12 Last-Gen Games to Preserve in a Time Capsule

 

4 – Dark Souls

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Speaking to Dark Souls fans is a bit liking speaking to Breaking Bad fans if you aren’t familiar with the series. They talk about it like it’s the Grand Canyon or Victoria Falls, like it is impossible to verbally communicate why the game is so important, you just have to go and find out for yourself and until you do, you are an outsider to a special kind of wonder. This is particularly true of Dark Souls because as you start to play, you are immediately met with a brick wall, a punishing opening level and boss battle which has caused many a player to turn way at the first hurdle.

Break past it though and you are treated to a game that understands the dynamic between challenge and reward perhaps better than any other. It has so much to give, but it’s going to make you work for it, you’re going to have to refine your tactics to get through every area, you’re going to have to figure out the story for yourself rather than being fed it by a linear narrative and you’re going to have to deal with everyone else that’s sharing the experience. If someone wants to come into your game and make life harder for you, they will, but equally if they want to help you, they’ll do that too. If Metroid Prime represented the strongest example of a ‘maze world game’ during the 6th generation and Castlevania was before that, Dark Souls is the next in line. It’s the kind of game you play for years and talk about for even longer.

 

3 – Spec Ops: The Line

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There are certain emotions that only certain forms of media can evoke. Gaming has a unique claim to guilt. In aligning you with a player character, it brings you into the story and invites you to identify with another person. Their thrills, pains and decisions are yours, whether you have a say in them or not. Spec Ops: The Line applies that maxim brutally, becoming the most striking, wrenching anti-war statement that the video game industry has to offer.

The infamous ‘white phosphorus’ moment throw you as a player into a state of discomfort that it’s almost impossible to break out of, some part of you has been made to feel complicit in an atrocity, a willing participant in an act so malicious that all the characters in the game that bore witness to it can do nothing other than to pretend it never happened and press on. But it did happen, and it haunts them and it haunts you, through the remainder of the game, the shocking ending and beyond. It almost feels as much like a psychological experiment as it does a game.

 

2 – Journey

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On the complete other side of the spectrum, you have this. When I talked about Braid I mentioned that gaming had hit a new advent of scope via simplicity during the 7th generation and nowhere was this more evident than in Journey. You have one aim: reach the mountain. On your way there you will encounter challenges, moments of exhilaration, fear and awe. You will meet others, and they will either silently help you, ignore you outright or playfully chirp musical platitudes before carrying on their way, but you’ll never know who they were and it won’t matter.

If there’s one thing to really take away from the 7th generation, it’s that it was the time when gaming really transcended from a form of ‘play’ into a true interactive medium of art and storytelling, in terms of recognition. Journey is an entry in a long line of living, breathing storybooks, and it was the one that broke the mold. Perhaps the most significant thing I can say of Journey is that it would be literally impossible to achieve in any other medium, it simply would not work. It takes the rudimentary elements of gaming: levels, enemies, save points, multiplayer and it gears them all towards telling one simple, powerful, esoteric tale. It is a laser-focused, unyielding interactive experience. A triumph.

 

1 – Mass Effect 2

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I’m going to open by talking a bit about the Godfather trilogy. Were this time capsule business applicable to films, which one would you preserve? I would choose the second one, it’s a stronger film, with a more important story to tell. As it is with Mass Effect 2. You might argue that there isn’t a great deal of sense in preserving a sequel as a historical artifact without the original to contextualise it, but I would rather see a bunch of perplexed future historians muddle their way through Mass Effect 2’s comic book intro sequence than deny them it in favor of the first one. All of the storytelling elements that made Mass Effect great are present in the sequel, but it has so much more.

The real beauty of games is that you are given free reign to decide how to absorb the story. When you read a book or watch a film, subplots and character backgrounds are hinted at, implied or whatever else and it’s up to your imagination to extend them, since all of the actual content is presented to you there and then. There’s nothing wrong with that, but being given the ability to legitimately investigate? To delve into the deeper reaches of the world you’ve stepped into? That is something else entirely and the Mass Effect games capitalise on it like nothing else. The space opera is a kind of story better served by gaming than anything else, you need to be made to feel a real, active part of that universe. You need to fall in love, find friends, make enemies and really get to know this broad, incredible expanse laid out ahead of you.

 

So those are my picks, and I can already hear you howling barbs of disagreement and disapproval. To that I say, good! Bring it! I want to know what you would preserve and I want to know why, leave your answers in the comment section, write a blog entry or record a video about it, gaming deserves to be thought of in historical terms, lets grant it that and look back on an amazing generation of gaming as we do so.

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