Video Games: My Gaming Pedigree

To remind myself why I got excited about going to Penny Arcade Expo in the first place, I’m going to peer back through the mists of ancient history and review my gaming track record.

I’ve been playing video games for a long time. It’s hard to say exactly how or when I started: I think it might have been in 1985, when Oregon Trail appeared on the Apple IIe computers at my grade school. My parents had already bought a Commodore 64 for our home by then, and bought me my first IBM-PC two years later in 1987, but they wanted me to use computers to learn how to type and make spreadsheets, not to shoot squirrels, ford rivers and keep my oxen from dying.

In 1988, at age ten, I changed schools and found a partner in virtual crime – Christie, my best friend of many years. The first clear memory I have of gaming with Christie was playing Rogue in her dad’s office on a computer the size of a convection oven. We boldly explored the Dungeons of Doom together, quaffing potions and battling kobolds on maps constructed entirely out of ASCII characters. Once we’d gotten a taste for character creation, it was on to Wizardry: I can still remember sliding in the 5 1/4″ floppies and waiting anxiously, pencils paused over grid paper, ready to map out levels and show that Mad Overlord who was boss. After defeating Werdna, we were well and truly hooked.

Sierra and Brøderbund defined our pre-teen years with Carmen Sandiego, Myst and King’s Quest, and even an illicit peek at the sexy pixel ladies in Leisure Suit Larry. Trilobyte and MicroProse carried me through the mid-90s with The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour and the original Sid Meier’s Civilization. Eventually Christie got her first console (classic NES) and we fought our way through Mega Man, Dr. Mario and some less-known titles like Disney’s Adventures in The Magic Kingdom.

In university I wanted to study and run after boys, so gaming took a backseat. Bookended by one incredibly epic PC gaming session of Sid Meier’s Civilization II with David in first year and a near-crippling addiction to Bejeweled in my last year, I was relatively game-free.

Then I finished university and moved in with a boy who was a dedicated gamer and who introduced me to the new breed of consoles: the Gamecube and the PS2. I got so excited I bought him an Xbox to round out the collection, and for a year or so went haywire exploring what game developers had been up to while I was busy getting my B.A. I was wooed back into gaming with Fable and Syberia, Shadow of the Colossus and Katamari Damacy, Psychonauts and Time Splitters. When I moved out I decided to leave the Xbox behind, but bought my own PlayStation and spent a lot of money on one of the first hard-to-find Wii systems that I got from a guy who knew a guy (thanks, Petar).

Nowdays I still game, but I have other, far more time consuming hobbies as well so I do it in moderation. The most excited I’ve been in recent memory was seeing Little Big Planet‘s world-building capabilities and multiplayer goodness, and of course hearing Stephen Fry’s amazing voice work. Keeping my eye on Dante’s Inferno (though the English major inside me quails at the transformation of that epic poem into poop and vomit battles), and always hoping that Tim Schafer will bring in another home run with his soon-to-be-released Brütal Legend action-adventure game. I mean, it has voice work by Jack Black and Tim Curry, so all seems well, but I do have trouble with loud noises, and I’ve never been a big fan of guitar-based video games. Bongos? Sure. Maracas? Sure. Guitars? Require too much coordination from my flailing limbs.

To close out, some short but revealing lists…

Games I own:

• PS2 – Bully; Burnout 3: Takedown; Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories; The Guy Game; Ico; Katamari Damacy; Odama; Okami; Psychonauts; Star Wars Battlefront; We Love Katamari
• PS3 – Burnout Paradise; Ghostbusters: the video game; Little Big Planet; The Orange Box (Half-Life 2; Portal; Team Fortress 2)
• Wii – Rayman Raving Rabbids; Super Paper Mario; WarioWare Smooth Moves; WiiFit; WiiPlay; WiiSports; World of Goo; Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Gamecube – Donkey Konga; Donkey Konga 2; Donkey Konga Jungle Beat; Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker; Metroid Prime
• Gameboy – Defender of the Crown
• NintendoDS – New Super Mario Bros.; WarioWare

Games I’d like to own:
Bioshock; inFamous; Fat Princess; Grim Fandango (hey, I missed it the first time around); Lego Star Wars; Ratchet & Clank Future; Super Smash Bros Brawl; Wii Sports Resort

Video Game Review: Jurassic Park III, The DNA Factor

Let’s get this out of the way.
Arguments for: There are none.

Arguments against: They are legion. Examine the hard stats with me, if you will: 21 games for various platforms were spun-off from the dinosaur-sized franchise that is Jurassic Park. None of them are any good. The best of the worst is the Sega Genesis game, spawned from the first movie, way back in the day. And here, with JP3: The DNA Factor for GBA, we are witness to the nadir, the bottom of the barrel, the most shamelessly uninspired relic of the once-mighty Jurassic empire.

The movie Jurassic Park III was released on 16 July 2001; in that fateful year, we were also given three JP3-based GBA games. I am writing this review on the eve of 2005, and although the movie is still watchable (mostly thanks to the “Oh, my God! Dinosaurs! Again!” look that is permanently plastered onto Sam Neill’s face), the games SUCK. SO BADLY. All of them are so lamentably lame that I was forced to use a sentence fragment just then to drive the point home.

Some concrete criticisms include: crappy avatar, unclear game goals, poor mapping, limited interactivity, stiff player motion, insufficient save points, lack of special items/weapons/tools, mind-numbing repetition in levels and absurdly low-grade graphics.

The tagline for the movie was: “This Time It’s Not Just A Walk In The Park!” After playing ‘JP3: DNA’, I couldn’t agree more. I would have been ecstatic with a walk in Jurassic Park! Instead, I got a slow, linear toggle along a brown path strewn with badly-drawn chasms that your character can plunge into without even having realized they were approaching an anomaly in the landscape. Fallen logs block you from manoeuvring smoothly forwards, up or down, which are really your only options. Diagonal motion to evade predators is a near-fictional concept in the Jurassic-verse.

Oh, and the “predators”! If there was ever anything less awe-inspiring, less voracious, less earth-trembling than the tiny, 2-D velociraptors that scurry across your path in level one, exhibiting all the grace and fearsome speed of paper cut-outs taped to a popsicle stick, I have yet to witness it.

I’m sad to report that I didn’t have the heart to get all the way to the advertised “intense puzzle action”, so it’s conceivable that that is what redeems JP3: DNA. But frankly, to reach any level of involvement with a game that requires me to slog through scenery, battles and characters that look like they were designed as part of the grade 6 “Turtle BASIC” project I did on my trusty old Commodore VIC-20 requires a level of commitment I simply do not have.

I think it speaks volumes that, before GameRankings.com became shitty and removed user-created reviews, 27 people took time out of their busy lives to warn you away from this game. I’m a busy lady, and I’m taking a LOT of time to write this scathing review. The average user-vote for ‘JP3: DNA’ was 4.2, and the pro ranking sites average out at about 47%. This is a score of unreasonable generosity. The milk of human kindness is being sucked dry from the teats that issued that score. There’s almost enough evidence in that score to support a conspiracy theory on the part of the game designers. People who gave this game higher than a 3 must be voting out of a passionate love of the subject matter, nostalgic affection for side-scrolling games, or brain damage from excessive TV viewing.

Most likely, the player who rated this game 8 out of 10 accidentally rated the wrong game. Other viable possibilities are that it was actually a monkey who misunderstood the subtleties of rank denoted by Arabic numbers, or a vicious sadist, cackling maniacally at the prospect of subjecting you to the agonizing punishment you will receive if you insert this cartridge into your GBA and power up. The two of us who gave this game a 1 star are confronting you with brutal honesty. We want to save you from our tragic fate.

I still have a lot of dino-games to try, but this was not the game I’m looking for. I will move along. May I humbly suggest you do the same.

Personal bias: There is no reasonable cause for me to loathe this game as much as I do. Seriously, I’m fascinated and awed by dinosaurs, I like video games, I grew up with side-scrollers, and I don’t have any strong aversion to Michael Crichton. Which leads me to the irrefutable conclusion that this game just plain stinks.

Like This Game? Try… You cannot like this game. In fact, there’s nothing I can do for you but pity you if you DO like this game. But if you like dinosaurs, I’m sorry to report that the time has not yet arrived where you can get satisfaction from your Xbox, PS2 or GameCube. Turok for the N64 has gotten some decent reviews, but I’m still holding out for something awesome. Put down the controller, walk to the video store, and rent all three of BBC’s documentaries, ‘Walking With Dinosaurs‘, ‘Chased By Dinosaurs‘ (starring Nigel Marven), and ‘Walking with Prehistoric Beasts‘ (narrated by Kenneth Branagh). You won’t regret it.