The Hell of It All (50 page)

In a previous life, I reviewed videogames for a living. As jobs go, it was a curate’s egg. On the one hand, I could legitimately sit around playing games until three in the morning without feeling guilty – even if I wasn’t specifically reviewing whatever I was currently playing, it all provided useful background knowledge. It never felt like work.

But on the other hand, whenever I told people what I did, they pulled pained, sympathetic expressions and automatically began treating me like some kind of adult baby, as though I’d suddenly started wheeling myself around the room on an undersized tricycle, gurgling and suckling on a dummy. Because games are for kids, right? So I was essentially a grown man reviewing
Mr Men
books, yeah?

And when I wasn’t viewed as a child, I was viewed as a nerd. How sad my little interests were. How dorky. It was bad enough enjoying the damn things but, being a games journalist, I took things one stage further by developing some understanding of how they were actually constructed. I might look at a new release and be impressed by the polygon count or the draw distance. Apparently this made me a tedious loser, because society decrees anyone who knows anything whatsoever about computers to be a boring idiot, while those possessing a similar level of nerd-knowledge of football or cinema or food are well-informed and sophisticated and sexually attractive and cool.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but being a games journo in the 1990s meant I was on hand to witness the birth of several landmark cultural icons first-hand. For instance, back in 1995 I visited the studios of Core Design in Derby to report on the development of a
new game starring a female explorer called Lara Croft. Tomb Raider was still in a rough-and-ready state – Lara was running through a grey landscape of textureless polygons – but it was clear this was going to be massive; she already had character.

A year later, I travelled to Dundee to drop in on a company called DMA Design, previously responsible for the popular strategy/ puzzle game Lemmings. They were working on a new title partly inspired by a ZX Spectrum game called Turbo Esprit. Turbo Esprit came out when I was 15; I loved it. You had to drive around a city (in a Lotus Esprit Turbo, naturally) seeking out criminals. What made it unique was the sense that the city you were driving through actually ‘worked’. There were traffic lights and petrol stations, roadworks and one-way streets. It was way ahead of its time.

DMA Design’s new game featured an even more sophisticated city, with pedestrians and fire engines and its own police force. You could walk around it on foot, committing crimes, pinching vehicles and trying to evade the law. It was called Grand Theft Auto.

It looked very different to the GTA millions know and love/hate today: it was all viewed from overhead, and featured simple ‘retro’ graphics. But it was great. I gave it a rave review, calling it ‘the gaming equivalent of a smack in the mouth’. ‘Give us a sequel with polygons and cars that flip over,’ I squealed. Years later, they did.

GTA IV is its latest incarnation. In its first week of release, it made around $500m. It’s been rightly, and widely, proclaimed a masterpiece. And it is – at least technically. As far as the script and storyline goes, it tries so hard to appear ‘adult’, it winds up looking downright adolescent. The bad guys are implausibly amoral, everyone shouts ‘fuck’ every two seconds, and the women are little more than haircuts and orifices. In other words, it’s like almost any Hollywood action film you care to mention.

But if you can ignore that, there’s a wealth of incredible detail and some surprising moments of satire. For example, Liberty City has its own TV networks, which you can sit down and watch if the mood takes you. One channel, Weazel, is a thinly-veiled parody of Fox that features shows such as
Republican Space Rangers
(a
fascistic cartoon in which dimwitted right-wing hicks roam the galaxy exterminating peaceful life forms) and the brashly titled
Vinewood Cunts
(a reality show about Paris Hilton types). And yes, they use the C-word right there in the game, in the gravelly voiceover for the virtual trailer you watch on the virtual TV in your virtual apartment in the virtual city teeming with virtual life. I don’t know quite why, but this really leapt out at me. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word in a game before. Never mind the polygon count – that’s genuine progress.

The one thing everyone knows about Grand Theft Auto is that you can kill prostitutes in it. That’s because it’s a ‘sandbox’ game in which you can kill anyone you like. Or you can not kill them. Or you can simply drive around slowly, obeying the traffic lights. If you break the law and the in-game police spot you, they’ll hunt you down and nab you. Murdering innocent people is neither (a) encouraged, (b) free of consequence, or (c) any more realistic than a Tex Avery cartoon. Nonetheless, Keith Vaz MP is probably standing on his roof screaming for a ban right now, confidently telling the world’s press that Grand Theft Auto IV is a dedicated, ultra-realistic prostitute-murdering simulator aimed exclusively at easily corruptible three-year-olds.

He means well, possibly. But he’s ignorant. The irony is that every time I read some dumb anti-gaming proclamation by Vaz and co, I get so angry I have to fire up GTA IV and shoot 29 pedestrians in the face just to vent the frustration they’ve caused. Thank God these games exist, or I’d be taking it out on real people.

Originally written for the Guardian Weekend’s ‘Dork Talk’ segment
.

Write a thing about the best videogames of all time, the Guardian commands me. And I obey. But space is short, so I’ve done it briefly. Bear in mind that these aren’t the best videogames of all time, just a personal and possibly perverse selection, listed in order of release, not merit. Anyway: insert coin. Hit start button.

Asteroids
(1979, Atari): Of all the early monochrome classics, Asteroids was my favourite, because it’s truly bleak. Rather than aliens or robots, your enemies are unthinking lumps of rock that are hurtling through space. Twirling somewhere in the middle of this cluttered void is your tiny, heartbreakingly fragile spaceship, armed only with a feeble electric peashooter. If Asteroids has a message, it’s this: you are insignificant, the universe doesn’t care about you, and you are definitely going to die. Brilliant.

Pac-Man
(1980, Namco): Pac-Man himself may be an ultimately unknowable yellow disc, but his spectral pursuers had proper googly eyes and everything. And nicknames. And blood types. OK, not blood types. But this was one of the first games with identifiable characters, which goes a long way to explaining its success.

3D Deathchase
(1983, Micromega): A Spectrum game in which all you had to do was avoid trees and shoot fellow motorcyclists. Simple, speedy pseudo-3D graphics meant suddenly you were starring in the bike section from
Return of the Jedi
. Yes. You really bloody were.

Stop the Express
(1983, Hudson Soft): A rare Japanese Spectrum game, this was an insanely breakneck combat/platformer in which you had to scamper along the top of a runaway train, fighting assassins and dodging obstacles. Best of all, when you beat it, your sole reward was a caption reading ‘Congraturation! You sucsess!’

Elite
(1984, Acornsoft): Most home computer games were simplistic, flick-screen affairs in which you played a fat mayor jumping over a nettle or something like that. Then Elite came along and took the piss. A groundbreaking 3D space combat-and-trading simulator that managed to convince me my computer could, when programmed correctly, house an entire alternative universe.

Jet Set Willy
(1984, Software Projects): Back in the day, you needed only a single programmer to create a game – and since said programmers were often geeked-out stoners, said games were often weird. Jet Set Willy’s blend of flying pigs, in-jokes,
Python
and
Freak Brothers
references encapsulates the homebrew quirkiness of the cottage industry software scene of the early 80s. We shall not see their like again.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(1984, Infocom): Still one of the only games to contain proper, structured jokes, H2G2 was a text adventure co-written by Douglas Adams himself. It was also the first postmodern game, since it knew it was a game, and also knew you knew, so sometimes it would refer to you as Arthur Dent (star of the game) and other times simply as you (the player controlling him) – whichever seemed funniest at the time.

The Sentinel
(1986, Firebird): You played a nomadic consciousness that had to absorb parts of the 3D landscape, then transfer itself inside a series of motionless avatars in order to travel – your goal being to ascend the highest peak before the ominous Sentinel stared you to death with his huge, cycloptic eye. In other words, it makes sense only when you play it.

Kato Chan and Ken Chan
(1988, Hudson Soft): An import-only title for the PC Engine (a tiny Japanese console), Chan And Chan was a below-average platform game – but one that revolved, startlingly, around shitting, farting and pissing. The point at which I first grasped the illicit joy of off-kilter Japanese imports. (Also for the PC Engine: Toilet Kids, a shoot-‘em-up in which you fired turds at flying penises.)

Tetris
(1989): There can’t be a human being on Earth who doesn’t love Tetris. Perpetual order from perpetual chaos. The most inherently satisfying video game ever created.

Road Rash
(1991, EA): Road Rash was a Mega Drive motorbikin’ game with a twist: you could swerve across the road to punch the other riders in the head, simply because you didn’t like them. All your opponents had irritating names, which made developing pointless vendettas a breeze. Few things in life have satisfied me as much as repeatedly smacking preppy, clean-cut Biff in the face until he hurtled into an oncoming taxi at 100mph.

Doom
(1993, id software): The king of all first-person shooters. Doom represented a huge technological leap forward, with graphics and multiplayer gameplay options that were way ahead of their time. But, most of all, Doom was scary. Really bloody scary. Flickering lights, horrifying monsters, pitch-black rooms and bloodcurdling sound design. The snarling, bull-like ‘pinky’ beasts that
galloped over and bit your face off without warning are the most unsettling enemy in videogame history.

UFO: Enemy Unknown
(1993, Microprose): It runs on the PC. It’s a turn-based strategy game. It’s got a ‘suburban alien invasion’ vibe straight out of the X-Files. Bored already? Your own yawning mouth is lying to you. UFO (also known as X-COM) was one of the creepiest, most addictive and absorbing games of the 90s. Today, turnbased games are out of favour and UFO itself is a forgotten relic – a shame, because if it was released next week on Nintendo DS, it would be a bestseller. Someone needs to resurrect it.

Tekken 2
(1996, Namco): In 1996 I spent weeks sitting hunched over a PlayStation controller in my living room, fighting flatmates and friends in an uninterrupted Tekken trance. It’s a hypnotic orgy of violence in which martial artists, thugs, robots, wrestlers and pandas knock 10 bells out of each other for no good reason; cue punches, kicks and harrowing acts of cartilage-grinding chiropractic violence that almost made you pity your opponent. Wonderful.

The Grand Theft Auto series
(1997–2008, DMA/Rockstar): Controversial series of ‘sandbox’ games that gift the player an entire city in which to misbehave. It began in 1997 as a cheeky mayhem simulator with a top-down, 2D viewpoint and a ZX Spectrum vibe. In 2001, it graduated to 3D and became an unstoppable blockbuster. The sun-kissed San Andreas is my favourite GTA, at least until the next-gen GTA IV arrives in a few weeks. Few Brits realise these games are made in Scotland: we should be far prouder of this stuff than we are.

The Orange Box
(2007, Valve): Must-have compilation containing both Half-Life 2 (the best first-person shooter since Doom) and Portal (one of the most inventive brain-ticklers ever conceived). Playing Half-Life 2 is a bit like starring in a sci-fi horror remake of Die Hard, but better, while Portal is a description-defying 3D puzzle that folds your sense of spatial awareness in on itself. Utterly fantastic.

The Burnout series
(2001–8, Criterion) Another great British creation. Forget the stuffy gearstick-porn of Gran Turismo, Burnout provides the most thrilling racing experience around. Not in the
slightest bit realistic, and better for it, it’s the spiritual successor to Road Rash – ramming your opponent off the road at mind-mangling speed. The most recent entry, the free-roaming Burnout Paradise, is fun, but punishes the player at every turn with an abysmal navigation system; 2004’s Burnout Takedown remains the high water mark.

Super Mario Galaxy
(2007, Nintendo): All the Mario platformers are superb: Galaxy happens to be the most recent. A dizzying, challenging, ingenious romp, it’s like having liquid joy poured into your head via the eyeholes. Anyone who believes videogames to be a mindless waste of time should play this. As surreal and inventive as
Python;
as much pure entertainment as 100
Tom and Jerry
cartoons, it’s a bona fide work of modern genius.

In September 2008, I wrote a one-off review for the 200th edition of
PC Zone magazine, the place where I started my ‘career’ in ‘journalism’.
Since I’d been away for a while, they gave me a rubbish title to
review
.

Euro Truck Simulator:
Thanks,
PC Zone
. You bring me back from the dead for one last review and what do you give me to look at? A game in which you drive a lorry full of tomatoes to Lyon. I thought the whole appeal of games was that they let you do things you can’t do in real life, like shooting a Nazi or jumping over a daffodil and landing on a cloud. Not so here. As glamorous exercises in escapism go, Euro Truck Simulator is on a par with fishing hair from a plughole.