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| why arent these games as fun as i remember them by sfg 07/27/2003, 12:21am PDT | ||||
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| I had this hankering to play old nintendo games from the 80s. ESPECIALLY the ones that I never had enough money to buy or rent. Games that I would dream about and try to make my own versions of in BASIC or Pascal. Games that I thought about during schooldays. Games that consumed my imagination.
Well now I am all grown up and all-powerful, just like I used to think I would be when I was a kid. In fact I am so powerful that I can download all those games for free off the internet and play them on a nintendo emulator. The problem is that all these games suck royal booty. Kid Icarus I remembera fascinating and imaginative world filled with eerie pseudo greek imagery and evil eggplants. However, when I play it now, I see endless hordes and swarms of annoyingly stupid enemies that basically consist of slightly randomly placed swooping motions which I am supposed to figure out the proper jump/shoot/move combination for. Not just once or twice. 5 times. 10 times. 40 times. 400 times. God I am dying here. This is the most annoying experience I have had in a long time. Going to the library is easier. Building a shelf is easier, and takes less time. Christ. Forget the damned eggplant. I quit halfway through the second 'level'. And half the 'items' I got were still a mystery to me, even after reading some retarder weirdos 'everything about kid ikarus' website. Excitebike. Oh lord. Well this game was sort of fun. Not really. It was actually alot MORE fun when I figured out the difference between 'normal engine power' and 'turbo' and didnt overheat every 10 seconds. On the other hand, ugh. What a boring fucking game. The mindless endless throbs of 'fans', big blocks making staticy sounds that are supposedly cheering me. Mystical 'enemy riders' that come out of nowhere and all seem to be going from behind to in front of me. Strange physics in which motion is discrete in the y dimension but not the x. Whatever. This game I actually played for 10-15 minutes before getting bored. Kung Fu This game was not 'bad' per se. On the other hand, after I got to some magician guy I kept punching his head and it kept falling off, and nothing would happen. He would kick my ass. The jacked up controls didn't work reliably. Actually they did I was just too slow to react to him throwing cermaic pots at my feet. But eventually I read some cheat website and found out I need to punch him several times. This is horrible for several reasons. The hordes of geeks trying to justify their addiciton are alot like potheads trying to say they have glaucoma or marijuana helps their nerves. Actually marijuana is as bad for your lungs as cigarettes and it's bad for your immune system. And video games dont teach you any valuable lessons, at least not ones like Kung Fu. What 'experience' or 'isnight' did I gain by having to sit there wasting 15 minutes of my life trying to kill the boss, only to discover some 'special trick' that I needed to do to kill him? That was in no way indicated and I could only have discovered by doing it? I learned that people who design systems think that when you get through their little arbitrarily created rat-maze-test like psychological experiments, that you are then declared 'smart'. What is really going on is that people with higher socio-economic or political status are making up their own definitions of what 'smart' means, then laughing like an overbearing controlling spouse does when their sweet-cheeks goes to the grocery at 2am to get purple gobstoppers. There is nothing whatsoever about 'intelligence' 'cleverness' or 'smartness' that in any way relates to the ease with which one figures out how to properly kill a videogame boss. It doesn't take brains and determination any more than learning to pee into a toilet does. It doesn't mean anything about you other than you are a good little robot who can ge thru the ratmaze better than the next kid. It may be said that I say this for I am a loser and cannot finish a game to save my life. Not true! I have done well at dozens of videogames. I am simply stating the hidden truth behind that 'success', that it was not 'success' at all and was in fact meaningless, pointless, and stupid. And not fun. Let me also add the standard freakish sexual gender-relationship scenario so common in these videogames. Apparently japanese videogame designers have rape and kidnap fantasies for every 'childrens' game they produce seems to be bent on this theme: evil tentacle demon steals 'your' girl, you have to go get her back, upon which she will be 'eternally grateful' to you. Grateful as in fuck you. This is a rather demented way to view a relationship. I do not recall this sort of thing happening very often in ancient folk tales, even while people's heads were being chopped off and their toes made into soup. I think that it is safe to say therei s nothing more perverse and distorting for a nations sexual health than for it to have a highly militarist historical tradition and/or for it to be taken over by the united states and reformed into some half-assed empty 'utopia' by force of a nut like McArthur. Marble Madness This didn't work too well on my emulator. But it was still interesting. Until I knocked the ball off the side of the edge the 80th time. Now people say I have 'bad hand eye coordination'. And yet I lived for 2 or 3 years entirely off my bicycle, including laundry, grocery shopping, trips to movies, the lake, parties, shopping, etc, often in car traffic. I can saw wood into little bits without losing any fingers. I can shove books around all day and only drop one or two. I can sling a 50 pound cart around chairs and corners like I was a ballerina. I can even play with my cats. Maybe my hand eye coordination is lesser than it once was but it is nowhere near awful, and somehow I doubt playing this inane game for 50 hours is going to help me. Rad Racer This sidn't work on my emulator. How sad! How can I truly explore my long lost feelings for these games if I don't root out every nook and cranny of my unrequited game lust? The end Well, I got bored of all of this garbage. I kind of wanted to download Ultima III to hear that silly music again. But I decided ugh, this is enough time wasted. Wasted, thats right. Wasted. And I am hoping that I realize something about all those hours of youth spent in front of this fucking machine. We were had kids. I say we were had. Hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Led astray. They locked us in houses and didn't want us playing with other kids because goddamnit, that was 'too dangerous'. They left us in houses alone with nothing to fucking do. The companies marketed to us like we were robots they could suck money out of. And they were right. We believed that they gave a shit. We dreamed of careers as 'Nintendo Playtesters', not realizing that being treated like a disposable tampon for less money than a garbage hauler, no union, and probably fired in 6 months when the holiday season lets up, is not exactly a 'career' I am glad I got these games and lived out my childhood fantasies of playing/owning them. Because now I can safely put away these fantasies and realize that basically any tragic outcome of my present situation is not, I repeat, not, because I didn't get to have whatever videogames I wanted when I was a child. Because now I have them, and ugh, I feel like I need to go purge my body, old skool style, with a sweat, vomiting, urination, defecation, the whole nine yards. Half the reason I played them anyway was because other kids were playing them and I wanted to be 'in'. Where the hell did I learn that shit? I would like to congratulate corporate Nintendo for making inane, reptetive boring meaningless arbitrary pointless tasks and brainwashing us into thinking we were having fun. You have prepared us well for the corporate world where we will be wonderful little obedient drones, so pleased and happy and full of ourselves when we complete our next 'task', devoid of meaning or connection to anything other than some smarmy congraulatoins notes or high fives from our peers for our 'accomplishments'. Even nintendo power prepared us for the banality of trade journals and conferences and shows, everyone pretending shit is shinola and some actors forgetting what reality was in the first place. I hear nowdays that videogames are a bigger industry than movies. Well, whatever. What it all leads back to in primeval times are the stories of the ancient ones. They were designed to keep us on the right paths and ease our pain and anxieties. Now we have stories to ease our pain and anxiety by allowing us to slaughter thousands of people and rob and kill prostitutes and received a congratulatory pavlovian reward at the end of it all. Conditioned responce, stimulus, response, over and over, a million times. Of course it has no effect! That is the point. It has the effect of transferring money from children to some corporation that has deluded enough of its employees into thinking they are being creative. It has the de-facto effect of teaching us that the 'right path' in life is to be a little white lab mouse and push all the right levers in the right sequence so the 'designers' will grant us 'pleasure'. But never freedom. I am not worried, though. This time we are living in is an anomaly. A bubble. It will burst. Hasbro and all the other scum sucking bottom feeders will wither away. Something new will replace them. You can't go on raising entire generations of people on meaningless robotoid fantasies. Something has to give. Maybe it will be the labor revolution in China where they finally get to have unions and see little reason to go on producing piles of plastic electronics garbage for the idiotic recreation of rich people across the ocean. Maybe it will be that people learn how to live in communities instead of little walled castles in the suburbs. But it can't go on like this forver. Nature abhors a vacuum. |
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