Quake 3.1

So the Quake Live Beta has been up for awhile now, and it's fun. However, it's not impressive. It is merely a free Quake 3.

You spawn. You find armor and a rocket launcher. You try to kill others while not dying. Sure, there are assorted game variants like Capture the Flag and Deathmatch, but nothing that hasn't been done before just as well. The graphics are about PS2 quality, a far cry from other PC shooters like, well, Far Cry 2.

It's not new, but it's still fun, and it's free. But a lot of older, similar games are just about as free. You can download the original Half-Life off Steam for $4.99 (or free on BitTorrent LOL). It's not a $60 next-gen game. But it does remind you why you play Quake 3 so much back in the good ol' days. Nostalgia is neat. But Street Fighter IV shows that it can be even neater than just a re-hash. Well, for $60.

A new old game

Games have been advancing for years and years, both in the technical aspects and the presentation. When Mega Man 9 came out on WiiWare, PSN, and XBOX Live, people applauded its Mega Man 2 likenesses. But this is a prime example that games are simply better now. Old games were so hard that they bordered on unplayable, and harkening back to the old days is not so much fan service as it is fan punishment. Have you ever played the original TMNT on the NES? There were so few health pizzas that death was almost inevitable, and if one of your teammates died, there were only two different places in the whole game where you could revive one of them. Also, the controls were stiff and unresponsive. At least the sequel was cool...

Even Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, widely regarded as one of its generation's greatest games, fell prey to "classic" game conventions such as not being able to turn in mid-jump. Nowadays, some things are just expected in current games, like, being able to control your characters. Maybe that's just me.

Review: Metroid: Zero Mission on GBA

Zero Mission is, firstly, a remake of the original Metroid on NES. The original Metroid is widely regarded as a classic of... classic systems. Still, have you played it recently? It's wildly difficult because there's only one direction you can aim, and you will get lost without a map more than you'd like to admit. Zero Mission is less of a direct remake, and more of a re-imagining. It's an improvement in every way. If the original Metroid had sex with Super Metroid and shrunk to GBA size, this would be the spawn of their cartridgey loins. You can shoot in angles and squat. There's super missles. There are hidden secrets everywhere. This is Metroid-vania at it's finest. The graphics are crisp and colorful and the animations bring classic enemies to new life. The sounds and music drip of nostalgia and make you fall in love with Samus Aran all over again.

There are very few complaints I can come up with. One is that once you start finding the extra energy tanks packed into planet Zebes, the game gets pretty easy. None of the bosses pose much of a challenge, but the exploration aspect makes up for it. You always feel like you're discovering something new, and Samus continually improves in tangible ways. Also, the levels added into Zero Mission that were not in the original Metroid are beautifully crafted and full of clever puzzles and uses for your suit's upgrades. Unfortunately, this reminds you that the original levels were rather sparse and uninteresting. Maybe they should have just remade the entire game with all new levels, a la Master Quest (the Ocarina of Time remake on Gamecube)? Maybe Nintendo left them in and merely added to them for nostalgic fanboys.

One last note: the last level level packs in so much action that you may poop your pants a little. The final boss, Mother Brain, reminds you that classic games were TOUGH, and the appearance of the metroids remind you just how much you hated them when you were a kid. And then, here's the kicker... Mother Brain isn't the final boss! There's even more game after you think you won, and it's all heart-pounding and awesome. This trip down memory lane is well worth taking, and you can find this game at GameStop for $7 in their glass case. Get it.

Warning: if you play this while you're on the toilet, you'll forget what you were supposed to be doing in there, and you will sit there playing Metroid until your legs fall asleep. Don't fall on your Game Boy when you stand up with wobble-legs.

Rating: 9.5/10

New old games

Sometimes, game companies create new IPs. See: Mirror's Edge, Mass Effect, any Tim Schafer game. Usually, though, they realize, "Hey, we're a game company." Then they let the purpose of a company (to make money) get in the way of the creative part of game creation. They see that Madden consistently sells millions upon millions of copies each year despite the fact that changes to the game from one season to the next are mostly superficial. They see that Psychonauts and Okami do not sell despite near-universal critical acclaim. Maybe it's the funny names. Maybe consumers just don't have as much money as they used to. Maybe Average Joe fears change. Barack is president now; maybe his inauguration can be the turning point for the game industry as well as the economy. Maybe people will start trying new things because the old things are boring. The old things don't work anymore. Change, as they say, is good.

Then why do game companies continue mining the past for ideas instead of looking to the future?

Space Invaders Extreme. Galaga Legions. Geometry Wars. (It's Asteroids in Technicolor. Zip it.) Halo Wars/Recon/ODST/4/5/6. DDR Super Max Ultimate Extreme Hyper Fighting II: The World War Road Warriors. Once-fresh ideas are now being re-hashed so continually and consistently that whole generations are now being robbed of the initial "wow" factor of a new game or a new technology. When GTA III was released and instantly popularized the sandbox world genre, people were amazed. They said things like, "Now I expect so much more from my games." Flash forward through Vice City and San Andreas and you have GTA IV - more polished, but basically the same game. Is it still fun? Most definitely, but not as exciting, fresh, or new.

Which brings me to my question: is the amount of fun you have with a game related to the amount of innovation in it? Are remakes (Prince of Persia, Bionic Commando, Ninja Gaiden) fun because the source was so pure and undiluted? How long can you milk a concept or franchise before it becomes obsolete and unplayable? Square Enix has made each new Final Fantasy game a fresh take on the classic RPG formula to varying levels of success, while the Tony Hawk games started to stink so bad that they finally took a year off to regroup.

Madden will always be fun despite the lack of substantial updates. Mario will continue to charm gamers the world over with each new adventure. Game developers will continue mining the past as long as there's money to be made (*cough*Sega*cough*). Still, as long as there are people that are not content to merely rest on their grandad's NES laurels, the future still has a future. And maybe it all doesn't have to be in the past.