Steemit Gaming Challenge: Why Games Are Good

So here I am, minding my own business, when the Zork-puter throws up an alert: I have been mentioned on Steemit! Holy cow, what could it mean? Did my recent Q & A session about Steem Basic Income cause somebody to laugh so hard they pooped the bed? Could the review I posted for Richard Laymon's Out Are the Lights have compelled someone to pick up a book? Or maybe that post suggesting some comics for people who don't read comics got a response?

Actually...hey, look at that, it totally did! Thanks, @saywha!

Oh, but the title doesn't say anything about comics, it's about gaming and challenges and things of that nature. Noticed that, did you? Heh...yeah, turns out @deadspace had this crazy idea to get folks writing about four games that defined their lives, or cured their hemorrhoids, or left them feeling all warm and fuzzy. He made a challenge out of it, then made the mistake of calling me out, thinking I wouldn't respond.

I've got bad news for you, @deadspace:

Challenge ACCEPTED, beeyotch!

So the idea is to pick four, and only four, games that somehow influenced myself and write a few words about each of them. Despite this sounding suspiciously like 'homework', I'm going to give @deadspace the benefit of the doubt and assume he was asking my opinion in good faith, not because he wants to find out how bad things get when I lace up the Boots of Groin Kicking.

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4) Zork I: The Great Underground Empire

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

Those words changed my life forever. Like @deadspace, I too take my Steemit moniker from a game, only in this case it was the mid-80's on a TRS-80 Color Computer, and I wasn't shooting up necromorphs, I was exploring a world limited in size only by my imagination (and the 8k of RAM the aforementioned TRS-80 contained). They are the first things you see upon stepping into the world of Zork.

Zork I: The Great Underground Empire was like nothing I'd ever played. Instead of moving digital sprites around an arcade screen with a joystick and pressing a button to zap alien invaders, you actually talked to the game using the keyboard. You wrote your instructions, the program looked at them, and assuming you wrote something permissible based on your inventory, location, contents of the room, and constraints of the parser (the bit of the program that interpreted those words for the game to understand), it replied with what happened.

Most games of the time focused around combat, or at least pitted you against some direct antagonist like the ghosts from Pac-Man, or indirect dangers like the giant rocks in Asteroids. Zork I had some instances where you could get into fights, specifically with a rather grumpy troll and a stealthy thief, but it was much more interested in testing your brain power than your sword arm. In Zork, figuring out the solutions to puzzles (or even figuring out there was a puzzle to solve in the first place) was the bulk of your experience. You could draw maps on graph paper, pick up and drop objects, find treasure, and kill yourself in any number of particularly idiotic or spectacular ways. What's more, there seemed no limit to program ingenuity as most of the puzzles offered multiple avenues for solutions. Throw in some randomized elements and one could truly say no two games of Zork were ever alike.

Zork I: The Great Underground Empire introduced me to Infocom, which led me to my love and enjoyment of adventure games, a genre woefully unrepresented in today's gaming world but which dominated the market in the 80's and 90's before the twitch factor and adrenaline rush of the first-person shooter eclipsed them.

Hey, speaking of first-person shooters...come get some!

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3) Duke Nukem 3D

People say you should be yourself unless the opportunity arises to be Batman, but where's the fun in being a billionaire playboy who moonlights as a caped vigilante? That's like playing life on 'Easy' mode. Why not instead crank it up to "Damn I'm Good!" and take control of a 'roided-out, strip-joint lounging action hero who thinks the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is a convenience store? Yeah, suck it down, fools. The rest of you can try to be Batman. I'll be Duke F'ing Nukem. Hail to the king, baby.

Duke wasn't my introduction to the FPS genre. Like most kids growing up in the 90's, Wolfenstein 3D was my gateway drug. Doom, and its imaginatively-titled sequel Doom II, sucked away plenty of hours of my gaming life too. And let's not even get into the plethora of clones, rip-offs, and would-be Doom killers that I've been collecting over the years. Then there are the WADs, the total conversions, the extra levels, and all the other goodies that kept the Doom franchise alive while iD worked on other things like Quake.

Why Duke though? While the levels feel three-dimensional, they really aren't. Quake did that first. The sprite-based graphics can't hold a candle to today's obscenely high polygon counts. There are games that look better, sound better, and control better than Duke Nukem 3D, so what gives?

Simple: nothing plays like Duke Nukem 3D. Duke is hilarious, irreverent, and never takes itself too seriously. It uses the technology of Ken Silverman's Build engine, married to the abilities of designers like Richard 'Levelord' Gray to create interesting, unique, and memorable stages filled with in-jokes, Easter Eggs, puzzles, and plenty of insanity. Other games like Blood and Shadow Warrior came close, but Duke Nukem 3D just had that intangible something which catapulted it into the realm of greatness. I've never had as much fun playing an FPS as I had playing Duke Nukem 3D, and I likely never will (though holy hell does Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition come close).

Of course, after running around the apocalyptic alien hellscape of Los Angeles, it's nice to slow it down a few notches and live in a different world for a little bit, where things aren't quite so hectic and you aren't in danger of triggering laser trip mines everywhere you turn. A place where you can assume a new identity and 'play' out a 'role', if you will. Coincidentally, that leads me to my third entry, labeled #2 to ensure maximum confusion...

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2) The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - Game of the Year

"Speak quickly, outlander, or go away."

"We're watching you...scum."

"You n'wah!"

Bethesda sure knew how to roll out the welcome mat for adventuresome souls, didn't they? While I had fun playing through Arena and lost countless hours to Daggerfall and its randomly-generated dungeons of terror, the Elder Scrolls series for me hit its pinnacle with the third entry and its two expansion packs. I've spent more time in Vvardenfell than any other fictional landscape of gaming--just thinking about the hours of lost productivity is enough to tempt a return engagement. For while it lacks the graphical fidelity of Oblivion or the infinite-spawning quests of Skyrim, Morrowind is something special: it's the last of the truly hardcore Elder Scrolls games where there's no hand-holding, no quest markers, and limited fast travel options. Its sequels boast larger landscapes in terms of geography, but Morrowind just somehow feels bigger, especially when you install the expansion packs which let you explore the mainland capital city in Tribunal, and the frosty Skyrim annex of Solstheim in Bloodmoon.

Morrowind has its faults, and there's an enormous modding community dedicated to making the game run better and look prettier, but even the generic vanilla game freshly installed from the CD or GOG.com is a treat to my eyes these days. Besides, it's the last Elder Scrolls game that made specializing in 'Spear' a viable option, and if you can't have fun jabbing an NPC with sharp sticks then what good is your game, I ask?

There's plenty to do in Morrowind, from joining the various guilds and fending off assassins, to patrolling the back alleys of villages and cities looking for opportunities, but Morrowind's most impressive contribution to the Elder Scrolls lore is the story of the Dwemer, and the first step you take into one of their steampunk-style ruins will take your breath away. It may sound crass, but my favorite pastime in the game is to loot these ruins for their Dwemer artifacts, the possession and trade of which is forbidden on penalty of death by the Empire. What can I say? I enjoy the opportunity to raid tombs. Roamer, wanderer, nomad, vagabond, call me what you will.

Hey, raiding tombs! That reminds me...

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1) Tomb Raider

Joke all you want about Lara Croft and her polygonal, over-inflated, triangle-shaped 'assets', but behind that buxom box cover is a game that blew the doors off the 3D gaming industry and launched a franchise lasting more than two decades, spawned dozens of sequels across just as many platforms, two separate reboot/relaunches, and three feature films.

Tomb Raider is what made teenage me part with the cash for a 3D accelerator card. I damn near wore out my keyboard just playing the demo. And while it looks block-y and rough today, it's still a game that has aged well, at least on the PC. Not that the PlayStation version was any slouch, but all you need is five minutes with the Voodoo-patched home computer install and you'll wonder how you ever managed to do or see anything on its low-res console counterpart.

Lara's adventures were to 3D gaming what text adventures were to old-school nerds: her environments were larger than life, with boundaries seeming to extend for miles, teasing at what might be just over the horizon if you could climb up the side of that cliff or make that huge jump across the chasm. With hidden secrets and bonuses scattered through every level, a plethora of memorable bad guys to fight, and a pair of final bosses that would make you regret not hoarding all that Uzi ammo, Tomb Raider is fifteen stages (or nineteen if you bought/downloaded the Tomb Raider Gold bonus levels) of wonder, exploration, surprises, and uncountable, hideous, painful, cringe-worthy death sequences. Whether it's shitting a brick the first time the T-Rex comes stomping your way across the floor of the Lost Valley, learning the truth about King Midas's curse the hard way, impaling yourself on one of the ever-present poisoned spikes, drowning in a spasm of underwater agony, being devoured by Velociraptors, or accidentally swan-diving into molten lava, Tomb Raider keeps you coming back for more long after common sense tells you to put down the controller and pay attention to the other woman in your life for a little while.

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So there you have it: my four choices of games that left a lasting impact on what passes for 'my life'. Now, according to @deadspace, I'm supposed to nominate a couple more people to keep the sizzle in this shizzle. I'm going to spin the rando-meter, and where it stops, we'll nominate:

• @triverse (and for the love of gawd, I forbid you to say one word about Robowarrior on the NES!)
• @darth-azrael
• @retro-room

Go to it, gentlemen. Make the Zork-man proud.