My generation, part one of .... Goldeneye
So I am still trying to figure out where I am going with this site. But to fair, no one seems to care either way and Steaze has been MIA for three months now.
So, I am going to combine two of the things I love the most into a long series.
Media
And My Generation.My generation:
I wrote about this in my post 2004 election post.
http://ineverlovedyou.blogspot.com/2004/11/as-we-move-to-and-too-as-well.html
For those people born somewhere between 1970 and 1986, there is a collection of individuals who were raised on some of the best media and in a culture that was relatively free of any real strife. Most of these people were not taught racism, sexism, or inequality. We were taught the idea of diversity. While this is a drain on some aspects of life, and certainly people will hate others as they grow older, the original teachings they got are going to lay solid, even if the mere act of going to work in a multicultural workplace can taint this belief, deep down we know that no one is any better. That’s something new. We may have differences and we may not initially like someone, but we know more so than any generation in ages that we are all created equal.
Somewhere between the facelessness of internet chatrooms and online play, we learn that, deep down we are all assholes. But we are assholes from the start. THAT’S the difference.
I believe in my generation. We will become a great generation, I have no doubt of it. Whether the world changes in 2013 or not, this generation is going to change everything. We are exposed to far too much knowledge and given the paths to make the difference. Even if we have a president trying to Big Brother the press, in the end, the reality catches up with them (evidence Clinton and Bush 43 with the video that shows he was CLEARLY INFORMED about Katrina).
I believe and I love my generation. The latter is due to knowledge. The former due to intuition.
Anyway, this is going to be a series of posts about what was us. The texts that shaped us as a collective, and the great works of our growth period.
With the exception of the posts about the Goonies and E.T. (and maybe a few others), this is about the period from 1993 until 2009, which about the time I will likely finish this whole thing (if I ever write more than three of these).
Each year will have anywhere from one to five entries.
It’s a list for all lists.
So let’s get to it.
Golden-Eye. N64. 1997.
To this date, I can’t remember why I bought this game. When I bought it, I heard it was a James Bond game for the 64, and I heard it was going to be OK.
The day I bought it, I also bought the Special Edition VHS set of the Star Wars Trilogy. Maybe why I bring this up is nothing more than memory, but it also seems like something of a kismet. At that time I had never spent as much time on one thing (other than school and other things of actual life) on Star Wars. I bought it because I thought it would be a cool game to play. I had mild expectations (mind you this was before the real boom of the net where everyone was shouting about new things 60/60/24).
So the end of this flashback comes to an end with this last recollection.
Me, Will, and Mike had been getting together the last weekends of the 97 summer to play Mario Kart 64. We were playing every Friday and Saturday before we went out. That night came and we were going to watch Star Wars, when we decided to play the multiplayer feature of Golden Eye.
We went to bed at 3 am.
We started at 6 pm.
There are few games that will ever cause a hush when you mention the title around people who play videogames. It’s something of a rare air that is like the reaction to art pieces in the canon to literati. They cause an awed silence, and if provoked, the people will give a long, unfocused diatribe about what they feel about the piece. It’s not quite a review, because it’s so gushing. It’s the critical response of having sex for the first time; it’s an experience you have so much joy, love, and sheer unprepared awe that when put into words, the spoken analysis is going to be both gushing and unfamiliar. You can try, but you can’t replicate the experience in words even with hyperbole.
I can think of few games that have done this.
The list:
Super Mario Brother 3: It’s all summed up with someone telling you “Mario can FLY. NOT ONLY THAT, he can become a frog.
Tetris: You can’t stop playing!
Grand Theft Auto 3: You can do ANYTHING. And playing it changed your temporary mindset so much that you kind of believed you could steal a car.
And finally:
Goldeneye: You are James Bond.
These games bring that hush. They evoke the same feeling of falling in love for the first time. You know you will be forever linked to something else.
I had an argument with a guy who designs games for a living. We talked about the best games of all time. We talked about Mario 3 and World, Super Metroid and Castelvainia SOTN, Final Fantasies 6 and 7 (I still love Tactics best of all), Tetris, River City Ransom, Halo, Doom, Tie Fighter, Metal Gear, and so on.
But we both agreed, if given a game, on the most modern of all systems, we’d like to have the ability to play Goldeneye for the first time again.
This was the first time that you ever played inside a 3-D world that was both intriguing and scary. You wanted to explore, yet you feared the next step.
A lot of elements that made the game so *awesome* were because they were revolutionary, but at the same token, it wasn’t just that it was something now available, it was that these paths were so enthralling.
I remember going through the 18 levels of the game, and beating the first major stages, only to be greeted with a new stage that was far more challenging than I thought.
Think of the levels.
The first level is outdoors, wide open and above ground. But it leads to the next level which starts in a Ventilator shaft. You spend the next few levels in a Communist Military Base until you escape via plane. After that, you take over a ship, fight in a missile silo, escape with a hostage in a Russian Library. And then you get to pilot a tank.
Granted this was all based off of a great action movie and one could discount the gameplay as simple recreation, but that would cheapen that initial reaction. This was the first game where you felt the joy as an active participant –vs. the passive viewer of a movie—of getting the chance to drive a tank in a city. You got to drive a tank, and you felt like you earned the right to do so.
The level designs are legendary. From the “Control” level which even in a rush couldn’t be done in less than 10 minutes (and each minute is still startlingly heart-pumping to this date) to the frigate level, filled with claustrophobic dread, or the Jungle level, where the camouflage of the enemies added a new level of gamer awareness.
I still could play this game today. I would play it more often if it wasn’t for a waning lust for higher technology. I want this game to look as good as it deserves to be. The single player portion of this game is nothing short of perfect. I want Rare to put this game on a next Gen system, and to make some slight adjustments.
But I have left out the best part of the game.
Multiplayer mode.
I won’t go into detail about the personal tales of my life with this game. I spent far too many hours to ever put into words.
And I am sure you have too.
I go back to the first night that I ever played this multiplayer.
There were multiplayer games like Madden, Bomberman, Tetris, Combat, and there were many primitive PC games that gave the live experience.
But all of them were dwarfed by Goldeneye. It was the four player function. It was the speed of one hit kills. It was the trash talking that could be brought to the players before online.
This was a uniting experience, one that was likely topped by later games and better technology.
But my closing thought is this:
What game can you remember that you tie so closely to your friends in this period.
Were there any levels better than Stack, or Facility, or Temple for multiplayer?
Was there ever a game you loved to play alone just as much as you loved to play it with friends?
What game ever let you play as a male icon?
Technology may top it, but few experiences will EVER amount to playing Goldeneye.
It's part of our growing up.
So, I am going to combine two of the things I love the most into a long series.
Media
And My Generation.My generation:
I wrote about this in my post 2004 election post.
http://ineverlovedyou.blogspot.com/2004/11/as-we-move-to-and-too-as-well.html
For those people born somewhere between 1970 and 1986, there is a collection of individuals who were raised on some of the best media and in a culture that was relatively free of any real strife. Most of these people were not taught racism, sexism, or inequality. We were taught the idea of diversity. While this is a drain on some aspects of life, and certainly people will hate others as they grow older, the original teachings they got are going to lay solid, even if the mere act of going to work in a multicultural workplace can taint this belief, deep down we know that no one is any better. That’s something new. We may have differences and we may not initially like someone, but we know more so than any generation in ages that we are all created equal.
Somewhere between the facelessness of internet chatrooms and online play, we learn that, deep down we are all assholes. But we are assholes from the start. THAT’S the difference.
I believe in my generation. We will become a great generation, I have no doubt of it. Whether the world changes in 2013 or not, this generation is going to change everything. We are exposed to far too much knowledge and given the paths to make the difference. Even if we have a president trying to Big Brother the press, in the end, the reality catches up with them (evidence Clinton and Bush 43 with the video that shows he was CLEARLY INFORMED about Katrina).
I believe and I love my generation. The latter is due to knowledge. The former due to intuition.
Anyway, this is going to be a series of posts about what was us. The texts that shaped us as a collective, and the great works of our growth period.
With the exception of the posts about the Goonies and E.T. (and maybe a few others), this is about the period from 1993 until 2009, which about the time I will likely finish this whole thing (if I ever write more than three of these).
Each year will have anywhere from one to five entries.
It’s a list for all lists.
So let’s get to it.
Golden-Eye. N64. 1997.
To this date, I can’t remember why I bought this game. When I bought it, I heard it was a James Bond game for the 64, and I heard it was going to be OK.
The day I bought it, I also bought the Special Edition VHS set of the Star Wars Trilogy. Maybe why I bring this up is nothing more than memory, but it also seems like something of a kismet. At that time I had never spent as much time on one thing (other than school and other things of actual life) on Star Wars. I bought it because I thought it would be a cool game to play. I had mild expectations (mind you this was before the real boom of the net where everyone was shouting about new things 60/60/24).
So the end of this flashback comes to an end with this last recollection.
Me, Will, and Mike had been getting together the last weekends of the 97 summer to play Mario Kart 64. We were playing every Friday and Saturday before we went out. That night came and we were going to watch Star Wars, when we decided to play the multiplayer feature of Golden Eye.
We went to bed at 3 am.
We started at 6 pm.
There are few games that will ever cause a hush when you mention the title around people who play videogames. It’s something of a rare air that is like the reaction to art pieces in the canon to literati. They cause an awed silence, and if provoked, the people will give a long, unfocused diatribe about what they feel about the piece. It’s not quite a review, because it’s so gushing. It’s the critical response of having sex for the first time; it’s an experience you have so much joy, love, and sheer unprepared awe that when put into words, the spoken analysis is going to be both gushing and unfamiliar. You can try, but you can’t replicate the experience in words even with hyperbole.
I can think of few games that have done this.
The list:
Super Mario Brother 3: It’s all summed up with someone telling you “Mario can FLY. NOT ONLY THAT, he can become a frog.
Tetris: You can’t stop playing!
Grand Theft Auto 3: You can do ANYTHING. And playing it changed your temporary mindset so much that you kind of believed you could steal a car.
And finally:
Goldeneye: You are James Bond.
These games bring that hush. They evoke the same feeling of falling in love for the first time. You know you will be forever linked to something else.
I had an argument with a guy who designs games for a living. We talked about the best games of all time. We talked about Mario 3 and World, Super Metroid and Castelvainia SOTN, Final Fantasies 6 and 7 (I still love Tactics best of all), Tetris, River City Ransom, Halo, Doom, Tie Fighter, Metal Gear, and so on.
But we both agreed, if given a game, on the most modern of all systems, we’d like to have the ability to play Goldeneye for the first time again.
This was the first time that you ever played inside a 3-D world that was both intriguing and scary. You wanted to explore, yet you feared the next step.
A lot of elements that made the game so *awesome* were because they were revolutionary, but at the same token, it wasn’t just that it was something now available, it was that these paths were so enthralling.
I remember going through the 18 levels of the game, and beating the first major stages, only to be greeted with a new stage that was far more challenging than I thought.
Think of the levels.
The first level is outdoors, wide open and above ground. But it leads to the next level which starts in a Ventilator shaft. You spend the next few levels in a Communist Military Base until you escape via plane. After that, you take over a ship, fight in a missile silo, escape with a hostage in a Russian Library. And then you get to pilot a tank.
Granted this was all based off of a great action movie and one could discount the gameplay as simple recreation, but that would cheapen that initial reaction. This was the first game where you felt the joy as an active participant –vs. the passive viewer of a movie—of getting the chance to drive a tank in a city. You got to drive a tank, and you felt like you earned the right to do so.
The level designs are legendary. From the “Control” level which even in a rush couldn’t be done in less than 10 minutes (and each minute is still startlingly heart-pumping to this date) to the frigate level, filled with claustrophobic dread, or the Jungle level, where the camouflage of the enemies added a new level of gamer awareness.
I still could play this game today. I would play it more often if it wasn’t for a waning lust for higher technology. I want this game to look as good as it deserves to be. The single player portion of this game is nothing short of perfect. I want Rare to put this game on a next Gen system, and to make some slight adjustments.
But I have left out the best part of the game.
Multiplayer mode.
I won’t go into detail about the personal tales of my life with this game. I spent far too many hours to ever put into words.
And I am sure you have too.
I go back to the first night that I ever played this multiplayer.
There were multiplayer games like Madden, Bomberman, Tetris, Combat, and there were many primitive PC games that gave the live experience.
But all of them were dwarfed by Goldeneye. It was the four player function. It was the speed of one hit kills. It was the trash talking that could be brought to the players before online.
This was a uniting experience, one that was likely topped by later games and better technology.
But my closing thought is this:
What game can you remember that you tie so closely to your friends in this period.
Were there any levels better than Stack, or Facility, or Temple for multiplayer?
Was there ever a game you loved to play alone just as much as you loved to play it with friends?
What game ever let you play as a male icon?
Technology may top it, but few experiences will EVER amount to playing Goldeneye.
It's part of our growing up.
posted by Indiana at
12:23 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home