They don’t make them like they used to
MARCH 2ND, 2016 — POST 058
My brother’s just moved down to Melbourne. For those for whom Australia is little more than poisonous snakes, desert, and barbequed shrimp, Sydney and Melbourne are separated by 12 hours in a car or just over 1 hour in a plane. He’s moved down there for uni. So I’m happy for him. But there has been one positive consequence for me. Moving interstate into a place with limited space has meant not all his worldly possessions could go with him. As such, last Sunday saw the introduction of his PS4 and our old PS2 into my entertainment console.
Like that Hot Chip song, we’re Xbox brothers. He’d bought the PS4 to play with some other friends and there wasn’t a week that would go by in which some aspect of the console, from the controller design to the fanboys’ line about better graphics or DDR5 RAM vs DDR3 RAM, would inspire chuckled-driven ridicule. But, you know, there was always the part of me that envied the wider selection of indie titles on the platform and with his PSN account, there was over a years worth of free titles from Secret Ponchos to Rocket League. I knew when I was setting it up, that the PS4 would slot comfortably into second place, slipping between the WiiU and Xbox One in terms of amount of use, at least until Pokkén Tournament and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD are released.
What I didn’t count on was the PS2’s potential to slide into first.
The PS2 is an historic console. It straddles the divide between the retro era of gaming dominated by Nintendo and platformers, and the modern era of competitive online and military shooters. And yet it isn’t really either. There is a sense that gaming has grown up with its player base, that where the 1980s and 1990s were largely spent in colourful worlds with cartoon characters, the 2000s in which the PS2 dominated became increasingly more mature, typified most clearly by the release of Grand Theft Auto III. However, one thing that I had forgotten about this era is that it was really quite youthful. Like a kid who’s stuck between childhood and their teenage years, the PS2 was host to a slew of “tween” games from the Ratchet & Clank and Jak series to the heyday of the EA Big imprint in …: Street variants of sport games (and SSX) and the Tony Hawk series.
These kinds of major releases have all but disappeared in favour of mature-rated, self-serious-or-annoyingly-winky AAA games or delicate indie darlings. There was a candid zaniness with so many of these titles that is for the most part absent from the current landscape. Rocket League is probably the closest a game has come to this feel in a long time and its success should be a testament to how right titles on the PS2 got it. Rocket League, unlike so many online multiplayer games, had no pretense about changing the gaming landscape. Rocket League is just a mechanically watertight, charmingly presented game. Like a Burnout or Wipeout it doesn’t take itself too seriously but, unlike a Sunset Overdrive or The Stanley Parable, it doesn’t draw attention to its own “wacky irreverence”.
Last night a friend of mine came around and we had a few goes at Horse and Graffiti inside of Tony Hawk American Wasteland (this was the only one I had because I had had to trade all the earlier ones in). We both quickly found our fingers in the revert-to-manual combo links and the grind modifiers. We both relished the mechanical complexity of the game in a way that games of the N64 and earlier simply weren’t. And yet we weren’t behind the back end of an M16, or in the middle of an apocalypse.
We were just skating.
—
