So I’ve been thinking about retrogaming, a topic that I’m sure is close to the hearts of many gamers of my generation.

In short — and in this context — retrogaming is simply the act of playing older games, and while it’s an unclear definition when a game makes the transition from “new” to “old” — and then to the elusive and revered “retro” — there’s no doubt that some of the most well-known and well-loved retrogaming involves arcade, console, and computer games from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras; the age of simple, chunky, colourful graphics and the charmingly tinny, memorable chiptunes. It’s an era of game development where the gaming community as a whole was really starting to find its footing and entrench itself, finding its place in society, and many of the games of the age served almost as prototypes to shape and define future creations. In short, the 8-bit (and, to a lesser extent, 16-bit) era defined gaming as a whole, and I’m sure few can reasonably argue otherwise.

The topic that frequently vexes me, however, and I’ve yet to find a reasonable answer to: Is the charm and allure of the “retro” simply because gamers such as myself have grown up through this iconic era and fondly remember with rose-tinted glasses, or is there truly a simplistic, innocent appeal to the games of this era — the forefathers, as it were, of the modern gaming “scene”? I’ve heard conflicting opinions, both from those who adore the era and practically worship the low-resolution offerings while others, such as a friend who I could only describe as a “modern gaming purist”, will snidely eschew any such notion, claiming instead that the only appeal is rooted in personal bias and hazy childhood memories.

So I’m going to open this topic to the floor, as sparse as it may be right now. Is there truly an intangible magic that will be remembered for generations to come, or are we simply blinded by fond memories of a time long-gone, when we were too naive to know any better?

Icecrown, the home of the soon-to-be-dispatched Arthas, bane of Warcraft players everywhere: A frozen wasteland populated by all manner of twisted horrors, towering structures of blackened steel, and — perhaps somewhat eclectically — vikings. It’s not a nice place, and it’s not supposed to be a nice place. It’s not somewhere that you’d take your family for a summer vacation, setting up the beach chairs on the frozen tundra and basking under the plague-blighted sky. It’s the closest place to hell you’ll find in World of Warcraft — Molten Core excluded, I suppose — and it’s already well and truly frozen over.

This is nothing new, a zone which has been around since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, though recently expanded in the form of three new 5-man dungeons and the long-waited Icecrown Citadel raids. Revisiting this frigid wasteland on my rather unpleasant quest towards Loremaster, I’m struck by a revelation: I honestly believe that Icecrown is the single worst thing to have ever happened to WoW, due to terrible design decisions, and I’m going to tell you exactly why.

First of all, it’s big. Really big. Imagine the biggest thing you can possibly visualise in your mind. Got something in mind? Okay, it’s not quite that big, but it’s close. Getting around this sprawling mass of an area can be tedious at best, even with a fast flying mount, and much of the space honestly seems wasted; it’s as if Blizzard simply tried too hard to provide a grand, epic experience of towering monuments, jagged hills, and sprawling tundra, and simply cranked the experience up to 11. I applaud the effort, but there’s such a thing as “too much of a good thing” — and this is most certainly not a good thing that’s being stretched out from one horizon to the other.

Secondly, and this is my main gripe, phasing. This technology, new with the release of Wrath, allows the world to change dynamically around each player depending on what events had passed in their personal timeline. One player may visit an area and see a village full of happy, innocent fools, ignorant of their impending fate — another player, who has finished the quest chain, may see a burning, ruined wasteland, with skeletons and husks of buildings abound. A great idea in theory, and it can really help bring the player further into the game, enhancing the ‘realism’ of it all; the problem is that it tends to segregate too much. Your friends have all done these quests, and you’ve done these other quests, and you’re all looking at different versions of the world, unable to properly interact with each other. Add to this the frankly abysmal decision to add in 5-man group quests — which are near-impossible to perform alone, and even a challenge for a duo working together — which are also dynamically phased, so you can’t even help out a friend if you’ve finished the quest or aren’t up to that point yet. It’s like playing a single-player RPG, except you can’t complete certain segments without the help of others. Catch 22, indeed.

Finally, the new dungeons — while I haven’t experienced the Icecrown Citadel raids yet, I must express a great deal of displeasure with the direction Blizzard have taken, which is to say, hand out high-level gear for minimal amounts of effort, and then build dungeons around the assumption that everyone is already heavily-geared so artificial difficulty must be imposed. One of the worst offenders is fear — a game mechanic that sends your character fleeing in abject horror, leaving them unable to perform actions, and yet can be countered in many different ways. Not so, say Blizzard, apparently diametrically opposed to such concepts that they themselves invented. Not so, indeed, as any and all fear effects in the Icecrown dungeons — of which there are many, I must add — have been replaced with a similar mechanic which has exactly the same effect, except is now impossible to block or dispel. Add in living bombs and a number of other “forced damage” mechanics and other unpleasant effects — Mirrored Soul and Overlord’s Brand being the sadistic older brothers of King Ymiron’s Bane, while Permafrost is an obnoxious evolution of Keristrasza’s Intense Cold.

Add all these together, and what do you get? You get a zone that hates you; a collection of 140-odd quests and a large selection of dailies, the final “endgame” raid instances before the release of Cataclysm, and a trio of 5-man dungeons, all of which seem to go frankly above and beyond in terms of sadism and artificial difficulty. This isn’t just a place in the game’s world that is difficult, it’s a place where the designers have gone out of their way to force excess difficulty and “challenges” in, using methods that often cannot be avoided or mitigated. This is a place where even the basic mechanics of the game — the rules of the world, as it were — have been twisted and modified, purely for the sake of adding extra forced lumps of adversity. Hell, it seems, truly has frozen over.

When I was a great deal younger and significantly less cynical, I used to while away many an hour at my friend Carl’s house, playing various brightly-coloured, low-resolution offerings on his monolith of a computer — an Amstrad CPC464, a behemoth of hardware compared to my own, with a massive 64Kb RAM and a beast of a 4MHz processor. While there were a number of games available on both cassette and the ill-fated, atrociously-designed 3″ floppy disks, one of the firm favourites at the time was Gauntlet II, a game that can only be described as a mash-up between dungeon crawler, top-view shoot-’em-up, and maze. Of the four characters available — Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard, and Elf — I always used to favour the brutish warrior (to which I tended to apply the esoteric green colour scheme), while Carl would usually opt for the blue wizard.

Thus began our adventures through the maze-like dungeons of Gauntlet, a game which — originally designed for the arcade, though successfully ported to many home computers and consoles — literally lasted forever, the dungeons cycling around and rotating or flipping themselves to provide the illusion of many more. As well as the legions of bloodthirsty monsters and the sadistic whims of your fellow adventurer, the sands of time were constantly ticking away in the form of an ever-depleting health bar. This was not a game that one could “beat”, but rather a challenge to reach the furthest point, the deepest dungeon. Rumours circulated about a “Super Sorcerer” in the form of a fire-breathing red dragon on level 100, but neither of us ever managed to get that far.

In the years following, I’ve played many of the ports, re-makes, and sequels to the venerable Gauntlet, yet none have truly managed to capture the charm and personality of the original and its masterful sequel. Gauntlet IV for the Sega Megadrive (Genesis, to those in Americaland) was one of the many, and while it may have fascinated me as a kid with its proto-equipment system and distinct objectives in the form of the Quest Mode, sadly this is another attempt which tried to recreate the magic and simply missed the mark.

While there are a few game modes available, including Arcade Mode, a recreation of the original “infinite dungeons” style — now playable with up to four, rather than the original limitation of an adventuring duo — the centerpiece here is the “storyline” driven Quest Mode, where the player must conquer the four dragons hidden deep in four themed towers — fire, earth, air, and water, tediously enough — before tackling the castle in order to retrieve some ancient treasure.

Gameplay is exactly what one would expect of a Gauntlet game — legions of seemingly endless foes, ranging from the thuggish Grunts to the devious Lobbers, and the ever-feared yet unimaginatively-named Deaths. Aside from gaining experience to increase one’s stats and using treasure to purchase improved equipment, there’s also the standard plethora of items lining the floors — potion-shaped “bombs” and keys, primarily, though amulets that provide limited invisibility and a few other items also make an appearance. It’s a fairly typical affair, involving slashing or shooting your way through the throng, finding hidden “trap tiles” that unlock various parts of the maze, struggling with the headache that the teleporters are bound to induce, and generally trying to find your way to the end of the dungeon in order to dispatch the hapless dragon stationed therein.

Unfortunately, Gauntlet’s original strength — its charming, unassuming gameplay — now becomes its greatest weakness. No longer faced with a “play until you die” scenario, the player is now given solid goals and objectives, but given the nature of the dungeons, which tend to require the majority of the enemies to be cleared before all the puzzle elements can be solved, it now becomes tedium, slogging through yet more wizards, yet more ghosts, yet more demons as you try to reach the next level, only to discover that you took the wrong exit (or missed a hidden switch) and have to backtrack yet again. The ambition of Gauntlet IV is its own Achilles’ heel, as the formula that worked so well for an arcade-style slasher/shooter translates poorly to a more RPG-like format.

I wish I could say I loved this game, and perhaps at first I did — its catchy, well-themed music and familiar, retro gameplay certainly struck a chord with me to begin with, but eventually it descends into a tiresome slog of distinct sameness. Perhaps it may be more enjoyable to play in the Arcade Mode with a friend or two, but given that the crux of Gauntlet IV revolves around its Quest Mode, I’m afraid I can’t recommend this version — not when there are so many other, better Gauntlet ports available on other systems.

Ahh, Sonic the Hedgehog, everyone’s favourite aqua-hued mammal, a hero to small, defenseless animals everywhere and the eternal bane of the devious Doctor Robotnik (known to the Japanese, and later in English-speaking regions, as Doctor Eggman). Sonic, the hero of the day, fighting against tyranny and practical application of metallic alloys since 1991.

Or is he?

Is this the face of a killer, or a terrified scientist fighting for his life against a relentless menace?

First, allow me to discount the, shall we say, “extended universe” of Sonic — the later games to a lesser extent, but for the most part, the cartoon series, comic books, and other such efforts which portray our portly Doctor as a typical bumbling villain, unable to perform the simplest of schemes without making huge errors or exercising monumentally poor judgement; I dispute the canonicity of these offerings due to the simple belief that a man who single-handedly created sprawling cities of steel, hundreds of varied and deadly robot servants, space stations, weapons of mass destruction, and more — a man of such supreme will and genius simply could not conceivably act in such a dim-witted and buffoonish manner. With that in mind, I relegate this article to the earlier occupants of the series, the games that eschewed deep story in favour of simple, colourful gameplay.

Sonic, then — a hero, a freedom fighter standing up to oppression in the name of small woodland creatures everywhere? No! Observe, if you will, the actions of this bespined rodent — wreaking a trail of havoc in his wake, destroying all that stands before him, causing untold amounts of monetary damage in his blind, berserk spree through the world in his single-minded hunt for blood. The games portray him in a positive light, naturally; propaganda, some could say, as his actions speak for themselves. Is Sonic truly “freeing” these small, hapless creatures from their metallic prisons as he destroys Robotnik’s legions of robotia, or are these helpless minions the willing pilots of the machines, unable to fend for themselves after their vehicles have been ruptured, desperately scrambling for cover to avoid the blue razor-blade wrath of their tormentor?

At the end of each level, in classic Sonic the Hedgehog fashion, a large pod-like tank is ruptured by the sapphire menace. What at first appears to be an act of altruism could easily be construed as an attempted massacre — these pods, prisons for the conquered, or birthing chambers nurturing the young until they are able to take their first steps into the world? Even Robotnik himself rarely makes any direct effort to intercept Sonic, instead opting to flee and hide at any opportunity, only turning to fight when cornered by this cyan devil who simply refuses to let the grudge drop, refuses to let the good Doctor away from the ever-present terror. Can we, therefore, blame the Doctor for defending himself with the aid of machines, when his corpulent frame is clearly no match alone for his freakishly mutated opponent?

So I say to you, dear readers, who is truly the victim here? Who has been relentlessly hounded by an unstoppable foe bent on nothing short of utter annihilation, who has been forced to create such devious traps and weapons simply as a matter of self-defense, and who, truly, is the villain of the piece? I for one will say this: Beneath those comically-large eyes and behind those abnormally-hued spines lies the cold, calculating mind of a killer. A hero, indeed, or the most violent sociopath the world of Mobius has ever seen?

“Blind with panic, deaf with the roar of the caged traffic, heart stopped on the road to Damascus, Paul sat at the roadside hunched up like a gull, like a bloody gull! As useless and as doomed as a syphilitic cartographer, a dying goat-herd, an infected leg, a kidney stone, blocking the traffic bound for Sandford and Exeter. He was not drunk, Esther, he was not drunk at all! All his roads and his tunnels and his paths led inevitably to this moment of impact! This is not a recorded natural condition. He should not be sat there with his chemicals and his circuit diagrams. He should not be sat there at all!”

Dear Esther — a Half-Life 2 mod which eschews the first-person shooter standards of combat and action in lieu of telling a haunting tale, one which changes each time the game is played. I first mentioned this in Linkdump #1, but I don’t feel as though that gives enough credit to this masterwork, so allow me this further indulgence as I revisit the island and attempt to illustrate what makes this “first-person ghost story” so special.

The game — if one can call it a game; Dear Esther is more an experiment in interactive storytelling — begins on a pier of an enigmatic and seemingly-abandoned island, a place both peaceful and chilling, oozing with atmosphere, coupled with an ever-changing story which differs from one play-through to the next. Indeed, if only one thing could be praised about this game, it would have to be the stunningly exquisite writing, realized fully by equally talented voice acting which easily puts many commercial efforts to shame. The story — presumably told by the protagonist, though the details are intentionally vague — recounts glimpses of details about characters both past and present, living and dead, with an ever-present edge of sorrow and despair, coupled perhaps with a hint of lucid madness. The island is a mystery in itself, strange messages and symbols scratched into the rock, an increasing sense of familiarity by the narrator, who could just as easily be alive or dead — is this real, the product of insanity, or perhaps a cold, desolate afterlife?

Completing the effect is a truly masterful musical score, which can also be downloaded from the website; my personal favourite is track 4, “Jakobson”, though the entire collection is frankly superb and aids supremely in building the powerful atmosphere of the game. If you hadn’t guessed by this point, atmosphere is precisely what Dear Esther is all about — there are no puzzles to overcome, enemies to defeat, or mazes to traverse, only an island rich with story and personality, one which cannot be adequately described and must instead be experienced.

There is little else I can say about the game without revealing elements of the unfolding plot; if a cerebral, moving experience is something that you crave, I strongly recommend a play-through — or three! — of this magnificent offering.