Fallout 2 might be my favorite game of all time. It doesn’t have the same nostalgia factor that earlier games like Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger have, and it will never match the replay factor of the Ogre Battle series. It’s not as mind-numbing as Ken Griffey Jr. or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and it doesn’t have the camaraderie associations that Tekken 3 has. But what it does have is this: perfection.
I started a football league and recruited a few colleagues, most of whom had never played fantasy. And we all got into it, started talking about our favorite players, teams we discovered that we liked, even the numbers game. And for me, I started envisioning my fantasy team in RPG terms.
The last time I played a Castlevania game was during the Reagan administration. So how in the hell do I know Alucard’s backstory? How do I know who Trevor Belmont is? This isn’t knowledge that arrives via osmosis, like talk radio or work conversation.
Sonic, for all its hedgehog oddity, never had that extra. It seemed forced, a sped up, dumbed down, pallette-enhanced non-entity. It had the soul of Bennigan’s, the magic of made-for-TV adaptations. And without that 9th dimension, it was only a rapid platform, an artificial barrier to a journey explored and experienced.
Start any video game and the beginning is full of fail. Games requiring high levels of twitch facility (think Ghost and Ghouls on the NES or Fallout 3 on modern consoles) result in a lot of deaths early on, until the player masters the dexterity required and the particular skills that respective buttons are mapped to.
We think video games are literature, and so why shouldn't there be literature about video games? That's the question we're hoping to answer here. Read more.
