Title: Red Dead Redemption

Format: PS3

Released: 21^st May, 2010

What a difference a song makes. I’ve recently been playing devilishly difficult 2D PlayStation platformer Rayman, and by Christ it is hard. Unfair, at points, but generally, just hard. And yet, such care and attention has been paid not only to the beautiful 2D graphics, with gorgeous sprites and animation that have aged far better than the unbalanced difficulty curve, but also to the music. Every level has a gorgeous riff or fill that conjures up feelings of excitement, derring-do, terror – whatever is required. It really does raise the experience from challenging platformer to absorbing adventure.

Great sound design expands a world, taking a selection of pixels and bathing them in that magic cauldron of atmosphere that makes them so much more than the sum of their parts. With the right flute trill, suddenly the parallax-scrolling snow-topped mountain range in the background of an enchanted forest ripples with hectares rich of promise; villages full of characters and adventurers pursuing their own agendas and stories, just out of sight, over the lip of the hill. Music and sound thrust a world outwards into the misty enclaves of the brain where the imagining happens; where strands of thought leap and latch onto a riff or a motif, connecting it irrefutably to a character or an idea, starting the rich process of association and connection that will resonate throughout the entire experience.

Early sound design was primarily in-game. The “whoops!” and “Yippees!” of Mario are just as character defining as his red jumpsuit, just as the industrial whizz of Sonic’s spin charging speaks as much of his power and speed as his blue, aerodynamic shape. The music, too – slotting into the genre, infusing a game with life, telling the player how safe or dangerous a place is, inducing joy and elation, freedom and excitement; terror and danger, claustrophobia and sorrow.

But things got more complicated; we soon had games that were set in periods we knew. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The 80s were real; people playing it may have grown up in them, or at the very least viewed the decade through the cipher of a hundred films. So Rockstar hit upon the idea of filling the radio stations of their world with authentic period music. Everyone remembers the first time they stole a vehicle, and Billie Jean came pumping out over the speakers. It was a curious moment of reality and fantasy colliding, with each aspect furthering the other in a strangely symbiotic, immersive experience.

And lo, Rockstar went on to make bigger and better games – the lunacy of San Andreas, the gut-punch of GTAIV (see #5), and then...Red Dead Redemption.

I had enjoyed Red Dead Revolver (its PS2 prequel, released June 2004), but it was a game plagued with development difficulties, purchased from Capcom on the promise that Rockstar would polish it up and release it as best they could, like an errant child on the first day of school. A grab-bag of semi-successful missions, empty towns with one or two points of interest, and decently pitched set pieces. But it was GTA in the Wild West! This was tremendously exciting, and despite its myriad flaws, exuded no small amount of awesome.

Then came Red Dead Redemption. Play the game. Really, do. It’s a colossal achievement. Superb voice acting and dialogue. Elegant gameplay. Mastery of genre. Truly beautiful graphics. The first time I stood outside the town of Armadillo, walked in the open prairie and looked up into the stars, it reminded me of working on a farm in the Australia outback myself, years ago, where the night skies were such that I will carry with me for the rest of my days.

But for all this, about halfway through the game, everything loses pace. The missions become repetitive, lots of the side-quests (hunting, collecting wild flowers, chasing bounties) necessitate too much travel, and thus became dull, and the story stalls. At this point, John Marston (us), needs to hop the border into Mexico. Exciting in theory, but a potentially bombastic river crossing is mired by standard shooting, and a slow pace. “Damn”, I thought. Nothing gold can stay.

And then you step off the raft, and find a horse tied up on the makeshift pier. Climbing aboard, you set out at a gallop into a huge new unexplored part of the map, with only a couple of markers giving you guidance. And as you climb the lip of the hill, this huge expanse of territory unfurls beneath your feet, and “Far Away” by Jose Gonzalez fades in.

It hit me for six. It really did. All in-game music up to this point was incidental riffs or licks – little strums of guitar, or action-packed chase music. And then the real world – a modern, new song by a contemporary artist – comes crashing through the walls of fantasy and 2010 met 1911 in this transcendental moment of unexpected joy. You can’t help but be wowed by the majesty of the environments Rockstar has created, but when they’re combined with beautiful, uncharacteristic music, the sense of immersion is put in momentary jeopardy, then increased tenfold.

It’s a risky move. So much of the game relies on period atmosphere and feel. To bring a modern song in, at such a pivotal point in the game, could have risked throwing the player rudely out of the experience, like the town drunk through the swing doors of a saloon. But the opposite happens. The sense of aching isolation and loneliness you feel accompanying John Marston on his quest to free his family, so many miles from home, is expounded in haunting vocal and guitar. I had to catch my breath, truly, before saddling up, and slowly trotting into unexplored lands. It only lasted a minute or two, but the moment was revelatory.

And great experiences are always made up of moments. The whole is crucial, but there will always be stand out stabs of memory that persist long after the disc is ejected and the game is sold on eBay. Your first glimpse of underwater metropolis Rapture in seminal FPS (First Person Shooter) Bioshock. Zombie dogs jumping through the window, shattering your hitherto-held gameplay illusions of safety in Resident Evil. Your first fumbling steps into a new country in Red Dead Redemption.

It was a jolt in the arm that was as necessary as it was unexpected. The game had me. Up until this point, I liked it. After, I loved it. I never knew quite what was coming next, and even though the game continued to make minor mistakes, it demanded to be cut some slack. It had impressed me. More than that, it had surprised me.

Red Dead Redemption will long remain near the top of the list of games that I will always love. Its gameplay will be bettered, trampled underhoof in the march of progress, and the graphics will (terrifyingly) at some point become laughably old hat, but when a game moves you like this, you don’t forget it in a hurry. Bold moments like this in games are among the most exciting experiences you can have. Carefully choreographed excellence, that has all the cinematic quality of a film, yet provides you with the freedom to explore it as you choose, the consequences thereafter all your own.

What a difference a song makes.

 

Next time: Metal Gear Solid!

Title: Earthworm Jim 2

Format: Mega Drive

Released: 22^nd December, 1995

As a child, my genre of choice was always the 2D platformer. Prizing reactions, skill and variety above all else, the Sonic The Hedgehogs, and Super Mario Worlds of the early 90s were the games I coveted most. I remember basing a friendship with a kid at school called James Turpin on the fact that he had a copy of Rocket Night Adventures on the Mega Drive. The rest came later. Then there was this really weird kid I met at one of those ballpit-centric adventure playgrounds for about half an hour somewhere up north who wanted my protection from a bully who threatened him with karate (It was like a truly awful 90s sports movie, just waiting to happen). With this chap, I actively attempted to cultivate a long-distance friendship because one of the first things he told me as I coldly turned to leave him to his fate, was that he had a Sega Saturn and a copy of the then-graphically-astounding early 3D platformer Bug!. It really was that simple: I was an opportunistic dick, and games were my currency.

There are plenty of standout examples of the genre, but I would play anything. Balloon-pecking utter oddity Alfred Chicken on our original powerhouse Amiga 500. The equal parts exciting-and-frustrating 2D platformer Elf, proud holder of the title: “first platform game I ever owned”. And stolen late-night Duck Tales sessions on a borrowed Nintendo Game Boy, warmly ensconced in the top bunk in the room I shared with my brother, eyes straining to navigate the grainy lines of the sepia screen whilst he grumbled at me to go to bed. It’s fair to say, Dear Reader, that I loved cartoon platformers more than fat kids love...well, cartoon platformers, too. And lard.

The original Earthworm Jim bewitched me. It was all so...unexpected. Each level stranger than the next, encompassing different gameplay styles and magpie-picked pop culture influences, all strung together with a wonderfully tenuous throughline involving a flying cow. But it’s the second title that holds the strongest place in my heart. It followed that rarest of sequel templates: go curioser and curioser.

Using a giant marshmallow to play keep-up with puppies and bombs, in order to destroy psychotic space-fowl. The shortest ever Street Fighter brawl with a hyper-intelligent goldfish. A level that actually makes the terror of admin fun. As I said...curioser.

My family had gone up to stay with good friends of ours, the Overs. My Mum, pregnant with my older brother, had met Carol, who was similarly beseeded with her eldest, Matt, in antenatal classes. When me and their second son, Steven, were born close to each other, it seemed natural that the families would grow in tandem. We’d gone up to Church Stretton to visit them, and they had this wonderful big old house built into the side of what can only be described as a small mountain that seemed like something out of a Neil Gaiman story. Rich with mysteries and oddities. Little did I know.

It was pouring with rain when we arrived, late on a Friday night, and we parked the car and ran up this twisting stone staircase that seemed to be hewn out of the very rock. The roads were built at ridiculous angles, where streets would run a metre or two parallel, with the inner about 15 metres higher than the outer, like a series of giant’s steps. It boggled my mind, and made me feel like we were guests in an impregnable castle, squirreled away in the depths of the earth. Writing this, I daren’t ever go back there; it was probably a bungalow on a molehill, but it seemed so huge and gothic back then. I must have been at least 10, because once we were sent upstairs to bed, me and my brother with Matt and Steve in their room, they flicked on the TV, clicked the Mega Drive to “on”, and there was Earthworm Jim 2.

You know that feeling when you’re so tired you can barely see straight, and you’ve been playing something for so long, that you can’t even be sure you’re enjoying it anymore? That’s how I felt about Earthworm Jim 2, late that night, after a long and stuffy car drive and buried in a darkened room under a duvet. I was exhausted, but we were all crammed around a black and white TV, eyes craning to make out the terrifyingly odd world we were exploring. I’m sure we wanted to go to bed, but we were entranced; each level was weirder than the next, and I was desperate to beat the section we were on, so we could find out where the rabbit hole led.

I was impressed by so much of the game, but there was one moment towards the end, by the time we were bleary eyed and the end of the night seemed to be resting on the back of our necks. After a nightmarish crawl through mounds of paperwork and demonic filing cabinets, in a level which, if I hadn’t replayed it recently on the Virtual Console, I would have sworn was some form of opium dream, you encounter this door. As you go to step through it, it sprouts legs, and moves. Blinking, we followed it. It moved again. We bade Jim give chase, and all of a sudden we’re rushing up and down staircases, pursuing this door through madcap corridors of paper and metal. Up ahead came some kind of wooden cabinet with a brass leg. The door ran over it, and tripped, falling flat. We approached our prize, not really sure what would happen. Jim grabs the door, opens it, from where it lies on the floor, and steps down into it, disappearing from the level.

It may have been the extreme fatigue. It may have been being awake at a late hour in a strange house on a hillside hewn of rock, like some kind of homey, stoney, Lovecraftian retreat, but this sort of broke my brain. This kind of cartoon logic, applied to an interactive medium, detonated in my mind, and left me with this memory I’m still holding now. This was really Earthworm Jim 2’s legacy for me; that of possibility. That you could make a mainstream, popular, well-reviewed game that sells well, (and became a series of cartoons, crap 3D sequels, and the like) and put in wonderful, logic-skewing lunacy like this that could screw with people’s heads. And they would thank you for it. Games could do anything.

Plenty of other sections of the game were weirder: there's the out-of-suit battles against series antagonist Evil The Cat (he’s evil. And he’s a cat), where the fact that Jim really is an earthworm is made abundantly clear. Not to mention the level “Jim's A Blind Cave Salamander” which has you playing as...well, guess - floating around some sort of neon-drenched pinball purgatory to the tune of "Moonlight Sonata", before taking part in a gaudy 50s quiz show for no other reason than why the hell not? But moment with the door represented a kind of gaming epiphany for me – demonstrating the sheer breadth of rabbit holes we could be going down every time we pick up a controller.

Early on, there's a level called "Lorenzo's Soil". Think of that.

The whole experience feels like some kind of fever dream, like an unbelievably nerdy Kubla Kahn, but it definitely happened. I think. And it makes you wonder how many other unexplored gems lie waiting, their strange delights begging to be discovered, worlds demanding to be explored and beaten.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just love the weird shit.

 

Next time: Red Dead Redemption!

Title: Uplink

Format: PC

Release Date: 1^st October, 2001

I’m just going to go right and out say it, Dear Reader. Uplink - by British developers, and self-professed “Last Of The Bedroom Programmers”, Introversion - is the greatest marriage of form and content in the world of videogames.

I’ll let that process for a second.

Picture the scene: a man sits at his desk, in a darkened room, hunched over his computer. The blinds are closed, and a blue glow diffuses from the monitor onto his face. Perhaps he’s wearing glasses, and the pale light reflects off them, twinkling across the desk. Perhaps an ash tray sits to the left, piled with used butts. Perhaps a freshly-lit cigarette dangles from his lip, jiggling encouragingly as he taps furiously at the keys and conjures transactions unknown and ungodly across the intangible ether of the internet. Suddenly, a knock at his door. He looks up, panicked, drawn away from the power of the screen to the more pressing concerns of the immediate now. A voice utters from the darkness:

“Hello mate. Want a tea?”

Uplink is a hacking simulator. What an amazing idea for a videogame. If you’re anything like me, and fingers crossed you’re not, you may have occasionally dreamt of the life of a hacker. Travelling around exotic European cities, with nothing but a laptop and charger, conducting missions of great importance, breaking into the highest security mainframes the world has to offer. Taking anything you want. I suspect hacking isn't so glamorous in reality, but this is the vision Uplink taps into. And how it taps; anywhere you sit down with the game, it is just you and your computer. This could never work on a console; it’s tailor-made for immersion. You turn on that system, and you’re in the game.

As soon as you load it up, it’s simply an alternate interface, as if you’re running a streamlined, neon blue version of Windows. From there, it’s a case of kitting yourself out with basic software, accepting a job from the mysterious “Uplink” corporation, and getting your absolute hack on. It’s immersive as hell.

I can’t overstate the brilliance of the idea. This isn’t playing as Nathan Drake, two removes from the character as an observer over the shoulder. This isn’t even inhabiting another person, say Gordon Freeman, and seeing things through his eyes. You are sitting at a computer as you, logging on to a programme on your computer as you, fictionally hacking the world’s largest networks. As you. Never has there been a thinner divide between game and player.

It’s largely down to graphic and sound design. The neon blues of the interface invoke stylish cyberpunk, without ever trying to be uber-futuristic, and therefore sidestep the trap some cyberpunk games fall into, that of aging faster than Julian Glover at the end of The Last Crusade. The soundtrack is equal parts ambient and urgent, pulsing with slow, insistent grooves that make you feel the next knock on the door could be the last you ever hear.

Uplink is all about paranoia. As soon as you buy your first tracing programme, and embark upon your first mission for “Uplink”, a constant beeping in the bottom right of the screen tells you how close your hack is to being picked up. Because as soon as you connect to a system, looking for data, you will start being traced. As soon as you make that click, you're under pressure. Yet initially complicated ideas (to me, anyway), like bouncing signals through various servers to put any security programmes off the scent, soon become second nature. But no matter how facile the target is, you’ll always keep one eye on how close you are to being caught. Initially all it means is a ticking off and a mild fine, but as the targets you are assigned grow in importance, so do the consequences.

The game is brutal. Once you’ve made your first few advances up the “Uplink” ladder, being fully traced means the men in suits kick your door down, and you go to jail. That’s it. You can save your game all you like as you go, but once you’re caught, you are kicked out of the corporation, and you’ve got to start an entirely new game, all those hours you invested going down the tubes. It makes that 93% trace as you’re deleting the last digital footprint in the mainframe that would give any indication that you were there all the tenser, as you rush to log out, all the while the bleeping rises to a crescendo, and suddenly stops. You breathe a sigh of relief. You escaped, this time. Then comes a notification a few days later – they’ve tracked you through another system where you left traces of your presence, and you have been caught!  Not knowing if faceless agents are tracking you down across the globe as you sit in front of your screen, frantically working on multiple, increasingly complex assignments, is the closest I have ever felt to being in a conspiracy movie.

In a similar manner to Grim Fandango (#6), I don’t have specific memories attached to Uplink. It’s a game I have played on and off since I bought it, 10 years ago. It’s certainly not something I play regularly, but such is its unique appeal, that it’s one I would never dream of selling. Far from the one-shot, quick-fire campaigns of Call Of Duty or Uncharted, where the whole aim of the game is a one-time rollercoaster of blockbuster set-pieces, Uplink plays a different game; one of a slow-burning, very unique tension. It’s not a game to play for weeks at a time, but the gameplay mechanics are so perfectly matched to the source material, that every so often, maybe a couple of years down the line, I feel a powerful urge to go back it again.

And it’s always the same. That sense of tension when you load it up – sometimes on a new laptop, which brilliantly feels like you’ve updated the game, somehow – and that deep-seated, powerful excitement. It’s like being in WarGames, where the fate of the world can be affected by the single click of a boy in front of a screen.  And those first few jobs start coming in, and every time, I think: “Yeah, I’d make a great hacker.”

Title: Final Fantasy VII

Format: PS1

Release Date: 17^th November, 1997

In my System Shock 2 article (#4), I mentioned a list: The Ones That Got Away. Games I started playing but, for one reason or another, never finished. Their plots and characters remain in my head still; spectral figures tugging at my brain strings for resolution, desperately begging to be taken out of the box, and levelled up just one more time. I’ll get around to them all someday. But bang at the top of the list, stands Final Fantasy VII.

It came out the day before I turned 12, Dear Reader, but was a PlayStation exclusive. As regular subscribers to this blog will know, at the tender age of 12, I was that most bereft of youths: console-less. Seminal titles like Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid passed through the hands of many excitable players, but not mine.

I have a friend called Stefan. We met on the first day at prep school, when we were both 7. We were in the same class, and, more fortuitously, in the same house. Indeed, our very first conversation read something like: “Hi, what house are you in?” “Hereford.” “Me too! Let’s be friends.” And there wasn’t much more to it than that. We shared a number of interests: drawing stupid pictures, making personalised sets of top trumps, being shit at football and, later, videogames.

I used to spend hours round Stefan’s house as a kid, making up stories together, playing about on the climbing frame in his garden and, as we got older and I discovered them: playing videogames. He had a fabulous programme on his PC called 3D Movie Maker: a very simplistic animation tool with which you could make short films. The character and background base was limited, but a microphone function meant vocal contributions were limitless. We made up silly voices, Stefan wrote a song on the guitar called “Chubb On The Run”, about a fat guy running away from a skeleton (I should reiterate: the character bases were limited) and we spent hours in his stuffy loft animating stories and growing weak with laughter at the scenarios we came up with.

He was one of those friends who taught you stuff. Many of the films I grew to love were first watched around Stefan’s house; he had two older brothers who exposed him to all sorts of cool movies, and I still remember the first time I watched Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom in his living room, being thrilled at the action, the set pieces. The music. Always stories. He also had a great taste in comedy, and this irrepressible ability to make me laugh until I couldn’t move. Afternoons at his place were always a treat, always locked away in our tiny little worlds, oblivious to the changing seasons.

I suppose it was when he moved to a different senior school that we drifted apart, though I don’t remember how quickly it started. Being in the same place forges strong bonds, but it’s also surprising how quickly they weaken when put under strain. But even though we were to wander apart though our teenage years, there were plenty of times where we saw a lot of each other. Summer afternoons, the PlayStation years and Crash Bandicoot, Abe’s Odysee, Resident Evil 2 and many more. But the presiding memory, towering head and shoulders above the rest, is Final Fantasy VII.

Midgar. The grungy, Blade Runner­-esque industrial cityscape where the game begins. I can’t tell you how much I love this place. Every time I look up at the London skyline of a dark evening, all I see in place of The Gherkin, is Shinra HQ, and I can't help but imagine I’m Cloud (the game’s protagonist), staring up at it, deciding how best to infiltrate its many rooms and uncover its dark secrets.

The plot of Final Fantasy VII is rather good. Characters are given room to breathe, and convincing relationships are built over time. Sephiroth, the main antagonist, is genuinely interesting, and given motivations far beyond your standard moustache-twirling, zeppelin-pinching science villain. But no matter how it developed over the course of the game, the claustrophobic early hours spent escaping Midgar, and the deep rot within it, rest snugly in the Final Fantasy VII­-shaped place in my heart.

You see, I’ve never finished FFVII. Never even come close. I’ve made leaps and bounds, many a time, both with Stefan, and on my own. But never more than 20 hours in. It’s odd; I must have put about 80 hours into it over the course of my life, but for numerous reasons, have never made it past the first disc.

We used to play it, you see, once the game was out and Stefan had got a pirate copy from Greece. I put aside my moralising (I was a very pious and sermonising child, who generally wanted nothing to do with software that wasn’t purchased legitimately. Though I made exceptions. Usually if it was a game I really wanted to play) and by the time we started hanging out after prep school, for a good few months, every time I came round, we’d start up FFVII.

And I do mean start. The PlayStation, for those who have never played one, only allows you to save your position in a game via a memory card, which is a portable storage unit you plugged into your console, so you could remove it and take it to a friend if there was something particularly cool you wanted to show them. Really it was a way for Sony to make money on consoles that cost vastly more to make than they were selling them for, but regardless, one saved one’s game on a memory card. And they were perilously small, in terms of memory and actual size.

Each time I went to Stefan’s house, we played through the opening of FFVII. It’s a thrilling few hours, with twists, turns, battles, betrayals, and beautiful FMVs (full motion videos). But when the pale morning light shone through the glazed windows and I had to put my head to rest on his uncomfortable blue camping mattress, knowing I was being picked up in the morning, we would save our game, vowing we would pick up where we left off next time. Yet when the next time came, the save was always gone. I mean always. Now the memory card was lost, now the saved file wasn’t on it. I don’t know what happened – maybe they were deleted by his sister Christina in an act of petty revenge for how much we teased her, maybe he saved over it with another file, but we lost more half-completed stories than I care to remember.

But I didn’t really mind. The game slowly started to acquire the texture of a classic film, as scenes we knew like the backs of our hands played out week in week out, and we navigated our way through, laughing at the silly dialogue, or at the fact that we’d named our chubby support character “Thin”, “Tubbs”, or something equally witty. Train-top escapes. Hiding out in the slums. Motorbike chases. All thrilling set-pieces, oddly undimmed despite our repeated exposure to them.

There’s a moment early on when a botched attempt at environmental terrorism lands you recuperating in an abandoned church, helped by a wandering flower girl, whom we usually called “Bagrin”, for no particular reason other than it was, and still is, a funny word. Bagrin would wake Cloud up, and they share a tender moment of connection. At the time I was listening to The New Radicals one and only album, (Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too) which I was utterly in love with, and still am to this day. Track 11 was always the track that blew my mind with its simplicity and indecipherable, somehow honest lyrics. It was called Flowers.

Somewhere in my brain these two ideas have fused into an almost perfect memory. Every time I play the game, or – more likely – listen to the song, I’m transported over a decade down the wires of history to those weeks in Stefan’s house, playing through the early days of a great adventure. It’s hard to explain, but some endorphine explosion happened in my brain which was a mixture of camaraderie, excitement, potential and god-knows-what-else, all tied up with that game, and by some synaptic miracle, that song. And also flowers.

All the memories of hanging out with my friend at that young age mesh together into one pleasant whole, and FFVII is somehow at the core. I think it was the first time I’d really played a game with that kind of depth, not to mention one of my early forays into the exciting world of consoles, and over the years we watched so many films and played so many games and made up so many stories that that whole house is this kind of shrine to nostalgia and delight.

I remember looking out of a window in his bedroom at who-knows-what-hour in the morning, looking up at this tall steeple of a church that sat next to Stefan’s house. At the time I was reading the Subtle Knife, the Phillip Pullman novel where a boy escapes his pursuers by cutting into another world, and I very keenly felt like out that window lay indescribable lands and adventures. It’s hard to truly convey the strength of that feeling, but I’m certain it’s all tangled up with escape and stories and videogames and the whole crazy mess of it.

Final Fantasy VII was one of the great exponents of this, and provided a window through which I could see strange lands, and become a hero, like the ones I’d read about. It was going exploring with my friend, seeing strange, yet familiar lands, escaping a little bit further each time, but never getting to where we needed to go.

So the game is one of the great unfinished loops in my head. I even borrowed it off my friend Angus years later when I had my own PlayStation, and got all the way to the end of disc I (20-odd hours of play), to reach a huge plot twist in the narrative. “Insert Disc II”, the game said. I scrabbled to the box, and hastily swung it open, reaching for the CD. I picked it gingerly out of the box, careful not to get sweaty prints on the underside...and the disc pulled apart. It had a crack so huge down it, it was practically a letter “C”.

And so I never got further than that. Maybe it was meant to be. Except that’s bollocks. I recently downloaded Final Fantasy VII on the PSN (PlayStation Network) and played through the first 15 hours. It’s aged surprisingly well. Perhaps I’ll get around to finishing it someday. Part of me wants to leave it untouched, this closed box of memory and nostalgia which, if opened, is unlikely to live up to the rose-tinted lens through which it’s viewed.

But ultimately, I will finish it. It’ll be good to know what lies at the end of the road, even if it means closing that avenue off, to start on another.

You always want to be pushing forwards. After all, you never know; an even more beautiful world might be waiting right around the corner. Let’s go see.

 

Next time: Uplink!

 

Title: Mario Kart 64

Format: N64

Released: June 24^th, 1997

If nostalgia is a beast that seduces the brain during one’s formative years, then the resultant offspring is truly spawned at university. All of a sudden everything you were into as a kid is retro and cool, and approximately 90% of university life is young adults repeatedly discovering they weren’t the only person to watch The Raccoons.

This is usually backwards-looking and disappointing. Either unironically joining The Neighbours society at Fresher’s Fair, or rewatching a beloved cartoon from your youth to find it’s a bit rubbish or a bit racist or a bit both. However, there are a few precious things that survive the erosion of time, and turn out to, even after repeated re-exposure, have something about them that has carried through the ages. Something that outlasts trends and fads and transcends a cultural movement to become imbued with that most elusive of qualities: timelessness.

Most of us enjoyed gaming. Me, Jabs, Geordie Chris and Banksy played a lot of Halo 3 online, with the superb entertainment set up we had going on. (See #5 – GTA IV) Big Rich and I sometimes played some vintage Golden Axe on the Wii’s Virtual Console (an online market where you can download classic games). Steve largely stayed out of the gaming world, as it wasn’t his thing. But there were 2 games I played in Number 53 that brought everyone together. One was Portal. The other: Mario Kart 64.

It came about initially, as does so much at University, out of nostalgia. All of us had played the game in our youths, and had fond memories accordingly. It seemed like your classic “oh let’s check this out again; bet it’ll be great”, the unsaid subtext being: “gird your loins, lads; this is going to be bollocks”. We plugged my four Gamecube controllers into the Wii, moved the sofas slightly closer to the TV, in silent homage to the God of Wires, and fired it up.

Straight away smiles abounded as the music began, and the joyful “Welcome to Mario Kart!” rang out. We opted for a 4-player versus race. I suspect we started at the beginning: with Luigi Raceway.

Title: Mario Kart 64

Format: N64

Released: June 24, 1997

14 years. A long time to rule a genre. For a game to have not been bettered, despite numerous sequels and graphical updates. A long time to hold the fort. For core gameplay not to have been improved. But maybe you disagree, Dear Reader. Maybe this is nostalgia talking.

Mario Kart 64 is the concept of balance boiled down into cartridge form. Later iterations of the game relied on wacky weaponry and ker-azy courses to artificially simulate competition, but the second game in the series hit the balance on the head with a single green shell from halfway down Luigi Raceway.

Every weapon can be defended against. Every track has its ideal racing line, and its time-shaving shortcuts – though woe betide anyone who thinks they can’t be compromised with a banana-shaped minefield – and most importantly: you can’t come close to winning a race without skill.

This is crucial. Never does a victory more hollow than intentionally squatting in last place for two laps to save up the best weapons and smashing through to take the podium. Mario Kart 64 has no time for such coarse methods: “Let the chancers languish in last place”, it proclaims. “We shall aim higher”.

Mario Kart as a series has been part of my gaming diet since I first played it on the SNES when I was 8 and had to go round to David Ossack’s house every morning before school because my mum had to go to work. To my charitable 8-year-old mind, other people’s houses sucked balls, but I let this one slide, because it meant that for a tantalisingly scant 10-15 minutes every morning, I got to play on David Ossack’s SNES and eat marmite on toast before the day began.

These were hallowed, ghostly mornings of instant absorption and painful, inevitable withdrawal. The call of “Time for school!” was never less welcome. Whether it be traversing Cheese Bridge in Super Mario World, or taking bobbling steps into the colourful, underappreciated platform lands of Plok, these sessions were delicious partly due to the marmite, but also, because of their brevity. It was the teasing promise of greater things, which has helped fuel my love for gaming that exists so strongly today. Scarcity creates desire.

Then came the N64 days. On that first great weekend when my mate Jay got one, I drove with him and his dad to a games outlet called “Special Reserve” that did good deals on electronics, to help him with his choice of games. I was a platformer fanboy at the time, and I recall being unimpressed when Jay opted for Mario Kart 64. Driving games weren’t cartoon platformers; what was he on?! Jay drunk a Ribena on the way back and did a purple sick on the front lawn when we got to his place. I guess we were both pretty confused.

Firing it up for the first time, it soon became apparent what we were dealing with. These were worlds of their own, with wonderful scripted pathways to race through. Even before I understood the simple fact that every Lakitu-held green light signalled the beginning of a new, self-contained racing story, the tracks themselves enticed me. The early courses: Mario Raceway, Kalimari Desert, Koopa Troopa Beach – to say nothing of the graphics – but once we unlocked the Special Cup, the creepily rickety Banshee Boardwalk and the psychedelic danger of Rainbow Road were delights upon themselves.

We soon turned our attentions to Battle: the stellar four-player combat mode, finding that to be a different, fresh form of competition. I was now sold on the game, and a new genre opened up in front of my eyes. Mario Kart 64 became a staple at any get-together, a group of boys crowded around a screen, losing themselves in a hail of “Yips” and “Owowowowows” and the sounds of us pissing ourselves laughing at each life-representing balloon we claimed. Breaking out a star at the last minute. Bouncing a green shell off the walls to send it round a corner in a friend’s face. The small but potent irony of taking out Donkey Kong with a selection of hazardously-placed banana skins. Joy.

But we moved on, as boys do, and other delights and fads took Mario Kart’s place. Diddy Kong Racing enthused for a while, being the least pale facsimile of the cartoon racing genre of the time (f**k you, Crash Team Racing. Just. F**k you) followed by Lylatwars, Perfect Dark et al, and then Playstation 2s and growing up and Halo and all the crazy rest of it. Gaming forged onwards.

But I had a feeling Mario Kart 64 would endure. It was partly the Nintendo seal of quality; not just a label on a box, but a genuine, tangible legacy of constant attention to detail and pleasure-inducing games which continued to blow my mind with each passing release. But it was also the timing of Mario Kart 64. Most gamers my age were having their tastes shaped at 12, sure, and it’s more than likely that nostalgia plays a part in why it tops so many “favourite game” lists now. But it’s more than that. Nothing else was like it then, and though in 1997 that was because it first, with the benefit of 14 year’s experience, it’s now because it’s the best.

Mario Kart 64 did not rely on gimmicks. It had fantastic track design, an incredibly well-balanced set of weapons, a small but robust selection of characters. Charm by-the-oversized-penguin-load. There’s a reason why future Mario Kart games include so many of Mario Kart 64’s tracks in their canon.

14 years. It’s a long time for a game to rule a genre. Pretenders to the throne come a-knocking every year, but the old, ugly, battered king holds them off. What’s his secret? Is it the wafer-thin veneer of nostalgia? The young things are all too scared to attack because, from afar, he’s still as unbeatable as he was all those years ago? But what if you get up close, and peek under the curtain, and he’s just a frail old man, surviving on family name alone?

To fully answer these questions, we have to go forward 11 of those 14 years to 2008, to a University in the north of England...

 

INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE 

Next week: Mario Kart 64: Part II!

Title: Gears Of War 2

Format: Xbox 360

Release Date: November, 7^th, 2008

Videogames are, for me, a shelter from the storm. When the controller's in my hand, I often enter a zen-like, focused state which shuts off the outside world. In the right context, playing is a soothing, cathartic experience.

Everyone feels there could be more success in their lives. There’s always more you can be achieving, no matter what path you choose, and with gaming there’s a certain symbolic delight to be had in conquering your foes and saving the world; people like to be heroes, and gaming is in a unique position to replicate that. On a crude level – and this week’s game is nothing if not crude – people like to kick the shit out of things to make them feel better. *Knock knock* Who’s there? Gears Of War 2, you say? Come on in!

December 2008. I had been in my first full-time desk job for a little over a month. The job was fine, but I wasn’t keen. Yet I approached it with a certain puritanical justification. I had just come out of three years of university which were among the best of my life, and had changed a huge amount with regards to taste and outlook. I had become more realistic. After a fairly hedonistic three years, I now felt I bound to the 9-5 life, almost as if it were penance. Jobless, full-time arty lives were a frivolous pipe dream, I told myself; an irresponsibility which no one in their right mind seriously considered past their mid 20s. I had decided I was going to work full-time, and find creative outlets elsewhere.

And yet - this wasn’t going so well. The office was full of great, but similarly frustrated people; highly intelligent, given little to do. Conversations were a mixture of highbrow theatrical discussions and acute boredom, but what really got me down was the sinking suspicion that This Was It. I’d been all the way through the education system, from nursery to prep to senior schools, before a gap year and university, for this? To work in an office for a low wage, making lots of money for other people. I had a job in the arts sector, so I kidded myself and anyone who asked that I was “using my degree”. Na. I was a desk monkey.

I was grateful to have a job – these were early recession days – but really, I was living at home with my parents, my only outgoings being travel, and I was bored to tears. Two and a half hours of every day were spent on a train, my face crammed into sad, sweaty armpits that seemed intent on crying pungent tears of sorrow at the merest of provocations, and I was spending the large majority of my day performing a job that could be done by a primate.

Years of tedium spread out before me. Of thought-obliterating Friday afternoon drinking sessions followed by weekend-long hangovers. Of snatched cinema visits late on a week night, before running home in the rain to get enough sleep to get through the next day. Of endless underground commutes, desperately trying to get somewhere. I couldn’t see an end to it. “But hey”, I thought, “This is what everyone does, right?”. “Man up and get on with it.”

So I did. It’s hardly the worst life in the world; London is one of the greatest cities there is, and I was lucky enough to be among the highly privileged bracket of people that not only live in London, but is employed there, too. Complaints-wise, I didn’t have a leg to stand on. But I was fresh out of Uni, and despite my constant internal attempts to rationalise the situation, this state of affairs depressed me. Tragedy is relative, after all.

December rolled around, and despite only having worked at the office since the start of November, the last day of work felt uncannily like the last day of term. I rather liked the comparison – a release from the clutches of the workplace, everyone scattering across the world to the warmth of their respective homes. It reminded me of nothing more than the guttering throes of a winter term at school or Uni, everyone heading back to their families for the Christmas holidays.

It was a half day, and very cold. The company had had a very good year. It was a few days before Christmas, and the air was chill. I remember wearing boots because of the ice, and trudging towards the tube, when I suddenly got tremendously excited at the thought of going home; of a long, warm holiday with my family; sitting around, drinking and eating, singing, party games; all the good stuff.

But it was lunchtime, and there would be no one home. I wanted to bask in the glow of the guiltless pleasure of doing nothing, and I was damned if I was going to spend it on my own. So before getting on the tube, I called my friend Adam, and asked if he was in. He was. I headed to King’s Cross.

I got there and a sense of immense calm fell over me. London felt very quiet. Perhaps it was snowing, I’m not sure. But things felt very still. I went over to Adam’s place, and got buzzed in. He was embedded in the couch opposite the TV, playing a video game. Can you guess which one, Dear Reader?

The gaming session only lasted a few hours, but gradually I felt a powerful sense of release. I had been masquerading as an adult for nearly two months, despite feeling younger than ever before, and the pretence was starting to take its toll. Sitting down with my good friend blasting through Horde mode gave me a heady draught of comforting gaming memories of the past; sitting on sofas with friends, battling the odds, laughing at the close calls. In that moment I suddenly and strongly felt that things weren’t so bad.

Horde mode should be fundamentally depressing, but it isn’t. It’s an unending co-op experience, where you fight off increasingly dangerous waves of Locust (Gears' aggressive alien race) with other players online until you are inevitably crushed beneath their overwhelming numbers. Yet there’s a strong sense of resilience about it, of the last stand. It’s a slow-paced, long-burn game that becomes more and more tense the more you withstand.

As the sun went down and London froze, we sat in that flat together, helping each other out with well-placed headshots, saving each other’s asses from certain defeat when the odds were stacked hugely against us, hi-fiving at the crazy successes and consoling over the close losses.

Perhaps this was longing for days since passed, but I felt ensconced in this warm bubble of timelessness during those hours, as everything else faded to nothing in the darkening evening. All the questions of jobs, career, life, were given a shot of morphine and put to restful sleep, if only for a little while.

I forget how long we played for. Adam’s internet connection kept inexplicably throwing us off the server, so no matter how far we got, fate gently flicked us in the balls and forced a restart, but it didn’t really matter. For me, it was an island of calm in this huge ocean I was paddling out into, and it was welcome.

It’s easy to mock the Gears Of War franchise. It’s big, dumb, space opera, with more grizzled marine than you can shake a rusted chainsaw at. But it knows what it is, and it does it well. There’s comfort in that.

And for those few hours on that freezing, clear afternoon, I just shot shit in the face with my friend. Life was squatting outside, but hell – this time it could wait.

Sometimes that’s ok.

 

Next time: Mario Kart 64!

Title: Far Cry

Format: PC

Release Date: March 23, 2004

My friend Tom recently pointed out that many of the experiences on this blog are uniformly positive. Friendships. The new. Fair point. Sure, I play games to see strange new lands, meet interesting characters. To experience the positive. But to imply this is always the case would be unrealistic. Enter: Far Cry.

Scene: April, 2004. My last year of school. And let me be clear on this point, dear reader: school was pretty good. I’m aware a lot of people have a bad time of it, what with bullying, bad teachers, failing spectacularly with girls, but, bar the latter, I was pretty lucky to avoid many of the education system’s potential pitfalls.

The last year of the 6^th form was great. But amidst all the fooling about and the revision and the nights out, there’s the darker stuff; heartbreaks, arguments with friends (usually about girls). Failure. School year 2003/4, we were top of the pile and like the Roman Empire we DEFINITELY MIRRORED, it was inevitable that the squabbles turned internal.

I’d had a falling out with a good friend the year before (over a girl, of course) and we’d never quite made up. He was a big part of the group, and that made things difficult. None of my mates wanted to choose sides, and so there was this awkward wedge put in the midst of this previously tight unit. I was also cocking things up with my girlfriend of the time, and she was well within my rights to think me an ass-hole, which she did.

On top of this, we were all going our separate ways in a matter of months, and there was this keen sense of fragmentation, of things falling apart. I was unfamiliar with this feeling, and found it difficult to process. I sought solace in a lot of ways, spending a lot of time on my own – going to the library, listening to music. Playing video games.

By this stage I had fumbled my way into learning how to drive, and would often go for a cruise at lunchtime, or in a free period, driving around being adolescent and sad, ruminating on changes that were to come, and generally being a bell-end. And I started playing Far Cry.

It was a beautiful game, and, like many that I came to truly love, prioritised freedom of choice. An FPS (First-Person-Shooter) set on a beguiling tropical island in Micronesia, the world of Far Cry became a destination I would visit time and again over that month and the next, always driving home at lunchtime in the cold, crisp spring sunshine, Led Zeppelin IV blaring out of the speakers, to somewhere I could forget all the problems I had in my life.

What pathetic problems they were, but tragedy is relative – particularly at that age – and in my small, solipsistic world, I didn’t want to think about broken friendships and exes, not to mention looming exams and a fragmented future. So I escaped to an unnamed archipelago in the South Pacific and shot terrorists in the blistering electronic sun, swam around in digital oceans, and raced speedboats up and down uncharted tributaries until my mind was soothed by the lapping waves, the cawing of exotic birds, and the soft thud of bullets into mutated super-soldier flesh.

And lest you think I’m segueing into my preferred model of rose-tinted, nostalgia-fuelled whimsy: this was a Bad Thing. I’ve spoken about positive and negative gaming before, and this falls resolutely into the latter camp. This is not dealing; there’s a difference between getting excited about a new release and popping life temporarily on hold while you blast through it, and side-stepping responsibilities completely to lose yourself in a tantalising, ephemeral, gaming fog. I was no longer 12, and this was no Super Mario 64.

Whilst I was a goon at 18, as indeed I am now, I was old enough to recognise that I was escaping, when I should have been dealing. I should have been working harder, I should have been building bridges with friends, I should have been apologising to my ex. I did none of these things. I learnt to play sad Pearl Jam songs on my guitar and I played Far Cry.

The game is great. There is no doubt about that. The graphics were superlative for the time, and the variety of approaches you could adopt were proto-Halo in their scope. But what I am trying to address is the life behind the game. Why are you really playing? What are you hoping to gain? Unlike a film, you’re not just sinking two hours into a game; you’ve therefore got to enjoy it on an extended level for it to be worth so much of your time.

And I did enjoy Far Cry. A lot. But I was patently using it as a smokescreen. When you’re 18, your problems probably ain’t so great (mine weren't), but if you maintain this approach into your 20s and potentially 30s, you’ve got yourself quite an evasive adult on your hands.

Once again: this is not the fault of Far Cry, or indeed, videogames. I can’t stress this enough. I detest much press baiting of entertainment, citing it as a cause for violence, anti-social behaviour, whatever. Cultural Bête Noires have always existed, but as a rule, it’s the viewer that should take responsibility. There will always be exceptions; people that are affected by stimuli in an exaggerated fashion, but I stand by the rule: don’t blame external factors because one is being shit at one's life.

Play, watch, absorb, learn from all forms of media. But don’t let your life fall out of balance. No matter how tempting the island is, don’t stay there too long; real life is waiting, and it’s often more exciting, unpredictable and terrifying than anything games have to offer. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a holiday every now and then. But be sure to you know why you’re going. You’ll enjoy your stay that much more.

 

Next time: Gears Of War 2!

Title: Grim Fandango

Format: PC

Released: 30^th October, 1998

I’m going to be straight up with you, dear reader; I have no strong memories attached to Grim Fandango. No conveniently parallel life-stories to compare and contrast. Not a pithily contrived lesson in sight. Sorry about that. I have, however, one reason for writing about it today, and it’s actually the best one there is: Grim Fandango is a gorgeous, shining, pinnacle of the medium. I’ll probably still wring a tenuous message out of it, though. Don’t you worry about that.

 

If there’s one gaming genre closest to my heart, it’s the adventure game. This beautiful creature is rarely spotted these days, having been brutally cross-bred with numerous gaming styles to varying degrees of success – be it to the cumbersome QTE (Quick-Time-Event) in the case of the atmospheric Heavy Rain (the good) - or to the risk-reducing franchise such as Back To The Future: The Game (the not-so-good).

Despite various failed attempts to resurrect the genre, which fell out of public favour in the late 90s, it is still one of which I remain immensely fond. There is a certain slow-burning appeal to its dialogue-and-puzzle-filled, sedentary pace, and I recall many an enjoyable holiday exploring the wonderful, bizarre, atmospheric worlds of such titles as Beneath A Steel Sky and Broken Sword.

However, despite the place these games have in my heart, there is one company whom I will always love: the mighty Lucasarts. Sure, they made a lot of of shit Star Wars cash-ins (and some good ones, too), but their contribution to the world of adventure games will never fade.

Maniac Mansion. Day Of The Tentacle. Indiana Jones & The Fate Of Atlantis. Sam & Max Hit The Road. Full Throttle. Monkey-freakin’-Island. The list of genre-defining adventure games released from the Lucasarts’ stable in the late 80s and all through the 90s is nothing short of staggering. Beautifully realised graphics, hilarious characters, absorbing stories, intelligent puzzles. Brave new worlds.

And the king of them all? Grim Fandango. I was 13 when it came out, and the name still sends a shiver of excitement down my spine. The art style alone (Film Noire meets Dia de los Muertos via Aztec visions of the afterlife) is such stuff as dreams are made on, and the characterisation, voice acting, plotting and sense of place are second to none. A detective/romance story populated with demons and skeletons whose job it is to uncover the deep-seated corruption preventing good souls from entering the afterlife? Er, ok. And also: YES.

You want to know how to build a world? Play Grim Fandango. There’s simply nothing like it. Just like Super Mario 64 the year before, Grim Fandango was a gateway into a fully realised, breathtakingly exciting virtual land. Yet instead of the uplifting joy of Nintendo’s offering, here was a darkly atmospheric, frequently off-the-wall noir thriller with a cast of broken loveables, from the silky smooth tones of afterlife salesman Manuel Calavera to the spider-like bulk of corrupt gangster Hector LeMans.

 By the time System Shock 2 came out the next year, I was 14, and fully into the swing of creative writing; in no small part due to my English teacher, Miss Bufton, who was really creatively nurturing and had great tits. One of my earliest (and proudest) moments was when I wrote what I felt was a rather excellent short story called “Daydreams and Detentions”, which featured a child bonding with a teacher after constantly getting in trouble (based totally on me, apart from getting in trouble; I was far too scared of being told off) for having daydreams in class. I opened the story with a sci-fi horror daydream ripped completely from System Shock 2, from the annelids (the xenomorphic menace from SS2) and The Von Braun (the spaceship from it) and everything else inbetween.

But even before penning such epic tales, Grim Fandango showed me early lessons in structure; each of the game’s four acts takes place on consecutive years, always on the same day – 2^nd November (The Day Of The Dead, of course) – where we rejoin Manny Calavera in his latest situation. The game also showcased beautifully the value of a coherent and fully-realised world, as well as a simple lesson in influences; take them from everywhere, (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Aztec Civilisation) mash them together and make the resultant product your own. “I didn’t steal from anyone; I stole from everyone”. (One of the writers of Alien. I don’t know which one. Deal with it.)

 In striving to impress Miss Bufton, I used to nick ideas wholesale, yet I never knowingly stole from Grim Fandango, even though I was in love with it more than almost any other game. I can’t be sure why, but it felt so apart from anything else I’d ever experienced, it was somehow beyond plagiarism. I loved it because although it was funny, it wasn’t afraid to be serious. Despite being set in the The Land Of The Dead, the souls inhabiting the game could indeed die a second time, often by a grim process called “sprouting”, where injection of toxin causes flowers to grow throughout the victims' skeletal bodies, rendering them a lifeless, petal-filled pile of inanimate bone. Watching a beloved character pleading for their life as their eye sockets fill with lush orchids, so often a symbol of life, is an oddly unnerving experience, and allowed for horror and loss without gore.

Many Lucasarts games stay strong in the mind, but none had Grim Fandango’s sense of style and poise. The 3D graphics were beautiful for their time, and such is the quality of the art design that they remain appealing to this day. But, as is the case time and time again with the games on this blog, it’s worlds that create memories. El Marrow, Rubacava, The End Of The World – how great to create these fantastical places from ideas to sumptuous concept art to in-game environments, and to then allow people to explore them, and then create a game to entertain them whilst they are there.

This article has rambled and touched upon many issues without ever finding its feet. For that I apologise. Grim Fandango is a game I have played numerous times in my life, but sticks in my memory only for the quality of the experience. All the lessons I have talked about in this article are retrospective; the 13-year old me was not sitting there going “oh, this’ll come in handy for writing an Edinburgh show when I’m 25”, but realising their import is part of this ongoing process in which I’m engaged for working out and justifying why I spent, and still spend, so much of my life playing video games.

It’s something which still baffles me, yet every time I sit down in front of a TV with a game pad in hand, the outside world melts away and I’m fused into the machine, ready to challenge, conquer and explore the endless variety of worlds out there. I guess all I have to say about Grim Fandango is that is remains one of the finest, if not the finest gaming worlds ever designed. The puzzles are good, if outclassed by Day Of The Tentacle. The dialogue is classy, but not as funny as Sam & Max, or Monkey Island. But The Land Of The Dead is an exotic, beautifully-conceived place which, ironically, couldn’t feel more alive.

Go check it out sometime. I think you’ll like it there. Tell Manny he's still the king.

 

Next Time: Far Cry!

Title: Grand Theft Auto IV

Format: PS3

Released: 29^th April, 2008

I often associate gaming with guilt. I love getting lost in luscious, fully-realised worlds, following the hero’s journey, developing a character from an underpowered weakling to an all-conquering powerhouse; it hooks me every time.  And yet. When I play, there’s always a little snag jaggling at the corner of my mind, quietly whispering the words: “You’ve got better things to do, Jon.”

These whisperings are not entirely without merit; I spend a lot of time playing games. But there is a difference between gaming time that is earned, and gaming time that is taken; during the former you relax, immerse yourself completely, and it is from this state that the great gaming memories and experiences are taken. During the latter, your focus is off, moderately difficult challenges seem impossible, and your mind constantly pulls out of the action for air, the unfinished loops of the day catching in your thoughts, tangling and pulling – vying for your attention.

It’s not a pleasant experience; you want to immerse yourself more deeply in the game to get away from that naggling voice, but the responsible part of your brain knows this is the last thing you should be doing. You never fully commit to the experience, instead participating in a sort of gaming limbo, ploughing through a level mechanically – not without flashes of enjoyment - but essentially phoning it in, not quite willing to surrender to the game, but not wanting to face the outside world either.

This has certainly been my experience, but only when I was gaming when I shouldn’t have been. But though this phenomena exists, never has it applied less, than to time spent with Grand Theft Auto IV. I’ve talked previously about saving up holiday time to indulge in a game, but any other gaming vacation seems small fry when compared to the campaign I waged to play GTA IV.

It was April 2008, and I was in my final year of studying English Literature at Durham. I’d had a blast on the course, but found myself constantly spending my hours pursuing other, less academic, interests – be it theatre, getting pissed with my mates, or videogames. I’d by and large got the balance of work and play just about right, and was on for a low to medium 2:1. I certainly wasn’t going to drop to a 2:2, so all I had to do was maintain my low-to-mid 60s average to get the grade I knew I deserved.

Then on 29^th April, GTA IV came out. I had been bought a PS3 as a big surprise birthday present from my housemates and family, and was making good use of it. The Orange Box had delighted, especially Portal, which will get its own article in due course, but apart from that, I had yet to really stretch the PlayStation 3’s silicate legs with a truly killer game. Plus, as students with time and loans on our hands, we also had one of the best entertainment set ups my impressionable eyes had ever seen; each member of the house contributed a wing to an entertainment colossus that included: Surround Sound, a 37” HDTV, Sky TV, PS3 with 2 and Xbox 360 with 4 controllers. In 2008, (and in fact, now) it had everything you could ask for. All I needed was the right game. Then I read a review in Edge magazine of GTA IV.

10/10. There had only been 8 titles that had ever been awarded 10/10, and each one was the kind of game your purchase a console for. So GTA IV, this hugely well reviewed, latest update of one of my favourite series of all time, was being released, and I had the perfect set-up on which to play it.

There was only one slight problem: all my exams.

May 2008 was peppered with 5 exams, each about 3 hours in length. I had finished my dissertation by this stage, but I had to haul myself through a shit-load of exam-condition essays before I could even think about setting foot in Liberty City. Because I did order it, you see. GTA IV arrived damn near 29^th April. I remember it looked perfect.

I pried the plastic-wrapped case from its cardboard package, and hastily unwrapped it. The manual smelt of awesome game. I inserted the disc, promising myself I was only going to seek proof that it was as good as people were saying before packing it back up and getting on with revision. The install took a tantalisingly long time; promising a huge, detailed world of depth and variety to get lost in.

Then I started playing.

The hour was scintillating. Housemates came and went, marvelling at the graphics, pointing out little touches like the mobile phone menu and contributing advice like: “Oooh, nick that car and go run over that fat guy!” It was GTA, but so much richer, more layered and (if you wanted it to be) more mature than ever before. The hour ended with Niko Bellic stood alone on a rainy walkway, bloodied knife in hand, as the midnight lights shone out across the city, the body of the first man killed in Liberty City at my feet. I remember stopping for a moment and looking at the skyline, feeling acutely like I was on the cusp of a great journey, thrilled at the prospect of this whole dark, exciting world to uncover.

But not just yet. I saved my game, and took out the disc. I placed the box under my bed, but not before removing the map of Liberty City from it and putting it on my wall. It became my target through those next three weeks; my holiday destination; my reward for three years of (relatively) hard work.

And there it stayed. I didn’t touch the game for three weeks. Then, on 23^rd May, I finished my final exam. It was weirdly anti-climactic. After so much writing and thinking and red bull, I walked out of the exam hall into bright clear sunlight, blinked, and then realised eighteen years of education were over. It felt strange. Directionless and free at the same time.

I don’t remember what I did after that; I’m sure I went out for drinks with other coursemates, and probably had a few celebratory cigarettes, but after a while I found myself back home. None of my housemates were to finish their exams for at least a week. I had this glorious entertainment system that was really not going to be used much over the next week, one of the most deserved breaks I’ve ever earned, and one of the greatest games of the last five years to play.

I poured myself a beer. I made a tea. I got a glass of water (I like this triumvirate of drinks; it gets me drunk, refreshed and rehydrated at the same time) and lay down on our leather sofa, which sat perpendicular to our TV, with my feet up and PS3 controller in my hand.

As I fired up Grand Theft Auto IV, the week stretched out in front of me. After this? Partying and celebrating with my best mates. And after that? A summer of something ridiculous before real life came a-calling. And after that? Who knew. Anything and everything.

But on 23^rd May, 2008, as the late afternoon sunshine poured through the window, I sat back, the cold, black PS3 controller in my hand slowly being warmed by my body heat. And that naggling little voice in my head went:

“Tell you what, though, Jon. You’ve earned this one.”

 

Next week: Grim Fandango!