Filling the gap

Few critics can claim to have sampled every important, influential and historically relevant piece in their respective industry. Reviewers of games, movies, music, TV and books will all admit to having some sizeable holes and embarrassing gaps in their repertoire.

On Kotaku, reputable game journalist Stephen Totilo bravely admitted to have never played Doom before (by the way - seriously? That’s like saying you’ve never played Pong or eaten a Mars Bar), and on Twitter, Strategy Informer “all round video games journalist extraordinaire” Joe Robinson revealed two gaps in his knowledge by being baffled by Max Payne and Oblivion references.

But while I don’t believe an encyclopedic knowledge of gaming and a impeccable history of playing games is a requirement in gaming journalism, it can’t hurt to develop a more rounded and thorough appreciation of different genres, developers and franchises. Especially when we’re introduced to types of games we would normally ignore, if there wasn’t a paycheck assigned to it.

For British Gaming Blog, my springboard into professional game writing, I received Universe at War, an RTS, from Sega. Seeing as my other staff were just as foreign to the wily ways of strategy and factions and units and resources as me, I took one for the team and reviewed it. It was a painful exercise, to say the least. With no context, I couldn’t say with any conviction whatsover if Universe at War was the best RTS in existence, or the absolute worst. I’d bring more meaningful criticism to a review of helicopter engines.

So I’ve decided to fill in the gaps, so to speak. There’s no real reason to be so clueless about strategy and simulation games, as well as plenty of other well-worn classics I’ve never touched. Tell a fellow game journo you’ve never really played a Final Fantasy game and you probably won’t receive a warm “well, no one’s played everything!”, but more of a look of contempt and a smack in the chops.

That’s what this series of blogs (titled Filling the gap) will hopefully describe - my perilous trek through the unknown and confusing. If all goes to plan I’ll play through the games I’ve never finished (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time), properly tried (Final Fantasy VII) or ever even touched (Starcraft). Let’s see how long I can go before I give up these ancient, unplayable, incompatible, unintuitive dinosaurs, eh? That’ll be fun,

To start, I decided to go for some age old PC games. I didn’t really want to head to Steam or Good Old Games - I didn’t want to have so much control over the selection, for one, and I’m something of a game collector. A rubbish, frugal, infrequent game collector, but someone who prefers, for old games at least, to have the dusty cartridge or the scratched CD or the dented box rather than some ones and zeros.

So I delved into the tubs and racks of old CDs at my local charity shops, pushed aside Bowling for Soup albums and OSTs of terrible movies, and came across these five games that looked like they might be worth a pop. There’s Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (50p), a Civilization styled game from Ensemble Studios (RIP). Speaking of which, there’s Civilizatoin II [sic - it really is misspelled on the spine] (£1), a standalone expansion pack / extended cut style thingy for Civ II.

Speaking of standalone expansion packs, Dungeon Keeper: The Deeper Dungeons (50p) ain’t one. I’m not sure how I missed the giant “Requires Dungeon Keeper” text on the disc, but I did. Looks like I’ll be trawling more charity shops this weekend. Also from Bullfrog is Populous: The Beginning (50p) which is the third game in the series. Finally there’s Descent 3 (50p), which I had heard of, but had no recollection of what it actually was. Turns out its a Starfox style space shooter, and not hugely relevant. Nevermind.

I passed on Riven (a little too steep at £2), The Sims (played it to death, but almost grabbed it for nostalgia), Prince of Persia 3D (apparently its the worst anything ever) and a Wing Commander game (I really didn’t want to lug that massive box back on the bus), but I’m pretty pleased with my haul - and the prices. £3 for five PC games is pretty good. Now to actually play one of them - how I’ll get them running on a Windows 7 machine, I don’t know.