options than ever to play games.”

It would have been more accurate of MSNBC to suggest “modern games have better controllers“. True, their were hardware limitations back in the day, but it was the developer’s responsibility to work around those limitations in order to ensure you maintained optimum control over your in-game avatar. There weren’t all that many games that stepped outside the boundaries of what could be achieved with the controllers available.

Some people have argued — particularly those returning to video games after a decade or two’s hiatus — that modern games are perhaps too complex where control methods are concerned. Anyone who’s played the likes of Super Mario Sunshine or The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time will certainly testify to the number of moves you’re required to learn during the course of the game. The number of ways in which the PS3’s Dual Shock controller can be used during Metal Gear Solid 4 would even scare the living crap out of anyone who last played a game with a SNES gamepad, let alone a one-button joystick.

It all boils down to that well-worn adage: it ain’t what you got, it’s what you do with it. Any controller, regardless of the number of buttons and joysticks attached to it, can become the gamer’s best friend or worst enemy, depending on how the developer implements their control system. A very fine balance has to be struck between what you want the player to be able to do and how intuitive you can make that process for them. It doesn’t matter if your controller has one or a dozen buttons, the player needs to be in the screen, not even thinking about the controls, rather than constantly staring down at the controller as if it’s a thing possessed.

There are plenty of retro games that did amazing things with just a single button joystick. Take a look at Andrew Braybrook’s Paradroid on the C64. You could pull off smooth eight-way maneuvers, eight-way firing (even fire in the opposite direction to which you were traveling without a loss of momentum) and even jump into a “capture” mode, all with a single button. Martin Walker’s Citadel, also on the C64, did all that and more within a similar game.

So yes, modern games do have better controllers, but they don’t necessarily have better controls.

Modern Games Have Better Graphics

“Video games are only fun to look at for so long. They either have it where it counts (the gameplay) or they don’t. But marry arresting gameplay with good looks, and you’re in for a lasting treat. Though blocky pixels will always have a special place in my heart, today’s games are more fluid, more artistic and more elaborate — in short, they’re downright gorgeous at times.”

Okay, this one goes without saying. No one’s trying to suggest that black & white movies are just as colorful as their technicolor counterparts either.

However, are modern games really taking advantage of the processing power available to them, or are they using it as a crutch? Back in the 8-bit and 16-bit days, consoles and home computers had a longer shelf life. To this end, developers would be challenged to squeeze as much out of these systems as possible. In many cases they’d discover various architectural oddities that could be exploited to produce results even the hardware manufacturers couldn’t have anticipated. Compare the C64 games of the early 80s with those of the late 80s and you’ll see a remarkable difference in what was possible, almost to the extent that they appear to be two different machines.

There’s no denying that today’s games look fantastic and we’re almost at the point where that holy grail of photorealism has been achieved. But what then? If every game looks photorealistic, how do we tell one from the other? This is where true visual artistry will come into play, as developers will then be required to investigate the possibilities offered by stylistic expression in order to differentiate their games from their competitors.

My point here is that 2D artists were already doing this in the 80s and 90s. With a limited number of pixels and colors available to them, artistic flair was required to grab a gamer’s attention. That’s not to say that modern games aren’t making bold, stylistic statements, but those titles tend to be the exception (see Ico, Wind Waker, Okami and Team Fortress 2) rather than the rule. Back in the day, stylistic statements were the rule. That’s why we have beautiful 2D games such as Yoshi’s Island that would lose all artistic value if translated to photorealistic 3D.

I loves me some photorealistic 3D — case in point there was a brief moment, while playing Crysis, where I actually had to stop playing because the illusion of realism was so overwhelming — but at the end of the day I’ll always prefer something that looks like it’s come from an artist’s brush rather than a photographer’s camera.

Modern Games Are More Captivating

“I played Atari 2600 and NES as much as the next guy — for entire Saturdays even. Addicting games will always have that kind of appeal. But today’s games bombard the senses on all fronts. They control better. They sound better. They look better. And they tell better stories. It’s no wonder “immersive” has become the most overused adjective in modern game reviews. I dare you to casually walk away from a game of “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.” It demands your attention.”

Okay, he wins here.

With their myriad limitations, particularly where memory and storage space were concerned, there was only so much an old game could give you. Plot, narrative, environment and ambience all had to be curtailed in the name of gameplay. As technology’s progressed over the years, we’ve been able to gradually feed those elements into our games, to the extent where we now have something like BioShock, which gives us a huge environment to explore, beautifully rendered with an art-deco style, drenched in a heady atmosphere of sounds and voices, all wrapped up with a compelling narrative that doffs its hat in Ayn Rand’s direction. Then there’s Thief: The Dark Project, Deus Ex, Half-Life 2, STALKER: The Shadow of Chernobyl, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resident Evil 5.

Poor old Space Invaders doesn’t really compare.

On the other hand, there’s much to be said for a game that allows you to pick up the gamepad and enjoy a quick ten minute blast without having to invest several days/weeks/months of your life in order to unlock and fully appreciate its intricacies. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are fully aware of this need, which is why the likes of Xbox Live Arcade, Virtual Console and PlayStation Network are home to a large number retro games, remakes and indie titles to satisfy the ten minute gamer.

Sometimes you just want a quick snack rather than a three course meal.

Our story doesn’t end here though. MSNBC are promising a follow up article that will offer 5 reasons why retro games are better than modern games. So maybe we’ll hold back on the gauntlet slapping until we’ve heard what they’ve got to say about that.

Related posts:

1. Retro vs Modern (MSNBC Lays Down the Smack II: Smack Harder)

You know the drill. It’s the end of the year, this is a gaming blog and a list of my favourite games of 2008 is presented below.

But wait! Yes, you, Little Miss Skipahead. I can see that furrowed brow from here. You stole a glance at the list and are a little perplexed about the presence of a few games from 2007. Well, I can explain. You see, I wandered out of 2007 and through most of 2008 with a decidedly underpowered desktop PC. It could just about manage BioShock and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, but beefier innards were required for anything a little more advanced. I finally got all multi-cored and 9800GTX+ed in September, whereupon I spent the following months playing catch up.

Well, that and the fact that most of 2008’s triple A titles were a bit shit. But hey-ho, let’s soldier on and see what’s what:

BioShock

Anyone who knows me can safely attest that I’m gay for Looking Glass. Their gameography reads like a list of my all-time favourite PC titles: Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld II, System Shock, Terra Nova, Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2 and Thief II: The Metal Age. (Yes, even Terra Nova. Bet you forgot about that one, didn’t you?) Needless to say, any fruit produced from the loins of Ken Levine would be mine for the chomping, so I was on board with this so-called “spiritual successor” to System Shock from day one.

I blasted through BioShock in a couple of weeks and loved every minute of it. It more than lived up to its Looking Glass legacy and delivered a highly-polished FPS experience that’s light years ahead of what most developers are capable of. Great visual design, gorgeous graphics, outstanding sound design and music. Despite what my fawning may suggest, it wasn’t an altogether perfect experience. The linear level design cramped my love of more open-ended gaming environments (which, ironically, Looking Glass pioneered so successfully in days gone by). Character design and movement borrowed heavily from the Quake II school of cartoon-like figures moving with gravity-defying speed and agility. (Don’t get me wrong — it all looked great but otherwise detracted from the realism. With the exception of the big daddies, the enemies never really felt as if they had any real weight or presence within the game world.) Still, in the grand scheme of things these are relatively minor quibbles. If 2K Marin do the same thing all over again with BioShock 2: Sea of Dreams, I’ll still be a happy punter.

Crysis & Crysis Warhead

Crytek’s Far Cry has a special place in my heart. True, it came free with my eVGA 7950GT card, but I’m not shallow enough to express my undying love for it on that basis alone. I’d never really followed Far Cry during its development phase and so knew very little about it, other than it sported some rather pretty graphics. I had the likes of Doom 3, Quake 4 and Half-Life 2 all queued up for my attention, but after spending a few hours with Far Cry just to “give it a go” I’d found my new gaming fix. Being somewhat disappointed with the never-ending parade of linear shooters, Far Cry knocked me for six. Here was a shooter that sported huge environments with massive draw distances. I could approach my objectives from numerous angles, opening up the tactical scope of the game considerably. The somewhat pedestrian “take out the evil drug lord’s henchmen” missions began to take on subtle sci-fi overtones as I delved deeper into the game. It was all very compulsive and… well, just pure fun.

So, yeah. Crysis? Pretty much Far Cry with prettier graphics and a nifty futuristic combat suit (and I got it free with my eVGA 9800GTX+!).

I’ve also slapped Crysis Warhead down because I played both games back-to-back, with nary a pause for breath. They both blend into one big homogeneous ball of pixels as far as my memory’s concerned. The only thing that made Warhead stand out for me, other than Psycho’s Cockney twang, was its far superior climactic level. The aircraft carrier battle in Crysis was fine, but there’s nothing to beat the combination of sheer terror and adrenaline rush in Warhead when you have to climb down from the radio tower, into an area swarming with aliens, with low health and little ammo, hoping you can make it to the downed aircraft without having to change your underwear too many times.

Awesome stuff. Crytek are now on my list of developers whose games I’ll automatically buy (or get free with my video cards) on release day without question.

Fallout 3

I decided not to follow Fallout 3 during its development process. Not because I wasn’t interested in the game — I’m a huge fan of both Fallout and Oblivion, so there was no question I wouldn’t be grabbing this the moment it hit the shelves — but simply because I wanted to avoid all the tedious fan squabbling and bullshit that came with it. (You know what I’m talking about — hardcore Fallout fans who had difficulty distinguishing Bethesda from the Antichrist, hardcore Oblivion fans who wanted nothing to do with the a sequel to some old turn-based bollocks, etc.) Consequently, I was able to simply knuckle down and enjoy the game once it finally arrived, free of all the pre-release hype, bluster and myriad spoilers courtesy of everyone who had access to beta code.

Fallout 3 checked all the right boxes for me: open-ended environment, non-linear design, sandbox potential, post apocalyptic setting, great visuals and sound design, etc. The only minor quibble, which was also true of Oblivion, is that there’s not much variety in the interior locations. Many buildings are laid out almost identically, which is a little bit disappointing given that the main exterior map is a veritable smörgåsbord of variety. Still, it doesn’t detract too much from the experience, given that it’s simply great fun to head off in a random direction and explore the world in front of you with relatively few constraints.

At the moment I’m not quite sure about the game’s replay value. Maybe its because I explored a huge percentage of the game’s content on my first run through — I don’t feel there’s a whole lot more to see or do. Oblivion was a little different in this respect. Much of that game’s content was tied to very specific character classes, so playing the game as a Paladin gave you a very different experience than if you’d played through it as a member of the Dark Brotherhood. Fallout 3’s class system pretty much begins and ends with the weapons available to you. The game’s content remains pretty much the same regardless of what character you’re playing.

But like I said, these are just minor quibbles. Assuming you’ve got about 80+ hours of spare time to dedicate to one single game, Fallout 3 remains one of the most compulsive gaming experiences of the last few years.

Left 4 Dead

Valve? Check. Zombies? Check. What more could a zombie-lovin’ PC gamer possibly want?

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of multiplayer games. There are a few I get a big kick out of (Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Red Orchestra being my particular faves), but I largely find them to be an empty, soulless experience. Most online games swing between two extremes — you’re either playing with a bunch of retarded, griefing fuckwits or a with a hardcore elite band of players who get more fun out of exploiting the game’s bugs and quirks than actually playing the game as originally designed. I guess there’s some entertainment to be had from each group (although both tend to gravitate towards Counterstrike), if you’re that way inclined, but I tend to be a little bit more conservative in my approach to multiplayer gaming.

Valve take an interesting approach with Left 4 Dead, where griefing is a legitimate tactic (if you’re played as the Infected) and anything less than tightly-knit teamwork is likely to get you in trouble as much as your team. It’s nice to have this sort of idiot filter built into the gameplay mechanics, because it invariably makes the multiplayer experience heaps of fun rather than the usual test of your patience.

Of course, L4D also works well as a single player game. Not that anyone in their right mind would want to play it that way exclusively, but it’s nice to be able to put in a bit of practice before you brave the online servers. This is one feature I felt lacking in Team Fortress 2. Granted, the tactical scope offered by the different character classes in TF2 makes it nigh on impossible to craft effective bots, but having “trial by fire” the only mode of gameplay has no doubt scared off many people who’d otherwise get a kick out of the game.

If L4D is lacking anything, it’s that the Survivors vs Infected mode is limited to just two of the game’s four campaigns. I’ve no doubt Valve will remedy this somewhere down the line, but little more than six weeks or so after the game’s release, I’m already starting to get a little tired of the existing campaigns and have decided to take a break from the game for a while.

Otherwise, L4D is the best damn zombie blasting fun I’ve ever had. Yeah, and that includes Resident Evil 4.

Grand Theft Auto IV

I lost count of the number of hoops Rockstar and Microsoft made me jump through to get this game up and running. After the 25 minutes or so it took to pull 15GB of data off two DVDs, you have to create an account with Rockstar’s Social Club (without which you can’t play the game’s multiplayer component). Want to save your game? (Yes!) Well, you’ll need to create a Games for Windows Live account. And before you do that you’ll need a Windows Live account too. Once that’s all done, you’ll typically need to patch something, then discover that the game crashes when Social Club’s running anyway. I think I finally got into the game after ninety minutes of faffing around. It doesn’t help matters that the game’s an absolute beast when it comes to system resources (making Crysis as demanding as Doom in comparison). The PC required to run this game with maxed out details at 720p+ resolutions has yet to be built, but a fairly decent modern rig will get the game running at Xbox 360 quality levels.

The game itself? Well, it’s okay, but it doesn’t hold a candle to San Andreas. The first thing that’s immediately apparent is that the game is much, much smaller than San Andreas. This is a bit disappointing at first, but GTA4 makes up for things by giving you a much more detailed city than you’ve ever seen in a previous GTA title. The attention to detail is nothing short of incredible. I walked around an area of the city on foot for about two hours, just taking in the sights and sounds, and was constantly amazed at just how vibrant and realistic the city felt.

In a nutshell, GTA4 is pretty much Now That’s What I Call Grand Theft Auto with pretty graphics. If you’ve played GTA3/VC/SA to death then there’s really nothing new on offer. You’ve played all the missions before, seen all the gameplay mechanics before and progressed through the same plot before. It’s fun to play, but Game of the Year material? Not by a long chalk, but then 2008 has sadly been a year of half-assed sequels and new IPs that have failed to inspire, so it’s been slim pickings.

Honorable Mentions

A few other games caught my attention in 2008. PC-wise, STALKER: Clear Sky, Far Cry 2 and Dead Space all looked interesting from the brief, cursory session I had with each. I’ll tackle each of those games properly during the new year. I also enjoyed The World Ends With You and Professor Layton and the Curious Village on the DS. I also finally got round to completing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the GameCube. Looking forward to Rage, Empire: Total War, Portal 2, Half-Life 2: Episode Three and Singularity on the PC in the year(s) ahead. May grab a PS3 some time in 2009.

Here’s to another twelve months of happy gaming!

Gaming Epochs

Feature length articles focusing on games from the upper echelons of computer & video game history. They’re not so much reviews as personal accounts of what these games mean to those who play them and the lasting influence they’ve had on the contemporary gaming scene. Our first batch of articles will feature the likes of Elite, Doom and Grand Theft Auto.

My Gaming Life

I thought it would be fun to turn back the clock and attempt to chronicle my ongoing experiences as a gamer from as far back the late 1970s, right through to the present day. What made me into the gamer I am today? What made me chose the various home computers and consoles that formed the backbone of my hobby? Expect huge dollops of nostalgic whimsy and recollections from behind rose-tinted spectacles.

The Zzap! 64/Crash Challenge

In a moment of madness, I decided it might be fun to play through every single game reviewed in the pages of Zzap! 64 and Crash. In chronological order. For the uninitiated, Zzap! 64 and Crash were the seminal 1980s video magazines, in the UK, for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum respectively. They managed to perfectly blend an air of authority with an irreverant wit—a combination that’s been unmatched by very few professional gaming journalists since (perhaps with the exception of PC Zone during the 1990s).

I originally intended to have just a single category, labeled The Newsfield Challenge, but seeing as Crash had a significant head start on Zzap! 64, I didn’t really think it wise to have Retroblique dominated by coverage of Spectrum games for a year or two. So we now have two categories, one for each magazine. I may expand this in future to include coverage of Amtix! (Amstrad CPC), The Games Machine (multi-platform), Sega Force and Nintendo Force. No promises!

Top Tens

What’s a blog, in this day and age, without a smattering of top ten lists? Retroblique will be no exception!

A Quick Blast

The Zzap! 64/Crash Challenge articles are all very well and good, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to just two 8-bit platforms. A Quick Blast will play host to games on other platforms, with no adherence to any particular chronology. One week we’ll be playing R-Type on the PC Engine, the next we’ll be playing Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast. We’ll also be playing retro remakes, contemporary indie games and homebrew titles for old platforms.

Links to the Past

Given that there’s thousands of gaming blogs floating around cyberspace, attempting to find decent articles of interest to retro gamers is no easy task. Links to the Past will provide our readers with a weekly roundup of the wheat we’ve discovered amidst the chaff.

Retro Bytes

Our catch all category for miscellaneous articles. These will usually be short editorial pieces or articles responding to talking points we’ve encountered on other blogs.

Well, that should give you guys a taster of what to expect from Retroblique in the immediate future. Having said all that, we consider ourselves to be a very flexible, organic blog, so our content will no doubt evolve in directions we haven’t anticipated. Some categories will eventually run themselves dry, but others will emerge in their place. Rest assured, you’re always guaranteed the best possible retro gaming coverage we can hope to provide.

The joystick vs. gamepad debate recently reached Re:Retro, where Joel reminisces about various game controllers he’s come to grips with over the years. It got me thinking about the choices I made when deciding how to interact with the games of yesteryear.

Console owners have traditionally had an easy ride. From the Magnavox Odyssey all the way through to the PlayStation 3, most gamers have stuck with the controller that came bundled with the system. It certainly makes sense—especially in this day and age—when you consider the huge amounts poured into each manufacturer’s R&D departments to ensure the default controller is the best it can possibly be. Third parties will offer their alternatives, but at best they offer little more than a few extra bells and whistles rather than an unnecessary reinvention of the wheel.

Things are a little different in the realm of home computers. Manufacturers of the various 8-bit computers desperately tried to persuade us that their machines were to be used for home accounting and homework. Instead, people bought them precisely so they could avoid doing those things, eagerly awaiting the next Space Invaders or Pac-Man clone to distract them from their daily drudgery. Consequently, home computers were rarely bundled with a joystick and so gamers were forced to choose from a large variety of third party options.

Which controllers did I opt for? Let’s find out!

Kempston Competition Pro 5000

Hooking a joystick up to a ZX Spectrum wasn’t for the faint of heart. In lieu of a built-in joystick interface, you were at the mercy of an interface device—something not unlike a hulking great black brick—that you plugged into the back of your machine. Persuading a dog to remain in its kennel while it’s raining sausages would have been a far easier task than persuading the interface device to remain in place. The merest whisper would dislodge it, causing the Spectrum to freeze or crash—usually while you were on target for a personal best on Daley Thompson’s Decathlon.

Things were a lot easier on the Commodore 64. It had two built-in joystick ports (affectionately known as Port 1 and Port 2) that couldn’t crash the machine even if you wanted them to. In fact, you were frequently required to swap your joystick between the two ports mid-game as you attempted to deduce which port the game’s developer expected you to use. (Port 2 eventually emerged as the default, mainly because joysticks plugged into Port 1 could interfere with the command line interface.)

My Competition Pro finally gave up the ghost midway through the C64 era, suffering from catastrophic shaft malfunction. (It happens to the best of us.)

Zipstick Super Pro

Any mention of the Zipstick Super Pro in the school playground was likely to result in bloodshed. “Cheap knock off!” cried the Competition Pro loyalists. “It’s got suction cups!” retorted the Super Pro rebels. “Computer games are fucking gay!” yelled the playground tough guys (all of whom are probably hardcore Madden 2008 players nowadays).

I never really found the Super Pro to be problematic. Truth be told, it seemed to be built of much sturdier stuff than the Competition Pro and often emerged from marathon Activision Decathlon sessions unscathed. Yeah, those suction cups were cool too, especially when you worked out how to remove them and slap them on your friend’s forehead at strategic opportunities during heated two player games.

The Super Pro served me faithfully right the way through to the end of the Amiga/Atari ST era, being consigned to a cupboard only because I’d moved on to Sega Mega Drive and PC.

Atari Pro-Line Joystick

A surprisingly adaptable joystick, the Pro-Line came bundled with the repackaged Atari 2600 and 7800 consoles.

I never really used my Atari 2600 all that much, probably because it arrived in our household somewhere between the Mattel Intellivision and ZX Spectrum. Nevertheless, once I worked out the Pro-Lines were compatible with the C64, they became my controller of choice for games that required lightning quick reflexes. I can’t imagine playing the likes of Uridium without it.

The Pro-Line also got a lot of use on my Amiga, being particularly useful for the likes of Alien Breed and even Formula One Grand Prix. You served me well, little Pro-Line buddy!

Logitech Wingman Cordless

Best gamepad in the history of the universe.

I shall weep bitter tears the day my Wingman Cordless decides to give up the ghost. It’s long since disappeared from Logitech’s product catalogue, having been replaced by a cheaper, gaudier, plastic monstrosity that I have no intention of buying.

The Wingman comes into its own for emulation purposes. It’s got everything you’d ever need—two analog joysticks, an 8-way digital pad, four shoulder buttons, six action buttons, a throttle slider, a start button, analog/digital switch and rumble functions, all of which are fully configurable. On top of all that, it’s beautifully ergonomic, has a tough outer case that still doesn’t have a single dent or scratch on it, and the batteries lend it a comforting weight.

Yeah, batteries. Being cordless it needs to run under its own steam, so 4 x AA batteries are the order of the day. They actually last a pretty long time, so even after a long run of extended emulation sessions it never feels like you’re having to change them out all the time. Get a battery charger and a pack of rechargeables and you’re laughing.

Which game controllers have you used on your home computer(s) over the years?

Adam Cadre’s Photopia is often cited as a classic work of contemporary interactive fiction. It’s literate, emotive and lingers in the memory long after it draws to a close. Surely an experience no gamer would dare forfeit? There’s just one problem: the game is presented to the player in the form of the written word.

It’s always interesting to observe the aftermath when a Photopia recommendation is lobbed into the youthful crowds that gather on popular gaming sites. Destructoid were this month’s mettlesome matadors, bravely red-flagging the game as part of their ongoing Indie Nation series. The results were disappointingly predictable, with the first wave of comment bombing offering the likes of “boring as hell”, “too tedious” and “I can’t handle this shit.” Cooler heads prevailed once the more patient readers were able to devote a little more time to the experience, but the damage had already been done. A very clear (if slightly illiterate) message had been sent to old school gamers: kids today don’t be wanting no text in they’s games.

An exaggeration, perhaps. Modern games haven’t abandoned text completely—as fans of The World Ends with You and Professor Layton and the Curious Village will testify—but it’s certainly true to say that video games exist on an evolutionary path that picks off textual elements as soon as technology allows. Where we once endured screen after endless screen of agonizing dialogue to further a game’s narrative, we now endure agonizing voice acting instead. Likewise, where a low-resolution mess of monochromatic pixels necessitated the use of on-screen descriptions to explain what we were supposed to be seeing, we now shell out hundreds of bucks on the latest ATI and NVIDIA video cards for the privilege of experiencing photorealistic 3D environments.  That old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words would be right at home in the contemporary gaming scene.

When a game like Photopia comes along and forces the gamer to climb back down that evolutionary ladder, we can understand why they might begrudge the experience. The text adventure genre throws an extra wrench in the machine: not only is player presented with a game world in the form of prose, their only means of interacting with this world is by typing text when prompted to do so. The sucker punch? You have to use a very limited vocabulary—one that often delves into an unfamiliar glossary—in a somewhat stilted, unnatural syntax.

I can see your raised hackles from here, text adventure fans, but you know it’s true. It can be frustrating when a game refuses to acknowledge your input in a way that seem logical. In a modern game, you’d walk up to the desk, press a single button on your gamepad and—bingo!—you’ve searched the drawer and retrieved the secret documents inside. In a text adventure that same process could span half-a-dozen inputs, even more if you’re having to guess obscure verbs and nouns. A case of apples and oranges, perhaps, but that’s kind of the point. Expecting modern gamers to instantly be at ease with a text adventure is a bit like asking a generation of moviegoers weened on The Matrix and Lord of the Rings to watch Modern Times—complete with jerky frame rates, subtitled caption cards and plinky-plonk piano—and damn well enjoy it. One or two will get a kick out of it, but most will find it a drag.

While text-based games have died a long, lingering death over the years, we’ve gained much from their loss. It’s hard to imagine a gaming scene without the likes of Shadow of the Collosus, Okami, BioShock and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl—games defined as much by their audio and visual aesthetics than anything else. It would, however, be unfair to complete dismiss the text-heavy games of yesteryear. While they were dominated by the text adventure genre, let’s not forget some of the other wordy gaming experiences that are all too uncommon these days:

System 15000

• Developer: AVS
• Publisher: Craig Communications
• Released: 1984
• Platform(s): C64, ZX Spectrum
• Closest modern descendant: Uplink

If War Games gave kids of the 80s an appetite for computer hacking—plus the delightful prospect of instigating World War III from the comfort of your bedroom—then the likes of System 15000 certainly helped satiate it.

A somewhat clumsy friends of yours managed to have all his money stolen by evil online people. Naturally, you’re a l33t hax0r, so you’re tasked with retrieving this money. The game simulates a computer terminal, which you use to dial into woefully insecure computer systems, hunting for breadcrumbs amidst the inform you find in order to further your quest. I assume the game was set ten years in the future, given that the virtual BBS networks didn’t take five minutes to display a line of text.

Text-based hacking games quickly faded into obscurity. Activision’s Hacker series is the most fondly remembered contribution to the genre, even though the main bulk of its gameplay concerned robots, surveillance cameras and videotape recorders rather than ANSI-based tomfoolery. It wasn’t until Introversion’s Uplink, published in 2001, that old-school gamers could delight in ye olde hacking once more.

The Fourth Protocol

• Developer: Electric Pencil Company
• Publisher: Hutchinson Computer Publishing
• Released: 1985
• Platform(s): ZX Spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC
• Closest modern descendant: KGB/Conspiracy

Life without the Cold War scarcely bears thinking about. I mean, there’d be no Rocky IV, no Top Gun and no 2010: Odyssey Two for starters. A chilling thought. More importantly, though, half the video games made in the 1980s would no longer exist. In some cases this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but it would also mean having to say a tearful farewell to the likes of Raid Over Moscow, Balance of Power and—hastily getting to the point—The Fourth Protocol.

Based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel of the same name, The Fourth Protocol spearheaded what I like to call the “action office” genre—a whole breed of game that managed to build up a surprisingly eventful narrative by doing little more than simulating a very untidy desk. Never had the world of manila folders, rotary dial telephones and coffee-stained address books been so much fun.

Like System 15000 before it, the game’s instruction manual (i.e., the cassette box’s inlay) gave you a single telephone number and pretty much left you to it. Not for the 8-bit era the elaborate tutorials we get today, as exciting as a whole ten minute segment on sharpening your HB pencil might have been. There were three episodic mini-games to tackle: the first two required you to intercept a Russian spy and discover the whereabouts of a suitcase nuke, whereas the final episode replaced the office environment with a text adventure as you coordinated an SAS team’s attempt to disarm the weapon.

Action office games are a little on the thin side these days. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney would be a fair comparison, even if there’s more emphasis on dialogue than one’s filing cabinet. But for the whole Cold War theme alone I’ll recommend KGB (or Conspiracy, as the CD-ROM version was renamed by its publisher, probably through fear of discovering their Corn Flakes dusted in anthrax), even if it does date back 1992.

Killed Until Dead

• Developer: Artech
• Publisher: Accolade
• Released: 1986
• Platform(s): C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC
• Closest modern descendant: Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun

Action office games have rarely been as much fun as Artech’s witty take on the board game Cluedo.

Following in the grand tradition of many an Agatha Christie novel, a number of diverse individuals are improbably gathered at the location of an imminent murder. It’s your job to determine the would-be killer and victim, as well as the weapon, location and motive. To aid you in your quest, your desk gives you access to character biographies, providing you with enough leverage to begin interrogating them. Thanks to the power of the 1980s, you were also given access to a videotape recorder that could be used to surreptitiously record revealing conversations between characters. The trivia-based elements of the gameplay may be better suited to fans of detective films and novels, but a bit of educated guesswork will work just as well.

Killed Until Dead succeeds because it’s so much fun to play. The writing is sharp and witty, the graphics colourful and cartoon-like, with a decent soundtrack thrown in for good measure. On top of all that, the game has about two dozen different plots, so it’ll take some time to bleed the game dry.

Classic whodunnits come and go in the world of video games, but the genre’s currently represented by the more than adequate Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun. It doesn’t have its tongue quite so deeply lodged in its cheek as Killed Until Dead, but should give virtual sleuths more than their money’s worth.

Alter Ego

• Developer: Peter J. Favaro
• Publisher: Activision
• Released: 1986
• Platform(s): C64, Apple II, MS DOS, Mac OS
• Closest modern descendant: The Sims

Well, gosh. A computer game developed by a qualified psychologist. Activision made a pretty big deal of hammering this point home in the various commercials and on the game’s packaging. Not that they needed to, because Alter Ego just so happened to be an excellent game.

As the title may suggest, Alter Ego gave players the opportunity to turn back the clock and play “what if?” with their lives. Starting at birth and continuing through to old age (although there were numerous opportunities to meet a premature demise), the game presented you with an ongoing sequence of everyday scenarios then asked you to make a choice as to how to respond or proceed. How you chose to respond would shape your alter ego’s personality.

Those of us brave enough to swap notes in the school playground discovered that we all invariably ended up the equivalent of psychopathic, jobless, 40 year-old virgins who would eventually die cold and alone. Thankfully, we’re now at a point where these predictions turned out to be unfounded—well, for most of us—so I suspect Alter Ego may very well have been Favaro’s attempt to seek revenge on the kid who shoved snowballs down his back in second grade. Those scars run deep.

The Sims is as close as it gets in the modern age, although there’s still a wide chasm between them. Whereas Alter Ego is very much about a very personal psychological experience, The Sims isn’t much more than a virtual doll’s house, albeit one that allows you to conduct no end of sadistically surreal experiments on your dolls.

Tracksuit Manager

• Developer: J. Foster
• Publisher: Goliath Games
• Released: 1988
• Platform(s): C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST
• Closest modern descendant: Football Manager 2008

While football management games were two a penny back in the 80s, Tracksuit Manager kicked convention in the shins by presenting each game in the form of a running commentary. No more feeble, pixelated abstractions of match highlights; a continuously scrolling ream of text described every throw-in, every knee-crunching tackle and every forceful nasal ejection of phlegm in minute detail.

It worked beautifully. Not only did it capture the drama of an unfolding match in a way that no other football management game had managed to achieve, it also afforded managers the opportunity to directly observe the effects of their chosen strategies. I.e., if Bryan Robson’s hamstring injury flared up for the umpteenth time that season, you’d see it affect his ability to complete passes, giving you a clear indication who you needed to send to an early bath.

Watching hundreds of games unfold in real time wouldn’t have been much fun, so you were given the ability to adjust the speed of the scrolling text and thus control the length of each game. Exhibition matches against Belgium would rush by in mere seconds, but come an important World Cup qualifier you’d be in real time mode, glued to the last five minutes of the second half, gripping your joystick in fear as England’s beleaguered defence attempted to hold on to its 1-0 lead. Certainly an experience that very few contemporary football titles have adequately emulated.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

• Developer: Infocom
• Publisher: Activision
• Released: 1985
• Platform(s): Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, C128, MS-DOS, Mac OS
• Closest modern descendant: None

While technically a text adventure, A Mind Forever Voyaging transcends the genre in so many ways it would be more fitting to describe it as a sociopolitical simulation with a sci-fi twist.

The player assumes the role of PRISM, the pinnacle of artificial intelligence technology, tasked to evaluate an audacious social reform plan. The vast bulk of the game’s content unfolds within a virtual facsimile of a city in South Dakota, where PRISM adopts the identity of an average citizen. There’s a long list of menial tasks that need to be carried out, all of which are used to assess the subtle effects of the proposed plan.

Yeah, you knew something bad was going to happen. As PRISM returns to the simulation at 10 year epochs, he witnesses the collapse of society as the plan goes awry. In the real world, PRISM’s creator has little choice but to condemn the plan, but the senator responsible for drafting it has other ideas. To say much more would ruin one of the most dramatic and tense climaxes ever experienced in a computer game.

Ironically, despite A Mind Forever Voyaging’s difficulty level being tagged “Advanced”, it was one of only a few Infocom adventures that I managed to complete back in the 80s. (The others including the likes of Wishbringer and Moonmist.) I’m not entirely sure why, although I suspect it’s because the experience felt more akin to reading a novel than playing a game, so I probably approached it with a different mindset.

While the other games listed here have very obvious modern descendants, trying to pick out something that even holds a candle to A Mind Forever Voyaging is practically impossible. Deus Ex and Half-Life 2 feature similar dystopian futures—with the former throwing in that extra conspiracy theory element—but wrap them up in a completely different form of gameplay. Portal offers some similarly foreboding “rat in a screwed up maze” ambience, but things are very much different outside that maze. Republic: The Revolution, at least on paper, promised to offer something with political bite, but clunky gameplay mechanics diluted the experience.

We’re unlikely to see the likes of A Mind Forever Voyaging again, at least in its original form. There’s so much potential wrapped up in a 3D first-person iteration of the game, although I suspect it would take a braver publisher than most to consider something so far outside the traditional FPS box.

Traditional interactive fiction aside, what other text-based games did you enjoy back in the day?