Game Nostalgia - 4-Bit Fanaticism

(I have removed Friday from the posts since I will likely never post on time.)

"You're still playing Atari?" my dad asked me today as I was piddling around on Game Room before we headed out. The truth is that I have always been behind the video game evolutionary curve. We had our Atari 2600 burning up the T.V. well into 1990 when my parents finally broke down and bought a Nintendo system. I have been consistently rewarded with a system about two years before it goes out of style. (With computers and cellphones, it is about two months.)

With this in mind, I must say: I FUCKING LOVE ATARI GAMES! Yes, their graphics are about as interesting as day old coffee grounds, and game plots were as thin as William Shatner's sanity. Yet they existed in an age when graphical limits challenged designers to innovate games more intriguingly, or steal from everyone else, as game copyright laws were extremely lax at the time. I still remember running through endless mazes to avoid Zots for hours of endless fun, and this happened only three weeks ago.

Tunnel Runner, 1983. Copyright CBS Electronics

Now, one could say that games have evolved so much that there is no point to looking back, and in some regards this is true, for nostalgia is often used as a cheap marketing ploy in lieu of innovation. However, to deny the roots of gaming is to forget the foundations that they laid for the games of today.

I guess in the end, what I find most fascinating about my 4Bit Fanaticism is that it mimics my attachment to other hobbies, for I often love my gateway item and my current fascination. All matters in between are immaterial, and it is often the first that stands as the most endearing and memorable experience.

So, for me, when I fire up Game Room, I wish not only to reclaim something that I once loved, but also to remind myself of where I am now and the path that I took to get here. Wiping out the horror of NES-level game difficulty though is an important step in the process.

Game Nostalgia - First PC Death

I am thinking back to the first character that I ever lost in an RPG, campaign death not withstanding. The game was Legend of the Five Rings, Second Edition (and yes, I must qualify that) and the character was a young Lion tactician hoping to make his name among an empire emerging from the Scorpion Clan Coup. What followed was a horrific foray into the Clan Wars, a time of great strife and evil as Fu Leng made his move to cast the empire into the 1000 Years of Darkness. The young Ikoma bravely fought alongside his campaigns until that fateful moment: exposure to the Wasting Disease. After much suffering (and 16 failed dice rolls), his life came to an end, as his unsteady hand during his final act of seppukku was met with the honorable duty of his second. The character was burned and buried in a tender bonding moment among the PCs before they had to move on in order to warn the empire of the approaching Crab/Shadowlands army. The back-up character, the Kitsu Shugenja, really never meshed with the group, and eventually, succumbed to the seductive evils of maho.

Lessons
The lessons that I took away from the event were quite simple:

1. When it counts, I will fail the roll that will be needed to save my character...or in this instance, all 16 rolls.
2. Character death can be a wonderful story point to bring the others together, but it is often trivialized in many RPGs.
3. The second character will never have the same impact on the story as the first. He/she will undoubtedly feel out of place and isolated from the rest of the group, possibly because he/she was never part of the bonding moment.

While I have had many characters suffer horrible deaths, none stick in mind more than this young samurai hoping to leave his mark on the empire.

(The second most memorable death resulted in an awesomely gruesome display in Call of Cthulhu, but this story should be saved for another day.