In contrast with many other real-time war games of the time, Myth II had no component of gameplay dedicated to the creation of units or towns. When the original came out in 1997, it was a refreshing alternative to the monotony of unit creation found in WarCraft II and Command & Conquer. Rather than controlling a small group of peons and workers to build a miniature town that then allowed the player to create units for battle, Myth focused on the battle straight away. At the beginning of each mission, players were given a specific number of units, and those would be the units that they had to fight with for the entirety of the mission unless an element of the script introduced them to more units.

Units were precious in Myth II. They were not disposable in the way of so many RTS that came before. When any of the units were damaged, it was a big deal for the player. The team at Bungie heightened the sense of attachment to units by also allowing the units to gain experience during combat. If a player were a super tactician in the single player campaign, he would be able to keep many of his upgraded, experienced units as he moved from mission to mission, and they would perform significantly better than the rookies in the campaign.

Make no mistake, the game was dark and gritty. The single player story was conveyed mostly through a series of journal entries from an anonymous soldier in the battles against the invading Fallen Lords. Where there was barely any story to speak of in WarCraft II, the single player campaigns of Myth and Myth II were actively entertaining. Betrayals, when they occurred, were painful. The fact that the player controlled a small collection of units increased the sense that he was insignificant in the face of massive changes in the fantasy world.

But, really, what made Myth so great, and what Myth II improved upon, was the shift in focus away from real-time strategy to real-time tactics. Strategy is the domain of generals and warlords while tactics are the domain of corporals and sergeants. It is war on the small scale. And on that small scale, small decisions matter. In Myth II, it is not simply a matter of outproducing another player in a multiplayer match. It is about the proper employment of troops. There is no brute force solution in the game. There is no teching to Frost Wyrms or Chimeras. You have X number of units, and you had better damn well keep them alive.

Two aspects of the game add considerable depth to the tactics a player can and needs to employ over the course of game: height and space. By that, I mean that Myth occurs in a 3D map where the height of a ranged unit can affect how far the projectiles reach. And, as for space, the units in the game cannot overlap, so the formations are integral to survival. A player can effectively create a wall of stronger melee units to shield the ranged units behind them. And yet, thanks to the powerful physics engine, each of the projectiles from those ranged units, be they arrows or spears or body parts, can actually hit friendly units. Thus a player has to consider how to properly place his archers to allow them to attack the enemies units without damaging his own units too badly. How about a nice hill? Well, that will work for a while, but what if the opponent sends a small contingent of fast melee units up to the hill and scatters the archers to the four winds? Point and counterpoint. Thrust and parry.

If the game only had melee units and archers, it would still be incredible, but there are also a number of other units that make the game particularly memorable. Dwarves are explosive-lobbing freaks who can potentially destroy an entire army that is packed together too closely. As a result, players tend to scatter their units when they see a dwarf approaching, but they also have satchel charges that they can drop. The canny Myth player will have a fast but weak ghol pick up the charge and run into the middle of an army and have an archer fire flaming arrows at the poor ghol until he explodes into tiny, colorful bits with the opponents army. If it sounds suspiciously like a suicide bomber… well… you probably won’t like the wights. Those units can only attack once. They are slow, and they attack by stabbing themselves in the chest unleashing a gaseous explosion that kills the wight anybody nearby.

The multiplayer options were deep. Here’s a brief–ha!–rundown from Wikipedia:

• Body Count: The player or team that deals the most points of damage within the time limit wins.
• Capture the Flag: Each player or team has a flag at their starting location. If the flag is ever lost, even for a second, the player is eliminated.
• Last Man on the Hill: A flag is in the middle of the map. The winner is the player who controls the flag when time runs out. If multiple players contest the flag, the game goes into sudden death, and the first player to get uncontested control of the flag for five seconds wins.
• King of the Hill: A flag is in the middle of the map. The player is credited for every second that he controls or contests the flag. The winner is the one with the most time when the game ends.
• Territories: Several flags are scattered across the map. The winner is the one who controls the most flags when time runs out. If any flag is contested, the game goes into sudden death.
• Flag Rally: Several flags are scattered across the map. The winner is the one who tags all the flags first (where “tagging” means taking uncontested control.)
• Steal the Bacon: A ball is in the center of the map. Any unit can move the ball by running into it, and clicking directly on the ball will cause the unit to follow it and bump it roughly in the direction the unit is running. The ball can also be blasted around with explosives. The winner is the player who controls the ball when time runs out. If the ball is contested, the game goes into sudden death.
• Captures: Like Territories, but with balls instead of flags.
• Scavenger Hunt: Like Flag Rally, but with balls instead of flags.
• Balls On Parade: Like Capture the Flag, but with a ball instead of a flag.
• Assassin: Each player gets an assassin target, usually a helpless Baron but sometimes more powerful units. If the assassin target dies, the player is eliminated.
• Stampede: Each team has one or more flags and a herd of animals or peasants. For each animal that reaches an enemy flag, the animal is teleported away and a point is gained. The winner is the team with the most points when all the animals are dead or safe, or when time runs out.
• Hunting: Dozens of computer-controlled wildlife units such as deer and hawks are placed on the map. For each animal killed, a point is scored. The winner is the one with the most points when time runs out.

Impressive, right? My particular favorite was Steal the Bacon on the evocatively named map “Gimble in the Wabe.” If you don’t get the reference, well, maybe it’s time you read a few poems.

So far, though, most of this praise could have applied to the original game just as well as to Myth II. What made Myth II stand out was the inclusion of a map and tools editor that spawned an entire community of avid developers. People used the physics engine in the game to create entirely new games that had nothing to do with the fantasy environment of the series. I confess that I even spent a large number of hours designing my own units and maps for my friends and I to play on.

The community was so keen on these tools that after Take-Two purchased the rights to the franchise, the company immediately released (or re-released, really) Myth II with a load of community mods as Myth II: Worlds. One intrepid developer even fashioned a mod called Blue and Grey about the American Civil War.

Unlike other games I have enshrined in my heart, I don’t think I’m particularly good at Myth II. That’s not to say that I’m atrocious at the game. It’s more that there are so many of the elements of the game that it’s impossible to achieve mastery. At least, it was impossible for me. That’s what kept me going back to the battlefield, and that’s why I still occasionally fire up my old copy of the game blow up a wight or two.

Or perhaps I just really like gratuitous amounts of violence and gore. That’s what my therapist thinks.

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The creation of Shigeru Miyamoto, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was the third installment in the Zelda series. In addition to the huge graphical upgrade provided by the SNES, Link to the Past also wisely eschewed the baffling side-scrolling style of its immediate predecessor with its return to the overhead perspective of the first game. By the time Link to the Past had come out, the Zelda franchise was already popular with the growing gaming population of the world, and in some ways, Link to the Past managed to define the series with its excellence and sense of adventure.

To this day, I still get a thrill when the theme music plays and the pieces of Tri-Force spiral into place on the opening screen.

Like so many RPGs that followed, Link to the Past began with a sleeping hero with no understanding or awareness of his destiny. As far as opening sequences in the 16-bit era go, the first mini dungeon might provide the best introduction to gameplay mechanics possible. Within that small dungeon, the player becomes acclimated to many of the mechanics of the game. Of course, as with any Zelda game the mechanics evolve as Link gains access to more toys, but the fundamentals are established early.

As with many Zelda games, Link has to rescue Princess Zelda, but it’s not from Ganon in this instance. Instead, it’s from a wizard who is planning to free Ganon from his magical prison. So, you know, it’s basically Ganon by proxy. In this case, Zelda isn’t the focus on the game at all. Sure, she gets kidnapped again after Link has gathered up all the pendants he needs, but she’s just the MacGuffin.

To be perfectly honest, playing the game again, the structure is rather grating. Link always has to collect 3 or 7 items from 3 or 7 dungeons to unlock the next part of his adventure. Who can forget the seven descendants of the sages that sealed up Ganon that Link must rescue in the Dark World? Such vivid personalities they all had… no, wait, they were all MacGuffins. The player, though, doesn’t pay attention to the repetition because the dungeons are so well designed and so engaging. Each one offers a new challenge and a new experience. Plus, the player always got a new toy to play with in the course of every dungeon.

Putting aside the collect X doodads nature of the game progression, the world that Link could explore was incredibly open. The fourth wall was never broken because the barriers placed in front of a player were part of the game. If the game didn’t want you to get into a certain area, it put one of the really heavy 8-ball looking boulders in front of you that you could only lift when you got the Power Glove. In this way, by limiting access without making it rigid, the game guided the player through the objectives laid out.

Long before I ever had a chance to play the game, long before I ever had a Super Nintendo, I was obsessed with getting the opportunity to play the game because Nintendo Power published a comic about the game. It had just enough style and just enough panache to excite a soon-to-be comic nerd like myself.

When I was young, during the SNES period, I had to play all of my video games in the basement. It was a basement in a small town outside of Chicago, and although it was half-furnished, it was still very much a basement. Concrete walls and pipes that dripped. The whole shtick. Let me tell you, it got really really cold in there. But I would spend hours in that basement while the temperature dropped to the low teens outside playing through A Link to the Past with my numb hands clutching that game pad.

I think the greatest testament to the game was that when I knew I was close to beating the game, I would actually get up early on school days–since my mom wouldn’t let stay up late to play–and sneak down into the even colder basement to play A Link to the Past. I managed to beat the game just as my mom was calling my up to go to school, so I wasn’t able to watch the ending. Not that the ending was all that impressive or really much of a denouement at all, but it was a reward for victory. So I came home from school that day and immediately beat the game again.

I know there have been great Zelda games since this one, and I know they may define Link more for other players, but I will always think of Link first as a wee little elf with a wee little shield shot from a top-down view as he cavorts his way between Hyrule and the Dark World. I can’t be the only one because between the original SNES version (4.61m) and the GBA re-release (0.33m) the game has sold almost five million copies in its lifetime. Not bad for a young elf, eh?

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First released in 1993 by Maxis, SimCity 2000 was the sequel to the surprise hit SimCity. While the other Sim games, like SimAnt, SimEarth, and SimLife, languished on store shelves, SimCity racked up a collection of awards and was ported to a variety of systems including the SNES. Will Wright, the mastermind behind the game, had clearly hit simulation gold in a game based on the tedium of city planning. As SimCity found the sweet spot in the creation folds of gamers’ brains, a sequel, once all of the side Sims were out of the way, was inevitable.

SimCity 2000 literally added a whole new dimension to the city building process. Shown from a dimetric vie, the maps in SC2K included height and depth in the construction of the city. Players were able to terraform the land, creating their own Nob Hill or a new Grand Canyon. Furthermore, players had to concern themselves with the intricacies of subterranean development in the form of the sewer system and a subway system. Where the previous game took a lot of the customization out of the hands of the player with its rigid block zone structure, SC2K introduced new buildings such as hospitals, libraries, museums, marinas, prisons, schools, stadiums, and zoos.

The level of immersion in the game was incredible. As mayor of the burgeoning city, the player could subscribe to relevant news updates in the form of fictional newspapers that informed the player of opinion polls, new technologies, and problem areas in the city as well as humorous, throwaway anecdotes about the city. The budget was presented to the player at the end of every year, and it gave the obsessive player an opportunity to delve into minutiae of costs in running cities, such as the amount of government funding to allot to hospitals and police stations.

Embedded in the game was a sense of environmental responsibility that elevated the game above other computer gaming fare of the time. Each power plant had certain drawbacks with the most damaging being the coal and oil power plants. The nuclear power plant, while producing less pollution, came with the caveat that it could meltdown one day. The most efficient power plant, of course, is a fusion power plant. Granted, I was young, but SC2K was the first I ever heard of that holy grail of physics research: sustained fusion. That is one of the things the game did best: it provoked questions. It was so deep, so founded in a certain vision of the world, that players could transfer some of the gameplay knowledge into the real world. Although the logistics of the game are far simpler than those of real life, players came to accept the rules of the game as potentially governing aspects of their own world. At least, that was the case for my own impressionable mind.

One cannot discuss the SimCity series without touching on one of the most compelling aspects of the game to many players: disaster. At the beginning of the article, I pointed out that the game, in contrast with many others, is focused on creation. But what’s the fun of building up a giant Lego castle if you don’t later pretend to be a giant and crush those sharp little bricks under your feet? Why bother putting together a jigsaw puzzle if you aren’t going to break it up again at the end? Enter natural disasters: fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and marauding aliens. If a disaster ever struck a player’s city while he was still constructing it, the site of that twister or fire could inspire terror and fear because the game is, ultimately, about feeling completely in control of tiny universe of people. They’re all the player’s people and until that fateful moment when the player decides, with a mad gleam in his eye, to stomp his foot down on those poor people, the player feels attached to those little opinion polls. As an aside, the scenarios in SC2K, typically focused on specific disasters, are quite well rendered such that, even today, watching the fires race through the virtual Oakland hills, I get a little chill.

Although the game has no true goal, no end point, there is one way to reach resolution in the game: exodous. At the end of the technology cycle, players are able to create vast arcologies, self-contained cities within the city. These elegant structures looked like science fiction creations, and, of course, they were science fiction creations. There were four possible arcologies, each reflecting a certain sociological view of the future. The obelisk arcology seemed domineering and fascist. The launch arcology looked like some sort of ecologists Utopian environment. One of the more clever Easter eggs around is that if a player created a large number of launch arcologies, they would all launch into space triggering an exodous. One can imagine these arcologies going on to found the settlements of Alpha Centauri. I know it’s juvenile, but when I was young, playing this game, I wanted very badly to live in an arcology. The game made it seem possible, and even if it weren’t possible in real life, it was possible in the game, which was almost as good.

By now, I know I’m never going to create the next great city or civilization. I’m probably not going to contribute to the creation of an arcology that blends nature with technology, but in games like SimCity, I’m able to imagine the future. A future in which entropy is constantly being held at bay by the innovation of mankind. I know it’s just a game, but it’s a game of new beginnings and those are the games worth remembering.

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Pirates possessed no narrative to speak of. The player could choose to seek out buried treasure, plunder ships, or simply accumulate wealth through a canny understanding of the good market. In addition, the game had no ending in a traditional sense, just as a the life of a pirate–barring death–doesn’t have a neat conclusion. Eventually, as the player’s character gets older, it becomes more and more difficult to recruit crew members until, old and scarred, the player is forced into retirement. Whether that retirement consists of begging for alms or being an adviser to the king depends on how much wealth the player accumulated over the course of his ill-fated journey.

Premiering in 1993 for the Genesis, Pirates! Gold took all of the best attributes of the original game and added complexity to create one of the greatest and most commonly overlooked simulation of its kind.

It begins by allowing the player to choose a special skill: fencing, navigation, gunnery, wit and charm, or medicine. This small choice shapes the game for the player. If he has chosen to be a master of gunnery, he is far less likely in to close with another ship and engage the enemy captain in melee combat. Instead, he’s likely to tack and adjust his ship based on the wind trying to minimize the amount of his ship that is exposed to the enemy as he fires volleys of cannons at his opponent. And if he chose a player with enhanced fencing skills, he’s far more likely to simply close with the enemy ship as fast as possible–likely with a smaller, more maneuverable ship–and duel the enemy captain.

Another differentiator, and this was the primary reason I fell head over heels for the game years ago, is that the player is confronted with a choice between different eras to play in:

1560 - The Silver Empire
1600 - Merchants and Smugglers
1620 - The New Colonists
1640 - War for Profit
1660 - The Buccaneer Heroes
1680 - Pirate’s Sunset

The main difference between each of these periods are the factions the player is able to play and which factions possess the most ports. In the Silver Empire, the Spanish colonies are at their most powerful, and they are flush with silver. If a player wants a real challenge, he can choose to play as a Spanish Renegade and slowly build up his reputation with the French until they offer him a letter of marque. Each era provides a different flavor of encounters. Or he can try to one up Sir Francis Drake and take San Juan. The game is that open.

In addition to money, the player also tries to build up his prestige (largely a function of how much money he has earned) to earn the right to woo one of the daughters of the governors of the ports. It might be misogynistic, but the prettier the wife, the greater the reputation of the player.

Unlike its predecessor, Pirates! Gold has the barest semblance of a plot. In addition to the usual marauding, the player is trying to seek out all four missing members of his family, each of whom has a piece of a map to the greatest score in the game: Incan gold. And this is where the game really becomes a classic.

If the game only had other ships to attack and fleets to manage, it would be a solid, serviceable step in gaming. But the fact that it has small touchstones of pirate lore in the game give the game a sense of authenticity. Of course, all pirate games are idealized, but Pirates! Gold manages to make the player feel enmeshed in that idealization. The player may slowly age and become less agile and adept, but over the years, he can capture the Spanish treasure fleet and the silver train and uncover Incan gold.

When I first rented the game, I played the game through at least five pirate lives before I put down the gamepad. I became so invested in the achievements of that pirate, far more invested than I ever became with any of my stats in Final Fantasy games, that I absolutely had to keep trying for one last big score to fame and the love of the prettiest woman in all of the Caribbean.

Since 1993, the game has been updated with a fairly well-reviewed PC game that has just recently been ported over to Xbox Live Arcade. I think it might be time to get out my old peg-leg and fake parrot and download some nostalgia.

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The point-and-click adventure game has largely fallen by the wayside as a major game genre, but in the early 90’s it was pure gaming gold. With the creation of Maniac Mansion and the SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) language, adventure gaming entered a golden age. As the primary game designer for Maniac Mansion, Ron Gilbert pushed adventure games to have a more rigid interface with user interaction in the game governed by set verbs rather than the previous text-based system which inevitably led to the player being eaten by a grue. Armed with SCUMM, games like Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure poured out of LucasArts, and all of them are fantastic games worth any gamers time, but I’m going to focus on one of my favorites: Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993).

In the product cycle of LucasArts, Sam & Max emerged as a new intellectual property after the company had produced two Monkey Island games and had just refreshed Maniac Mansion with Day of the Tentacle. The characters were based on the comics of Steve Purcell, a LucasArts employee. The set-up, as with many great games, is rather straightforward: you control a dog detective with a homicidal lagomorph companion as you investigate the disappearance of a big foot from a circus freak show.

As alien as I may make that sound, one compelling aspect of the game is that its humor arises not simply from wacky hijinx but also from a knowledge of detective noir in both film and literature. In order to properly satirize the genre, one cannot simply impart a sense of ironic distance to the protagonists because such distance is intrinsic to the genre. When the viewer watches Humphrey Bogart tracking down leads in The Big Sleep, he is completely in command of every situation with a sarcastic or flip remark in his arsenal to turn each conversation to his advantage.

You find that same wry grin and winking eye in every single novel by Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammet, so Steve Purcell had to go to extreme lengths to establish an effective parody. Humanoids are out, so our protagonists are mammals of unknown origin. The other characters in the game take the existence of these creatures for granted, and Sam and Max are frequently presented as being on a level above all of those around them. Well, Sam is, at least. That characteristic of detectives is still in place.

As for ironic distance, Sam and Max are not only aware of the detective genre, they are aware of the medium:

Max: He’s not a real guy, Sam! Can I keep his head for a souvenir? Why do you suppose its ticking?
Sam: That’s no head, Max! It’s one damned ugly timebomb! Let’s leave this criminal cesspool pronto!
Max: Good idea, Sam. Maybe we can ditch the head somewhere while the credits are running. Mind if I drive?
Sam: Not if you don’t mind me clawing at the dash and shrieking like a cheerleader.
Max: Sam, is “pronto” a real word?

They know that they are characters in a video game even though they only acknowledge it intermittently, and they use that awareness to humorous effect. With his slouching posture, fedora, and trench coat is the very image of a dog shamus, but he subverts the stereotypes of noir. He is a dog, after all.

This is a game where it really isn’t about the goal. Certainly all of the adventure puzzle elements are there, but solving each puzzle is a lesson in hare-brained humor. The player keeps clicking to hear more from these incredibly hilarious characters. As I played through the game, I rarely tried to solve the given puzzle of an area until I had tried to See/Touch/Take/Talk to everything in the room. As an example, one of the set pieces involves Sam and Max visiting the world’s largest ball of twine, and upon arrival, Sam and Max exchange witticisms:

Sam: The words “big” and “large” only begin to describe this thing.
Max: I think “stupid” and “inane” would be useful additions.
Sam: Not to mention “grotesque.”

And that’s fantastic, but what’s great is that many players will insist on Look(ing) at the ball of twine that they have already been introduced to, which elicits a throwaway line:

Sam: I haven’t seen that much twine since that night in Tokyo in ‘68.

Every bizarre environment is filled with these nuggets, and it’s a testament to the greatness of this game that players seek out each piece of dialogue for more mad-capped wit. Much of the humor is violent (in a cartoonish way), but it really runs the gamut. Look at this wonderful play on words:

Sam: I don’t have anyone to call.
Max: Call me, call me!
Sam: You’d have to get cellular.
Max: I’m pixular! It’s better than cellular!
Sam: That was bad, Max. Really bad.
Max: Hey, who cares? I’M CUTE!

In all their violent glory, Sam and Max are cute. They’re adorable and friendly. In short, they’re exactly the sort of characters to build a franchise on.

Unfortunately, for over a decade after the release of this wonderful game, there were many attempts at a sequel, but no success. On the plus side, for all of us Sam and Max fans, Telltale Games is now releasing Sam & Max games in an episodic format. The success of the first “season” of the game has lead to season two. I haven’t yet played the games, seeing as how I was on a Mac for a long time, but now that I’ve upgraded to an Intel Mac, I think it’s time to test these games out with a fresh Windows installation.

I can’t yet vouch for the new installations in the Sam & Max oeuvre, but I can say that any fan of adventure games, detective movies, or zany hijinx absolutely must give Sam & Max Hit the Road a try.

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And the only game we had in our library that had truly cooperative gameplay was Bubble Bobble.

In contrast with the “taking turns” multiplayer of Super Mario Bros., Bubble Bobble gave my sister and me the opportunity to play together with a common goal. Of course, we were never really sure about the nature of that goal. Certainly, there were levels, so there was a clear progression. We knew our integers as well as the kids next door, so we knew that 39 was higher and, thus, better than 38. It’s just that there didn’t seem to be a lot of logic to the game itself.

The objective, near as we could understand it, was to maneuver our two colorful little dragons–Bub and Bob, apparently–around the static collection of platforms that composed a level and blow bubbles to capture various enemies. Those enemies were creatures of unidentifiable origins, borne of the contents of a toy shop channeled through the mind of Dali and given life. To our young eyes, they were delightfully colorful and somewhat sinister, particularly when we failed to pop a bubble in time, and the little monster became enraged and red and stalked our poor little dragons like demons from our nightmares.

If we failed to capture and pop all of those monsters after a certain amount of time, then the alarming words “Hurry up!” flashed across the screen and all of the little creatures became angry, and they were only soothed by one of our deaths–at least most of the time. As I said, the logic was never clear. Accompanying this sinister message was a change in the tempo of the usual, soothing Bubble Bobble theme (bum bum bum ba-dum bum bum ba-dum bum bum. . .) to a frantic, accelerated beat. It was a tune that wormed its way into the chest of the player, young or old, and inspired panic. It was almost impossible to cope with a level once it had reached this point of no return. And then the invincible “Skels” emerged, enemies that looked like the skeletons of our own little Bub and Bob. If my sister or I managed to salvage the situation, it always seemed miraculous. And then we were instantly conveyed to the next level with scarcely any time to enjoy our triumph.

We naturally assumed that as soon as we reached the final level and beat the final boss, no matter how many lives we lost, that we would have beaten the game. Except that it was never the “true” ending.

My sister and I played through Bubble Bobble about twenty times. I played through with each of my parents ten times a piece. We never received the “true” ending.

What makes Bubble Bobble truly great as an arcade game, or an arcade game on a home console, is its seeming simplicity combined with its almost absurd difficulty. In addition to the basics I mentioned above, a player needs to collect letters that appear in certain levels based on unknown conditions to receive the code for the “true” ending. And then there were the other tricks a player learned. The dragons could only jump so high, so if a player wanted to get up a stage with limited platforms, he had to us bubble jumping, essentially blowing bubbles and bouncing off them. Later in the game, the monsters get angry and break out of the bubbles so soon after being confined that the player has to master a “bubble kiss” in which he bubbles and then almost immediately hits the bubble to destroy the enemy.

There are few games from the NES that I will still pick up and play with my friends because, for the most part, I’ve mastered all of them. I know how to beat them. I know the shortcuts. I know the secret codes. I know all of the moves because they are well documented. Bubble Bobble is an arcade masterpiece because it is so complicated and difficult that it is worth returning to. I will never be a master of the game, and I will always fear the sound of that accelerated theme music, and I will always appreciate that look of nostalgia that overcomes my face when I start to hear someone hum the theme song.

If you haven’t played it, you should. Don’t bother with any of the ports to the most recent consoles. Find an arcade with the game or dig up your old NES, blow out that cartridge tray, and power on.

Since it is a video game–a simple entertainment–the organization is not raping the world of its finite oil supplies but tapping into the “Lifestream” to create energy for the populace. And there’s a little matter of harnessing this Lifestream to create ultimate weapons for world domination. Let me make this clear: Lifestream is not a transparent analog for oil. First of all, it manifests as a glowing green fluid. It isn’t black. Second of all, it’s made out of the souls of the dead and not decomposed biomatter. . . Right. Even though this game came to the U.S. in 1997, its motivations are very contemporary. Perhaps that is one reason the story has aged so well.

The game opens with a small “revolutionary” group blowing up a reactor in the oppressively dark city of Midgar. Because the player is in control of the members of this group and because we all know corporations are evil, this is activism and not terrorism. As far as most of the city is concerned, however, this group is a terrorist cell. This is serious subject matter for a game to take on in a world in the middle of the Dot Com bubble. The main character is a former soldier (and member of an elite group called SOLDIER, obnoxiously enough) of the evil corporation whose initial approach to the movement is mercenary. Cloud is an unsympathetic character with a pragmatic attitude as the game begins. This is a game that takes itself very seriously. That is why Final Fantasy VII was revolutionary.

I am not claiming that it was the plot that changed video game development and gamers’ attitudes toward RPGs; it was the entire presentation of the game from the top down. As a technical achievement alone, FFVII changed the way video games were presented. Naturally, the use of pre-rendered, full-motion videos was the first aspect of the game lauded by critics. It was as tough Square was trying to blur the line between video game and movie. The opening movie of the game does not simply set the scene for the opening action, although it certainly has that effect. The slow pan around the technological city of Midgar is interrupted by frames of a train racing through a tunnel. As the camera continues to the circle the city and zoom closer to the action, there are an increasing number of frames showing the racing train. Quite quickly the camera is thrust directly into the action as it reaches the train’s location in the city and the game begins en media res. This opening has become so canonic, so representative of the power of traditional cinematography in video games, that Sony used the scene to demonstrate the power of the new PS3.

The graphics that follow that scene are sadly dated. While the background environments suggest a 3D environment, their presentation now appears murky and blurry. The characters in the overworld and towns are blocky and without expression… or hands, for that matter. They look like Lego men walking around in a Renoir painting. At the same time, the battle graphics are still impressive. Certainly, they are nowhere near as refined as the graphics in games from the XBox 360, but the technical abilities of Sony’s first generation are remarkable after so much time (in video game years).

There are a number of genuine flaws in the game. The translation is confusing and unclear at times, and it really would have been helpful with such a convoluted story for the verbal presentation to have been more clear. The story, even after playing through the game four or five times (don’t ask), is so labyrinthine at times that flow charts might help. Oh, and the first appearance of a black guy in a Final Fantasy game features a portrayal that is fraught with stereotypes. Barret, while a far more likable character than the story’s protagonist, seems like he’s always about to start demanding fried chicken and watermelon. He also swears the most out of any of the characters.

As a game requiring manual input from the player to proceed… FFVII is no great challenge. I cannot recall if there are any required battles that I could not beat the first time through, but I suspect that the greatest obstacle in the game is the random encounter rate. While there are plenty of minigames that distract from the constant press of random encounters (a genre convention hated by many), it can be extremely frustrating to leave a menu screen and press up for less than half of a second and hit a random encounter.

Those quibbles are minor in the face of the milestones the game achieved. As I mentioned earlier, the opening scene of game employs cinematic elements, but the greatest innovation that all of the technological advances of the Playstation allowed was that of mood. For the first seven or eight hours of the game, the player is confined to Midgar, a city with no sun. The presentation would be reminiscent of the movie Dark City except that it preceeded that movie by a few years. The player never sees how the uppercrust of the city lives because Cloud and company are marginal characters in the slum of a “great” city. The environments are dark and dirty. There are few natural colors in the palette of Midgar. The brightest environment in these opening hours is actually the interior of the neighborhood brothel. There are some humorous moments in these first few hours, particularly during the sidequest in which the characters scramble around the redlight district trying to barter for women’s clothing to disguise Cloud as a woman. Over all, the mood is dark and oppressive as reflected in the colors the designers use. The great pay off after those opening hours is this feeling of relief the player feels as he leaves the city. It’s as though he releases a breath that he didn’t realize he was holding in. And that’s just the beginning of the game.

The graphics are not the only thing that contribute to the mood. In fact, one could easily argue that the music of Nobuo Uematsu carries the bulk of the game’s emotions on its shoulders. There is nary a wrong step in the music. Let me say that I know very, very, very little about music. I can say that the music was tense when it needed to be tense, dissonant when it needed to be dissonant, and lighthearted where it needed to be lighthearted. It carefully supplements the environmental design of the game. When the characters cannot speak for themselves–there is, after all, no voice acting in this game–the music speaks for them.

I could go on for a very long time about this video game. I could try to pick apart the scenes that make the game worth all of the acclaim it has received, but it would take many more hours and many more pages. Some critics claim that this game is overrated. Some fans even hate this game because it is so often cited by gamers as their favorite Final Fantasy. These fans claim that all old-school Final Fantasy fans prefer FFIV or FFVI. Guess what, I’m one of those fans. Or I was. Until I came back to this game again and realized what it did for the genre. My favorite edition of the series will always be Final Fantasy VI, but FFVII deserves acknowledgement for how it changed the genre. When Kefka poisons the city of Duma early in FFVI, it’s hard to feel, viscerally, the loss. When Shinra destroys an entire sector of their capital city… well, the player feels that loss. It really is a great game, and it took me ten years to realize that.

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