Anyone who even faintly recalls the days when Pong was both the coolest and most technologically stunning video game on the market is likely to be astounded by how far games have come. Shapes are no longer large hunks of poorly shaded polygons floating across single colored screens, but fully 3-D rendered full motion video sequences between top quality interactive graphics that hardly resemble old fashioned sprites.

The war over the next generation of game consoles began almost before the current wave hit store shelves, a twinkle in the developers’ eyes even as current models were being created. And, as all other races for the next best system, this one is already getting brutal. Sony actually plans to pour 120 billion yen (1.14 billion dollars) into its next console, where Microsoft appears to have plans to use three IBM developed 64-bit microprocessors in theirs^[1]. “Staggering” is not quite strong enough a word for this sort of behavior.

So why, with all of these gorgeous graphics, increasingly powerful processors and more frighteningly immense worlds to explore, do people seem to be aching for “the good old days”? If you’ve been in any store with a toy section, you must have seen something to indicate what I’m talking about. Well established video game manufacturers are realizing that there’s a lot of money in the ancestors of modern games^[2]. I can personally attest to the brand spankin’ new Atari joystick that comes complete with ten classic arcade games, not to mention having thumbed through collections of older arcade games for the Playstation and PC.

It’s more than a quick buck on nostalgia. There is almost… a lacking that comes with a lot of game experiences these days. Now, I’m not going to complain about plot-driven games. I rather like a little storyline with my gameplay, myself. But I do admit to getting generally annoyed when a game manufacturer focuses their money and energy solely on 3-D cut scenes and overall graphics rather than players having fun while they make their way through a game itself. Let’s face it, games today are endlessly complicated. The amount of time, effort, and cursing it takes to successfully complete a game like Vice City is hardly worth that large a chunk of your life spent merely to brag about having actually able to finish the game. Of course the extent and sophistication of the world itself is as awesome as it is confusing; but it’s the frustration portion of trying to get through the gaming experience that turns several people off of playing.

It’s not simply a complaint that games today are “too hard”, but rather that they aren’t fun enough. There’s less of a balance of challenge to enjoyment than there is a basic ignoring of gameplay altogether for the sake of how pretty everything looks. While Xbox and Playstation are battling it out like insane prize fighters over their deliciously geek-lusting processors, Nintendo actually seems to be taking a different approach to matters. Yasuhiro Minagawa , a Nintendo spokesperson, commented, "Our machine will be ready at the same time as the other new consoles, but we're not sold on developing powerful microprocessors to create graphics that cannot even be viewed on existing televisions^[3]." In other words, it seems the darling of the home console world… isn’t focusing merely on prettiness alone.

I’ve always been the first to reprimand Nintendo for its dumb moves, but this one is (dare I suggest it) actually starting to make sense. As usual, said accusatory behavior was born from a Legend of Zelda-based incident. I’m going to be completely honest, here; when I saw the Spaceworld 2000 video of perfectly detailed, elegantly lit, smoothly moving three-dimensional Link and Ganondorf fighting^[4], I was more than elated. But the year after, when it was announced that the video was merely a “demo” having nothing to do with the cartoony, cel shaded look of what The Wind Waker was to become, I was… upset. Ticked off beyond belief. Absolutely ready to throw Miyamoto out of a high Nintendo building window myself. Did I ever get over that? Well, almost.

See, I came to understand something about graphics. They’re great when they’re pretty. They really, really are, and I can more than appreciate attractive characters in three glorious shaded and texturized dimensions. But what’s even better is having enough actual fun with a game that you continuously have to pick it up again, with just enough challenge to keep you on your toes, and not so many buttons to remember that you have to make up your own new curses just to identify how frustrated and angry you are at the controller in your hand that didn’t ask to be created by evil console creators, nor hated. Taking a look back at Final Fantasy 7, a person can realize that perhaps it is possible to have a game with not so fantastic graphics (not to say they weren’t good, but the super-deformed thing still annoys me) and a semblance of character development and storyline, that also happens to be fun to play (or so I’ve deluded myself into thinking).

Beyond even that example, let’s take Mario, our favorite plumber and monkey tamer of Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brothers, and a handful of other Nintendo games. He has evolved into what he is today due to the stumbling blocks of the technology he came from. The only reason he ever had a mustache was to distinguish his face from a flesh colored block, like the fact he only wore overalls to allow a player to see his arms. Who knows what he’d look like or what profession may have been chosen for him had the graphic and memory restraints not been in the way? Would a world-wide shared Legend of Zelda obsession have been half as psychotically strong had all of the enemies been perfectly rendered, not allowing our imaginations to take hold and assume what they’d all “really” look like if you were to stumble upon them in the woods?

The message here for game designers is simple: some of our best gaming memories are eight bit memories. Make no mistake here, this isn’t just my own take on “simple minds, simple pleasures”. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Our minds need to be engaged, not numbed with an intense barrage of graphics and plotlines masked with a false complexity that just hides their lack of meaning. Gamers don’t want all the work done for them. We want our own minds and imaginations to be able to roam freely – as they do with simple graphics and fundamental storylines – instead of being force fed a designer’s virtual reality. In other words, more than eye candy is needed to make a game that’s going to be more than a pretty disk abandoned at the bottom of a drawer.

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Footnotes

1)Taken from Yahoo! NewsReturn

2)For more about the classic game genesis, refer to Slate’s Blasts from the PastReturn

3)also from Yahoo! NewsReturn