Not Rusty – Totally Oxidised

Blurring lines and Sonic the *******

There are times in life when your perspective on things gets totally and irretrievably shattered.

You bumble on through your existence sure that everything is basically alright and that one day all your dreams will come true. You’ll be tall, handsome, attractive, intelligent and the wittiest, most desirable collection of bits of meat on the planet.

And then along comes the cruel ice pick of reality to burst your little bubble of delusion and leave you feeling like you’ve been dragged by the arse down a road made of sandpaper – confused, disorientated and raw.

It could be anything – an emotional rejection, no toilet paper left on the roll, or any one of a billion banal tragedies.

I’ve experienced my fair share of them, but to this day, never thought I’d be including an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog among the gamut of soul-blisteringly dour reality checks.

You see, I recently purchased a copy of the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection for Xbox 360 hoping to indulge my love of retro games in glorious HD.

I loaded up Sonic The Hedgehog for the first time since I was 11. I sat down and set about nostalgia-ing my way through Green Hill Zone Stage 1, grinning like a goon as the twangy background music and twinkle of collected rings washed over me.

Then, I jumped a gap, hit the spikes twice and died.

Yes, I died. On Stage 1 of Sonic The Hedgehog. I am a failure.

Green Hill Zone death - Epic Fail

I sat there clutching the controller with mouth gaped openand  a Neanderthal’s frown. I was a cross between The Thinker and a catatonic buffalo that’s been kicked in the crotch.

How did this happen? This was a game that used to start at stage four for me, for my friends -  so innate was the ability to cane the easy stages.

Now, I was staring at a dead hedgehog on a flaring phosphorescent screen and wondering why it hadn’t done what my fingers told it to do. I have never wanted to strangle a fictional animal so much in my life. Not even the Nazi unicorn.

But getting rusty at games is a routine element of gaming, isn’t it? You get engrossed in a different title, and when you come back, it takes the fingers a few minutes to get back to pushing the buttons that it usually pushes and soon you’re merrily bashing away again, right?

Not this time. This experience was different. I was not so much rusty as I was totally oxidised.

Somehow, in the intervening years between Megadrive and Xbox – not counting sporadic bouts of emulation – I had become shit at a game played by children.

In a desperate attempt to discover the cause of my sudden unexpected descent into crappery, I asked fellow retro fans what the deal was. They said things like “games are easier nowadays” and “collision detection is better”.

At first it rang true: of course – it’s all the game’s fault! It can’t be me I’m a cross between Billy Mitchell and Hulk Hogan. Unstoppable.

I returned to Sonic and blitzed Green Hill Zone without pause. Then I got murdered on Marble Zone in about eight seconds. Damn.

So I reconsidered, and decided it’s not the game’s fault. Between the dizzying amount of strangely named buttons and that every time you move forward it transports into you the super-power-Matrix-cinema state where you have to time your button pressing rhythm exactly to the undercurrents of the Adriatic or something in order to knock out the end of level boss, games are about as hard as they ever were. As for collision detection…well…Dead Rising, anyone?

Dead Rising - A collision detection hoot

The games aren’t the problem. They aren’t the bad guys at the core of my gaming failure.

No, it’s reality that’s the problem. Modern games have physics engines that replicate real movement. They have world maps, draw distances and NPCs and interactive sandbox capabilities.

Wanna buy property in a virtual life and become a hunter/mage and live a sedentary existence with your dwarf girlfriend forever? It’s not only possible, it’s damn well required.

Now compare that to the reality of retro games. You jumped in water? You died. Went off the edge of the screen? You died. Hit a piece of incumbent scenery? Take a guess…

If you wanted invincibility it was in a box at the very breaking point of the edge of your character’s fragile little animated life, and it lasted only just long enough for you to lurch from one insanely hard enemy to the next one; he who probably killed you.

Games are too normal, and thus the consequences are too normal. The more modern and interactive games get, the less and less consequences the gamer suffers. Not because it’s a world with normal rules, but because despite all the craziness in modern games, the rules are somehow getting more and more like the craziness of living real life. Which, let’s face it, if you get rusty at it, it means they cremate you.

And it’s not just real life, either, but real life with a reset button. The net result of which being that now when you jump in the water, you expect it to splash, your character to get out and you go merrily on your way.

It’s not a bad thing, particularly if you enjoy traversing puzzles without having to endlessly repeat them like some maddening voluntary water torture, it has the worrying side-effect of atrophying your punishment muscle, that part of your brain that makes you ignore the amount of times you died before and assures you that this time you can do it.

Modern games are hard, but they leave you with no desire to beat that vindictive, cruel collection of circuitry and concentrated punishment in front of you once and for all, just to prove to the twisted maniacs who created it that whatever they can throw at you you’re capable destroying them, because you’re a sleek, metallic virtual juggernaut who cannot be stopped.

Unless you spend any amount of time away from them. In which case you suddenly become the single greatest idiot in existence.

Just another little reality check.