A gamer at 40 (or "a gamer grows up")

WHY!? WHY HAS THIS HAPPENED TO ME!? I WAS SO BEAUTIFUL, SO VIBRANT, SO YOUNG!!! NOW I'M OLD, WASHED UP, USED UP AND FED UP!

Sorry, I should be more professional, but you see last month I turned 40 — four friggin' decades old. They say life begins at 40, but you try telling that to Paul Walker or Chris Benoit! Ooh, sorry. Anyway, being 40 in 2015 means that I was born just before the start of the golden age of arcade gaming, I grew up through the 8-bit and 16-bit eras and I came of age just as the internet connected PC gamers from all around the world for unprecedented levels of virtual mayhem and carnage. I was still young enough to thoroughly enjoy the online console explosion and the Xbox 360 ranks as one of my all time favourite game consoles. For the past five years I've been prattling on about my favourite arcade games and occasionally I've talked about modern games, but those articles are now few and far between. I've defined myself as a gamer since before that was even a term and I've spent more time gaming than almost any other leisure activity. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago things started to change. As work and family life took up more and more of my time, I found myself almost resenting the time required to indulge in certain hobbies and I have to confess, gaming was one of them. The reason for this was simple: few hobbies require as much of a time commitment as gaming. Just take the recently released The Witcher 3, for example; the developers, CD Projekt RED, have said there are around 200 hours of gameplay in it. 200 hours? That would get you about a third of the way to learning French or Spanish and that's just one game.

It's because of this time commitment that I gave up playing online after Gears of War 2, but even single-player gaming needs more time than I have spare and it all started to feel a little pointless. I may have played over 200 hours of Skyrim back in 2012, but since then I've only completed two games: Mass Effect 3 and Diablo III. In my various game libraries I have a lot of great games waiting to be played, including Dark Souls, Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 2, The Witcher (1), Kingdoms of Amalur, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Dragon Quest IX, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Super Mario 3D World, L.A. Noire, Metroid Prime Trilogy, Legend of Grimrock, Legend of Zelda: Spirits Tracks, Brutal Legend, Trine 2, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Mark of the Ninja and both Mario Galaxy games. And I have countless more downloadable games going stale on the hard-drives of my Xbox 360 and PC. There is no way I will finish even half of them.

But despite all this, I still like video games and I still feel they have a lot more to offer than people give them credit for. So what is a 40 year-old gamer to do? About a year ago I thought I'd jack it in altogether, but in recent months I've had a change of heart and there are two reasons for that:

1. I got out of a job that was killing me with overtime.
2. My kids are now both old enough to play and they love gaming. 

My son is nearly 9, has been playing since he was about 4 and loves his racing games, pouring hours and hours into Burnout Paradise (surely one of the greatest games of the last generation), Blur and Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing; my daughter is 5½ and she started about two years ago with Kinect games, but got really good at gaming thanks to Minecraft and Mario Kart 7. To my kids gaming and the Internet are just part every day life, and because of games like Minecraft, Terraria, Super Mario, Skylanders, Disney Infinite and of course, the Lego games, they are now both big gamers. I didn't even push games on them, I merely responded to their interest by showing them other games.

At Christmas, my kids got their first console (as opposed to hijacking mine), a Wii U and we all love it. Nintendo has put out some fantastic stuff and I've already played it far more than I ever played on the Wii, despite owning one for nearly 8 years (SteamWorld Dig is my current jam). The half-tablet/half-joypad controller is great for keeping the kids quiet when the wife or I want the TV (even if we just want the TV off). And despite the fact it is already facing its twilight years, with games like Splatoon, Xenoblade Chronicles X and the new Zelda still on the horizon, I reckon we'll be enjoying it for some time to come.

Is Splatoon a genuine, family-friendly
alternative to the big military shooters?

For me it's a bit like coming home to my gaming roots, because it has loads of games that are like the kind of games I played growing up and they have no pretensions of being Hollywood block busters or grand artistic statements. They're game-ass games. And for a man who is, in truth, a little too old to still be playing games, the feeling of reliving my youth with my kids, rather than extending it, seems an acceptable compromise. And besides, they say the family that plays together, stays together, so when all four of us are whizzing around Rainbow Road on Mario Kart 8 or kicking seven shades of shit out of Jigglepluff on Super Smash Bros, our family is no danger of falling apart.

I know there are some gamers out there who will mock the direction my gaming has taken and say that I'm out of touch, that not a real gamer. But listen, I really have down the rabbit hole with this hobby for most of my life.

Homeworld was great on these

As a kid, I marked myself out as a nerd by playing on my computer or console, rather than hanging around the local park, and my favourite holidays were the ones that gave me access to an arcade. I spent my entire summer between 5th year and 6th form playing nothing but 4D Sports Driving (and gained about a stone in weight as a result). As an adult, I got even deeper into gaming. I played the original Quake online using QuakeWorld and custom character models that I'd designed. I spent a decade building gaming PCs, doing dumb things like over-clocking my Intel Celeron 300A to at 466MHz in pursuit of more frames per second. I had crazy peripherals like 3Dfx Voodoo graphics accelerator cards, almost every controller in Microsoft's Sidewinder series (including the ForceFeedback steering wheel and Dual Strike FPS gamepad) and even ELSA 3D Revelator glasses (they were great, especially on Homeworld). I used to lug my giant tower case and a 17" Iiyama CRT to my friends' flats and houses, so we could all play Half-Life or Age of Empires or TOCA Touring Car Racing against each other. I was even in a Half-Life clan at one point, called Full Metal Y-Fronts, who took part in an online tournament hosted by WirePlay (we completely failed to get anywhere in the competition, but never mind that). By the 2000s I had added a Dreamcast, a PlayStation, an N64, a GameBoy Color and a NeoGeo Pocket Color to my hardware collection. In the mid-noughties, my girlfriend and I were as deep into World of Warcraft as you can go, sacrificing sleep, food, sunlight, and even sometimes hygiene in the quest for epic loot. I can remember lost weekends were we would be up until 3 or 4 in the morning doing raids, only to get up again by 7 AM so we could stick all our unwanted drops in the Auction House. And in 2008, I even pursued my hobby into professional life and got my name of the credits of a handful of already forgotten games.

So, I have been what people would now call a "hardcore gamer", but that time has passed for me, like going clubbing or owning a hot hatch. And I say what people now call hardcore gamer, because back then we were just known as gamers. Back then, there was us and them, the non-gamers, and that's it. Now, people who play games can be split up in to all sorts of groups. There's a divide between casual and hardcore, a divide between console and PC gamers, a divide between online and single-player gamers, a divide between simulation and arcade gamers, a divide between retro and modern gamers, a divide between indie and AAA gamers, a divide between games played by enthusiasts and those played by people who don't even think of themselves as gamers and a divide between people who love artsy games and pretty much everyone else. If you talk to people from any one of these categories you will find some who think people on the opposite side of the divide are downright crazy. Take single-player and online (multi-player) games. Even in games that offer both, such as the Halo series, you will find people who never explore and experience one half of the game.

Dear Esther is a strong argument for games as art and has no gameplay whatsoever

But what does all this mean? Well, at the beginning of this post, I talked about turning 40 and how I've grown up with games, but the fact is, video games are closer to 60 years old (if you take William Higinbotham and Robert Dvoraks oscilloscope-based Tennis For Two into consideration). Games have grown up too. We've all heard the reports of World of Warcraft having 11 million active players, Minecraft selling over 60 million copies, AAA games having $100 million budgets and Grand Theft Auto V earning more money than any movie or album, but those facts are not the biggest evidence of gaming's growth and maturity as an entertainment medium. It is the fact games can be divided into so many different categories and serve such a broad audience that really speaks to the maturity of the medium. You can compare it with the success of Marvel's blockbuster super hero movies, which appeal to everyone from comic book guys, to movie geeks, to families and to women who just like Chris Hemsworth's pecs.

Marvel has mastered mass appeal

I've learnt to accept that I am now a gamer dad, I play games with my kids and I love it. Seeing my daughter giggling with excitement because she's just taken out her mummy's kart out with a red shell is as much of a gaming high as I could wish for. You might be a die hard retro gamer, eschewing polygonal graphics and 32-bit processors as "modern rubbish". You might be a sharp shooting Battlefield nut, who could head shot me from the far side of Paracel Storm before I'd even worked out where the beach was. Maybe you only play FIFA and would never consider yourself a gamer, despite buying a PS4 just to play the next game in the series. Maybe you love Kingdom Rush on your phone, but only play it every now and then. Maybe you have a mock F1 car in your living room, with a three-screen display, an authentic F1 force feedback steering wheel and hydraulic seat. Maybe you want your games to ask deeply psychological questions, such as Lucas Pope's immigration officer game, Papers Please. All of that is fine, because no matter what type of game you like, the industry has something for you. This is the evolution of any industry or art form, it is not a sign of selling out, dumbing down or pandering to stock holders. Fear not, the kind of games you want are still being made, whatever they might be, they just now have to take their place with the games everyone else wants.

What I'm getting at is this: what we, as gamers, need to do is show our maturity, especially those of us who are part of the old guard. We need to accept that there are difficult types of gamer, without making a big deal about it, in the same way most of use will happily watch Max Max: Fury Road, Avengers: Age of Ultron and the Minions movie without putting ourselves in a particular movie goer pigeon hole or verbally abusing someone who isn't in the same pigeon hole. Because there is no us and them when it comes to most other entertainment mediums, because with time and greater diversity comes mainstream acceptance. And I don't know about you, but I think games and the people who make them, deserve to be considered normal and worthwhile, not just niche and nerdy. Games are brilliant and game developers and some of the smartest, most talented and hardest working people you'll find in any industry. They and their work deserve better from society and it starts with us.

MTW

MMXIV

Happy New Year, arcade fans. This is a pre-programmed post, as it's my daughter's birthday today. Happy birthay, Chick Pea!

2013 was a great year for this blog. My Twitter follower count shot up, thanks to some careful use of hash tags, my Worth a Look feature allowed me to talk about lots of modern games with retro vibes and I managed to tell you all about 120 of my favourite arcade games, thanks to my Top 10 feature.

So what have I got planned for 2014? Not much, I'm afraid to say. This year is shaping up to be crazy at work, plus I'm in the middle of a major personal project which sadly has to take precedence over blogging about old arcade games. I will still be putting up posts, just nothing routine (not even Classics of the Month, although I my do one for the road). But the great thing about writing a retro blog is I rarely have to worry about specific dates and deadlines.

So I hope you all have a great year and if you got an Xbox One or a PS4 for Christmas, take a moment to find something retro to play and don't forget how important those early games still are today.

Bye for now

MTW

Game Over

On Monday, 1^st September 2008 I walked through the doors of one of the UK's oldest independent developers and my career as a technical author in the games industry began. Today I left that developer and the games industry by those same doors.

Believe me when I say, however complicated you think games are to make, they are a lot, lot more complicated than that. I have never felt so out of my depth as I did during the first couple of years. People throw around the phrase “mind blown” all the time, but during the first week my mind was blown in a such a tangible way it was like a fuse had actually popped in my head. Just Google 'global illumination', 'radiosity', 'inverse kinematics', 'cloth dynamics' or 'particle physics' and you'll see what I mean. Nonetheless, the past 3½ years have been quite a roller coaster ride and I wouldn't change a thing. I got my name on the credits of 4 released games and 2 others that are still in development and I've worked with guys who helped create some genuine classics, including Blur, Warhammer Online, Timesplitters, GTA, The Sims, Tomb Raider, Lemmings, Micro Maniacs and James Pond.

Sadly, there's little or no future for me in the games industry and I am unlikely to ever return. When I started I had dreams of becoming a designer or maybe even a producer. That idea quickly went out of the window when I discovered “crunch time” meant working 12 to 18 hour days for months on end in order to get everything done on time – a problem I was spared in my role.

And so it's time to come back down to earth, stop bumming around in jeans and a T-shirt and get a “grown up job”. I start my new job at the beginning of June, which not only shows there are jobs out there if you look, but also gives me some time to play few more games before I start.

MTW

So you don't like modern games?

I write a blog where I wax lyrical about old arcade games and the only modern games I talk about are the ones like old games. So does that mean I only like old games? No, on the contrary, I love modern games and working in the industry has done nothing to quell my enthusiasm for games new and old.

Here are 10 modern games (in alphabetical order) I love, that have nothing to do with arcade gameplay mechanics.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

I don't get comic books and I didn't like either of Chris Nolan's Batman films, but despite this, I loved Rock Steady's Batman Arkham Asylum. For the first time I could see why comic book fans wanted Batman to be dark and brooding, rather than camp and colourful. This game has brilliant combat, great gameplay mechanics and lots of atmosphere.

Bioshock 

What is it about us humans that makes us love dystopian visions more than utopian ones? Maybe it's like Agent Smith said in the Matrix: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program." The world of Rapture started out as a utopian society, where science and human endeavour were rewarded above all else, but that's not the world the player gets to see. Instead we see what happened when it all fell apart. And what a glorious playground for the dangerous and insane it is too.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series

Street Fighter II turned arcades into battlegrounds, with players demonstrating their nerve and skill in face-to-face competition. These days that competitive spirit may have moved online, but it's just as fierce as it was 19 years ago. The Call of Duty franchise has been around for almost half of that time, but with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare everything changed. The new generation of online consoles came to life like never before and the world had a new favourite competitive game.

Elder Scroll IV: Oblivion

Tolkien will never know just how big the ball he started in motion when he wrote Lord of the Rings has become. From other fantasy authors such as Robert Jordan, David Eddings, Terry Brooks and David Gemmel, to boardgames like Dungeons & Dragons, to card games like Magic the Gathering, to videos games like Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. The latest instalment in this legendary series is a triumph of video game design and technical prowess. Outside of MMORPGs (more on those later), few video game worlds are as vast or as well realised as Oblivion's.

Gears of War series

The new flagship series for Microsoft's Xbox 360, Gears of War is a grim and gritty sci-fi horror, with some of the most visceral action in video game history. But it's also a series that's got more to it than just big guys, big guns and bloody gore. There is real emotion and pathos in this series - Don's pursuit of his captured wife in the second game is testament to this. It also conveys the feeling of comradery among soldiers better than any other game too; in Gears, you are not a lone soldier, you are one of four brothers, together to the bitter end.

Mass Effect series

A sprawling sci-fi RPG, with as much focus on conversation as combat, Mass Effect's world is deep and involving and somewhere I would love to live. Few games have ever been so cinematic and the blend of combat and conversation is unrivalled. The series shifted focus with the sequel to be more action-orientated and less open, but at the same time the characters and their relationships grew. I can't wait for the third instalment.

Mirror's Edge

More dytopia, but a very different kind of Bioshock's grim and rotting world. The unnamed city of Mirror's Edge is polished and gleaming, but every bit as broken. Incorporating parkour with first person action sounds like a recipe for disaster, but with Mirror's Edge it works beautifully. Running, jumping and sliding through the city is fluid, exhilarating and dare I say it, liberating. It's a game that feels like it could not have existed on previous generations and is definitely a product of our time. For this one I had to include a video, so those who haven't seen it can witness it for themselves.

Super Mario Galaxy series

Nintendo's mascot is one of the few 90s gaming icons to survive the transformation to 3D polygonal graphics. Super Mario Galaxy is one of the most fun, charming and above all inventive games you are ever likely to play. I feel the Wii was a bit of a misfire overall, with far too many inspired games with poor controls, but this game shows just what the machine is capable of, both with its graphics and its motion controls. The sequel has just come out and actually manages to be even better than the first one. I don't know how Nintendo do it.

Portal 

Oh my God, what a game Portal is. Ingenious and hilarious, stark and yet brimming over with character thanks to the menacing, maniac matriarchal super computer that is GlaDOS. The puzzles in this game are some of the best ever offered up in video games, thanks to the sublime portal gun, but beyond the puzzle package here is a game that manages to tell such a great story with so little effort.

World of Warcraft

Five years ago, a bunch of my work colleagues convinced me to try Blizzard's new massively multiplayer role -playing game, World of Warcraft - or WoW for short. I had previously tried Everquest and not liked it, but I had liked the Warcraft and Starcraft strategy games, so I gave it a go. I was quickly hooked. I also introduced it to my fiancée  thinking we would maybe play it for a few hours a week, but she became hooked too, and for the next two years we were putting tens of hours a week into this vast, colourful and engrossing game. We're married now with two kids, so neither of us have time for WoW, but if we did, we'd probably be hooked again.

So there we have it, ten modern games/franchises that I've enjoyed every bit as the arcade games of my youth. Arcade throwback I may be, but gamer I am first and it's my love of games that lead me to the arcade in the first place and it's that continued love that keeps me playing today.

MTW