This week I picked up ‘Transformers : War for Cybertron’ for my Xbox , and needless to say it’s wicked. The game it self is like someone cut open my brain as a boy and put everything I wanted on a disc and shoved it into my console, well apart from Kimberly from ‘Power Rangers’ moving in next door of course, though hope springs eternal. The action consists of robots, explosions and exploding robots all wrapped up in the personalities we all fell in love with in the first place. The game really is brilliant, however the thing that hit me while sitting on my sofa, sans jeans naturally, is that its all a bit easy. Easy can be great of course, look at the first Metal Gear Solid game, KFC or the cheaper nameless lap dancing joint beside Angels on Leeson street, easy can be a lot of fun. ‘Transformers’ is of this this example, even the huge boss fights are old school ‘Star Fox’ affairs with a bright red glowing orb exactly where the baddies weak point is. The issue with games such as Transformers, Gears of War and a host of other shooters, is that while brilliant, my brain is getting rather a little bit spoilt.
All this came to light this week because I found myself shunning the Xbox in the corner of my flat and was down in my old room back in Arklow, which of course contains my old PC. This computer is very dear to me. It is how I played Half Life after all, downloaded albums and being a teenage boy with a computer in my room it gave me my closest view of a girl until I discovered the pub. It is my T.A.R.D.I.S and like the Doctor’s machine, she is old and has seen better days. You can almost hear the girl coughing when I turn on iTunes, so naturally enough next generation gaming is out, desperate for something to play I turned to retro land for my gaming needs and downloaded a game I had missed out on, ‘Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis’ and soon I was feeling rather dumb indeed.
The game itself is that forgotten gem of a genre, the point and click, and its by those masters of the point and click , Lucas Arts. Being a late comer to PC’s I had missed out on a lot of the classics of the genre but had owned some of the later entries such as ‘Escape from Monkey Island’ and ‘Grim Fandango’ and while really enjoying them, the problem was, I was never really any good of them. I decided however never to take this personally as a lot of the puzzles in those games felt that you needed either to work for Lucas Arts or possibly have a smack habit. The puzzle that had stopped me in ‘Monkey Island’ for example involved catching a criminal using a device to smell him, sure afterwards when explained there was a trend of logic but it did all seem a little wacky to me. With ‘Grim Fandango’ the same issues were there but I felt good that I had actually beaten the game, knowing full well that I wouldn’t probably have been past the installation screen if it was not for the walkthrough I kept looking up online. The seeds of doubt had been planted in my head and the facts were there, these games were pretty much sitting me down in my chair and calling me stupid, so I ran. This was of course until I returned to the old excuse of ‘Oh those games were just hard because I didn’t get the jokes in the puzzles, this is Indiana Jones, my brother from another mother, this will be a walk in the park’. So I turned on ‘The Fate of Atlantis’ and was proved very wrong.
The game immediately plunged me into the world I wanted, I was Indiana Jones, only a 16 bit version of him, and soon I would be faced with my first problem, attempting to get past a rather grumpy bouncer and with this I panicked. After an awful lot of clicking (but oddly slack amounts of pointing) I had got it out of the bouncer that he wanted something to read but had read the only book in my inventory and about a second later I found myself having pressed alt and tab and was typing into google ‘Walkthrough for indi..’ but stopped and remembered the newspaper stand I passed on the street. Suddenly I was back in the world of Nazis, whips and puzzle solving, offered the bouncer the paper I just bought and I was in. Delighted I jumped out of my seat, happy in the fact that I had beaten the point and click curse of old and was busy trying to figure out where I would hang my Mensa certification. Flash forward about ten minutes, I found myself facing down a snake in a tree and running to my online walkthrough safety blanket, defeated the snake and sulked off away from my computer. So while there are hundreds of puzzle game titles out there today, mostly involving a Nintendo DS and a smug family in an ad it seems, it is a shame that there are not more titles like the point and click games of old. Games like the brilliant ‘Portal’ were one of kind because they made you feel smart, and games like Transformers can be great because you very rarely have to think at all but maybe if there were more games like ‘Indiana Jones’ that actually make you feel slightly stupid, my spoilt ‘Gears of Wars’, KFC, next door to Angels brain would actually do some work. In the meantime however , I wonder how things are going down Cybertron way.. explode-y no doubt…
Nice post. I used to play the Tom Clancy ‘Rainbox Six’ games on the prior computer, and Tiger Woods golf for a few years. Not playing any real games on the laptop these days. Speaking of retro, I still have game disks for the 80′s era Atari system, though no longer have the hardware, ones by Strategic Simulations were my faves, although very old school
Great post, I’m dying to play the new Transformers. DO a review of the new Xbox whill ya?
PS
Gaff put on some god damn Pants while in the flat.
I loved a good point and click back in the day. The Simon the Sorcerer series were gems. As were the 2 discworld games. I don’t think I ever managed to finish one without a hint or cheat at least somewhere along the way, but I was still chuffed with myself.
The discworld ones were bastards until years later when I had read them all and understood the logic of them.
Never managed to get the 130 gold (I think) to join a guild or something in the original simon the sorceror.