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We’re all living in the future of Phantasy Star Online no comments

There’s no way we’re living in the future of Phantasy Star Online, you cry — there’s no talking robots with laser swords and nobody’s scrambling for floating red boxes while wearing properly silly costumes.

Perhaps we’re not actually living in the future of Phantasy Star Online, then. But we are living in the timeline where the vision of 2000-era Sonic Team became the blueprint for just about everything.

Yet ask folk about PSO and you’ll hear something about how you spelt ‘fantasy’ wrong, or how that’s ‘the one where everyone’s got spiky hair and rides big yellow birds’. Indeed, we live in a timeline where everybody’s played a spiritual successor to Phantasy Star Online ,  but few could tell you exactly what the damn thing is.

Let’s fix that by taking a look back at what PSO actually did that was so gosh-darn fantastic, and why it never quite made it into common video game parlance.

Let’s go back to the future.

More electric words…

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The video game power fantasy is kinda bullshit no comments

Be the better of your world and everything in it — that’s power. The child staying up past bedtime, the worker telling their boss to get lost: people enacting their will and breaking the rules, free from comeuppance and consequence. Video games, they say, are made to bring that fantasy to life.

And that’s almost right: video games do empower us to act in ways we never could have before, freeing us from those pesky real-world constraints. But that’s wrong, too. Video games are drenched in the edicts of a designer telling you precisely what can’t be done — a distant parent who wants you to grow in ways that make you thankful you surrendered that hard-earned cash.

But that fantasy stumbles in the face of that catchy chest-opening jingle or that oversized text littered with arbitrary numbers. In a medium where a mere sound or pop-up is specifically engineered to keep you in the worlds it creates, power is the last thing you would ascribe to its audience.

All-powerful, then, we are not.

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The untold tragedies of the Spencer mansion no comments

Resident Evil VII marks a true return to form. Specifically, a first-person mutation of the series’ original form. Hallways, herbs, pistols, shotguns, puzzles — the 2017 entry in Capcom’s long-shambling series is a slow-paced trek through a veritable house of horrors.

Absent from the list of things many consider classic Resi is the series’ pervading sense of tragedy, something that’s almost impossible to itemise. A half-decent crack at it might include its foreboding musical score, its identifiably human foes and those small, seemingly inconsequential notes.

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Games have become the soundtrack to our lives no comments

Video games propose a thousand ways to be. We live, we breathe, we dream the experiences they gift to us — either across an eight-hour campaign as the titular hero or through months as an alter ego in massively-multiplayer world.

Become what you want, when you want. Become a beefed-up supercop that chases green orbs across a darkened cityscape, or a bow-wielding hunter that slays giant mechanical dinosaurs. Become a near-infinite wardrobe of things to wear, with each choice saying just as much about us as the real decisions we make — simply because there’s so much to do and so much to be.

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Everybody’s an addict in Control’s grey-walled world no comments

Remedy has accomplished something so many before have failed to do: craft a world that feels consistently inconsistent, a place governed by a set of rules far, far beyond our mortal comprehension. Rules we can feel but never truly know.

That feeling — that sense you can nearly almost define the world of Control but not quite — is the enigmatic engine that drives Remedy’s latest.

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The importance of giant frog testicles in video games no comments

You’ve got the shiniest shoulder pads, you’ve got the biggest sword, you’ve got the most stupidly-shaped headpiece — one so stupid it’s not even close. You’ve got the absolute bestest of the bestest, and not even the most big-brained six-year-old could over-superlative just how absolutely pimpin’ you are.

You fought and toiled and carved the very skin off your greatest rival’s ass-kicked corpses for a veritable buffet of widgets, whats-its, and whats-thats. You don’t know what half those whats-its are — you just know you need to mash ’em together to get something really, really cool.

You’re a walking billboard for the absolutely legendary legend that is you.

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Connectivity killed the video game sandbox no comments

Video games used to be a meditative experience. It was just you and the box, with controller and cord as the connective tissue. Those thoughts — those pesky mental constructs — vanished to the experience in the moment.

It’s why there’s a soothing silence to consoles of yore. It’s you and its world — or it’s you and its world and the friend sitting next to you. It’s a date who leaves their phone in the car or, more aptly, doesn’t have a phone at all. Those sixth-generation start-up screens were the lights dimming in a movie theatre, a vacation with email switched off.

More electric words…