It’s interesting, the Neo Geo was like a suped-up Sega Genesis in a way. It had the same processor, like the original Macintosh, and this was a processor that came out in the 70s and could have competed with Intel’s IBM chips. But for some reason it’s popularity came later with the arcade machines and Sega’s Genesis was “arcade in the home,” while “Neo Geo” was “idealistic arcade in the home, for people of discriminating taste,” except it turned out to just be a system for low-brow fighters.

I’d like to see a set of standards and rubrics made that encompass all the distinctive computer art and computer sound styles of the 80s and 90s, before computers began imitating reality so closely. You had difference quality visuals and soundchips, each with their own fans and subcultures out there. You have “NES style” and then you have people who love the ZX Spectrum and then others that love the Sharp X1 maybe (well, maybe not), but still others that like the Master System the most (smspower.org), and they all live in their own little cul-de-sacs, not to be disturbed, but they have preferences for the different styles of the systems of their childhood. Each has a different flavor, I mean. And now we live in a kind of post-hardware age, where graphics and sounds and gameplay of video games are hardware-independent: you can port a game to Wii, 360, PSP, iPhone, and PS2 and it will all be very similar. And you can emulate dozens of systems with ease on a variety of different systems, and there are only a few popular CPU architectures in use now. So we can just have a set of standards and rubrics, as I say, whereby you look up what codifies “early Sega style” or “PC Engine feeling” and then, if you are making a new game in DirectX or Allegro, you can give it the right palette, the right sound effects quality, and so on.

I feel that the 8 and 16-bit days were good for video games. Graphics and sounds were no longer abstract, but still not realistic enough to seem like reality. Well, video games will never seem like reality and they still don’t, but it was just futile back then to even try to make it realistic. And the controls were perfectly balanced with the graphics and sound: each was about of equal importance, really. I mean, video game controls just can’t be very complicated. A few buttons, tops. And so graphics and sounds should be similarly simple. Nowadays though a lot of games have really complex graphics and music, voice overs and cinematics, yet the gameplay isn’t much more complex than it was in the 16-bit days. So it seems silly from an “old-timer’s” perspective.

@Keira -
Many thanks. I’ve been keeping up with your blog since I’ve found it – you are one of the few writers that recognizes the importance of video game history. One of the things I *may* consider doing is writing something on reviewing games. I’m experimenting with the idea that every game has potentially some kind of aesthetic value in it even if the game is ‘bad’ or mediocre… and that game reviews should somehow attempt to find the aesthetic value in everything. In that sense these would be game reviews for folks who have already played the game – like Jason Rohrer’s great review of Paradroid for the C64.

Being someone who stays (mostly) away from new games anyway, preferring to browse bargain bins, I have to say that one of the marks of a great game is one that, even if you’re new to it, still seems like an awesome game. All ‘great’ games went through a stage of being lauded for their graphics, but what’s left when that’s gone?

I’ve discovered some gems, but I’ve also discovered plenty of games that didn’t live up to the hype of the time.

And yes, they truly were a lot more difficult back-in-the-day.

The problems might not just be the journalist is rubbish; it might be publisher pressure, reviewing a buggy copy and assuming things will be fixed, having editors put words in their mouths, and advertiser pressure too. The system is kinda borked but getting slightly better over time, but I still rarely read reviews anyway.

Anyway, if you do join the mailing list, the current paper starter Devin had high praise of you after reading this thanks if you can help! Join up and post, since it’s in the starting stages there isn’t much down on paper, and there needs to be an initial meeting sometime (there’s some others who are not on the list who want to help too). This goes for anyone else reading this who wants to give history some help, we could always use any help at the Preservation SIG (/advertisement for volunteers)

Many thanks for your response. Thank you for raising the question/clarification regarding game review quality. When I said that “The current bemoaning of the state of video game reviewing can almost be completely attributed to a problem of language”, I’m making the problem slightly more broad than history alone. When reviews are missing historical language, they are missing one vital component. But there are many other kinds of language that we need in game reviews: experiential language, emotional language, ludic language, social language, to name a few. I’m hoping that by covering the ‘historical language’ component I can shed a bit of light on the issue.

And – thank you for the invitation to the IGDA Preservation SIG! I’d love to help out in whatever way I can with the white paper – I suppose the first thing will be for me to join the mailing list.

Anyway, I finally got around to reading this, and yeah, very interesting and insightfully written article. I put it up at the IGDA’s Preservation mailing list, since we’re starting a whitepaper on, you guessed it, “Why Game History Matters” (more or less). If you were interested in helping, well, it seems you have a good way of writing about the subject I’m most impressed, although I agree, the point on reviews is problematic – the quality of reviews has more flaws then the journalists ignoring game history.

Not enough people think video game history is important, anything to persuade someone is good in my book

Also; yeah, this is certainly encompassing the “Theme” of this months roundtable. I was a lot more boring choosing my topic, hehe. I should write my own short essay on this topic sometime though.

I played Zelda (NES) recently, and my response was not disappointment – in fact, I found the game downright frustratingly difficult! I forgot that the game mechanics of yesteryear are far more challenging than the current generation of games. Novelty is of course an element of many kinds of games, but novelty alone isn’t sustainable as an art.

I like your comment on “gestures and nuances” – that’s what this blog is all about …. finding the frustrating attempts at something beautiful in games that most people found irritating or terrible when they were first released. Art history is much like that, serving to contextualize an art piece by showing how it follows (and does not follow) artistic convention developed over time.

As for the comment on game criticism – you’re absolutely right about not making it a system of obscure referencing and lazy intellectualism. That is also a form of poor game review writing that serves only to connote prestige among music enthusiasts. I only gave that rather hackneyed example to show that even the most superficial historical integration is infinitely better than uttering ‘repetitive’ (jeez, I’m become repetitive here). But I do think that game ancestry – genealogy – is of vital importance. Without that background (which *should* stay in the background, I certainly agree!) there is no basis for understanding a game by itself. One of these days I want to spend some time looking through various forms of game journalism and showing how they demonstrate different, better and worse, forms of writing.

Thanks for contributing your thoughts – I enjoy reading your blog.

That said, I agree that it is rewarding to return to classic games with a critical eye. You can look at a game like Metroid and see what the developers were trying to do, and within the rudimentary structure you can see some of the gestures and nuances that become lost as technology moves forward.

I’d only caution against becoming too referential in game criticism, as you say, “the battle scenarios are not unlike the random battles found in all Final Fantasy games prior to XII.” Read any music review where the critic constantly drops band names you’ve never heard of and see how frustrating it gets as an outsider. Sometimes it’s better to keep that information in your mind as background. It’s possible to describe a game without using empty words like “repetitive” and without relying on the game’s ancestors to do the description work for you.

I’m looking forward to more of your reviews like the one you did of Underworld – the narrative components of games are one element that we can appreciate as players. There are many of course, but by developing the language of narrative we come to a much fuller sense of what it means to play games. I’d love to write something as involved as your analysis some time with other games.

Thanks for dropping by!