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Remember The Time

A short while ago I downloaded the Dracula-hunting game Super Castlevania IV on my Wii. It was one of my favorite platformers as a teenager. The first game to show the true power of the Super Nintendo, as anyone could tell because it had Super in the title, it featured big, colorful characters, Dolby-like surround sound and, perhaps most importantly, MODE 7 (I can’t remember if it was capitalized at the time, but it should have been). MODE 7 was Nintendo’s secret weapon against the oft-forgotten NEC Turbografx-16, but it seemed custom made to annihilate the Genesis. It’s hard to believe Sega, the company slowly destroying one of the best video game franchises in history, was Nintendo’s biggest threat twenty years ago. Regardless, MODE 7 was a special setting that allowed Super Nintendo game programmers to do crazy things with the graphics. They could stretch a map like a plastic surgeon’s patient, spin it 360 degrees at high speeds (perfect for flying games like Pilotwings) and zoom in to microscopic levels. The graphics would pixelate like Lite Brite, but the effect – the effect was beautiful. We had never seen anything like it before. And at the time Konami, creator of the Castlevania series, was still at the top of its game. I remembered gigantic Frankenstein zooming in and out of the screen, running through a corridor while the background shifted in the other direction, and, most memorably, whipping a post and hanging on for dear life as the room spun around. It was nuts. I hadn’t downloaded a Wii Virtual Console game in months, but thoughts of beating Dracula once again jumped into my mind. I paid the $8. The game downloaded. I made myself a drink and sat down for a night of pleasure. 

It took no more than a minute for me to realize I made a mistake. The beautiful orchestral music, wonderful, and the gameplay, familiar. The problems, however, were numerous, beginning with the graphics, which looked like someone took a beautiful painting and smeared it with water, leading to the awkward controls that seemed to be accepted in their entirety back during video games “golden age,” whatever that means, not helping the problems with monotone gameplay that resembled the best of a tired action genre – not classic, but tired – trampled by God of War and other harbingers of the platformer apocalypse even Konami could not have predicted coming years later. The final straw was when I died and was given a password. Does anyone else remember this shit? I wrote it down, but I doubt I’ll be putting in the eight-symbol code anytime soon. Besides, the Wii hard drive is small. I might as well delete the game and regain the memory space. 

What I experienced is but an example of what we all have experienced at one point or another: trading time or money for the warm, fuzzy memories of a game, only to realize that our tastes, our expectations, are totally different. Some of us got into the retrogaming thing several years ago by downloading programs like MAME (I wrote about MAME for Playboy magazine here: http://www.damonbrown.net/category/journalism/video-games/playboy-magazine/). Often free, emulators allowed us to download old-school arcade games and play them on the computer. They also, technically, may have been illegal – legal scholars are still debating that – but at least we didn’t get burnt when, say, the Journey (http://www.mame.net/screenshots/journey.png) video game wasn’t as good as we remembered. We also didn’t have much of a choice. Arcades were disappearing and stalwarts Atari, Midway and Namco weren’t churning out arcade compilations as they do today. 

There were numerous arcade hits collections on the home systems, beginning, perhaps, with the original Playstation. They didn’t really take off, however, until the portable Nintendo DS and Sony PSP came into fashion. Arcade games were perfect for quick plays on the road. The rough graphics came out pretty sharp on the small screens. Companies could also make a profit by sticking awful games with great ones, kind of like those DVD packs that feature Jennifer Aniston’s “The Break-up” with her Oscar-worthy turn in the Leprechaun series. Criticisms aside, compilations offer great opportunities to preserve gaming history. I almost broke into tears when Capcom announced my favorite arcade game, Strider, was coming to the last PSP arcade collection. It almost made the Quiz and Dragon inclusion forgivable. Emphasis on almost. 

Late last year we started getting back into the home consoles: XBox Live Arcade was thriving, the Playstation 3 offered limited classic titles, and the aforementioned Virtual Console became a hit. Now companies are releasing new old-school games every week. Wonderful, right? Not so much. Most don’t offer demos – a brilliant marketing move on their part – so the only facts we can rely on are foggy, deceptive memories from two decades ago. Weak games previously squeezed between hits, which justified the purchase, are now being sold on their own. It’s the buffet syndrome: the Mu Shu pork is easy to digest among 100 other items, but we realize it true malignant nature when we order it as a single entrée. Some “premium” games are almost $20. That’s about the price of an excellent used XBox game. You’re almost better off bringing your jaundiced Sega Saturn out of the closet and going hunting on eBay. Well, at least the downloable games are guaranteed to work. 

GameSpot and a few other websites are taking the time to review classic arcade game downloads, but I suspect most of us won’t stay to listen as they defecate all over our favorite titles of yesteryear. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to download an, ahem, emulator to try before you buy. For myself, I’m only downloading blockbuster hits from now on. I already got whipped once. 

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