Backlogs and Childhood Lament

It seems that now the 90s are over a decade ago the once popular game series' are starting to get rebooted. It's as if some latent energy causes any game that has been dormant for 10 years to awaken something in the mind of whoever still holds the copyrights to it. We've got Syndicate¹, Aliens vs Predator¹, XCOM¹, Rise of the Triads, Mechwarrior, Hitman and even mention of Doom 4 and Descent 4 floating lazily in the 'we're considering it' pile. These games of yore harbor fond memories of my childhood (yes I had Diablo 1 which was rated MA15+ when I was about 6 but I turned out fine) but the reboots seem to be mostly borrowing the name and changing everything else. Why did I like these games to begin with?

This speaks more about my childhood than I care to admit.

The problem is that nostalgia is a tricky beast. As a child what you perceive as awesome is quite circumstantial. You loved a particular game because that was your only game until next year when either Christmas or your birthday cropped up. As a mother would say to their daughter on the eve of an arranged marriage, 'You will learn to love him.' Instead of booting up a game from a vast backlog you'd replay a game you had completed numerous times before. You really got to know a game inside and out because of this whereas these days a game is lucky enough to be played at all let alone completed even once. Sites like Backloggery lead me to believe I'm not alone in this and recent events aggravate me even more.

Releases this year were a bit slim and apart from Mass Effect 3 early on in the year the next release I nabbed was Guild Wars 2. Now this is an MMO and conceivably holds hundreds of hours of gameplay but I was done with it after about three solid weeks of playing it. The reason, apart from several game related issues I might speak of later, was that Borderlands 2 was just around the corner and I was super pumped. After about two or three weeks solid of Borderlands 2 it was off to Halo 4. While playing Halo 4 I kept seeing news of new DLC for Borderlands 2 and updates to Guild Wars 2. Three game releases about a month apart and I was jumping ship to whichever game was being released next all the while new content for previous games was piling up behind me.

The way I consume games as an adult is vastly different to when I was a nipper and if I had to choose I'd prefer to go back to one game a year. Another thing I noticed is that it's always easier to replay a really old game that you had once played in its day than an old game a friend recommends. I can go back and play all the old Dungeons & Dragons games from Black Isle² and declare them better than any recent RPG yet I can't be arsed to play Metroid or Commander Keen.

This screenshot is enough to give me a throbbing erection.

So now about a decade later we're seeing a resurgence of all the games we saw when we were kids. Only not really because the games are mostly just piggybacking off the name because the publishers are too scared to announce a new series which leaves me perplexed. The fans of the original aren't going to be pleased by the non-pure sequel and the people who never played the original wouldn't care what the name is or if the play style is different. There's really no point making a reboot or sequel if you're not going to keep to what the original was because at best your game will be treated indifferently by half your audience and at worst you've pissed off your sole audience.

Let's take Syndicate as a prime example. The original was an isometric strategy game with weapons and armament research done between missions and territories from a world map were selected for successive missions. The reboot is a first person shooter with the only semblance of research is done on the cooperative side. Everyone who had played the original scorned the new iteration as an attempt to appeal to the young, attention deficit Call of Duty-playing crowd (I'm not saying that all people who play Call of Duty are young or attention deficit. Ok, well, a little bit.) who probably never played the original. The kicker is that I didn't mind the new Syndicate. I would have forgiven all the little things that make it so unlike the original if they had just mentioned it was 'inspired by' the original instead of a direct sequel. Apart from the nausea inducing bloom, narrow field of view, lens flare, mouse smoothing and motion blur³ it was a pretty cool game to play cooperatively. It was gritty, visceral and I really dug the idea of militant corporations but because it shared the name and not the gameplay of a game made about 13 years ago it constantly irked me.

'A faithful sequel and a worthy addition to the series.' - No one, ever

Becoming an adult with disposable income but with the mind of a child is what leads to having backlogs. It also causes you to age faster as well and you start to complain about new releases and how they're not the same as when you were a kid. The thing to remember is that people are living their childhood all the time and nothing is going to change the memories and experiences you had as a kid. It's not like reboots and sequels are destroying what came before, those games will always be there (thanks to pirates and sites like GoG). All you can really do is ignore the dodgy releases and for shit's sake stop buying games during Steam and GoG sales. Try to finish a game and wait two months between purchases and you might come to enjoy a game you would have previously only spent an hour on.

Look at these smug bastards with their clean-cut look and amazing prices. Cunts.

¹Can we not use the exact same name as the original? It really screws up search engines when both the newly released game and the one from 12 years ago have the same name. Make the name a plural or add a subtitle like 'Revelations', 'Rebooted', 'Rehashed', 'Redone', 'Remastered', 'Recreated', etc

²Side note here: how great is Good Old Games? I had heard of them from several news sites but hadn't checked them out until, ironically, I couldn't find a pirated copy of Temple of Elemental Evil as I'd lost my disc and couldn't see it for sale anywhere. After finding it on GoG for a pittance I promptly bought all the AD&D games and every game from my childhood. You want $5 for a game that pulls my childhood heartstrings and includes the soundtrack, artbook, avatars, making of movies and everything with no DRM? Take my money! Who says piracy costs a sale?

³All these traits were common in games released during a time I refer to as the Dark Age of PC gaming which occurred from 2006-2009. What a shitty bunch of years for the Master Race where the first thing you would do is tamper with .ini files and third party tools to make it run properly.



I'm a centenarian in a twenty-something body