My Personal Gaming History.

My Personal Gaming history.

I started to build an interest in the Gaming society, while I was in the last years of primary school, with the release of the Sony PlayStation 2. This was the beginning of a lifelong passion for gaming. Before the release of the PlayStation 2, I had never owned any console at all, even though I knew a lot of people who had the original PlayStation, and the Nintendo 64, so this was my first chance to enjoy playing without being chased by my friends outside. However I didn’t get my PlayStation 2 till Christmas, a month after release, but it was definitely worth the wait.

The first game which came with the console bundle was “Maximo – Ghosts to Glory” or called “Maximo” in Europe. This game was a children’s Hack and Slash spectacular from Capcom. The overall plot to the game was quite interesting;

“Maximo, a brave knight, thinking he’d found a trustworthy assistant in the likes of Achille, decided to leave his apprentice behind and go out into the world. Achille turned out to be an evil super-villain, and now the land is in trouble. Four princesses have been captured, and the dastardly Achille has spread them across the world, stashing them away in four separate towers. To make matters even worse, Achille has taken Maximo’s main squeeze as a bride. The knight must now battle fierce creatures and explore dark lands, in the name of peace and love”.

(http://capcom.wikia.com/wiki/Maximo:_Ghosts_to_Glory)

The overall playing style was very easy to learn pick up and play with easy to learn, basic controls and story objectives, which gradually became harder as you progressed through the game. Now I think back and analyse “Maximo”, I notice the atmosphere was brilliantly created to set the scene of being in the underworld, however not making the whole experience too scary, because the game was rated a 12. The world assets, such as trees, treasure chests and weapons were very low poly, and the characters were too with the exception of the bosses. For such a simple game, with a low development budget, everything you could wish for in a Hack and Slash/adventure game was there. However I can’t say it was very memorable, only for being the very first console game to be played by myself. I think the reason for not being memorable was purely because I was finding my feet in the gaming world at quite an early age.

The most memorable game I have played in my time has to be Bioshock 2. This game, having won more than 50 games of the year awards, was such a well put together experience. First of all being set 10 years after the original Bioshock, it follows the actions of the fallen underwater city, named Rapture and test subject Alpha’s attempts to fight his way through the horror ridden world to find out who “has been snatching little girls and bringing them back to the undersea city of Rapture. Players step into the boots of the most iconic denizen of Rapture, the Big Daddy, as they travel through the decrepit and beautiful fallen city, chasing an unseen foe in search of answers and their own survival”

(http://www.microsoft.com/games/en-gb/games/pages/bioshock2.aspx).

On the art side of things in Bioshock 2, I love the way the game is set in the art deco period of the first game (1958), but there are slight changes, having being 8-10 years after the events of Bioshock, making the date of the second game 1968, which gave Art Deco a “broadly-applied stylistic label”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco).

The Bioshock franchise gave such a different style and look to the games of the modern generation of consoles. Also it was one of the first games to have an underwater setting linked so nicely with certain dates in time, such as world war 2 etc., to give it just a little bit more believability. Bioshock is an overall clever, visual attractive and atmospheric game, which will become, if not already, a classic game, thanks to 2K.

A chance to dream!

A chance to think the unthinkable. What I would like to see from games in the future is the ability to interact and immerse you within the game and its characters, LITERALLY. I would love to hear about an experimental simulating game, which acts so real, that you even enter an altered reality, as mentioned on the previous post “The future of gaming”.

Another asset I’d look forward to seeing in the future of the games industry is a game engine powerful enough to produce environments that would show no cracks in creation/development or having a console with another ability to scan the environment you’re playing the game in and changing the mood of the game, swapping the background music around at different scenes or sensing you’ve got the curtains shut or no lights on, then enhancing the gameplay to more tactical or changing the lighting of the game. I think these two assets would make the difference between a game and real life, which would be great!

Games I’d like to see take control of this potential/experimental equipment, would be the Call of Duty franchise, showcasing the involvement and interaction. Feeling the motions of the soldiers etc. And maybe even a good horror game such as; Dead Space or even Bioshock to make great of mood lighting and sensing when the player is in a nervous disposition, I think that’d be so scary to be able to change the game to how the player is feeling at the time, maybe that’s a little too far.