The Journey is the Goal

I have just interrupted my game of Ultimate Ghosts ‘N Goblins, after having played Diablo on my PSP, to write on my blog. I think my experience with UGNG played a large role in prompting me to write here. I remember playing Ghouls and Ghosts on my Sega Master System, or was it my Mega Drive, back in the day. As I recall, it was the most frustrating game I’d ever played, but it had this wonderfully cheesy aspect to it that made it sadistically satisfying. Well, thankfully the youth of today can have the same experience I got when I was young by playing UGNG on their PSPs.

To give you some idea how frustrating UGNG is:

For those of us who grew up with the consoles of yesteryear, we all remember starting our platformer games with nothing but 3 lives. We would then travel through a hotizontal 2D environment collecting points, resources, rings, coins or children who say ‘thank you Michael’ before being forced to confront a boss at the end of the level. Often, if we were attacked or were hurt in some way, we would lose a power up, health or something else. When our health reached zero, we would lose a life and be forced to restart at the start of the level or at the last ’save point’ we passed.

In UGNG, when you start the game on ‘Novice’ your character runs onto the screen wielding javelins. A glance to the bottom left hand corner will reveal that your champion does not, in fact, have three lives, but somewhere between half and one dozen lives. You die after you are hit twice unless you survive long enough to pick up suits of armour or, I suspect, a shield. Thankfully, you respawn where you died.
Anyhow, needless to say, by the time I reached the first boss, I’d already died 3-4 times and had accepted that the only way I was going to be number one at this game was if I played it endlessly for hours at a time. The sort of activity only a 5-year-old would have the patience and time for.

Prior to playing UGNG, I was, like I said, playing Diablo on PSP. Now, I remember Diablo from back in the day. For those who are unenlightened, Diablo was the game that preceded Diablo 2, that tedious game that consisted of mouse-clicking, item acquisition and Mephistocide. Now, I found Diablo 2 a boring game, so boring in fact that it wasn’t until about 6 years after it was released that I actually got around to finishing it, and even then, only with the help of a dearth of games on the computer I was playing it on. This is distinguished from Diablo on PC, which I picked up about a year after it was released for about $5 from a garage sale, and finished soon after. If I recall correctly, it was a terrible game. Playing it on the PSP, though, it seems a lot better. Firstly, there’s autoaim, so you don’t need to worry about accuracy when firing bows or spells. Secondly, there double-speed which means that time in the game passes two times faster than it did on PC. With these in place, I find playing Diablo on PSP not all that bad. Hopefully it’ll get better as I play more.

Actually, I’m not sure where I am going with this post. I guess I just want to talk about the games I’ve been playing.

I recently finished Civilization 2, by which I mean I owned Civilization 2. If I can defeat the game on the highest difficulty against the most opponents in the largest world and triumph, the game is done and done. From this, I then moved onto Alpha Centauri which is very similar while being different at the same time. It almost feels like after having made Civilization 2, the designers thought ‘look, we can do this and this and this now, if only it made any sense in the context of civilization. I know! In the future on another world, anything goes, so lets set it there!’ And so Clinical Immortality was born.

Well, I’m going to leave it there. Bored of writing now. Need to find new games to play. Only 4 more days until Fallout 3 comes out, possibly 14 more months until I have a computer that can run it.

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