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A History of Ranting
It’s amazing how quickly the games industry moves on. When the Rant started, we were just getting to grips with the Nintendo 64, and in only seven years we have skipped the Gamecube, with the imminent release of Wii. Generally it is only the best or best known games of the moment that get reviewed in the Rant section, and in those seven years that has totaled just over a hundred - and not all of those were too good. It may be that the quality threshold has moved far higher up the scale since the 8-bit generation, but there has to be some consistency in the core value of a game.
Many would laugh at the review scores we come up with, 9/10 for Jet Set Willy, and only 4/10 for Perfect Dark Zero. Sure, technically it is like comparing the Afterburner coin-op with a Casio calculator, but it’s the validity of the gaming experience factored against the increased technology of the time. If Matthew Smith wrote JSW in this generation, it wouldn’t warrant any attention, let alone a review score. PDZ with it’s five year development cycle, cutting edge technology and half a million man hours of skill poured into it, didn’t hold my attention as long as JSW did in 1983. It didn’t hold my attention for even 5% of that time.
That pretty much sums up the entire theme of the Rants, and pretty much the entire ethos of the Retrogames company and the magazine it was founded on. It doesn’t matter which generation of gaming technology you are on, amazing graphics and special effects are great, but it is far harder to ‘wow’ us now than it was in 1985. The bottom line is the gameplay, stop thinking about techniques and start thinking about originality. Even as a developer stuck in the money obsessed constraints of your parent company, nobody is going to remember an FPS game set in World War 2, but they might remember an FPS game set inside the human body. Nobody will remember a driving game using real life cars on real life tracks, but they might remember a running game using real life people in a shopping centre.
What am I talking about, if everything in the games industry was original and exciting, i’d have nothing left to Rant about!
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