It’s hard to believe it’s already been about three weeks since I ran my very first convention – a culmination of eight months of planning and four straight days of labor, capping off an extremely busy spring semester for me. While the convention was of the anime nature, of course, tucked away in the corner of the building, there was a room filled with every anime fan’s second-best friend … well, wait … that might be Pocky, so we’ll just say video games are an anime fan’s third-best friend.
While most of the gamers attempted to hijack all six televisions with Super Smash Bros., I was stunned to see the convention’s college advisor to bring in a Playstation game I haven’t seen in probably 10 years. In 1997, Konami’s Tokyo development studio released a quirky, four-player arena battle game under the title Poitter’s Point. It was a bizarre game filled with crazy characters, environments and concepts and to boil it down, the object of the game was to run around the arena, picking up any item players can find and throwing them at the other players until they were knocked unconscious. The wackiness of the game made many believe the title would never be destined to release in the United States, but a mere three months after the Japanese release, Konami proved us wrong by releasing the title under the name Poy Poy. However, North America seemed to be the only “big three” territory that didn’t appreciate the thought with a purchase as only Europe and Japan received the game’s updated Poitter’s Point 2.
Upon seeing my friend’s copy, I was immediately impressed with his span of games appreciation, but it seemed I was the only person at the entire convention who had even heard of the game before, let alone played it. At this time, this is when I noticed that the Gamecubes were full of players going to town in the same game they had played a million times over, while the Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation and the import games on the Playstation 2 were virtual ghost towns. Are people really that uninterested in playing something new and original? In reality, this convention could be the first and only chance in a lifetime people would be able to experience some of the games we had running, but I suppose flexing their multiplayer muscle in a game they play on a daily basis was personally more appealing. As we live in an age of “sequel-itis ,” I suppose it’s time to accept the fact originality and unique game play experiences are a dying breed.
While in today’s world developers don’t want to take risks and are making mad money off players who are content in playing the same thing over and over, I remember the NES being a bit of a different breed. By now, the mystery of Super Mario Bros. 2 has long been solved by anyone who has the Internet or a friend in the know. While Japan received direct sequels for its Mario and Zelda games that aimed to challenge fans of the original games, America’s Nintendo felt U.S. gamers wouldn’t appreciate being challenged so much and stated players would want sequels that provided radically new game play experiences. Thus, Doki Doki Panic got stripped of its Arabian storybook theme and the Famicom Disc System’s remixed Zelda game completely missed the U.S. (that probably had something to do with the fact the disc system never released in the U.S., though). Even though the changes baffled many gamers, we still ate it up.
But, perhaps, this leads back to the fact that gamers in the VCS and Atari eras had a lot fewer choices than gamers do today. I can remember as a kid being desperate to play any new game I could find, regardless of its genre, publisher, developer or system. Also, perhaps, with the shift in culture, the “cool” video game kids only stick with the proven titles in order to show people that they “get it.” Whatever the reason, what baffles me is why in today’s world, when there are so few barriers around video games anymore, that people aren’t willing to reach out and grab something they’ve never seen or played before. I could only dream of importing games as a kid and back then, I wouldn’t even begin to know how to tell someone how they could get a game from Japan. Today, even a five-year old can ship a game from Japan with the click of a mouse. If I didn’t know what a game was as child, I had to ask a friend, look at the back of the box or hope a magazine covered it. Today, that same mouse click will bring up reviews, screenshots, videos, release dates, publisher information and more about any game that ever existed, period. So just why do people still insist on unfamiliarity as a means to shun away games they don’t know about?
I won’t let it bug me too much, though. People can still claim ignorance and lack interest in Poy Poy. That just meant I could walk up and play it whenever I wanted to during the convention.
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