The post below about Sonic Gems Collection was totally a setup for this post. Haha, no apologies. ^^

I will, however, put it in a nifty cut, becuase it’s pretty ranty. Main idea: Game collections are starting to be awesome because they’re reflecting an era in which simplicity and complexity were, in my opinion, perfectly balanced.

Hey, I think game collections are beginning to come into their own. I was never terribly interested by, say, Namco’s classic collection because the games stubbornly still had the old controls. They felt stiff and unresponsive. Update them, then I’ll play your uber-revered set of classics. But lately, things have been getting better. I think this is in part to the fact that the collections are a bit more modern.

Hate me if you must, but I’m not fond of really old pre-8-bit era games. I’m not going to play Space Invaders for more than five minutes, and Donkey Kong might get you about 15. Galaga, which I hold pretty dear, is going to get 10 minutes. That’s just the way it is. There wasn’t a whole lot of substance to games back then, because there was a lack of both imagination and memory. They became simple tests of skill, with lots of incrementally more difficult iterations, and trying to see how long you could survive. Hence, the high score board. As games have evolved into what they are today, scores have disappeared. However, today’s games are so packed with gameplay elements, storyline, extras, collecting, online multiplayer, etc, that I find myself daunted and uninterested in many cases.

The creamy middle ground, the place where there was both simplicity and complexity in balance, was roughly from 8-bit to early 32-bit (speaking in terms of popular home consoles). That was my favorite time to play games. Mario and Sonic were offering up not only great gameplay, but changing settings. Games weren’t required to be EPIC as they are today, but developers were testing ground that was beyond the ‘test of skill.’ The area beyond that began to bring us the pretty graphics, the customizable gameplay, and the story progression that define less than the bare minimum for games now.

Anyway, I was talking about game collections. Game collections started out rehashing tests of skill, which was important for nostalgia and history (hey, the kids playing now need to know where games are coming from if we’re ever going to go through with the whole ‘games as art’ idea). But we’ve done it all over again again, and we need to start bringing out games from this ‘creamy era.’ And we are, thank god. Taito has a nice-looking collection coming, and Capcom as well. The Sonic Gems Collection rocks really hard for a collection made up of underdog Sonic games, even if it is missing a few titles (Bring me Chaotix and arcade Sonic, you bastards!!). Sega Ages is something that’s been around for a while, and has some pretty good volumes out there. Good older games are becoming available in bulk, and hopefully it’s not just for the nostalgic value.

My point is that I really wish more developers would take inspiration from these collections, but update their ‘feel’ (controls, graphics, storyline), and not feel compelled to make huge games. Cave Story epitomizes this idea, and I consider it the most perfect game created so far.

Maybe I’m alone in my opinion, maybe I’m just being old. If I am, that’s fine. But I think that ‘creamy era’ (lol) games were better than any other time. They are what I keep playing for hours on end these days, and they do exist, usually in the form of indie and GBA and DS games.