Old Games Mean More Old Truths!

First off. You chumps have been slacking. And by you chumps, I mean the other blogs I am subscribed to. I just scrolled through my Dashboard reading list thing and the top ten or so most recent posts all belonged to Brendan Kelly... I can only read so many posts full of references to male ejaculate before I need something else thrown in the mix. So to you five or six other people I'm subscribed to, get posting.

I have more news in video games this week because for some reason playing through Zelda just got me way back into older games. There was that and a long discussion about how X-Wings work. Mitchell, Kyle, and I were all discussing the finer points of how specific space crafts in Star Wars work and after a while we all came to the realization that our common knowledge on this subject was derived mostly from the Windows 95 classic "X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter"... I had to play it again. Well, we were at Mitchell's house and found that he still had a retail copy of the original X-Wing, which would have to do for the time being. As it turns out, when you pop the disc for a 17 year old DOS based video game it a computer running Windows XP it doesn't really care to work so well. I then had a project for the night. It seems the primary issue was that Windows only allocates a very small amount of RAM for the DOS command prompt and it's not enough to launch X-Wing. That was all fine and dandy so we altered a Windows Config file to tell it to take some more ram... that didn't work either. After a solid two hours of wrestling with this and scouring the internet for clues I sadly gave up for the evening and went home.

As a fun side note, I did temporarily break Mitchell's computer so that it no longer knew how to launch Windows... Oh man. That would have been funny if I didn't know how to fix it.

When I got home I went ahead and downloaded a torrent of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter... Yup. I illegally downloaded a 15 year old video game that I owned at one time... so sue me. The next day I burnt the ISOs to a disc, launched it up, and! ....nothing except a frozen installation menu. Well crap.

Thankfully a bit more searching found me a couple patches, one to make the game able to be read in XP instead of Windows 95, and another to make the audio work with newer versions of Direct X, and I was installing the greatest space flight simulation combat emulator OF ALL TIME! And I must say, while graphic enhancements haven't been kind to this game; the ship models are rigidly polygonal and "flight simulation" means little white dotsfly past your face and every now and again a clunky 3D model of a ship comes into view, but the gameplay is still actually kind of amazing. There's a pretty stiff learning curve which keeps you engaged for quite some time. I also remember the "realism" that I felt from playing it and what made it so much better than any console game being the amount of things I had to do to maintain control during flight. Pretty much every key on the keyboard has a useful function and many two button combinations also have a function and you have to learn them all swiftly maneuvering and dodging Proton Torpedos to stay alive and complete mission objectives.

The biggest downside of this game is the fact that we'll probably never see anything like it ever again. I don't think there's been a game ever since that required such an intricate mastery of controls. Everything now a days is, "right trigger right trigger, look around for new bad guy with joystick, move around with other joy stick to dodge... Oh shit there he is! RIGHT TRIGGER! RIGHT TRIGGER!! Blow his fucking head off!" Seriously, I'm so sick and tired of the same old re-skinned first person shooter/war game. How did the video game industry dupe us into this trend? Why are people willing to drop $60 plus $5 in presale reservation and then wait in line at midnight the night of launch to get "Shoot Dudes in the Face Vol. 187: This Time it's Aliens and a Few Different Guns!"?

Video game nerds are constantly fussing about going, "Why does Nintendo make so much damn money? They don't make 'hardcore' games for 'hardcore' gamers." When they say "hardcore" they mean those same old first person shooter rehashes because these games generally have the biggest developers attached to them, they have 'realistic', adult characters encountering 'adult themes' and the most up to date graphics... this apparently makes a game "hardcore". Nevermind the fact that Nintendo created a game and exercise device that is so fun to use that it got millions of people who normally sit on their ass blogging and watching Scrubs to not only get off their ass and use it, but they fight over the limited supply of the damn game. A tiny bit of innovation people... that's all I'm asking for. Then maybe I'll rejoin the Non-Nintendo or Square-Enix-"Games that were made after the year 2000"-Circuit.

Until then I'll stick with my DS and playing ROM emulations of my old favorites. By the way, I just beat Mega Man X3 the other night and god damn, does my thumb ever hurt. More on that later maybe... For now, I need to find something more useful to do.