Top Ten Favourite Video Games – 10: Pokemon Yellow

I had a lot of fun a while ago when I wrote about my favourite television shows. It was great to just talk about things that I love and go into why I loved them. It’s also kinda dawned on me that I don’t have a terribly long time left to write this blog, before the challenge is complete…

So, on that note, there are a few more lists I want to get through! The topic of this list? Video games!

Video games is an incredibly new medium and art form, which means that even Space Invaders and Pong are considered quite young in the scheme of things. The extents of this art form and even which games can be considered ‘true art’ are still argued today, and will be argued for quite some time.

The main difference between video games and any other type of medium – such as film or the novel – is that there is a direct link between what the player of the game does and what the character in the game does. There’s a level of interaction which is unique to video games, and that’s what completely sets it apart from anything else. In some ways, a player can be more immersed in a video game than in anything else, as they’re directly impacting the story and the journey that the characters go through.

It’s this immersion that I’m judging this list by. These games are those which drew me in completely, which caused me to agonise over decisions that I made or cry over characters I lost, or which allowed me to become consumed by all-out fun and forget the rest of the world around me.

The one thing that I’m unhappy about with this list is that I feel that in the future, it’s definitely going to change. As video games are a young medium, I don’t think we’ve been offered the best that we possibly can. There was a time when Pac Man was the most advanced and powerful game out there, and while it’s certainly fun now, it has been eclipsed by other games. Video games are barely in their adolescence and the potential is limitless.

I also find that if I enjoy a video game, then I get sucked into it as soon as I start playing it. That’s why a few entries on this list are quite new – these are my favourite games that are on my mind right now. I’ve played quite a few games in the past year alone and yes, a couple of them have made the list, but that’s because they just drew me in so close and didn’t let me go.

So this list is my Top Ten Favourite Video Games at the time of this writing. It may change in the future, it may not… Only time will tell. But for now?

10) Pokemon Yellow

Pokemon Yellow isn’t the most advanced game. It’s not the best written, the characters aren’t that dimensional and the mechanics were broken as hell, as the later installments in the franchise showed us. So why do I love it so much?

It was the first game I finished.

My gaming history started in 1999, when my parents got my brother and I a GameBoy Pocket each, along with a ’50 in 1′ game cartridge (or something like that… there were lots of games on it, but only two or three were any good). It was a hell of a lot of fun at the time, but as my first exposure to games, of course I’d think it was.

Then my parents got us Pokemon Yellow. It was the first real game we’d ever had and I was hooked right then and there. I savoured every Gym Battle, collected any monster that I could and when I finally beat the Elite Four, I was over the moon. Not only was the challenge incredible, but I got to explore the world of Pokemon, learn all of the different species, all the different moves. Not only did I have my trusty Pikachu (which I refused to evolve), but I gained a strong, practically invincible companion in Nidoking and together, we conquered all who stood in our way.

I’ll be honest, a lot of my love for this game is nostalgia, but the Pokemon games as a series are incredible. From what I can tell, no one expected them to take off as they did, and they’re only getting stronger and stronger as time goes on. And as I’ve found out, my generation has a rather intimate connection to the series. Everyone has a favourite Pokemon, everyone has that one Gym leader they couldn’t beat, everyone has worked hard to make an almost invincible team.

I still play Pokemon games, every now and again. There are things about the series I love and things I’m not too fond of, but all the games I’ve played have been enjoyable at the very least. Formulaic as hell, but very enjoyable.

Pokemon Yellow was the game that sparked my interest in video games in general. I consider it to be my first real experience with games and, as I said, it was the first game I ever finished. Completely. 100%.

I’m talking all 151 Pokemon, right in my pocket. I remember being so proud of that, and I still am. I thought it was so awesome, at least until my friend caught all 251 Pokemon in Pokemon Gold… But he was just a show off.

Actually, that’s a nice note to end on. It was a mutual love of Pokemon which was one of the reasons I met one of my best friends in the entire world. So there’s that too. Pokemon has a way of bringing people together and affecting their lives, and none affected me more than Yellow, with that earnest and determined electric mouse on the cover, ready to start the greatest adventure.

Bad Fan-Fiction

Every now and again, the feeling of writing fan-fiction comes over me. Sometimes I’ll just get an idea that I think ‘well… that could be interesting to write’ but I never follow through on them. It’s difficult for me to try and write fan-fiction, I think, because I feel (wrongly) that it could be a step back for me as a writer. It wouldn’t, it really, really wouldn’t, but I feel that what I need to do as a writer is to focus on writing original stories.

But I think that an idea for fan-fiction doesn’t quite transpose completely to original fiction. When writing fan-fiction, you are writing for a fan base who already knows the world and characters that you are writing about. The world creation and world building has been done for you, so it’s up for you to expand upon that world – to explore what could never be done within the world created, to bring something new to it.

You know what fan-fiction world I find kind of interesting? Pokemon. Not so much the anime, but the games are an interesting basis for a lot of cool ideas, especially since the main characters and the Pokemon themselves are essentially blank slates to be drawn upon. I’d love to come up with a cool Pokemon idea, but there’s just so many awesome ones out there, I can’t seem to think of one that would be adding something new.

But, as I was saying before, you can’t transpose fan-fiction directly into original fiction by just changing the names or anything like that. Especially if it’s an example of badly written fan-fiction. And I know about badly written fan-fiction, because I’ve written quite a bit of it. Quite a bit of a bad fan-fiction.

Don’t look into that.

I will confess that I read a few pages of 50 Shades of Grey the other day because, like something that tastes terrible or smells like death, you’ve got to know for yourself. No matter how badly someone describes something, there’s that little voice in the back of your mind that plants an idea, Inception-style, that surely… surely there’s no way it could be as bad as everyone says it is.

It just screams bad fan-fiction. In the first few pages of chapter nine that I read, the most obvious example that 50 Shades was simply bad fan-fiction with the names changed was how badly it was edited. Not just grammar or spelling, but content. There were four very long, very tedious pages of the main character making breakfast. I’m sure that a decent writer could have made those four pages really interesting – filled with subtext, symbolism, or convey an appropriate sense that the character was out of her depth. I’m sure that a good writer would have done all that with four sentences.

The second ‘obvious bad fan-fiction’ factor that I saw was the fact that the line ‘I turned on my iPod’ didn’t end there, and we were treated to the main character musing about whatever song’s lyrics and how they affected her life and demonstrated how they affected her life by repeating the same fricking lyrics. I’m not saying that lyrics should never be used to describe a character, or how a character is acting or feeling, but if done badly, it just screams bad fan-fiction. There’s a bad fan-fiction way of using songs and lyrics – I would know, I’ve done it myself – and the choice of lyrics can be very telling as well, especially if they are ‘I am an outcast…’ or whatever they were in 50 Shades. 

There’s a part of me that kind of wants to read 50 Shades of Grey now. Like it or not, it’s become a cultural phenomenon. It’s responsible for getting porn novels – I’m sorry, ‘erotica novels’ – sold in supermarkets, right beside Dr. Seuss. I remember getting some advice from film-makers at university; ‘See everything you can, even the terrible movies. Go see Twilight, you’ll learn something from that, even if it’s how not to make a movie.’ And with that in mind, maybe I should read 50 Shades. I’ll learn how not to write a novel, and I’ll be able to take what I would learn and what I’ve experienced and start writing anything else. 

 

Video Games Are Art 3: At World’s End

So, some of you might have noticed that The Walking Dead, the game, has had a pretty strong effect on me. It’s one of those games that I just loved from start to finish, and I’d even go as far to say that it’s even better than the comic it’s based on, as well as the television series – both of which I think are fantastic. It’s just a solid piece of entertainment and an incredible example of good storytelling.

I’ll warn you now, there will be some spoilers of the game in this blog, so don’t read it unless you’ve played through it. I’m not kidding, this isn’t a choice. If you haven’t played it, go play it. It’s incredible. If you have played it, you have my permission to proceed.

I know a lot of gamers out there might think differently, but I play games to experience a good story. Generally speaking, of course. I’m sure everyone has some games that fall short on the story aspect and are simply great fun (my favourites for that are Team Fortress 2 or either of the Left4Dead games… or Pokemon, can’t forget about Pokemon!), but when I think of my top five, they all have a strong story and strong characters, and any game-play faults or technical issues that may be present are essentially forgotten as I’m so engrossed in the world of the game.

It’s the same reason that I don’t hold ‘the game has good graphics’ as a strong selling point. Good graphics don’t automatically make the crap story or badly developed characters better, they just let you experience the badness in high definition.

So when I was presented with games like Heavy Rain or The Walking Dead, which are both lacking in strict ‘game-play’, I wasn’t bothered. They are more like interactive films or stories, and if the stories weren’t as strong as they were, I probably would have found them incredibly boring. But I got absorbed into the world of these games and I couldn’t stop playing them until I saw those final credits roll. And I’m already planning how I’ll tackle my next play through of them, to see how my experience would change.

Long story short: I like good stories. And damn, The Walking Dead is an amazing story.

From the instant the game began, I was hooked to the main characters, Lee and Clementine  especially little Clem. When it comes down to it, your role in the story is to protect the eight-year-old Clem; some very cynical gamers may call this ‘Escort Mission: The Game’. But I was attached to Clem from the very beginning, and the makers of the game ensured this by not making her a shit character. It’s as simple as that. For some reason, a majority of game makers (and film makers, let’s be honest) can’t seem to write children characters well; they make them whiny, annoying, stupid and incompetent, and in a gaming situation, incompetency gets you hated by everyone playing it. But from the very beginning, Clem is helpful, insightful, cautious and downright adorable. She’s very smart for her age, but she still sounds like a child – something that’s incredibly hard, and a wonderful achievement of the writers and the voice actress – and the fact that she does feel like a real child makes the player connect with her. The player’s goal of protecting Clem only strengthens Lee’s goal of protecting Clem, which means that at no point does the player hate having this child tagging along, getting in the way and ruining the game.

It actually surprised me how much I thought about this game after I’d stopped playing it. I was constantly considering the decisions that I made, who that affected, and what kind of decisions I might have to make in the future. It was a morality system that worked, because it didn’t focus on morality. Every decision that you could have made was a plausible one, and neither one was right or wrong, it was just different. It allowed you to play a realistic character and still maintain some control over your decisions. While there were large-scale decisions, such as which of two characters you had to save, there were much more personal ones too. In Episode 1, you had the option of giving a stranger who had been bitten by a zombie your gun, in order to let them end things on their own terms. You could give them your gun, or you could try to convince them not to give up. Both are very reasonable options to chose between, and it’s up to the player to decide which one suits their version of Lee.

The moment I realised exactly how strong the story in this game was occurred at the beginning of Episode 3. From the very beginning, I decided that I would play Lee as a character who would do whatever it took to protect Clem, above everyone and everything else, and then I would do my best to do the right thing. I wanted to remain a humane, caring character who tried to stay sane in a world of insanity around them. Episode 3 changed that, when a few characters were making a dangerous run into a pharmacy to gather supplies, knowing that the living dead could be upon them in moments. A girl ran screaming from a building, attracting the dead towards her, and I was given the choice of letting her live, and giving the characters more time to collect supplies, or putting her out of her misery, and making things more dangerous for us. It was that moment that I realised that my ideals and focuses had shifted as I had been playing the game. I was no longer trying to do the right or humane thing, I had to focus on doing what’s best for the group, even if that meant letting an innocent girl get eaten alive.

That moment meant something to be, and cemented The Walking Dead as a truly great game in my mind.

I got so invested in these characters and this story, that I was desperate to save and protect as many of them as I could, and any time I failed was devastating. And the ending… The ending was brilliant.

This was a game that encouraged choices and forced the player to make some tough decisions, and all of them were thrown back in your face in the last Episode. In an eerily quite scene, Lee is confronted by a stranger, and is forced to explain his reasoning behind each decision he made, every choice, every action, and was forced to see how that could have been wrong, and how Lee may have caused more trouble than he prevented. It was tough to sit through, and a fantastically written scene.

The ending was heartbreaking, and it almost brought a tear to my eye. That’s all I say on that, you should experience it for yourself. It was simply brilliant.

So this was the game that made me question this idea that video games cannot be art, or that something’s looked down upon just because it’s a video game. I can’t understand the fact that there’s still this sense that the act of playing video games is looked down upon, is that just me? Does anyone else feel that? Even though they have been integrated into our lived, is there still this stigma in the general public?

I was going to talk about Bioshock as well, but I just got caught up in my love of The Walking Dead. I’ll save Bioshock for another post, but it’s a brilliant example of what can be done with the medium and what can only be done with the video game medium.

What about you? Are there any games that blew your mind? Are there any games you think would blow my mind? I’m always looking for more games to sink my teeth into (although I do have quite a few sitting there, waiting for me to try them), so any recommendations are more than welcome!

In summation, I’m unsure if The Walking Dead would break my Top Ten favourite games, but it’s easily Top Fifteen. It has some of the best characters and writing I’ve ever seen in a game, and I found it incredibly hard to stop playing it until I had experienced it all. Give me a few weeks, and I might give into the temptation to click that ‘Play’ button once more, and experience it all again.

It would be worth it.

Pokemon

I think I am very much a product of my generation in the sense that I believe that Pokemon is freaking awesome. And, don’t worry, it’s okay to agree with me. Because Pokemon is so very awesome and everyone knows it. Everything about Pokemon is awesome (except the anime, that kind of sucks… but moving on, quickly, quickly, before we all get depressed at how annoying Ash is).

I find it funny how I thought I ‘outgrew’ Pokemon when I reached high school – those shaky first two years when you’re trying to re-invent yourself since throwing off the shackles of primary school youth; trying to appear and act as if you have matured and should be taken seriously, when in reality, trying to be more grown up than you really are is a reasonably immature thing to do.

However, the hobbies of my youth were slowly phased out as I got to high school – not completely, though; my obsessions with Teen Titans and Codename: Kids Next Door were really just beginning. I think that Pokemon suffered the most. Hours of my life that I had devoted to collecting all 151 Pokemon on my Yellow Version were forgotten, as I was trying to make myself seem cooler than I was. (For those of you playing at home, I failed).

I remember getting to Year 12 and finding that Pokemon was starting to make a comeback in my year – suddenly old GameBoys were being dusted off, or emmulators were being downloaded onto phones (hell, if we could have gotten it on our graphics calculators, you know that we would have! But Tetris was fun enough for that). I didn’t think much of it then, it just sort of happened, but now that I look back, I think Year 12 was the year we really stopped trying to impress each other by pretending to be more grown up than we really were. That sense of leaving those years of education behind us get us all nostalgic, and the go-to response for our generation was to, once again, pick between Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle.

The new Pokemon games, HeartGold and SoulSilver came out half-way into my first year of university, and I found it hilarious the amount of people walking around the campus playing those games. Practically the exact opposite of high school where, aside from year 12, people would retreat to an almost hidden corner to play those types of games. I do love that about uni – there is no need to try and impress people. We’re surrounded by students who really want to be there, and we simply don’t worry anymore about the same stigmas that haunt high school halls.

This post got really retrospective really quickly. I honestly just wanted to talk about how awesome Pokemon is, but I suppose the true awesomeness of it comes from my childhood memories and the nostalgic factor that comes from playing those games. I mean, those games – and by extension the anime, and the trading cards, and the soft toys, and the figurines – practically defined a generation. We are the Pocket Monster generation. The toughest decision we had to make was who was going to accompany us on our very own Pokemon journey – and in some ways, it’s quite a personal decision (I always picked Charmander).

We wanted to catch them all.

Video Games

I really dislike the Lana Del Ray song of the same name. I’ve heard it a couple of times and, instead of being whimsical or mystical or… something, I just found it boring. It felt bland and emotionless – the musical equivalent of gruel, except unlike Oliver Twist, I didn’t want any more. But, I’m aware that some people like her stuff, so that’s probably the last I’ll say about this topic.

Let’s be more literal: Video games are awesome. We all know it. Ever since I played my first GameBoy (Ah, Pokemon Yellow… those were the days) I feel like I’ve been quite hooked. (For the record, my first console was a PlayStation and my favourite console is the PlayStation2, mainly because I can still play my old Playstation games on it. I’m enjoying the PS3, too, but no back-compatibility, so… I digress…)

However, I feel like I’m stranded in between the area between ‘casual-gamer’ and ‘actual-gamer’, at least as far as my gaming education has gone. In the past year, I have come to terms with being an actual gamer – the blame of which rests entirely on a friend of mine that we shall call Phyll – but I feel like I haven’t played enough of the ‘classic’ games, or at least the really good ones that everyone else seems to have played and loved.

At the moment, I’m in a habit of starting lots of games and not getting through them. I’m currently part way through Bioshock (which has a fantastic atmosphere), Final Fantasy XIII (which I’m quite enjoying, story wise, although it does seem very streamlined), L.A. Noire (I love playing detective, the feel for the game is perfect), Mass Effect (I’m very behind, considering I bought the first one just before the third one was released), Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep (Out of the three storylines, I’m onto the second), Chrono Trigger (Final Fantasy crossed with Dragonball Z? Yes please), Red Dead Redemption (Again, amazing feel) and Dead Rising 2 (soooooooooo much fun). As well as various Pokemon games (some Nuzlocke Challenges) and occasional outings to Arkham City.

… Which seems like a lot, now that I think about it…

So, this is less a rant, and more a request. If you have any games you want to recommend, I’ll put them on my list and I’ll try to get through them as best as I can. Or, if you’ve played some of the games I’ve mentioned here, what did you think of them? (Although, try to keep your responses spoiler free, please. ‘I wasn’t too fond of the ending’ is okay. ‘I really hated it when everyone died and Steven turned out to be an alien from Venus’ not so much.)

Expect a few posts like this over the year, probably to do with movies, books and/or music/musicals, but for now I’m focusing on games.

Anything, literally, anything to distract me from actually sitting down and doing some Uni work.