My Gaming Experience #1 - Return Fire and Ephemeral Friendship

School clocks always tick much slower than regular clocks. There's never a sound more satisfying than the blaring siren announcing the fact that you're free from a study period; and able wander toward lunch time.

During high school, I wasn't popular. I played my fair share of chess in the library during lunch, completed frivolous research, and wrote ramblings about games in my English books. That all changed as the golden age of gaming began, with the likes of Half-Life, Quake II, Unreal, and other, now classic, titles that I was discovering by the dozen.

Enter the unlikely high school art teacher, a young gentleman named Mr Burnett. He was a gamer and all round awesome dude, with brown dishevelled hair, a stubbly, patchy beard, and a healthy dose of enthusiasm and humour. Enter the unlikely console he owned - an original Panasonic 3DO; and a little game called Return Fire. Move aside, Sony PlayStation.

Return Fire is essentially a vehicular death match style arena game, where you choose between a tank, a helicopter, a Humvee, or an APC.

There's a quadrangle of death formed by these units, with tanks besting Humvees and APCs, Choppers besting Humvees and Tanks, and APCs (with some anti-air capability) able to take down choppers.

The objective is to capture the opposing team's flag and return it to your base, through any means possible. You control one unit at a time, but the map contains pre-built walls, turrets, and other things designed to keep you out of the enemy base.

What made this game fun was not the simple premise described above, but the atmosphere in that room. A big, hulking CRT TV (with built in VHS player); on wheels, with the 3DO on the shelf below, haphazardly distributing assorted RCA and controller cables. The way in which the game was played - you take one unit, and play until your unit was destroyed. Then, hand the controller to the next person.

There were no teams, but it was everyone for themselves, especially as you'd find yourself trying to kill the person you, four respawns ago, handed the controller to. It was a deathmatch within a deathmatch, the last man standing, and an outrageously brilliant soundtrack, unparalleled in any game I'd ever played up to that point.

The soundtrack, I would later learn sounded so damn good, because it used CD-Audio support, and was dynamic, based on the events in the game. It didn't have any original music, but instead leveraged classical hits, like Wagner's Flight of the Valkyries, ala Apocalypse Now when you were getting on a destructive trial with the helicopter.

Then there was the death screen, a laughing skull, particularly stunning when playing split screen multiplayer and having events unfold that both players died simultaneously. I don't remember the names of the people I played Return Fire with. I don't even remember why the lunch time Return Fire sessions stopped, but what I do remember, is that for 3-6 months, the Panasonic 3DO, and the little known title, Return Fire was the greatest pinnacle gaming had ever achieved.

It took a good 15 years, and a game called World in Conflict to recapture the action, desperation, and awe that Return Fire instilled in me during my teenage years. The best memories of Return Fire are the simple ones; and the fact that the art classroom turned into an arcade, for just a little while.

And now?

Return Fire is now a game of a fine vintage, 22 years old. I recently attempted to get this game going via emulation (using RetroArch) - and could only find the Sony PlayStation version available. I fiddled with some settings, plugged in a controller, and loaded up the title.

Without the atmosphere, and nostalgia that the art room at my old school contained, the loud, classical music echoing against hard surfaces, and the cheering (and commiseration, the anticipation of getting another turn, and the schadenfreude at seeing the person before you lose their unit) - the game was just not the same.

The gameplay, the core functionality and soundtrack is still there, however, no longer tinted by nostalgia and the cobwebs of old memories, the experience just isn't the same.

Perhaps it's time for a reboot, or indie game emulating the nature of Return Fire, which in today's environment would be a cross between Rocket League, a MOBA (DOTA, or League Of Legends), and a rogue like tower defence game, with infinite depth and replay value.

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This post is an entry for the 'gaming experience' contest being run by @jodipamungkas and @playfulfoodie. Go check out the contest here.

The images in this post were sourced from Moby Games