Wednesday, 16 January 2008

The history books tell it (supplemental)

Another reason it's hard to make a Top 20 list of games is how to assess older games. Have you ever, as an adult, seen cartoons you loved as a kid? There's some timeless classics, Looney Tunes and the like, but I was channel hopping on satellite TV a while back, and found a MASK cartoon.

I loved MASK. I'd get up at some ungodly hour on a Saturday morning when everyone else was still asleep to watch it. I'd endure Timmy Mallett and the Wide Awake Club for MASK. Later on I realised it was just an extended advert for action figures, but even so had a bit of a soft spot for it. On watching the cartoon twenty years later, though... good lord, it was bad. Really terrible.

Similarly, obviously Thro' The Wall won't exactly stack up to Crysis, but after the previous post I thought I'd grab an emulator and give it a try again. It really is basic (in BASIC, ahahahaha, sorry), and today probably wouldn't be in a Top 2000 of games, let alone Top 20. At the time, though, it was the greatest game in the whole world (albeit the only game, but never mind). How to weigh that up against photo-realistic graphics, strong storylines or deep gameplay?

2 comments:

DraconianOne said...

I remember the game MASK - didn't it have transforming vehicles or something? I don't recall ever watching the cartoon that much though - perhaps slightly after my time.

Whether a game could stand up today is a difficult question. Could Doom survive vs Quake or Half-life? Could Star Wars Arcade vs X-Wing? Could Elite vs X3? I (obviously) decided not to consider that and just consider them as games I had a lot of fun playing.

Zoso said...

I think MASK included such amazing things as a car that transformed into a plane by... opening its doors!

And yeah, probably best just to remember stuff as it was at the time. Never go back, ladies and gentlemen, never go back.