issue 20 // volume 42 Flawed By Design: Graphical infidelity > How the graphics race changed gaming Adam Tatelman Arts Editor hat’s uncanny about the advancement of graphics in games is the way it has both spurred and restrained game design. Early on, the push for better looking games resulted in more powerful machines that could process more complex and interesting mechanics. Graphics didn’t just change the way games looked—they helped change what games could do, and the way they were marketed. However, relatively little has changed in terms of gameplay over the last three generations. While games may look better, the ideas and mechanics on hand have barely changed since the early 2000s. Most people think that Nintendo was the first company to market a home gaming console. That’s not exactly true. The very first home console for television was the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972. It was later licenced to Nintendo in 1974, and was beat out by the Atari 2600, which reigned as the sales king of the second console generation. The NES wasn’t released in North America until 1983, inspiring rival company Sega to release the Master System two years later. This was the beginning of a free market arms race for even better graphics technology that changed the face of gaming forever. To explain what a “bit” is in computer parlance would be extremely boring, so suffice it to say that it’s a way of expressing how much information your console can process. The NES and Master System were 8-bit consoles, and their graphics were very primitive. As such, they had to rely on abstract ideas and imagery to express their visuals. How did we know Mario was a human? Well, he looked like a blocky person. The animated blocks illustrating Mario are called pixels; together, they are called sprites. These are the very building blocks of everything we call graphics today. In the fourth console generation, Nintendo and Sega moved from 8- to 16-bit consoles with the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis. This allowed for a higher pixel count and more detailed and colourful graphics, smoother animations, and forays into experimental realms like multi-layered tile backgrounds and pseudo-3-D scaling. This advancement allowed for a commercial explosion the likes of which had never been seen in gaming. Gaming companies started to market themselves on the power of their consoles, in addition to their extensive game libraries. In their zest to outpace Nintendo's graphical advances, Sega engineered a number of poor add-ons to the Genesis. Arcade from hell > ‘Ghosts 'n Goblins’ video game review Lauren Paulsen Senior Columnist OOOO8 here are many games that give mea fond sense of nostalgia for my childhood. The original Ghosts ’n Goblins is one of them. This side-scrolling arcade game may be older than me, but that doesn’t diminish its entertainment value. Ghosts ’n Goblins has a thin plot, but you can’t expect much from a 30-year-old game. You play as a knight named Sir Arthur on a quest to save his lover, who has been kidnapped by Satan. You must defeat many monsters along the way, carving a path through six different stages before you have a climactic battle with Satan. At least, I think that’s what happens. I’ve never gotten past level four. This is not from lack of trying. My brother and I have tried again and again to beat this game. It is so notoriously hard that we would rage-quit and not touch it again for long periods of time. I don't think I’ve ever come across such a difficult arcade game. What makes the game so brutal is that you can only take damage twice before you die. If you get hit once, you lose your suit of armour and have to run around in your underpants until you get another. Once youre hit a second time, you're dead. To top that off, you have to restart every level at the beginning, or, if you're fortunate enough, a midway checkpoint. And you have to do it all undera time limit. If you run out of time, you instantly lose a life. I’m usually very good at video games, yet I find this one very challenging. I can’t even use the It began with the Sega CD, the first home console with CD- ROM support. Unfortunately, the game library was small and obscure, and the CD disk space was mostly clogged by full motion video cutscenes with awful resolution. The Sega 32X promised the first 32-bit games in full 3-D. Though its transition from pixels to polygons laid the groundwork for future 3-D games, Sega’s technology was not yet advanced enough to make those games look good. The release of the Nintendo 64, the first 64-bit console offering decent-looking full 3-D games, marked a turning point in the graphics race. The Sega excuse that I was a child, because I’ve played Ghosts ’n Goblins as an adult, and I still find it just as challenging. I'd recommend this Saturn was edged out by the Sony PlayStation, which improved on many of the ideas that the Sega CD flubbed. This transition to 3-D as the gold standard for graphics sparked off a new generation of console wars, this time between Nintendo, Sony, and the newcomer Microsoft. Three generations later, the games industry as we know it had come into being. Most are quick to cry “gameplay over graphics” without realizing that graphics have been a part of the driving force behind innovation in design. But it is also important to realize when a limit has been reached. Like the 32X, the modern 19900 SAME OYER oldie as a gem for avid gamers, although some will be turned off by its extreme difficulty. You can find it online to play for free. arts // no. 7 Image via Doom copyright Bethesda Softworks industry is what happens when presentation is prioritized above all else. Rampant sequelization and market oversaturation becomes inevitable, because a sustainable quality apex has been reached, and the race for graphical quality no longer brings technical innovation with it. Consider the printing press by way of analogy. The first text ever printed was the Bible. For years after, the presses made advances in print quality, but the most commonly printed text was still the Bible. The solution for games is to stop inventing prettier new fonts for the Bible to be printed in, and start printing things other than the Bible. Screenshot from the arcade version of “Ghosts ‘N Goblins” Someday I will get through all of those levels. I hope you can too.