The Atari 2600 (1977)

Video games are the only medium that one can have a deep discussion about the hardware.  Film historians may go in depth about film quality and formats, but you will rarely see two casual moviegoers discussing DVD vs Laserdisc.  Literature even less so;  you'll never see two people debating over which is better, quill and ink or printing press.  But video games are different because they inhabit the hardware they are played on.  The console becomes part of the gaming experience.  Back in the 90's, there was a debate between the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and TurboGrafx16.  These days it is between the Xbox 360, Wii, and Playstation 3.
And so I would like to write my first analysis of a console with Atari's Video Computer System, more commonly known as the 2600 (named after its serial number).  Here is a video game in its purest form.  No pretenses, no preconceptions, and no real predecessor.  Released in 1977, it was not the first game console as believed by many, that was the Magnavox Odyssey (1972) which was a total failure on all accounts.  Atari must have taken the Odyssey's flaws into account and tried to remedy them for its own system.
The Atari used interchangeable cartridges for its games, a completely new idea in gaming.  At that point, most games were played in the arcade, with each cabinet holding only one game.  The 2600 separated the hardware and the software, allowing many games to be owned and played on one system.  The controllers feature only one joystick and one button, and were detachable from the system.  Its design is classic:  power and option switches on the front, top-loading cartridge slot, wood grain on the front.  The system was an immediate success.  The rest of its history would be read as a rise to glory, followed by destruction by its own hubris.
Early titles were mainly ports of arcade games to the system (although very well-made ones).  Games like Asteroids, Pong (renamed Video Olympics and featuring a number of Pong variations), and Space Invaders are all examples of the Atari's ability to accurately simulate the games of the arcade.  This trend would continue with the excellent later titles such as Centipede, Frogger, and Ms. Pac Man.  The relationship between Atari and third party developers is one that would be unheard of today:  Atari bought the property to the arcade titles, and then had one of their own programmers translate it to the 2600.
Atari made their own games as well.  They were the first to realize that having a console at home meant that they could make games that could be completed.  The earliest example of this is Adventure, which I have written about previously.  Later titles to follow in this trend would be Raiders of the Lost Ark, and yes, the dreaded ET the Extra Terrestrial (more on that later).  With Atari handling all of the major releases, things were going well for the 2600.  It was at the height of its popularity that it started to show some major flaws, that would lead to its downfall.
The first mistake Atari made was in not allowing its programmers the dignity of credit for their work.  Creative designers could sneak their initials or names into the games via Easter eggs, such as Howard Scott Warshaw and Warren Robinett.  The majority of them were unsatisfied though, so in 1980 there was a major exodus of Atari's most talented programmers, who went on to form the massively successful Activision.  There was nothing Atari could do about Activision games being sold for its system; it featured no lockout chip to differentiate between licensed and unlicensed games.  Anyone could make 2600 games, and everyone who could, did.
There became a flood of games on the system, most of them being completely terrible.  But surely Atari was able to maintain the same level of quality in their own games to keep itself from sinking?  With only the most inexperienced programmers left, even the first-party releases suffered.  There are two main games which are blamed for the death of Atari, the first of which was Pac-Man.  Atari really screwed the pooch with that one.  They arranged for there to be more games made than there were existing Ataris, and paid the programmer by each game made, not sold.  It was still the best selling Atari game, technically, but the disgustingly low quality of the game caused many returns and refunds, making it a major flop.
The second of the terrible games was the infamous ET.  Made by Howard Scott Warshaw, an actually talented programmer, it should have been a great game.  The problem was, Atari wanted the game completed within a six-week time frame, giving Warshaw barely enough time to squeeze out what was a very buggy and half-realized game.  The released product should very well have been only a prototype.  ET was, like Pac-Man, an initial success, but angry players returned the games, making it another bomb.  Urban legend states that Atari took the leftover carts of ET and buried them in a landfill in a New Mexico desert.  With more product being made on the market than sold, Atari went bankrupt, and the whole video game market crashed in 1983.
Years later, now that the smoke has all cleared and we can look at the system in full clarity, we can appreciate it for what it truly was:  an ambitious, yet failed, experiment in home video game technology.  Why was it a failure?  It still had a vast library of first-rate titles, many of which still hold up to this day as marvelous fun and entertainment, and is looked upon with fond nostalgia.  Its failure was entirely on the part of the company that produced it, but on the bright side, future game consoles would learn from the experience, the first of which being a brave grey box produced by Nintendo.

Metroid (NES, 1986)

Right from the title screen of Metroid (1986), with its dark visual and haunting, lonely music, you can tell that it is going to be a very different NES experience.  I have already talked about the vastly superior Super Metroid, but this first game is, in its own right, a masterpiece of the 8-bit era.  It was one of the first games with non-linear progression, power-up collecting, and an unsettling and thick atmosphere.  This would set the bar in one of the greatest series in video gaming.
In Metroid, you play as the bounty hunter Samus Aran, who is sent to the planet Zebes to wipe out the space pirates, and destroy their leader, Mother Brain.  They are harvesting the parasitic life-forms of the planet, called Metroids, and plan to use them for scientific experimentation and hopefully as a weapon.  To enter the space pirate base, Samus must first hunt down and kill two of their leaders, Kraid and Ridley.  Upon doing so, Samus discovers that the pirate base has been taken over by the Metroids, and fights her way through to Mother Brain, who, once defeated, sets off a time-bomb, which Samus barely escapes.
The character of Samus Aran is interesting because she is one of the first female protagonists in gaming.  The game has multiple ending screens based on how quickly you completed the game, and completing the game faster reveals Samus's true gender (throughout the game she is fully suited, and neither the game nor manual mentioned her gender).  Playing as a female character was unheard of back in those days, when women in video games were things to be saved or otherwise, the hero's motivation.
The gameplay is classic NES platforming with a twist.  Instead of the game being broken up into straightforward levels, there are a few giant sections that you will have to explore and backtrack through.  It essentially puts you in a maze at point A, tells you what point B is, but not where you will find point B or how to get there.  From the start, you will naturally start going right, only to be met with a wall, with a hole too low for you to walk into.  By going back, you will find the morph ball upgrade to the left of where you started, which allows you to roll up into a ball, and now you can pass the wall.  This part of the game is a brilliant way to teach the player about power-ups, how they will be needed in order to progress, and that the game will not follow a straight line.
The game also features great atmosphere and personal development.  Every area of Metroid is dark, unsettling, and threatening.  The whole of this game is subterranean and it really feels like it.  Enemies are almost entirely consistent of the natural creatures that live on Zebes.  In the main area, you will find all sorts of insects that crawl around uninterested in you, or actively trying to kill you.  And kill you they will, because at the start of this game, you are mostly helpless.  Your beam attack only reaches a few measly measly meters away, and you have only thirty health.  But collect weapons upgrades, health upgrades, and new attacks (such as the famous screw attack) and by the end of the game, you will feel empowered.
Metroid, like so many other of the experimental games of the era, is not perfect.  The lack of a map system makes navigation nearly impossible, as many areas look alike.  The game very much makes you feel like a rat in a maze.  The jumping is somewhat floaty, but this is forgivable since level design is made to work around it.  There are a few flaws in the level design though.  Vertical passageways are long and tedious to climb and a fall may send you back to the bottom.  There is one room that can only be accessed by blowing a secret hole in the floor, but going down there will yield no rewards and will likely become impossible to climb out of.
Despite its flaws, Metroid is one of the best games on the NES.  It, along with The Legend of Zelda, helped invent gaming from the 90's onward.  It has become one of Nintendo's most prolific and celebrated franchises, with such adored titles as Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and Metroid Prime.  The original received a remake on the Game Boy Advance called Zero Mission, which both expanded the story and improved the graphics and controls.  Metroid shall always be remembered as a progressive title on a system famous for having many of them.

Dear Esther (PC, 2012)

"Dear Esther, the gulls do not land here anymore.  I've noticed that this year, they seem to shun the place.  Maybe it's the depletion of the fishing stock driving them away.  Perhaps it's me.  When he first landed here, Donnelly wrote that the herds were sickly and their shepherds the lowest of the miserable classes that populate these Hebridean islands.  Three hundred years later, even they have departed."

So begins Dear Esther (2012), with your character narrating one of the letters he has written to a woman named Esther.  Who exactly is she?  This is the first of many mysteries that surround this amazing game.  Your character is stranded on an island, which has obviously seen human activity before.  There is a radio tower that blinks faintly in the distance, and he is evidently living inside of a decaying lighthouse.  Whether he came to the island by choice or by accident is irrelevant; his boat has crashed upon its shore, and he is now lost to it.

This game is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.  Originally a modification of Half-Life 2 using the Source engine (developed by independent studio The Chinese Room), this 2012 commercial release of the game is essentially an HD expansion.  The island is gorgeously drawn, reminding me of the grassy beaches of Cape Cod, and the rock formations around northern Michigan.  There is a caves section of the game which blew me away with its grandeur and beauty.  Stalactites and stalagmites create a spiderweb of rock, and water drips from them into cloudy pools on the ground.

So what is the gameplay like?  Well, I wouldn't call this a game to play, more of one to experience.  All you do is explore the island, taking in its majesty, and also collecting clues to a greater mystery.  There are no enemies to fight, there are no puzzles to solve.  There has been a lot of debate as to whether or not Dear Esther can be called a video game.  A critic at Destructoid criticized the game heavily for its minimal level of interaction, calling it "W Key: The Game" (the key that you hold to walk forward).  So, why should you play this game?  Sounds pretty boring.  "Au contrair," I say.  I think that the inclusion of obstacles in this game would be detrimental and jarring to its real purpose:  an intellectual puzzle.

The most interesting part of a mystery is in the solving of it, not the explanation.  Dear Esther knows this, and even in its beautiful final act and conclusion (which I dare not spoil for you) it only raises more questions.  But they are satisfying questions which hold great incentive for the player to re-experience the game multiple times.  Why am I here?  Who is Esther?  Are there any other intelligent beings on this island?  The game offers no explanations, but gives a substantial amount of clues.

From the first moments of the game there is mystery.  Going inside of the lighthouse, you will find that someone has been there also, who has painted the molecule of an alcohol on the wall.  This has thematic relevance, revealed later by one of the character's brilliantly written and acted narrations (done by Nigel Carrington).  He speaks of how Esther died in an automobile accident, and that it was caused by a drunken man whose memory torments the narrator.

The narrator also quotes from the only thing he has in his possession, a book by the cartographer, Donnelly, who came to the island in the 18th century to map the island, and chart the history of its original inhabitant, a hermit named Jakobson.  Donnelly discovered that the hermit came to the island in search of pure solitude, but eventually succumbed to an injury to his leg.  The narrator has also sustained a broken leg, so now he is going to cross the island to complete what Donnelly started, and find his absolution.

More wall paintings are discovered in seaside caves.  Depictions of neurons, nerve endings, more molecular structures.  Eventually symbols from electrical diagrams start popping up, and then whole circuit diagrams.  A painting of five "male" symbols suggests that the painters were five men.  One of the most intriguing pieces of evidence is a congregation of monolithic boulders obviously not set by nature.  In the center, found on the ground, is a chemistry textbook lying next to a copy of the Holy Bible.  These other people were chemists/electricians, but were they also religious?

Religious themes recur throughout the game.  Walking along the beach, the narrator comes across the rotting remains of a ship, only the skeleton is left.  The mast of the ship has come to resemble a cross sitting lonely in the sand.  In the caves, you will find this scrawled on the wall:  "BEHOLD, DAMASCUS IS TAKEN".  If you look carefully, you will find "Acts 22:0" written, and after I looked it up, it made sense.  Acts 22 of the Bible tells of the conversion of Paul the Apostle, his sermon at the city of Damascus (which apparently fell upon deaf ears), and then his arrest.  Perhaps the chemists, after being lost on the island for so long, have turned to religion to comfort them, and now want to convert anyone else who finds the remains of their micro-society.

Dear Esther is a fairly short game, beatable in about fifty minutes if you rush through it, but that is missing the point entirely.  If you stop to look around, collect evidence, and solve the island's mystery you will find an intellectual experience that will linger with you far beyond your completion of it.  This is also the first game that brought me nearly to tears.  The build up to and the conclusion of the game is one of the most emotional and gratifying moments in video gaming that I have experienced.  If we are to accept video games as a legitimate form of art, then this game is an example of the kind of magnum opus that the media can produce.

Yar's Revenge (Atari 2600, 1982)

At a distance, this game will appear to be a jumbled mess of information.  The premise doesn't make even the slightest bit of logical sense.  The screen features a block of random flickering pixels, and each character is a distant abstraction of what they are meant to represent.  And yet, Yar's Revenge (1982) is one of the most finely crafted and enduring games on the Atari 2600, and also my favorite on the system.
The game was designed and programmed by Howard Scott Warshaw of Atari.  Most people will not be able to know him by name, but he was one of Atari's more prolific programmers, having also made the adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark and, yes, the ill-fated ET the Extra-Terrestrial.  This game is proof that ET's failure was not on the part of Warshaw being an incompetent designer (it is, in fact, evidence to the contrary), but Atari's poor business decisions.  His influence on Yar's Revenge's success is a stroke of genius.  Originally meant to be an Atari port of the arcade game Star Castle, which the 2600 would not have been able to support due to technical limitations, Warshaw changed the premise of the game to make it workable.
The premise is this:  you control a housefly trying to fight off an attack by the alien, Yar.  You may move and shoot in eight directions (highly uncommon for Atari shooters).  First, you must shoot down the barrier the Yar hides behind to expose him, while avoiding (what might be) a homing missile.  That flickering area I mentioned earlier?  That is a neutral zone, where the missile cannot kill you if it touches you, but you cannot shoot.  Once the Yar is vulnerable, you touch him to summon a bomb, and aim carefully to hit him with it, which will blow him up and advance you to the next level.  Be careful through, because without much warning, the Yar may decide to fly out and attack you!
This may sound convoluted in theory, but in practice, it is great fun.  This game actually offers a high level of strategy and fair challenge relative to the other games of the age.  If you shoot from a distance, you are safer from the attacks of the Yar and also the missile.  If you draw close, however, you can achieve greater accuracy and speed, at an increased risk.  You must use the neutral zone to your advantage, and since you wrap around the screen (go off one edge and you reappear on the opposite) it can be used to make quick escapes from the missile, which grows progressively faster with each level.
What Mr. Warshaw created is one of the greatest games of its day.  While other Atari games age and/or rot around it, Yar's Revenge stays fresh and fun.  Compare it to his other titles.  While Raiders of the Lost Ark is generally considered to be better than ET, it is still archaic, cryptic, and in some places, dysfunctional.  Yar's Revenge, on the other hand, shows its age only in its visuals.  Howard Scott Warshaw has been unfairly criticized for ET, whose flaws are mostly not his fault.  He ought to be celebrated for the enduring classic that he created.

Limbo (PC, 2010)

A small boy awakens, completely alone, in the woods.  It is not clear to us who he is, but we get the feeling that he is not alone.  The forest opens up to reveal a Stygian river, and a boat takes the boy across.  Damp noises in the distance suggest a lurking evil.  We come across another life-form in the woods on the other side, a giant tarantula.  The boy deters the titanic spider by making it step in a bear trap, but is later caught in its web.  He manages to wriggle out and escape, but is still under pursuit.  He finally takes care of the spider by dropping a boulder on its head.
He encounters some other young boys, but they don’t want anything to do with him.  The boy approaches one of their camps, and is greeted by the dead body of another, hanging from a noose.  They set traps for him, but the boy evades all of them, and getting through the tribal camps, he comes across a massive machine.  When he turns it on, the machine starts the rain.  He takes refuge from the maelstrom inside of a factory, but it will prove to be no more a sanctuary then the forest.
Limbo (2010) is an indie game directed by Danish game designer Arnt Jensen.  It seems that the indie movement of our time is bringing with it a movement of video game auteurs the likes of which was previously inconceivable.  The early craftsmen of gaming, such as Shigeru Miyamoto, David Crane, and Hideo Kojima, are the equivalent to film’s John Ford, Cecil B DeMille, and Alfred Hitchcock.  Similarly, Arnt Jensen, Suda 51, and Tim Schaffer are equivalent to Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Stanley Kubrick.
The game itself is a 2D platformer with puzzles, but it would seem to be much more than that.  Much of the game gets its marvelous effect from atmosphere, storytelling, and a logical mystery that challenges the player.  The game is entirely black and white.  All characters and objects are silhouettes, and the boy is the only one having eyes.  Along the way, he will encounter the giant spider, other children (a possible reference to “Lord of the Flies”), mind-controlling worms, and creatures that eat said worms.
The atmosphere is constantly unsettling.  The air is stagnant with the feeling of dread and foreboding.  The boy will have to make some dark choices to survive.  For instance, to evade a trap (a giant press that will be set off by a trip wire) you must use the body of a dead boy to set it off, allowing you to pass unharmed.  This game features some heavy gore, mostly by implication, which makes it seem more gruesome than the bloodiest games.  I’m not fazed when I see an alien grinded by a chainsaw in Gears of War, but when the boy in Limbo falls from a great height and I hear the snap of his bones, and then see his body go limp and his eyes shut, I cringe.
This is a fairly short game, beatable in about two hours, but it is such an emotional, intellectual, and challenging experience that you will want to play it multiple times.  I suppose it is better that I want there to be more of the game than feeling like it overstays its welcome.  The ending does feel somewhat abrupt, but it is a mind-bending scene that creates an interesting new puzzle to solve, which has been in my brain like one of those worms, driving me forward until I reach some absolute answer.

Gargoyle's Quest (Game Boy, 1991)

Capcom was one of the most prolific game developers from the mid-80's to late-90's.  On the NES, they created Mega Man, Bionic Commando, and had a relationship with Disney that produced some of the best licensed titles of all time.  So in 1990, when the Game Boy came along, they mostly did what all other third parties did:  they made watered-down ports of their console games.  There was one huge exception though, and that was Gargoyle's Quest (1991), a completely original Game Boy game that took big risks, made grand innovations, and is still just as good today because of that.
You play as Firebrand, a gargoyle called back to the ghoul realm when an army of "destroyers" attack, attempting to take it over.  Legend tells of the Red Blaze, a mutant gargoyle, who defeated the destroyers several millennia ago.  Firebrand must become the Red Blaze and save his people from the wicked invaders. Unlike most video game plots of the era, this one has twists and turns that yield some real surprises.  At one point in the game you run into a town where the villagers (who are zombies and demons) call you a fraud and tell you that another gargoyle is the true Red Blaze because he has the eternal candle.  Of course you defeat him in battle and prove yourself.
The game does well to keep you engaged in the story which seems massive when compared to other Game Boy games, and it does this through the clever mixing of genres.  There is an overworld map where you go to different towns and get into random enemy encounters.  Action segments of the game are done in a 2D platforming style, well suited to a handheld game.  In these action stages, you can jump, fly (for a limited time), cling to walls, and breathe fire.  I've never been a fan of the "double-jump" in gaming, because it almost never makes physical sense.  In a game like Super Smash Bros, it just seems like the characters are bouncing off of thin air.  In this game however, it makes perfect sense because the main character has wings.
This is also complimented by level design and upgrades.  Each level has a different concentration and variation on different aspects of the gameplay which keeps things interesting.  Some levels may have a focus on combat while others have very few enemies, being more like obstacle courses.  The levels are all well designed, but being on the tiny Game Boy screen things can feel a bit cramped sometimes.  There is a system of upgrades to go with the other RPG elements of the game, which will grant you more health, higher jumps and longer flying times.  The last level is a masterfully crafted combination of everything you have learned.
This is a great game, but also a flawed one.  As I mentioned before, there are random encounters on the map screen (which are looked down upon in traditional RPGs) which play like miniature platforming stages.  These break up the pacing a little and are the cause of a few undeserved deaths.  The difficulty curve is also a little weird.  Like Kid Icarus, some of the harder stages come early on when you are weaker, and then when you've gained more health things get a little easier.  The final confrontation with King Breager is also kind of anti-climatic.  He cheaply blocks most of your attacks by holding his arms up and fires homing sparks at you, and after exhausting several lives trying to strategise, I finally found a sweet spot by his head where I spammed attacks at him and won.  It was disappointing, to say the least.
Don't get me wrong though, this game is definitely worth playing.  In twenty years, it has aged surprisingly well, and its great points overshadow its bad ones.  It offers a great challenge without being terribly frustrating.  It experiments with gameplay styles in a way that makes it a wholly unique experience.  Capcom is known for making games that push the graphical capabilities of their platforms to the limit, and this is no exception.  This is one of the best looking and most atmospheric Game Boy games.  On the NES, there would come a Gargoyle's Quest II, and a third game on the SNES called Demon's Crest.  The critic Derek Alexander said that this is Capcom's "most consistently good series to date," and I can't disagree.

Bit.Trip Beat (Wii, 2009)

One trend of indie gaming is the use of a retro video game aesthetic, which heralds back to the days of the Atari 2600 or NES.  This may be due to nostalgic love or limited resources, but has a negative tendency to date these games to a day before they were made, and become a cliche.  One game where this art style fits perfectly though, is Bit.Trip Beat (2009), a rhythm/music game based on the idea of the original Pong, and taking it to the absolute limit of what it can be.
You control a paddle that moves up and down, and must deflect squares that fly at you.  When you hit them, they beep, adding to the background music that plays, and forms the melody.  Simple in design, but complicated in practice.  There are a variety of squares, that move in a straight line, or zigzag, or split into multiples, or connect together to be knocked back in unison.  There are three different levels (or songs) and each plays for about fifteen to twenty minutes.  This may not seem like much gameplay, but the incentive to go back and improve how well you can do gives it replay value.
The quality of the music is another great reason to play this game many times.  The songs are a mixture of retro-video game and electronic styles, with blips and bleeps making up the notes, and a steady drum beat that grows louder and increases tension as the levels grow more difficult.  At the end of each level, there is a boss, based on different retro games, like a boss where you play Pong against four other paddles.  This game offers great difficulty and fun, that steadily increases as you progress.
Bit.Trip Beat puts you in a different plane of reality.  Its abstract visuals, simple-yet-addicting gameplay, and trance-inducing music begin to take hold of your mind.  Is there a real story to this game?  I don't think so.  The main character from the games, Commander Video, appears in cut-scenes in Bit.Trip Beat, but would not get any semblance of story until the later releases in the series.  Next would be Bit.Trip Runner, a platforming-rhythm game where you actually play as the Commander.
I would compare this game most closely to abstract art.  Pixel art would be what most people would instantly think of, but pixel art is itself, abstract.  An arrangement of squares meant to represent something else.  Many people confuse abstraction for being completely non-objective, but no.  It is the most basic representation of its subject.  One scene from the game that impresses me is during the song "growth".  In the background, you can see a brain assembling, made of cubes.  First the brain stem is attached to the cerebellum, then the cerebrum slides into place.  A pair of optic nerves attached to cube eyes completes the surreal image.  Not that you would see that clearly while trying to deflect squares.