Why I Hate Video Games. But Love Freeware.

As a growing lad, I was utterly in thrall to the world of video games. I was born in the mid-80’s, the first heyday for computer games, and, although I (by which I mean my mother) couldn’t afford a console or computer of my own for years, everytime I went round a friend’s house who had one I would be glued to the things. But, sadly, it did not last. Why? Technology, that’s why.

I remember playing some game on a ZX Spectrum or something, involving walking around boring mazes picking up apples for hours, becoming obsessed by the way that when you walked the character into a wall, his feet kept on moving even though he wasn’t going anywhere. Everytime I went to see my cousin, six hours by train to the south of England, I would drive everyone to distraction by wanting nothing but to play on his Super Nintendo or Game Boy. The amount of childhood friends I must have angered by insisting we play Sonic or Dizzy instead of anything ‘energetic,’ or ‘outdoors,’ (an alien term for me at the time) did not concern me as long as I got my little fix of unaffordable gaming heaven.

Later, when I eventually convinced my mother and father to furnish me with an Amiga 500, I sat on my window sill all Sunday, pining for my father to arrive with the thing, even though I knew he wasn’t going to come until much later that evening. It was pathetic. I became absorbed with my Amiga in the coming years, playing everything I could on it, sticking by it like a decreped animal well beyond its useful years, and playing everything I could on it to death, most notably Brian the Lion, Benefactor, and Superfrog. I remember a friend complaining in 1997 or something, well into the ’PC-in-every-home’ age, that Worms on the Amiga was unplayable because the mines, which blow you up should you get too close, couldn’t be seen because they were the same colour as the landscape due to the machine’s very limited graphical capacity. I didn’t care, it was MY Amiga, damn it. To hell with innovation.

I was forced, eventually, to move up to the glorious world of the PC, and Windows based gaming, and for a while, I was seduced by the ‘exciting’ gameplay and luxurient 3D graphics. Carmageddon was especially ace, but then you can’t go too wrong with gory, car-based, zombie death. I even loved a few first-person shooters, the current darlings of video games. Quake was pretty good, and I played Quake IIto death when I got it for my birthday (oooh, what a sweet birthday that was), but the absolute best was System Shock 2, the slow, cinematic build up of fear done entirely with suggestion, voice-acting and atmosphere is unparalleled even today. I hated the shooting though, the panic that a lot of gamers seem to remember Shock 2 fondly for, I even cheated by giving myself extra ammo when it seemed to run out too quickly. ‘Where was the fun in struggling through the game?’ I excused that with, reasonably.

And I suppose that was the point when something began to sink in, something that became totally apparent when playing through that ‘unshakeable classic’ of gaming, Half-Life. The start of the game, I loved, along with, apparently, every other gamer; the way the story unfolded without jumping out of the character, and the great start of exploring the game and meeting scary monsters, it was brilliant. Then the army show up. All of a sudden, you have to deal with competent A.I., and you find yourself legging it across rooftops for the fear of being killed by helicopters, and there’s sound everywhere so you don’t know what’s going on, and it’s all so bloody realistic. And then it’s really dark in places and you have to hide because unseen assassins above you are shooting you in the head, and there’s no way to stop and look or take your time, and I just turned the thing off, and never returned.

After Half-Life, that was it. The media were besotted with the game and the A.I, and the realism and the graphics and everything. PC’s had reached such a level that graphics could render things so close to the real world, and the enemies could fight like real people; but where was the fun?! Every game that followed had to push the envelope further and further, requiring ever more meatier machines to beef the graphics up and ever more skillful gamers to play. All of a sudden you had to think of strategy, weapon selection, approach, your character’s own safety; and not only that, you had to think about your computer, how much it cost to make it better, how to get the best ‘performance’ out of it. If you wanted to play online, an idea that enthralled me for a while, you had to be competent in thinking about networks, and ICPs (whatever they are). They replaced the fun with stress. And all because suddenly, computers could.

Well, bollocks to that. I still loved games in essence, but I hate all the modern ones. All of them, because of what the fucks in the media and the companies did to them. But then I calmed down, and made several discoveries. The first was Emulators. I discovered that, with a simple, windows-based program, you could make your PC, no matter how meaty it was, behave like a Super Nintendo, or a Sega Megadrive, or whatever you wanted, and play any game that was ever available for them, for free. Amazing. I mean, alright, they don’t have ‘advanced engines’ or realistic explosions or make you feel like you’re ’really there’ or anything. But why would you want to really be there anyway? There are so many awesome, forgotten games for these systems, which I shall write more about soon.

Secondly, even better, was the online, free game, community. People, lovely, wonderful people, exist who make great games and them make them available entirely free, on the internet. This understates quite how great this is, but you begin to comprehend it when you play some of them and see the amount of work that has gone in. I highly recommend Doukutsu Monogatari also known as ‘Cave Story,’ to anyone who fancies a bit of gaming FUN that is about a billion times better than anything released commercially since god knows when. It’s a great 2D platform / adventure / shooty game with a great story, beautifully drawn graphics, a massive game world that you can explore for hours and a great feel to the movement and physics. And all for free, and for love. Astounding. There are many, many others as well, which I’ll be writing about here soon.

And so faith in video games was restored. Playing emulators and free games is simpler, much more fun, and far, far cheaper. Commercial, graphically intense, stressful games can cock off, I’ve found something much better.