Random Acts of Nerdness: What Time is It? - The Curse of Gaming Savings Time

Okay, I’ll admit that joke was in really bad taste, but I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s almost true. As I get older and find myself shouldered with more responsibilities, like a job that requires me to (get this) show up when I’m scheduled to, a fiancée, and loads of other stuff that’s too complicated for me to bring up right now, I find myself falling further and further behind the grind of the video game industry. As the 128-bit era gives way to the 256-bit machines (or, to be accurate, the sixth generation gives way to the seventh), I find myself stumbling behind the march of progress and not enjoying the latest titles with my fellow gaming nerds.

I’ve been actively collecting video games on my own prerogative (read: buying them with my own money instead of begging exasperated parents for them) since around 1995. Lately, I find myself hard-pressed to muster the time to play anything within a year of its release. For example, I just got an Xbox last winter for the hell of it, and I’m still in utter shock that I purchased a PSP in the spring.

Frankly, I don’t mind this method.

One of the reasons is I’m currently operating on Gaming Savings Time (GST). I’m borrowing this concept from the December 2nd, 2000 PVP, one of the best comic strips I’ve ever read. The idea is a gamer can’t afford the latest technology or gets so behind that he or she doesn’t notice. Because of this, gamers operating on GST will blissfully purchase bargain-bin items and marvel at games that the rest of the world has since disregarded, if they’re generous, as quant.

There is a certain advantage to this, and it’s another reason I’m stuck in supply-side gaming mode. By the time I find a game that I want, it’s usually ridiculously cheap. This leads to a different problem, wherein I decide I can afford (why not?) twenty more of them. My shelves are currently stocked with dozens of unplayed games, many of which I’ve purchased for less than five bucks. So if I ever win a million dollars and never have to leave the house again, I’ll be happy I held off purchasing these games and horded them when they were available for next to nothing. Of course, if I had a million dollars, I could have afforded to pay full price for these games in the first place, when they were new… you know what, bad example.

For the first six years of my life, my parents had an Atari 2600 and a Colecovision, which provided the whole of my video game experience up until that fateful day when my mother bought me a Nintendo Entertainment System as a reward for not screwing up my ring bearer responsibilities at my cousin’s wedding in 1988. This, along with the purchase of the inevitable Gameboy, kept me enthralled until the Christmas of 1993, when I received a Sega Genesis. It was pretty much at that point on that I started saving my money and buying every system I could afford.

It wasn’t until the release of the Nintendo 64 that I briefly played the system launch game. I still remember being so excited about the system that I reserved one for launch day. Keep in mind this was when there were only two games coming out, but that didn’t stop the mounting excitement. I remember writing in my school journal about two times a week about the system, to a point where it annoyed my fellow classmates to no end, so I kept doing it. You can imagine my unparalleled joy when I got my hands on my N64 two days in advance.

The next big launch was the Sega Dreamcast. I sort of decided a day or two ahead of time that I wanted one, so I marched over to Sears and picked one up. For a while, the Dreamcast managed to push the ol’ Playstation aside, but not for long.

Since that point, I haven’t gone out and picked up a system for launch. For one thing, I’m rather fond of my internal organs, and I don’t wish to sell them just to buy a Playstation 3 from a scalper for the low, low price of ten-thousand dollars, nor do I want to brave fierce blizzards and gun-toting maniacs for the privilege of waiting in a one-hundred and sixty-eight hour line to purchase an Xbox 360, nor do I want spend a rather embarrassing night with Reggie Fils-Aime in exchange for a Wii.

The launch of a new system these days seems to be about as civil as a backyard wrestling match, with inexperienced losers hurling each other through inanimate objects for the sole purpose of accomplishing a goal they won’t even care they accomplished within a week. It’s also a joke when a big company can’t throw together enough systems to meet demand, as if they can’t push back the release date and, as outrageous as this idea sounds, have enough system available for launch. Not only is it a huge hassle to get a new system at launch, it can be dangerous, with stories of muggings and shootings rare, but still echoing in our minds. I don’t care enough to be a part of it.

Even if Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo had enough systems in stock and offered to personally deliver a system to my house, I still wouldn’t shell out the money, because I have plenty of games to play as it is. I’m sure this sounds like a major slap to my inner nerd, but I’m coming to a point where I don’t think I’ll ever be able to play them all before my big game over. So I’m more than content to enjoy great titles that aren’t cutting edge.

Of course, by depriving myself of the latest games, I’m missing the feeling of freshness and run the risk of having less fun with a particular title because I might have experienced its mechanics or similar ideas in another title. I didn’t play Halo all the way through until I bought my Xbox, and by then it was six years old and had already seen a sequel, not to mention dozens of other first-person shooters to compete with it. It was still fun, but I had played more impressive games, and I was experiencing it amidst critics who put down the game for its faults as the sheen of its novelty wore off.

This would have been a tragedy if it were the case with my first experience of Super Mario 64. Back in 1996, there were no games like it. No other game gave players the freedom and control over the on-screen character. I was totally blown away by it back in the day, and it pretty much justified my ownership of the Nintendo 64. Today, I’m pretty embarrassed about spending sixty bucks for a N64 game, with the lone exception of Super Mario 64. It was the Star Wars of video games.

If you’re wondering, I thought Sonic Adventure, my first Dreamcast game, was pretty cool, but it wasn’t nearly as polished as Mario’s game. Perhaps that’s just a testament to the quality of the game Nintendo put out.

Of course, on the other side of the coin, I regret spending so much on games. Even in my collection, they’re a lot of games that are terrible by today’s standard, and don’t have that special lasting appeal. A perfect example is Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, which I absolutely had to have, since all of the magazines hyped up as a revolutionary game. When I spent my sixty dollars to play it, though, I was hit with an utterly broken game that was terrible even back then. I sold it for half of what I paid for it, only to purchase a copy again years later, because it was a dollar and I wanted to remember how stupid I was so I wouldn't do it again. After dusting off the N64 and popping Turok in, the mystery of how this game achieved such Acclaim (nerd joke!) is more puzzling than those rocks on Easter Island.

I find this happens every now and then when I get the urge to play an old favorite, only to discover the gameplay has rusted over time. Or I’ll play an older game for the first time and find myself wondering how it ever passed as a commercial product (I’m looking a quite a few N64 games, here). In this sense, we’re lucky we have so many games under our collective belt and so many advances in technology, because at least if a company decids to put out a bad game, it can rip off of other titles or have enough refinement to be playable. Less than ten years ago, this wasn’t the case.

I find that the age of the title has little to do with it. There are a lot of classic arcade games I’d rather be playing than some new acclaimed titles, and I still find myself having fun with NES titles that could be considered terrible games. Part of this is preference, but another part is craftsmanship. With so many parts going into games these days, there’re more things that could go wrong. I’m again citing many mid-grade N64 games here, with stiff play mechanics, limited options, and blurry graphics. It makes me wonder how Nintendo ever pulled off Super Mario 64.

I attribute this to a phenomenon I dub “transition syndrome.” You can see this throughout the history of video games. It seems when gaming takes a jump from one technological innovation to this next, there are a lot of sub-par games or games that are considered great for their time, but don’t hold that lasting appeal. It happened during the video game crash of the eighties, it happened in the mid-nineties when games were transitioning from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, and it sort of happened during the Dreamcast run and when the Playstation 2 started up. The closest thing we have to these sorts of growing pains now may be motion sensing technology, but in my opinion, the leader in this technology, Nintendo, has done a surprisingly good job in making it work okay.

This is where GST comes in useful. By operating on GST, if a once-great game ages horribly and is unplayable, at least I’m not out much money. Sure, I’m not exactly supporting the industry this way, but I figured I paid my dues during my early N64 years.

Based on my experience as a gamer, I feel, despite the high costs of current hardware, it’s a great time to be a gamer. The trade-off now is the hardware is getting more innovative, with features like massive media playback options, a centralized online gaming network, built-in hard drives, wireless and motion-sensing technology, and upgradeable system software, all supported right out of the box instead of being shoe-horned into the system with questionable or gimmicky peripherals. The hardware is getting really cool these days.

But don’t forget the recent platforms. Because the market is so large, games have never been cheaper or had better production values. As I mentioned, I can routinely find hit games for less than five dollars, something you just couldn’t do ten years ago. For the gamer who wants to play games that are part of the generation they are currently in, those newer titles that cost an arm and a leg now will fall in price, and the base price for new games will lower as the new systems get older. I can’t stand it when people complain about how high video game prices are. My feeling is, if they’d step out of their local Wal-Mart and look around a little, they’d find great deals. Or they can just buy mine.

So while I’m currently running around like a clueless old dork playing my new Xbox games, plus any number of unplayed Playstation, Playstation 2, and Gamecube games, as well as titles on older platforms I’ll probably never touch, at least I know I’ll be set for a few years of entertainment should Al Qaeda decide to blow up any and all video game developers and retail outlets. Even if the economy falls into disrepair and all I have is a TV and my collection, I’ll be all set for some gaming action.

Or, if you’d rather, I’d be ready Tu-rok.