Kanto to Hyrule, Mobius to Santa Destroy, Planet Reach to Little Big Planet, Cinema Student, Screenwriter, and all around gamer, Eric Parra is a bad enough dude to bring you your weekly fix on relative gaming. Whether it’s reviews, previews, or FAQ’s, matters that are professional or just personal, make sure you check Neon Tommy every week for all sorts of interesting tidbits in the world of video games. And remember, it’s dangerous to go alone.

 

 

From the transformation of old-timey radio detectives talking about dames to pop stars blasting about babies, from comic books with grown men wearing their underwear on the outside to graphic novels with grown woman wearing only their underwear outside, and from black and white silent shorts to colorful full-length features in the third-dimension, video games have undergone just as much of an evolution. 

 Gaming started out in a time where graphics meant nothing at all to a gamer. Imagine watching a movie, but you don’t have any actors or sound or even a screen, just a bunch of text on sheets of paper with some binding. Blasphemy, am I right?

Well, there was actually such a time, and it was not as tragic as you may think. Games were indeed much simpler, but there was a lot left to the imagination. That’s not just a red square on the screen! That’s the evil legendary space pirate who killed everyone on your intergalactic space village (the big brown square) and stole your beautiful space princess and destined lover (the blue square).

Gameplay was extremely subtle too. There was no blue fairy yelling in your ear that you missed a turn at the volcano, no professors telling you how inappropriate it is to take your bike out, and definitely no giant pictures of buttons to press so you can watch your character do impossibly cool things that you, yourself, cannot get your character to do. Nope, you had to press random buttons and figure everything out through trial and error. Or just give up and do something else, like I used to do. Old games are hard.

New games are very popular though. Take the Far Cry 3 trailer that just came out. Far Cry is a game where you shoot people, the environment, things in general and you adventure in the jungle or some other fancy terrains. But the latest trailer…well, I’d say it topples pretty much every upcoming movie trailer in terms of presentation. The characters look amazing, but not as much as the background which looks almost as if it were filmed by a real camcorder. 

Graphics and cinematics have constantly been upgrading, becoming more and more realistic to the point that looking at older games can sometimes be painful on the eyes. The latest and greatest graphics generally get the most hype from games and are generally mass audience pleasers. It’s eye candy, so people eat it up. But like with actual candy, too much is definitely a bad thing.

Dead Island, for example, also had an amazing trailer about a family being attacked by zombies in slow motion with a very touching song. There was no gameplay footage shown, however, and when the game came out, the reviews were not nearly as praising as they were for the trailer (the trailer is pretty awesome, but be warned, it is graphic.)

I’ve started Mass Effect recently. The first one, I’ve heard the second is much better, so I’ll have to get back to that sometime in the future. But basically, the game is an amazing testament to story-telling that games have hardly trekked on before. This isn’t the kind of story you make up when you try to explain to your cousin what the pixels ambiguously represent, like I used to do with Tetris. Mass Effect lays everything out, with amazing dialogue, brilliant characters, and mind melding choices for the player to make. That being said, the gameplay for the first one kind of sucks. More often than not, I just want to skip ahead so I can keep seeing my character talk and be awesome without me controlling him.

A point I’m getting to, is that a lot of games have swapped gameplay for cinema and storytelling. This is a good thing to some and a

bad thing to others. Personally, I like a game that can tell a great story. If that story has amazing visuals, even better. Metal Gear Solid may as well be a 32 hour movie with slight breaks of shooting and buttons commands, but it’s still fun and entertaining, so that works. Same goes for the Uncharted series, which is shorter, but probably even less gaming and more watching as your character leaps, kills, runs, and everything else you can possibly think of with the press of a single button. Again, it’s very entertaining (especially if you have even the slightest interest in Indiana Jones) and so that’s okay with me. LA Noir and Heavy Rain are very interesting games that I have not yet ventured into playing for some odd, unexplainable reason, but they are essentially interactive movies. Simple commands tell your character an idea of what they should do, and then they do it very differently than you probably expected. The whole thing is very cinematic. 

Sometimes, gameplay is sacrificed to exemplify the visuals. Dead Island is an example. Sonic the Hedgehog ’06 is an even worse example, where the visuals are extremely impressive, but the game is almost unplayable due to glitches, bugs, and impossibly long loading times. There needs to be a balance, and some games can reach that balance. Other games just look to be the prettiest. Others aren’t pretty enough. 

Music is constantly changing, comics are constantly changing, movies are jumping back and forth and through hoops, but they hardly ever stay the same, and video games are literally all of the above and more. It’s definitely a media that changes faster than any of the others and one that’s constantly growing without any immediate decline in the future, so I’d keep my eye out.

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