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Every Month, the Editorial Page with one-quarter byte December 2000's "Two Bits" are titled : When I Was Your Age...[...a phrase I hope to never say on this web site again (hopefully) !]Huzzah! I just got a new computer; affordably, yet practically. My old computer was a Pentium 2-300, and with new games like American McGee's Alice and even RealMyst (?!?) requiring 400 or 450 Mhz machines at the slowest, it was time to get a new PC! My new computer is a Pentium III, 800EB, with an ATI Radeon 64mb AGP graphics card (I know all about Nvidia cards, though I need the Radeon's 2D capabilities for my Television and video reviews, as well as its 3D abilities for games). It has 128 Mb memory, 30 Gig hard drive, and Sound Blaster Live sound. Admittedly, it isn't the most powerful PC on the planet, though I have no complaints! Here's where the amusement comes in: what was one of my first games played on this system...? Was it the latest demo of the upcoming game, Oni? No. The game of choice wasn't Alice, either, nor RealMyst (although I did re-play those games, later, for a more honest review for each). Sure, I played (or will play) these games later, though what was one of the first, if not the first? If you care to make a guess, you have one line of text left, before I answer for you. The games I played were simulations...of old Intellivision games! No joke. It's true. This is actually a case of good timing. I
had just heard that the folks at Intellivision
Lives! had released a game pack of four of my favorite Intellivision
classic games, for free. The game pack includes Shark Shark!,
Beauty & the Beast, B-17 Bomber, and Minotaur
(basically, this is the game formerly known as AD& D: Treasure of Tarmin, which no longer has the right
to use the AD&D trademark). The game pack is to promote the release of
their second CD collection, Intellivision Rocks!, which will
include additional titles not earlier available for their first CD
(including many Imagic games, and additional Intellivoice Games). These are exact replicas of
the originals, playable in the comfort of home computing today. There's
even a game pack for However, all this is immaterial, for the
point of this editorial. It is equally unimportant that Intellivision
Lives! got a Don't worry, I won't say that line often. Allow me to only state the obvious; modern games are superior in technology, though lack a certain something. There's some little trait to B-17 Bomber, beyond its simplistic icon map of Europe. Similarly, there's something more to Beauty & the Beast, than a mere stick figure posing as said "beauty" (I guess, however, looking at supermodels these days, this is an accurate enough depiction). This added trait of these games --whatever it is-- coaxed me to immediately play this free game pack, even before playing a more recent, 3D-enhanced game. Don't ask me what that trait is; you have to play the games to see what I mean. The bottom line is, "When I was your age," games had that quality. Perhaps the word I'm searching for is "originality." Nearly all modern games are based on a facsimile of Unreal/Quake, and perhaps even use the same game engine. These games rarely modify the game engine enough to speak of, so it's usually just the exact same game, with different textures wrapped around the characters and walls. Compare this lack of originality to, say, Microsurgeon, with its unique view of "innerspace" surgery. Can you imagine how cool this game would be, if updated to a 3D accelerated game engine? I'll undoubtedly play this classic game, via the Intellivision Rocks CD, and ask myself that very question. Modern game designers are too busy with their cliché Quake clones, to provide a decent answer. Even the Quake series seems to be, more and more, the exact same game as before, with better visual FX. Before you argue, allow me to ask one question: could there be a Quake game, without the overseen "rusty walls" as the only environment texture? It's beginning to get a little repetitive.
Perhaps, on the other hand, it's mere nostalgia. It's rampant in the media lately. A recent sneaker commercial, for example, is a salute to the now-defunct 1970's children's show, The Electric Company. Pairs of Generation-X 30-somethings combine the letter "B" and "oing" to create the word "Boing." I'm not certain why; it's just a cute way to appeal to my generation...and others as well. I'm sure somewhere, Morgan "Easy Reader" Freeman is smiling. Perhaps the Intellivision game pack just hit on that same love of nostalgia. On the other hand, there is something lacking in most games these days. They're often amusing, and quite clever, though rarely as timeless as the games that, say, made into Techtite's recent choices for Top 50 Multimedia Classics (or its upcoming sequel list, of Top 50 Video Game Classics). Modern games rely too much on "technology," not imagination, to survive. As a result, games these days just don't have the appearance of timelessness. When I was your age, they did. I'm Techtite, and these are My Two Bits...
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Macintosh
Deep Impact game rating here at Techtite.com. The important thing here is,
what possessed me to play such dated games, on my way cool, super duper,
top of the line PC? The answer is complicated, though it coaxes me to
utter a cliché I never thought I'd hear myself say, until I was several
decades older (and that's presuming, God willing, that I live that long).
The phrase probably makes you wince, too: "When I was your
age..."