Chrono Trigger DS, and some other stuff

When I was a kid my first console was the SNES and one of the things that was very limiting at the time was the fact that there was no store in my city where you could get games for it. Of course piracy didn't exist back then and the only option was having my dad pick up a game every month when he went to the Netherlands. Now being a kid who just got into the whole gaming thing I relied on his taste, which was surprisingly always spot on. Mind you games were very expensive at the time especially for our standards. It was about one game per month for me and every time when he came back it was filled with anticipation and expectation. My only touch with the entire gaming world was the official Nintendo magazine and naturally they were a pretty biased news source. We didn't have internet access at the time so I was pretty much kept in the blank about most things. Despite all of this I have maybe 2-3 SNES games that actually suck and many times he would go out and buy some game that he didn't know anything about. One particular game I like to remember was Illusion of Time (Illusion of Gaia in the US). This was one of those risky titles that he picked up and didn't really know what it was about, other than the fact that it was a hit. And it sure as hell was. Up until that point apart from the Zelda games I never played any other action RPGs and I like to come back to this particular game because of the compelling story it told.

Nowadays games have huge budgets for everything from graphics, music and story telling and yet very few of them manage to grab a real hold over me like this one did. I still can't quite figure out why it is that older games have such a bigger emotional value to me than new ones. The gameplay in Illusion of Time was relatively simple and offered a typical balance between puzzle solving and good old hack and slash action. But the characters you played with in this game, their lives and their problems felt so realistic, they evolved over the course of the game and faced the challenges presented to them. You could identify with any of them and made the entire experience much more immersive than any god damn DX10 pixel shader 2.0 graphics card will do today. It's not that I don't give a fuck about graphics anymore but it's even more interesting to see so many new Wii or even Xbox360 games being made today that have worse graphics than some N64 games. I recently played The Ocarina of Time on my N64 and it still managed to dazzle me with it's looks. This leads me again to the point that it's not the polygon count, the textures or the fucking shader model that make that difference. It's level of immersion you experience. In Ocarina of Time it was undoubtedly the fact that all time I was playing it as young link I felt completely helpless and unable to manipulate the world around me. I knew that no matter how good I played in that part of the game it wouldn't matter, eventually I'd have to face the big boss and he's kick my ass. That fact alone made it so much more powerful. And it came true in that game, after you get your ass kicked as a kid and after 7 years pass you are awakened as an adult to a world that's fucked up and now you have to put everything back in it's place.

The title of the blog entry is Chrono Trigger DS so I guess I should get to it already. I recently got this game for my Nintendo DS and played it for the first time in my life. I know that as a hardcore gamer this was one of the games that were long overdue on my play list. One of the problems I've been facing recently is the fact that all the new monitors, graphics cards and HDTVs have spoiled me. It's very hard to play a newer generation game on an HDTV that isn't made in HD let alone some SNES games. The upscaling makes the games look very pixelated and it's so hard to force yourself to play something you missed out on as a kid when there are so many new titles being introduced every day. And the fact that I recently picked up an Xbox360 doesn't make it better.

But thank god for the DS, since it's a portable console and since it has such a small resolution playing this old title felt fantastic. And I felt the exact same emotions that I got from Illusion of Time, the characters were real, the story was fucking amazing. All the plot turns and twists, I wasn't expecting half of the things that happened there and even the fact that it has 13 different endings based on how you play it is amazing. I honestly don't know why it's so hard for developers to make something really unique like this nowadays. Ok maybe I'm being too harsh, of course there is a bundle of new generation titles that are memorable and that try new things. But I think it's the little things that always keep me coming back. For example I'd like to point out Half Life. One of the things that make this game so successful that many people probably don't realize is the fact that the main character, Gordon Freeman, never says one word. With all the hundreds and hundreds of lines of dialogue being poured into games today this guy never says one fucking word. And you can be sure that he never will. That's because the developers know that that guy in the game isn't actually Gordon, it's you. You're the one in charge of saying things, if you feel like it of course. It's such a simple approach yet it works so perfectly. I've played through all of the Half life games and it's amazing how every time I find myself talking to the characters in the game, saying things that I suppose Gordon would says. This make the entire experience unique and much more realistic than for example having your character spew random shit every time you kill someone. I'm the one in charge of killing, if I want to say something I'll say it.

In any case if you own a DS and never played Chrono Trigger get this game now, it's been nicely revamped with extra features like online multiplayer and of course the touch screen controls make it even more fun. On a personal note it's freezing cold in this city and I still can't get my sleeping habits back on track. I'm also starting to hate psytrance more and more and keep listening to random Trip hop, IDM and whatnot. And I'm sorry that I've turned of my last.fm scrobbling for now, my playlist is a big mess and some things have been playing on repeat forever so of course I don't want to spam the website with it.

Posted on January 14th at 18:57 by Dovla Previous entry | Next entry