Games I Am Currently Playing:

Streets of Rage 2 (Sega Genesis via XBox 360) - In the box art, Max looks like he’s floating in midair with really tiny legs, but on closer inspection, it’s just the bottom half of some dude that Blaze roundhouse kicked, who Max then elbowed in the face. And that really captures the elegance of this game. The systematic beating on hundreds of punks never seemed as refined after this, but with a cast of cleverly named characters and some great vocal effects (Bourbon, drunkenly: “C’MON!”), SOR2 had a sense of self-parody as well.

Project Sylpheed (XBox 360) - Granted, I started playing this last night in a post Bioshock haze. That said, I don’t recall being too impressed. Instead of the graceful controls of Freespace or the inherently interesting plot of X-Wing, we’re treated to way too much exposition and a cockpit that’s backward and clunky. I’m prepared to stick it out a little longer because, as everyone says, space sims are so rare, but you at least hope they would get better with time.

Games I Was Playing But Now Not So Much:

Urban Dead (PC): It’s hard enough playing Halo in real time with a headset convincing my teammates not to shoot me in the face and call me a faggot, but stopping hundreds of zombies when everyone is playing on a different schedule is damn near impossible. It doesn’t help that the zeds can come back to life with full health almost immediately, but fallen survivors have to stand up, seek a revive point, put in a request at an external Web site and wait until another survivor comes along to help them. I stopped playing once I upgraded my character to super badass, killed a bunch of zombies and watched our home base fall after one of my teammates shot me in the face.

Bioshock: Let me know when the universal ban on spoilers is lifted and I’ll have more to say on this matter.

N (PC): I have nothing bad to say about N and its sadistic rocket/laser/tripmine death traps, with no means of counterattack. But my interest was bound to run its course before the 400+ included levels did.

Games I Am Meaning to Play Soon:

Super Metroid (SNES via Wii) - I know in my heart that Metroid Prime 3 will disappoint me. This old standby will not, and since I never owned a Super Nintendo, I’ve got a great excuse to revisit this after never solving it though emulators.

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I’m not sure why, but something about Telespiel’s nominees for most influential games (up to 2006) inspired me to unearth my Microsoft Word graph skills. It’s an eighth grade science lab all over again.

Click on the image to see the undistorted version.

As you can see, we’ve recently entered a dark age of influential games, at least according to the German game journalists who compiled the list of nominees. There has not been such a dearth of influence since the late 70s. The top 16 finalists, posted at GameSetWatch, tell a similar tune, with winners every one, two or three years between 1984 and 2000, then nothing until World of Warcraft in 2004.

What does this mean? My first thought was, “That sounds about right.” It’s a common criticism that the games industry is wading in familiar waters these days. But the more I think about it, were really much more influential in the 80s and 90s? Sure, we had some new genres — first-person shooter, third-person shooter — come into their own, but I can’t shake the feeling that the judges were touched, at least partially, by nostalgia. For example, Star Wars: Rebel Assault made the list. The game was enjoyable, but only as a landmark along rail shooters’ path to destruction. Let’s not confuse impact with influence. R-Type had a lasting impact on gamers, but the influence didn’t persist in the 3D age, and side scrolling shoot-em-ups now exist only on the fringes of game culture. And Track and Field? I must have missed the hot trend of speedy button-mashing Olympic games that followed.

Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto 3 was omitted from the nominees; a game that creates its own genre deserves a nod, at least. Halo 2 set the standard for online console play, but only its split-screen predecessor appears on the list. And then there’s Diner Dash, played by millions, it set the standard for “time management” games to follow, and spawned countless clones and copycats.

Obviously it’s hard to judge a game’s influence without ample time to observe the ripple effect, but there’s room for a little foresight here.

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