I have a confession to make, and that is that I am sickened with games at the moment. I don’t just mean video games, and nor do I mean games of the past. I am despairing of games as they are right now. Now that my ranting, overexaggerated statement is out of the way, here’s why:

I recently took on an assignment, writing about Second Life games from the perspective of my ‘avatar’ there. I shan’t be sharing these writings in explicit format for unimportant reasons which remain my own. It is, however, quite a recent assignment, which has led me to discover new depths to my world; I’d never really noticed how many games were there until I began to look for them. This short stay has made my realisation all the more stark, however. It is so rare to find a good game in that world. Judging by what I’ve read of Brenda Brathwaite‘s perspectives on generic games design, I fear that the clunking SL platform may only be a small reason for that. To be fair to the designers there, many of them posess no desire to create fun interaction far beyond having a hobby or providing an add-on to their primary business. My purpose is also not to attack a majority of what is also a very small niche, either.

After putting attempts at my second game to rest, muttering complaints of, “looks good, but ultra-cryptic puzzles do not foster a longer-lasting or more compelling experience”, I reached out to my DS and began yet another session of the one game which has lasted me longer than most: Advance Wars: Dual Strike. As of now I have had 270 hours of my life devoted to it (equivalent to the average amount I would have totted up just brushing my teeth every day since the age of 4), have only earned a third of the available medals and may still have around a quarter of the battle maps yet to play. The game is flawed, has some mean difficulty spikes and some quite unbalanced C.O. ‘powers’, but is based on a mechanic so solid as to have kept me coming back on and off since it was released in 2005.

I don’t want to hark on with a phrase I’m glad to see the back of: they may not “make them like they used to”, but in the same way that I looked back upon individual consoles long after their second-wave release gems had faded into memory, I find myself asking when it became so rare to find compelling fun.

To be fair, it may simply be my choice of games. With so little free cash at the moment it can be hard to pick a decent one out, and I’ve made a wrong choice of my own many a time. It seems to be more common on Wii, as my favourite series manage yet again not to live up to even a different direction that’s anywhere as gripping as a Sonic Adventure 2 or an Ape Escape. Hunting around Second Life‘s grid for fun reminded me of my hunts inside games stores, though, and the slow crushing feeling I have when I walk past column after column of multi-format, annually-renewed sports titles; film tie-ins released long before the film itself, and often posessing none of even that medium’s charming take on the ideas; the omni-present shoot ‘em up, representative of a genre that I do enjoy but find hard to buy much of. So that’s the new games, but most stores these days still sell pre-owned, and as years go on I find the racks filled with greater quantities of all the old games I was wise to skip over the first time. The system of recycling old games for the store’s profit and players’ apparent opportunity only works so long as nobody keeps a hold of the games they enjoy most. It just so happens that those titles are also the ones that are deepest and most enjoyable.

My one glimmer of hope has been downloadable games. My sister, for example, has racked up an impressive tally of hours on Super Mario 64 for Wii despite not being an active gamer. My own fond memories are mainly of games of the Playstation and Dreamcast era. It’ll take some time for those to become more readily available, but the chance is there and some of what I consider heyday gaming might be made available to us once more. I want this not just because I’m too lazy to plug old consoles in, and nor do I want to play the proud fanboy, gladdened to see a favourite of mine make money again. Nah, I just want the chance to play something fun again, and it just so happens that games back then seemed to be better at it.