A Quest Draws Near

Quite recently I found myself living in a hotel for work purposes with a ridiculous amount of time to kill. My birthday came around and my loving girlfriend purchased a Hyperkin Retron 3 system. Access to a large retro game store and the internet may have created a monster that should not be. Today we fight slimes. A lot of slimes.

Dragon Warrior is a very charming game that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to into. To be honest the game hasn’t really aged that well but it still stands as a streamlined version of the RPG’s of the late 80’s. It’s clear a lot of the design decisions were based on computer based RPG’s that came before; the perspective is top down like Ultima, the entire game is tile based like Wizardry, and the story is nothing more than “Kill the Evil Wizard, Save the Princess” like real life.

 The monsters of Alefgard are polite enough come at you one at a time. Every encounter is the hero versus a single enemy, which is fortunate because our descendant of Erdrick is pretty adept at dueling. The player character learns offensive and defensive magic, hits like a truck, and dons the most powerful equipment in the land to kill monsters for experience and profit…to buy more equipment and learn more spells to kill even stronger enemies one at a time. Expect a bit of a grind, but while encounters can be frequent most can resolved just as fast.

The original Dragon Quest is very out dated. Graphics aren’t important, the game plays well enough. I’m sorry to admit that playing NES games on a clone console makes your 8-bit adventures sound like ass, so I can’t really comment on the status of that. The menus are obtuse; you have to open the base menu to get anything done, like talking or going up or down stairs. I understand stairs can be tricky when you are traveling alone, but when you walk around on the world map and automatically enter towns and caves there’s no reason you should have pick it from a menu. Finding certain items without a guide might seem a little difficult for newer gamers, but the overall difficulty is not as tough as other games in the genre.

I came into this game expecting a history lesson. I got one. I loved every minute of it. There’s just something  about this game where you don’t question yourself and just agree “But, thou must!”

Why Do We Fight?

In the wake of a new generation of console wars I realized I have an opinion that hasn't really seemed to be voiced. Yes, I'm a grown man that loves his video games. Yes, I feel like I have a stake in whatever these corporations make available to us to fuel this hobby. Too bad I there doesn't seem to be anything inventive going on this generation, save terrible press conferences and retractions. Microsoft has completely alienated its consumer base while Sony seems to want make things easier for indie developers to get down the pipe. All the chatter seems to be about these issues. To be honest I don't plan on spending four or five hundred dollars for a new console at launch where it looks like everything that will be done looks like it could have been done on the generation before it. 

When we were graced with the change from 8 to 16 bit gaming sound, graphic quality, and controller design seemed to improve leaps and bounds. When we went from 16 to 32 bit gaming the third dimension was a revolution. The jump to the 128 bit times brought us the beginnings of online play and a huge jump in storage media. And this last generation was the unveiling of the HD experience. Where are we going from here? I can't really see anything truly next gen happening here (I don't buy cloud computing yet, bandwidth is still quite expensive).

Why are we fighting over this anyway? The days of SEGA vs. Nintendo are long gone, games cost so much money to make that titles that move millions of units are considered failures, and it seems the masses are just fine with buying similar games every year. We can't completely blame the public where we blame the economy for everything. Sure games are technically cheaper than they've ever been, but now people work harder to keep what they have; buying multiple $60 games every month (or several a year) can't be expected. There's a reason some of the sleeper hits from the last few years didn't get widespread discovery until prices went down.

Alright you can fight. I'll watch. From my backlog of games from the 8 bit era until now. I really mean to finish Contra without the Konami Code at some point...