A Trip Down Memory Lane
Bear with me for a moment, but we are going to travel back in time. The year is 1987… and yes, I know most of you might not have been born yet. Konami was an epic game producer for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I was lucky enough as a kid that my parents got me a NES… and it was awesome. My library wasn’t vast, but I enjoyed every game I had. One particular game that stole many hours of my youth was Castlevania, by the aforementioned Konami. This 8-bit classic was a side-scrolling epic battling vampires and the various associated ghouls and undead creatures. It wasn’t an easy game by any measure, in fact I don’t think I ever took Simon Belmont through the entire questline. Was it frustrating? I would venture to say I was mildly annoyed, but not enough to quit playing.
The save system in Castlevania consisted of a string of alpha numeric characters; without the full data, I remember it was four lines of text with about 12 digits per line. Clearly, Konami wasn’t playing around when they thought of this. There was no way to fake a code and skip ahead, the combinations were simply too vast. There was, however one method to “crack the code.”
Back in Pennsylvania in the 80s, my family shopped at Redner’s Markets. These were the days before mega Wal-Mart Super Centers popped up in every strip mall, so we did our shopping at real grocery stores, imagine that. As soon as I got into the door, I made a beeline to the magazine rack… not for the top shelf, but to find the latest Electronics Gaming Monthly or Nintendo Power. Every month, these mags would have the latest 8-bit innovations and upcoming games. Those were awesome, but I would find myself furiously searching for the codes and tricks to give me an advantage. Now, mind you, it didn’t make the game more fun to play, but it made me feel like a video game master if I could enable some sort of “God Mode” to crush all opposition (Bwahahaha). Every month, the mags would have different tricks, tips, and codes to help gamers gain their advantages. Those codes were usually different every month, so it was literally a crap shoot on which games would be featured. If I happened to own one of the games featured, I would have to run to my Mom and ask for a pen and paper to copy it down, because there was no way we were shelling out another 4 or 5 bucks to buy the book. Hence, the code for Castlevania… it was extremely complicated and even the slightest mistake in penmanship would doom my efforts to enable this code. I couldn’t wait to get back to the house to try this out. After some trial and error, the code eventually worked and I was able to do great things in the game with minimal effort. Sweet.
Fast forward to current day. Most people today have unprecedented access to the internet. With that, the scenario as described above is pretty much extinct. Yes, magazines for games still exist, but the online encyclopedia of information is vastly superior to search and find exactly what you’re looking for. YouTube alone will show you exact videos and screenshots for you to follow to conquer some of the more frustrating parts of today’s video games. Is this good for gaming? Has the internet ruined the genuine discovery of game content? Let’s explore.
You can find nearly every game guide/walkthrough online.
Text-based walkthroughs (with and without spoilers even!)
Video walkthroughs exist for most of the newer games
Cheats and glitches are cataloged and easily searched so players can repeat
Exploits are heavily reported and disseminated before game companies can patch them
While some gamers will not give in to the temptation to gain an edge, many do. Your humble Warbirds have used online guides to deal with the tougher parts of the game “Destiny.” Mind you, we still had to actually put together a team and deal with the raids and nightfall strikes, but it was helpful/less frustrating once the dynamic was revealed. In some of our first runs through the Vault of Glass, we had some idea of how to complete the missions, but it still took us HOURS to complete. We got faster over time, but without some of the online guidance, we may have just said “f*** it” (We also said that plenty of times).
One of our crew was always adamant that he wanted to discover the game with fresh eyes and refused to gain an edge when the expansions were released; no YouTube or online guidance. We were able to complete most of the events and strikes without immense trouble, but those raids…
What do we, gamers, want from a game? We are always begging for more content, right? A compelling story? A manageable/scalable difficulty level? As these games increase in complexity, online guides will always exist. Will it ruin gaming as we know it? Probably not. It will, however, take discipline on our part to attempt to play through game content without these assists. But if it helps your enjoyment of the game to use a walkthrough, then do it; just don’t complain that you aren’t enjoying the game because it’s no longer a challenge…
