I remember playing games with my friends in college, because it was still a great way to unwind. In the overwhelming majority of cases, I didn’t. With so little time to devote to anything other than school and work, it ended up being a rare occasion that I could sit down and puzzle out the complex controls and mechanics of any recent game. This, I believe, is why I fell away from gaming in my college years.
The game existed, and you innately understood everything there was to understand the moment you saw the game in action.įast forward a few generations, and that was almost never the case any longer. It took no time to explain, and no time to learn. You could play the game with your younger brother and have just as much fun as you would with your uncle. The learning curve was practically non-existent. (And – what seemed a revelation at the time – sustaining visible damage if it did so.) Ultimately, though, it was a game perfectly suited to the one-button philosophy of Atari. Or, well, I suppose it could have, as every so often a stagecoach would drift through the center of the screen, absorbing shots. The game couldn’t have been less complex. Whenever a shot connected, the struck cowboy would fall onto his rear end, which always made the two of us laugh. I’d guess there was a single-player mode as well, but I’m not sure I ever actually touched that. It was a two-player game that saw each of us controlling a cowboy, firing blocky projectiles at each other. One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Outlaw on the Atari 2600 with my uncle Glenn. Of what gaming itself used to feel like.Īs games through the generations grew larger, deeper, more complex, they almost uniformly lost the feeling of addictive simplicity that attracted me in the first place. I mean that it reminded me of what games used to feel like.
I don’t just mean that it reminded me what they used to look and sound like, though it certainly did those things. It reminded me of what games used to be like. Then Mega Man 9 came along, and it didn’t just give me another good time. The medium evolved and in many ways no longer felt like the one I grew up with, but if I sat down looking for a good time, there were more than enough games that would give it to me. Resident Evil, Metroid Prime, Pikmin…even the game that remains my all-time favorite, Majora’s Mask. In the years between when I stopped playing Mega Man games and his miraculous resurrection in Mega Man 9, there were plenty of games I enjoyed. Julian Katris Do on Housekeeping post: Nov.Zing on How to assemble the soundtrack of Death Stranding.
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