This is an extensive post from DC staff writer Steven Jones (AKA Count Stex) from his blog Stex Toys. It goes into exhausting detail, but I felt abridging it would not do justice to a life so geeky. So here in all it’s rubber-keyed glory is the gaming history of one man. -Alex

Born in 1974 I grew up during the kick off of the home computing era in the UK, starting out with every parents educational favourite the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers, having played briefly with my fathers work’s Tandy and my Uncles ZX80 & ZX81, so whilst my friends played about with their rubber keyboards and the like I was tapping away on a full blown keyboard, typing in game program code from each months Acorn magazine and seeing what I could change in the code to give me more lives, or better damage. This is where the computer bug bit me and my future career was probably set in place at the age of 8!

The BBC Micro eventually gave way to the Atari ST, during which time friends had moved away from computers in the main, relying on the more focused gaming potential of the NES/SNES and Master Systems/MegaDrives. However for me the computer based platform not only was an easier sell to the parents, but also allowed me to continue ‘playing’ with computing in general, programming, digitizing sound clips, and even creating games thanks to the likes of the Shoot ‘em up Construction Kit.

The Atari, with a memory upgrade at some point, saw me through until the birth of the PC era, which I can only assume we got in on early due to picking up issue 1 of PC Format, and ZERO (later to become PC Zone) the magazine that would stay with me until this very day. I entered the world of the BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) which precursored the dawn of the internet. There was no real online play, and only a couple of people could connect to any given site at a time, but I saw the potential even then and spent hundreds of pounds on phone bills for which my parents got rightfully miffed! I stayed with PCs and away from any console system what so ever for quite some time, all the way through University in fact (Computer Science of course) though I do recall getting into some retro gaming during my forth year when the PCs had reached the stage they could emulate the Atari and I could relive my formative years. Being a house hold of Computer Science students has it’s advantages. We had a separate dial up line for internet access, this was the age of ‘free’ dial up internet, which fed into my computer, then we had a household network so these years of my early twenties where the ones to open my eyes to what would become online play. Doom featured heavily, as did the excellent Descent 1 & 2 which with an MS sidewinder 3D joystick was one of the most involving gaming experiences I ever had.

Returning to the real word, and obtaining a job right off the bat whilst still living at home saw my disposable income rise to previously unimaginable levels, 19” CRTs and cutting edge CPUs and Graphics cards heralded a golden age for my PC gaming life. Strangely it was at this time of cutting edge PC gaming I first dipped a toe into the console waters. The game that sold console gaming to me is the acclaimed Golden Eye on the N64, which whilst still having inferior graphics and power provided that multiplayer experience I hadn’t been able to achieve since returning from university. And once the system was in my household, ok my parents household, the trickle of other titles started to flow.

This flow then increased when I moved into my own house with my Danish girlfriend who I had met online via ICQ in 1998. The N64 provided us with a gaming experience we could share, as the thought of maintaining two functional gaming PCs at the time was a bit of a stretch given I was the sole breed winner for a while as Linda built up confidence in her English, or perhaps that should be in understanding the local Liverpool dialect of scouse! The N64 eventually gave way to a GameCube where we adventured together through the lands of Hyrule and collected some Sunshines, sharing as much of the experiences as we could despite the solo gameplay of the day.

Something was coming though. Something which would see the consoles return to rarely used dust collectors languishing in the living room whilst upstairs, in the ‘office,  two gaming PCs would be humming away for hours on end, morning, evening, night. It was of course 2004. It was when gaming fun would turn into gaming addiction, carried on the shoulders of Elves and Orks. World of Warcraft was upon us, and the next two years would disappear in a questing, auctioning, levelling powerfest that would eventually see use using an entire weeks holiday to reach level caps. It was two years of fun, but it became all too consuming, end we eventually had to cut ourselves off completely, there was no ‘just a couple of hours’ with WoW, it was all or nothing, and in the sake of health and sanity we chose nothing. Still to this day, when we see a screen shot, or hear tell of Ironforge or the Ogrimar on the winds of twitter we get pangs of memories, dark fingers in our minds trying to return us to Aseroth.

Gaming probably took a slight back foot for a while after WoW, a PS2 entered the house with the lure of GTA and Pro Evo, however once a USB to PS2 Dual Shock converter was located the PC versions of these games took over and the PS2 was retired to a box in the office. Probably a surprise to many given the love the industry has of the PS2, but also testament to just how focused on the PC world I was, given the option the PC would always win. It was higher rez, it was more powerful, I could run things in the background whilst playing to allow text and chat with other PC users. There was community. How could these console things be so captivating when there was no human to human contact, and so few co-operative games a couple could play together in the way WoW and later City of Heroes would allow us to do. Eventually the Wii would arrive and we bought on the promise of new interactions and our old favourites returning, however it’s grip was short lived.

And so the console world was lost to me, I couldn’t justify paying out for a 360 or PS3 that had no chance of matching me PC based experiences. They just play games, often the same games, and how can they provide the same human links the PC does. Sure they have their online play, and yes they do seem to be getting an awful lot of co-op games, but really why would I pay to do what I already can? And that’s the way it would have stayed had my cousins 360 not of red ringed, and he went out and bought a replacement. I figured getting a 360 for the price of a repair job was ok, I might play the odd game online with my cousins who also had one….

The rest as they say is history, once you’ve experienced the connected up, immersive world of the modern day console (Wii you are not included in this due to your lack lustre online service) there is little turning back, 95% of the games installed on my PC now are RTS titles which I’ve yet to see implemented well without a mouse for control and the 360 had become the goto system to fire up, play and check what everyone else is playing. Hop in an online game, take down some waves of Horde, or fend of Zombies with a few mates. It’s take what the PC world can do, and condensed it into a single system that everyone is a part of, it’s friendly, it’s cooperative.. it’s family.

-Steven Jones

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the increase in pricing on XBLA for the average game. I have a few issues that need going over.

• The premium priced titles of 1200+ MS points are vastly outnumbered by smaller, cheaper games.

• The 400 point, achingly simplistic dual-stick shooters shoveled out at the inception of XBLA are hardly a decent point of comparison to weightier offerings like Braid and Battlefield 1943. So yes the prices appear to be going up, but so is the general quality level of the top games on offer.

• We’re really just paying for the right to play the games, physical media is a by-product of how it is usually conveyed to us. In other words, these are games and just because they’re downloadable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay a premium price. In a perfect world for game developers there would be no physical media or second-hand market, because that represents a loss to them.

Bearing in mind that I love having a solid copy of every game I own over downloads and I’m a total cheap-ass, that was pretty hard for me to say.  What bothers me (and always has about MS points and XBLA) is the pricing structure. I’m sure I’ve said this before but if you buy a 1200 point game you’re not paying $14.99 (£10.20) for it, because you invariably have to buy 1500 points: $18.74 (£12.75). Unless you have the self-control of a Franciscan monk, those extra pounds, dollars and pennies get spent on odd Rock Band songs, themes you probably didn’t need and soon an eye-patch for your avatar. Microsoft know this, otherwise the price points would be different (500/1000/1500 point games) or the bundles you can buy would be different (400/800/1200 etc.)

It’s the third-oldest trick in the book and it’s remarkably effective, because for every one of you reading this with the discipline to buy 2100 point cards and sit on their caches of juicy space bucks for months on end there are fifty of us (myself included) who leap on the first shiny thing that catches our eye so we can throw our change down like it’s burning a hole in our pocket. Sony are just as bad with their £5 minimum wallet transaction, which becomes infuriating when you’re 8p shy of a Littlebigplanet costume. There are all sorts of ramifications on display here about the current economic crisis, but I’ll just say this. I don’t mind paying for DLC, it costs what it costs, but I DO mind buying MS points I clearly don’t need.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to continue my scouring under the couch cushions, that rent won’t pay itself you know.

One of our regular listeners and consistent message-writers is Steven Jones. We’ve recruited him to occasionally post articles and musings on our site and as an introduction I’m putting up this entry he made at the beginning of June on his blog Stex Toys. It’s about moving back to consoles after PC-only gaming for many years. We get a kick out of reading his work and we’re fairly certain our audience will too. You can expect more from him in the future.

-Alex

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It’s been fast. It been packed. And perhaps most importantly of all it’s changed me forever. Bold words but a little over six months ago, when XBOX ownership fell upon me by pure chance really, I didn’t expect to find myself where I am today.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always been a PC gamer. That platform of a never ending release cycle, that would laugh at the idea of ten years and consider ten months a ‘constraint’, constantly straining at the edges of what can be done, pushing the limits that actually make console gaming possible. Now that said I’ve owned a Nintendo device since the N64, but I could justify that for the top notch first party releases that were never going to come to a PC.. at least not without the dubious world of emulation.

My view was that anything the XBOX could do could surely be done just as well on a PC. After all the XBOX was just a PC in a box, sure it was cutting edge when released, but by this time the technology has seriously moved on. PCs do exist that can actually run Crysis, just. Anything else would be easy. I was even put off more by the games which found their way from the console to the PC, I found them poor relations and badly implemented. Hindsight now shows me that this was lacklustre ports, even the acclaimed Bioshock turns me off in it’s PC incarnation.

What I hadn’t been prepared for, what you can’t actually get a feel for until you are actually in there is how joined up the whole experience is. Sure I use X-Fire and Steam on the PC which can link me up to other players who are playing the same games as me, but it’s an option addition, a nice to have that a large number of PC gamers just don’t bother with. On XBOX this is a part of the whole thing. Linking up with other players is about more than just the odd bit of multiplayer. It’s a competitive, cooperative, social, true community, bring people together not just to play, but to interact. It’s something you can really feel a part of, and which makes you better for it. Or rather it can, whether this environment turns you into a more complete gamer or just some arsehole who gets a kick off beating up, virtually as it might be, other gamers is down to your own mental makeup.

And so it is I find myself six months later with a game collection two thirds of my Wii game collection, which has had years to establish that lead, with plans to expand it further well bedded in. The system which I planned purely to play a couple of multiplayer games on with the couple of friends and family members has become just that only several times over. It’s opened my gaming world to new friends and communities that have come as a very welcome addition, no doubt helped on by the explosion in use of Twitter during the same period. The XBOX has become my go to system for gaming, and for creating some new shared experiences with my fiancée and friends which really is what life is all about. The PC has become far more of the versatile communication tool that it always has been, and will be for a long time to come. Sure I still play my RTS games there, for the mouse has yet to be bested for the intricacies of those game mechanics and I have a large enough PC game collection to keep me going back from time to time. However even some of these games, the likes of Bioshock and Mass Effect I’m contemplating selling and re-buying for that games console I avoided for so long.

I’ll still always be a PC gamer of course, it’s the platform that still delivers some of the most interesting and diverse gameplay styles anywhere, although I will admit some of the iPhone/Touch games coming along are a challenge to this. However even with the opportunities offered by XBLA, PSN and WiiWare there is no easier way than making something for PC, and just placing it out there on the internet. You can control your own distribution, maximise your return. Of course what you don’t get is the visibility to the market, there are just too many ways for people to find new things on the internet which is where the power of the consoles enclosed marketplaces can be a boon.

I realise that this whole post reeks of the evangelical spiel of the newly converted, however for me, right now, it’s how I feel. It’s why I’ve left it six months before I made a real stand about it, assuming any honeymoon period will have passed, my excitement and interest in this years E3 pretty much confirmed that I had moved into a new era though. Who knows where I’ll be in another six months, maybe by then there will be a BluRay based system joining the fold, that’s when I’ll know things will never be the same again!

After the recent announcement that Modern Warfare 2 will have a “Prestige Edition” released that comes with a pair of Night-Vision Goggles on a Styrofoam head, I did a little research to assess the ten levels of crazy for video game special editions. Here are my findings, organized from sane to bat-shit nuts.

10. Maps: Especially cloth maps (Lunar: Silver Star Story/Darksiders/World of Warcraft). Along with strategy guides (Super Metroid) this is the most useful pack-in item a game can have. Often there was no special edition, you just got this in the box. These are actually useful for the game experience, plus they look and feel nice to have as part of your gaming library.

9. Soundtrack or making of DVD: Again a pretty nice edition and I honestly wish we’d get more of them. The original Grand Theft Auto and Killer Instinct may not have music you’d rather listen to than *insert your favorite band here* but it’s part of gaming history and again good to have around. The making of DVD is the equivalent of extra features for a movie disc. These are pretty common these days. Most special editions will have some sort of disc full of behind the scenes footage. They vary in quality, but once again this is part the game’s heritage. The work these people put into making the game needs to be documented and it gives us, the consumer, an insight into what that takes. I honestly haven’t watched any of them twice though.

8. Figurines: It’s all downhill towards Crazy Town from here. This is the largest growing trend for pack-ins at the moment and the first item on this list that really has no function, unless you plan on collecting 32 of them and using them to play Chess. Admit it, most of these figurines on closer inspection are far less cool than they looked in the promotional picture. Fallout 3, Metal gear Solid 4, Assassin’s Creed, Street Fighter IV and Sacred 2 are all offenders here. On Digital Cowboys one of my guests had bought the Bioshock special edition just for the Big Daddy figurine. On reflection he commented that it looked like it was painted by “a blind two-year old”. Another friend of mine found the drill arm had fallen off his Big Daddy, and this became a fairly common complaint. If figurines are going to continue, we should demand a higher quality of tat.

7. Resident Evil 5: Now I’m going to start singling out games because this is symptomatic of simply throwing crazy crap into a special edition for the sake of it. Mirror’s Edge did have a very limited edition messenger bag which fetched high prices on eBay but RE5 went one further. In this special edition you get a bag, a figurine, a steelbook tin, a patch and a necklace. How many of those patches are currently adorning denim jackets? Who’s wearing their Kuju Necklace? Hands up! I’m guessing a high percentage of this stuff is just in drawers. Was it worth it?

6. Fallout 3: I’ll admit that the messenger bag might be usable in daily life, but a lunch box and a head knocker, while cute, are literally just shelf-candy. Unless you eat lunch out of yours, that is. Remember, I’m not saying these special editions are wrong or that they should stop, just that they’re crazy and seem on first impressions to have been assembled in a frantic race around the offices of the game developer, grabbing stuff off desks. I eagerly await the Splinter Cell: Conviction limited edition paperweight and the Assassin’s Creed II stapler.

5. Grand Theft Auto IV: Duffle bag, check; soundtrack CD, check; artwork book, check; lock box, say what now? What the hell does a lock box have to do with GTA IV? It’s a game about crime; surely a wire coat-hanger or a baseball bat would be more appropriate. This one just seems like they had a meeting and after all the suggestions for pack-ins were in, the lock-box was the least incriminating. If you use yours, good, but did this special edition get bought purely because it was GTA?

4. Halo 3: Master Chief’s head. This is actually pretty cool. It’s iconic and well-constructed and bigger than you’d imagine. The drawback is it’s still a bit too small. You could put it on a child or a dog, but let’s face it, all of us wondered when we saw it; why couldn’t they have made it a little bigger so I could get that thing on? That’s Halloween for the next five years! Instead it’s just collecting dust on our over-crowded shelves.

3. Resident Evil 4: Chainsaw controller. OK, not once, not ONCE have I ever spoken to anybody about the absolutely classic RE4 and had them say “Dude you gotta try it with the chainsaw controller!” Firstly it’s entirely superfluous to play; we have a GameCube pad, several in fact. But secondly and most importantly, Leon never uses a chainsaw in the whole game! That sack-headed maniac at the beginning does. This is just baffling.

2. Gears of War 2: We get some pimped out gold lancer and hammer-burst codes with the special edition of this one. They look stupid and make you stand out a mile away to wily snipers. Clearly nobody got the message as these codes fetch decent prices on eBay. However the crowing glory is that massive toy lancer chainsaw gun (always with the chainsaws). It’s even crazier in the UK where we hate guns of all kinds (apparently) and had to make do with a gold variant that looked like (in the words of Chandler from Friends) an eyesore from the Liberace house of crap. Nothing says classy like a big gun made of gold plastic.

1. Modern Warfare 2: But nothing could compare to these working Night Vision Goggles. And not just for their ridiculous predicted price ($149.99/£119.99). I would understand if they were synonymous with the game, but you think NVG, you think Splinter Cell, Sam Fisher and the three green lights. Not to mention the incredibly creepy implications of the super COD fan sneaking around at night, looking at us, when we think it’s too dark to be looked at. If you’re thinking of buying these, I’m scared of you, plain and simple.

This is our latest YouTube video. Enjoy it and spread it around. It could very well be a popular meme among those who watched this year’s E3.

With Tales of Monkey Island just released on the PC and the Wii, the re-skinned original Secret of Monkey Island imminent on PC and XBLA, Sam and Max tearing up the charts, Wallace and Gromit breaking new ground and the success of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, fans of the point and click adventure game have reason to be very happy right now. Lucasarts also just announced the re-release of ten more games on Steam, among them SCUMM classics Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Loom, The Dig and Full Throttle.

If you’ve never heard of SCUMM you’re in for a treat, or you might be nonplussed at how archaic the interface is. It’s hard to tell how new people will react when all you have of these games are fond memories. Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (the first of these games from Lucasarts) is basically a way of clicking on an object and then selecting from a set of actions; PICK UP, PUSH, PULL, OPEN, CLOSE, TALK TO etc. It was created by Aric Wilmunder and Ron Gilbert in 1987 and was simple but devilishly effective in giving you an open world that was filled with possibilities, puzzles, oddball characters and usable (stealable) objects. The system was also uncharacteristic for a video game in that it was often entirely non-fatal. One of the greatest strings to its bow is that Monkey Island won’t kill you; the flipside is that you can find yourself completely stumped with a chicken in your hand, unsure of how to open a locked door or get past a stubborn pirate.

It’s all different now. No more thumbing through magazines to find the walk-thru. We can access the FAQ with a few mouse clicks, and YouTube has our backs for visual aids to the point where we don’t even need to play, but as any SCUMM veteran will tell you, that completely defeats the point of these games. The joy is in working out what Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert’s twisted sense of humor could convey into a puzzle. Once solved they were all mostly logical, but there were a few that simply boggled the mind and made you wonder how you were expected to come up with the solution on your own. These were usually solved by a tip from a friend or magazine or simply trying everything with everything. SCUMM was revised into GrimE in 1998 and Grim Fandango brought adventure games into more of a 3D plane. It’s very interesting that nearly the entire genre has been defined by the output of this one studio. They were arguably the Harmonix (and Neversoft) of their day. Their legacy lives on with Telltale Games, a studio comprising of many of the original creators.

Clearly, right now, to answer my own question, the adventure game IS back; it’s whether it will maintain that’s the more pressing issue. Many of these games have been legitimately playable to those that know how for years using SCUMMvm, on PC and emulating DOS, but now the big consoles and Steam are getting a taste, and the accessibility is rocketing outwards. Every classic, from Day of the Tentacle to Zack McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders could be re-released on every platform and a whole new generation can sample them, along with misty-eyed folks like myself, remembering our days hunched over an Amiga 500 or Commodore 64 in fusty, curtained bedrooms. I’m personally very glad I never went outside or I wouldn’t even be writing this, but after that, I’m wondering where Telltale Games and others will take the genre. Will the new crowd get tired of this relatively untapped but unarguably obtuse style of game? Even more unnervingly; will the old crowd find themselves unable to plow through on what might be nostalgia alone? The flourishing market says otherwise. There are opportunities to evolve, but should they be taken? Arguably the worst Monkey Island was the PS2 adventure Escape from Monkey Island, which attempted to bring Guybrush’s story in line with current tech. Or will we see smaller creators or Telltale themselves making smaller, retro projects, the games we never played? Or it could be a balance of the two. Classic controls (albeit regularly with a controller and not a mouse) and polished up graphics, like the Secret of Monkey Island Redux. Gilbert has given it the thumbs up and with Brutal Legend, Schafer could very well become a more prominent figure in the industry. Prominent enough to be able to do whatever he wants? We can only hope.

There is a new hint system in the overhauled Secret of Monkey Island that may just keep everybody happy. Personally, I’m just relievedwe get to see these Adventure games again at all. Anything else is a bonus. It’s also pertinent that I was considering buying (the by all accounts God-awful) Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings on the Wii, purely because it has Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis thrown onto the disk like an afterthought. Now I don’t have to because it’ll be on Steam. Thank you Lucasarts!

It’s hard to recall but this was one of the big PS3 releases, drumming up massive E3 excitement over the rolling demo several years ago. On first glance it’s just Godess of War, twin blades twirling, quicktime eventful and featuring an epic, mature, Conan-style fantasy storyline. To be absolutely honest, the first impressions aren’t too far off. This is every bit as action-packed as Kratos’ journeys, if considerably less gruesome. What sets HS apart is the level of elegance, both in the games heroine, and the design and flow of the game itself. Rather than just mashing the buttons and flailing the blades of Chaos, there’s a little more Ninja Gaiden-style switching of stances and timing of blows. Hammering square will get you blocked and killed fast. You have to time and counter. Nariko arcs about the screen, a lady-shaped death-machine, but each button-press has to be managed. There’s no hand-holding here. You have to earn your awesomeness.

The reason this game stands out in the mind, and why when you’ve finished it, it will stay with you and leave you wondering why other games don’t do it that way is the performances turned in by the mo-cap and voiceover actors. Gollum himself; Andy Serkis plays Bohan the tyrannical and brawny villain, injecting every line with easy, almost likable, poisonous charisma. He’s not some gloating D-lister with pretensions on being Emperor Palpatine, this is an award-winning actor at home in a digital role. He’s more like the terrifying man you meet in the pub and pray you’ll get away from before he snaps and you get a pool cue in the eye. The man who would be Kong also took up the role of dramatic director for the rest of the cast, and it shows. Every line is committed to, every emotion feels true. If every voice director in gaming took this much time and effort to get his crew emoting then games would honestly be further down the road to being taken as seriously as films. Nariko, Bohan, Kai, Shen are all excellent characters, none of them stereotyped, all of them interesting, with strengths and frailties making them far more human than we’re used to in this medium.

Looking back on the game, it’s really a pretty slick but standard slasher. Golden Axe brought right up to date (and not like the atocity that was Beast Rider) but the reason to find this game again is that if you own a PS3 and if you’re looking forward to God of War III for reasons of story and character as well as action then you owe it to yourself to get this played in the meantime. It has some annoying sections involving crossbows and catapaults and the sixaxis controls, but a little perseverence, aiming first and keeping a cool head will get these completed. Criminally overlooked on release and not likely to see the sequel it probably doesn’t need, this stands alone as a time when Ninja Theory (They of Kung Fu Chaos) truly excelled and made an action game with a bit of heart and soul for a change.

If you recently sold your DS Lite and bought a DSi, sorry pal, you’re a sucker!

Don’t get mad at me, get mad at Nintendo. They promised you an upgrade. The ability to buy brand new mini games and a sleek form-factor with a slightly bigger screen. All they took was that useless old GBA slot that was taking up so much room. Unfortunately for you, that means you traded the best SNES games and frankly some of the best handheld games for Mario Clock, Mario Calculator and the ability to buy small, or “express” portions of other games. On consoles we call these demos and don’t pay for them (Yet… God I hope I didn’t jinx us) It was, in effect, a downgrade.

Tell me, with your hand on your heart that DSiware is what you hoped it would be right now. Obviously it’s early days, there’s so much Nintendo could do with this new market. But if you look at their track record for the past year of WiiWare, they’ve yet to even approach the signpost for the parking lot to the ball-park of quality that some of the titles you lose in this transaction equate to.

Here’s just the briefest of lists of games you can buy as GBA carts cheaply on eBay.

• Super Mario Brothers 1,2,3, World and Yoshi’s Island (Advance)
  
• Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords and The Minish Cap
• Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission
  
• Golden Sun 1 & 2
• Final Fight
• Street Fighter Alpha 3
• Warioware Twisted
• PoKeMoN Ruby and Saphire
• Fire Emblem
• Final Fantasy VI and Tactics
• Mario Golf
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
• PLUS Guitar Hero on the DS
  

By all means add your own in the comments section. You may not want to buy games second-hand. If so, Nintendo loves you and you will probably be able to buy all the above again legitimately. You may also still have a GBA,  I have a GBA SP for when my wife’s using the DS, but the screen isn’t as bright. You may simply not care about these games. If that’s true of all the above, why do you own a handheld at all? Now in a year’s time, look back on this article and it may be that I’m dead wrong. I’m sure a few good games could come out. Nintendo could even pull some classics out of their magic hat to rival even A Link to the Past, and the others from both the shining days of the SNES and the quirkier inventive streak that the GBA development cycle represented, but let’s face it, it’s not likely.

Whatever your feelings on the demise of the king of pop, if you’re in your mid-twenties or older you’ll remember this game. Moonwalker was based on the movie, itself a collection of music videos and montages culminating in a lengthy,  naive adventure- tale involving Mike trying to save three kids from the evil, drug-dealing Mr Big, played by Joe Pesci. The centrepiece of this is the fairly spectacular video for Smooth Criminal. This imagery formed the backbone of the Sega arcade game and shortly afterward; the Genesis and Master System versions.

The arcade cabinet was an isometric beat-em-up that saw Jackson trawling the streets, rescuing children and throwing magic bolts at hoodlums, armed guards and robotic dogs. Utilizing the dance button activated a smart-bomb style dance attack that forced every enemy to get in behind Mike and dance along with him before expiring suddenly. The home console versions followed the same premise, only with a 2D platforming engine, more suited to the hardware.

The game was decried by many as a crappy license but think hard. How many other games feature singers kicking the crap out of thugs and then coercing them into highly coordinated dance routines? Most music fighters are rap-based and one-on-one. I’m thinking Def Jam Icon here and Wu Tang: Shaolin Style. There are simply no others. So in that way, Moonwalker stands alone. Also it contained digitised, chip-tune versions of Mike’s music. Smooth Criminal, Beat It, Bad, Billie Jean and the obvious choice for the graveyard level; Another part of me. (Licensing, precluded the use of Thriller outside Japan). It was plinky-plunky and exemplary of the limitations of the Genesis, but still funky and recognisible and it gave the game a musical identity.

It was simple stuff. Smack about bad guys and rescue the kids from around the levels. Bubbles the chimp then comes and sits on your shoulder and points the way to the boss, which invariably turns out to be a bunch of goons. Very occasionally you’d get a shooting star that would turn you into a missile-spewing flying robot. It really wasn’t bad at all… well it was Bad… in a good way. Licenses may mean this game will never see the light of day again, but I would encourage Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to consider it for their online marketplace. It will obviously sell and for the youngsters who weren’t around when it came out, (before the premise of Mike hunting for children took on an objectionable aspect), it’s a great fun title with challenge and replayability. Well worth the 400 points or equivolent it would cost.

Michael appeared later in Space Channel 5 (parts one and two) and as a secret character in Ready 2 Rumble Round 2, both on the Dreamcast, so clearly his relationship with Sega and indeed video games stayed healthy. I would not be surprised if a Jackson-themed Singstar tore up the charts this Christmas. We gamers have definitely not seen the last of this man.

It’s always been very easy to look at video games and find the obvious female stereotypes strewn across our thirty year history. Since we’ve been able to identify adventure characters by gender, they’ve been largely male. Pitfall Harry, Jet Set Willy, Mario, Link. In fact the big revelation at the end of Metroid (Samus was and remains a woman) was pretty groundbreaking back in 1986. When females turned up it was usually either as damsels in distress to be rescued (Final Fight, Mario, Zelda) or weaker, faster fighters to balance the mediocre man and the beefy guy (Streets of Rage, Golden Axe). Then with Street Fighter II we got Chun Li, the token female who was actually pretty good at holding her own and was followed by Cammy and eventually a deluge of lady Street Fighters, each tougher than the last. But women still hadn’t too often been the stars of games.

So it’s 1996 and Lara Croft is up on the posters, her gigantic polygonal mammary glands making all the adolescent boys dribble, and giving developers ideas. The move to 3D meant everything changed for one (well two) reasons. “Hey, let’s make some games with a sexy girl as the star,” they said. “I mean who wants to follow a guy’s tight, supple buttocks around for ten hours? Certainly not girls, they don’t even play these things.” And nobody thought to ask why. Surprisingly following Croft, developers actually managed to hit the mark a few times with slightly more well-formed female characters. So we got Jill Valentine (Resident Evil), Aya Brea (Parasite Eve), Darci Stern (Urban Chaos), Hana (Fear Effect), Cate Archer (No One Lives Forever), Joanna Dark (Perfect Dark), and Heather (Silent Hill 3). It wasn’t the done thing to have girls play the damsel in distress any more and the sexes became equals of sorts, albeit that women were still often the weaker choice with the bigger pockets. Until finally we started getting some real characters that weren’t just eye candy and sometimes the fact that they were female played into the story and had a real effect on their character progression; The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3 probably being the best example of this.

But despite this short-changing of 51% of the species, I’d like to argue for the other 49% for just one minute. Looking back on these games it’s pretty obvious that men get just as rough a time of things as women. Possibly more so, because developers don’t even have to think, “Hang on, what does this say about how we view this gender?” they just pump up his muscles, stick a gun in his hand and send him down the chute into the battlefield. Chris Redfield in all his lumbering, sweaty glory exemplifies this point. His arms may look like condoms full of walnuts but does he ever say or do anything memorable? In contrast, Sheva of Resident Evil 5 at least has a back-story and some motivation other than simply, “Umbrella bad, Chris SMASH!

It’s embarrassing to say but video games in general, still being a medium on the brink of maturity, means that both genders are portrayed in broad brush-strokes and that comes down to lazy writing and a lack of focus on characterisation. But look to the best stories and you’ll find a better class of woman and man. Metal Gear may be absurd at times, and might not rank alongside the best cinematic storytelling, but Solid Snake is as great a male character as The Boss is a female one. Heavenly Sword pitches a girl born into the role meant for a boy in a male-dominated world and though she’s an incredibly strong fighter, her best characterisation comes in the form of her vulnerability. The mistake most inexperienced writers make (myself included at times in my shady past) is trying too hard to make characters look cool, tough and near-invincible. That’s very often boring as hell and impossible to relate to. Our flaws are where the reader and subject join up. Karla Valenti in Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit to my fellow Europeans) for example, is incredibly claustrophobic, a fear which impacts on the game itself as you struggle to push her through a darkened, cramped basement. In this case, it didn’t really matter that she was female, and some games have capitalized on this manner of storytelling.  Mass Effect pulls off the perfect balancing act because it’s absolutely immaterial which sex you pick, everyone reacts to you the same. And guess what; my female Commander Sheppard, with all her hard-bitten lines, scarred face and equally damaged personality is the best female I’ve seen portrayed yet. Taking the gender issue out is not the answer every time, but in this case it works perfectly. Clearly BioWare took a hard look at the story of Ms. Pac-Man and saw an equality they could relate to. So in conclusion, it’s not that games are sexist. It’s not even that game developers are gender-biased. It’s that bad writing is just that. When games get consistently good stories, written by mature adults, both men and women will be portrayed in a better light. We will get the rounded individuals who resemble real people. We just have to hold on through all the meat-headed heroes and buxom, gun-wielding vixens until the culture catches up with our ideals.