*note: Sorry for the long delay between posting this entry, this piece was originally slated to be posted on the night of September 28th 2009. However, something horrible happened in the lives of all of my friends and family members on that day, and I was in no mood for this post. My good friend Ricci Sepulveda drowned while out at Canyon Lake, and I put any work that I was doing on hold. Now that I have had the mind to finish it, I will now post it this morning. Sorry for the delay, and I hope you enjoy! The following is the original text, written over the matter of several weeks due to the aforementioned tragedy.*

Alright, after DA decided to take a massive crap involving the 3 and a half hours of work I did on my fucking original post of this subject, I have no choice but to revise and try to remember everything. Anyway, High 5/Low 5 is basically a series of blogs that I am planning on turning into a normal thing where I list my top 5 favorite instances in the subject matter, which I refer to as the golden rim of the barrel. After that, I list the top 5 of the worst instances of the subject matter, under the guise of the golden turd lying dormant at the bottom of the barrel. Sometimes, I will include an honorable mention and/or what I like to call the ‘slash award’, which is awarded to the item that fits directly in the middle of the field, as neutral as can be, and practically acts as the ‘/’ in High5/Low 5. In this issue, I will be discussing my High 5/Low 5 of Gaming Genres.

I will begin the countdown at number 5 on my list of High 5 genres. In the number 5 spot considered as just inches above the pile of pig crap which fills the barrel, is the Adventure game genre. Adventure games have been around almost as long as the computer game, beginning on large floppy drives and consisting of text based adventures such as ‘Adventure’ and Zork. In these games, the screen will tell you what you see, and will feature a text entry bar at the bottom for you. Typical player responses included such phrases as ‘ick up’, ‘examine’, and ‘open’ or ‘close’, followed by the object of your desire (example: OPEN DOOR) which to me was actually a little confusing, especially when you were stuck in a maze and had to type GO SOUTH or MOVE WEST with no visual representation of what the maze looked like, using nothing more than your imagination. Also, most of the time the commands I typed it were never recognized. I don’t understand why ‘OPEN LEGS’ made no sense to Zork.

Later games in the genre introduced point and click interfaces with graphics instead of text for a better representation of the world you were in. Examples of this are Companions of Xanth (possibly one of my favorites), Myst, and LucasArts’ adventure series’ such as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. These adventure games racked your brain with complicated puzzles and interesting ways to experiment with your surroundings. The interesting thing about most adventure games is that unlike most genres you have no stamina. If you are allowed to die in these games, they are usually caused by your own negligence such as causing a cave-in or pissing off a troll, and they happen in one instant, leaving you with the option to start over, or in more complex games to continue from before you ran into your confronting experience. Lately, Adventure games had all but died out, but they seem to be having a comeback in the form of games such as Zack and Wiki for the Wii, and the recent re-release of such games as Sam and Max (though not really a re-release, but more of a sequel) and Monkey Island. The point is that these games do have an audience, and the new games are just as good as what we remembered in the golden age of gaming. The adventure genre can also go so far as to include greats such as the Legend of Zelda series (which is also probably the only example I have given where you can die easily because combat is real time, thus being an ‘action/adventure’ title), and the lesser known (but loved my myself) Hamtaro handheld games. These are probably what I think of most when I hear the term Adventure game, though in the back of my mind, I still see the arrow pointing at ‘ICK UP ROCK’ and ‘THROW AT TROLL’.

Number 4 on the list is First Person and Third Person shooters, hereby referenced as FPS/TPS. I probably should not have categorized both of these in the same number, but the reason this genre even made my list was because of Star Wars Battlefront, which was by default a TPS game, but could also be an FPS. Famous FPS games include DOOM, Halo, and my personal favorite, TimeSplitters. My favorite part of being in a FPS game is becoming the character by literally seeing through their eyes. TPS games obviously have the opposite, almost Role Playing effect by actively seeing that you have taken over the persona of someone else as opposed to feeling like YOU are the hero. This is not a bad thing, and the team based competition that has grown over the years for this genre has certainly put a good word for it on my list. Since I always shy away from online gaming because I’d rather see the face of the person I’m playing with, I only get my experience from either sharing the same screen, or on rare occasions, linking the game systems together on independent televisions, which is 1,000,000 times more fun than playing with 8 year old idiots who win with cheap shots for lack of sportsmanship. Not to mention it is priceless seeing the face of your buddy when he realizes the sticky pink thing on his helmet is much more deadly than a cute little spider.

As far as TPS games go, it’s more or less the same deal as FPS games, although designers tend to get a little complicated by adding Action/Adventure styles to the typical shooter gameplay, resulting in such games as Tomb Raider and Duke Nukem: Time to Kill, among others. In all fairness, these games were not portrayed as well as FPS games because of the lack of accurate manual aim, and had to rely mostly on auto aiming. This is especially true in games like the GTA series, which while it is typically a TPS, it’s also a driving/racing game, and more of what I would categorize as a ‘sandbox’ title. However, since there is no sandbox genre on this list, I’m going to write it off as a driving/TPS game. With that in mind, I now bring your attention to number 3.

Driving and Racing games enter the number 3 spot on my High 5 list. Now if you know me, you probably also know that I have a lot of fun with driving. Naturally, my love of cars went hand-in-hand with the many driving/racing games of my time, and it has been a strong genre in my library since I played games. After all, my very first game I ever played was Excitebike on the NES. When I think driving games, I think of Driver, Grand Theft Auto, and the third game on the Die Hard Trilogy compilation game, which is widely considered the BEST Playstation game ever made as far as I am concerned. As driving games are fairly rare in contrast to racing games and that there is not much else to say about conventional driving games, I’m going to delve more into the genre of racing. Now when I say racing, I am more geared towards the arcade style racing games, such as Hydro Thunder, Burnout, and later Need for Speed games. I don’t usually play simulation racers such as Gran Turismo, Forza, or Project Gotham, but to be fair, I do own at least one of each of these titles, and I do play them from time to time. However, I do prefer looking badass drifting effortlessly through a turn against traffic than fighting my piece of soap that looks like a skyline as it slides at 14 mph into the wall of a slight left turn while the NPC racers casually go about on their perfect line on the track, barely bothered by my frightening advances… That’s why the replays always crack me up.

My favorite game in this genre is neither simulation, nor is it arcade (though it can be considered arcade, especially since it HAS an arcade version) and it has to be the Mario Kart series, hands down. I tried to pick my favorite from the bunch, but I love all of them. If pushed to say, I’d have to pick Mario Kart 64 just because it has the advantage of being the first one I played, and it made me fall in love with kart racing in general, although nobody can do it quite as well as Mario.

Getting closer to the golden rim of the barrel comes my number 2 pick: Light Gun and Rail Shooters. Granted Light Gun and Rail Shooter are two different genres of games; they had enough in common to both tie at the number two spot. Examples of Light Gun games are House of the Dead, Virtua Cop, and Carnevil, which all started in the arcade, and do the best in the arcade with use of a custom gun controller on the unit with a series of mirrors, and a sophisticated system of light and lasers to add their unique control to these games. Some light gun games made it to the homes as well, but they were expensive if you needed the gun controller, and some just said fuck it and had it where you controlled a crosshair on the screen with the joypad. In light gun games, you have almost no ability to control the exact movement of your character in which you are in FPS mode looking through their eyes, once again giving the illusion that it’s really you shooting at the things popping out at you. These games never get old to me, and even though I’m not moving, I do like that my character at least seems to know where he/she is going, and leaves the shooting to me. The only problem is I hate that goddamn dog.

In rail shooters, well, these can be best described as playing a Shmup (Shoot Em’ Up) game such as Darius or Raiden from a 3D perspective behind the character/ship. Examples of this are Tempest, Panzer Dragoon, and my all time favorite series, Star Fox. If light gun games are considered the FPS of this genre, rail shooters would be the TPS games. Rail shooters allow you limited movement while continuously moving in a preset direction similar to the way a light gun game works, minus the expensive gun controller. In some games, you can speed up or slow down your progress to the end such as in Star Fox, even though you cannot physically turn away from the preset path. Even though the games in this genre are seemingly very simple, they are difficult to master. As light gun games were primary for arcades, rail shooters were primary for home consoles, although one of the first rail shooters was tempest which was in arcades in the days of vector graphics which were just simple 3 dimensional wireframes; which brings me to my number one favorite gaming genre of all time…

The best gaming genre on the planet, and the golden rim of the barrel, is Beat Em’ Ups. I have never, and will never get tired of these games! It’s surprising how something as simple as walking down the street and hitting the same two buttons to flatten baddies left and right so repetitively never gets repetitive, especially when you got one or more friends helping you out, or fucking you up, lol! Popular games, and some of my all-time favorite games, are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, Streets of Rage games, and Battletoads games. These suckers were very popular in the late 80’s and into the mid to late 90’s, until they all but died off turning into the new century. However, I was turned back on to these brawlers with the XBLA release of castle crashers, which singlehandedly revolutionized the genre using simple RPG elements, and simply providing a solid beat em’ up experience, especially with support for 3 of your dumb little buddies. I also hear news of another beat em’ up game coming out soon for major consoles which involved fairy tale characters cutting each other open…. sounds like a date with destiny for me. Here’s to beat em’ ups coming back to mainstream, and for a goddamn release of Streets of Rage 4!!! Another Battletoads would be great too RARE, or just release a revised port of Battletoads and Double Dragon: Ultimate Team to XBLA!!!!! By the way, if you want to know who to talk to about making the best brawlers in the world, Konami is the place for you 

Well, that’s it for the High 5 section of my review, now it’s time to plug your nose, and roll up your sleeves, cuz’ now were gonna dig deep into that barrel of pig crap until we reach the golden turd and scrape it from the bottom of the barrel. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Low 5 section of this blog!

In spot number 5, right at the surface of the pig crap, we have the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPG’s. For sake of argument, I’ll also include regular campaign RPG games. Now, my biggest piece of pig crap under my nails is the MMO. Typical games that fit this genre are World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, and Star Wars Galaxies. As you should know from reading this, I am not a fan of online multiplayer, let alone a game that is entirely dependant on the concept of playing online. Secondly, the presentation to these games is always shit. The in-game models are stiff as a horse’s dick, the gameplay is dull and has large pockets of time where all you are doing is gaining experience by camping and killing the same enemies over and over again, and looting the poor creatures to the point where a butterfly can drop 5,000 gold and a piano after you step on it. Finally, these games are useless for my type of gaming because after awhile, the servers shut down for good, and the game is then unplayable. I like to go back and play games that I played 10 years ago, and MMO’s simply will not connect to a dead server, not to mention all of the good MMO games need you to pay to play. I know that there are free MMO games available, but the only one I had any fun with for any amount of time was Ragnarok, and even then I only played for about two weeks then moved on.

As for regular RPG games, I like these better than MMO games, and they seem to be in contrast as the pig crap that gets stuck in the tiny ridges of your finger prints, where the MMO is the giant sharp slab under your middle finger. Famous RPG’s are the Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger/Cross, and Pokemon. My nitpick with RPG games is that most of them rely too much on chance, and the endless item collecting and stat building that gets to the point of containing so much information that you have to remember, one day you decide to take a break with another game, and then you come back and have no idea what the hell you were supposed to be doing. The same can be said for adventure games, and it is a general nitpick. I also hate that even when you are trying to get somewhere, every 5 steps you run into a random battle. This is true for almost every RPG I’ve ever played, especially Pokemon. I can understand the feeling of collecting stuff, but it’s tedious when it’s the entire goal of the game, especially when it’s almost impossible to find all of the creatures or artifacts in the damn game! Now, like I said, RPG’s aren’t that bad, but with all the things I mentioned above, I don’t have the attention span to stare off at something as unattractive as the models in an RPG, and as cheap as the fights are. Granted not all RPG’s share this quality, but the majority of them make you wonder. My favorite parts of RPG’s usually are the cutscenes, especially with the Playstation RPG’s. My favorites of this genre are the Paper Mario/Mario RPG series, and Parasite Eve, which I guess can be categorized as survival horror, but it’s still RPG as far as I’m concerned. Also, I have noticed that RPG’s get much more fun when the tired ‘turn based’ battle system is instead a ‘real-time’ battle system, and it feels like an advanced 3D single player brawler, and that is good. Kingdom Hearts, Fable/Fable 2, and .Hack (which I have only watched others play) use this system, and the quality of the gameplay improves on top of that. Final Fantasy’s boring gameplay department could learn a little something from these guys. But enough of the surface of the pig crap lets move along, and get our hands dirty.

At number 4, we got Real-Time Strategy games, such as Advance Wars, Starcraft, and Civilization. The problem with this genre as opposed to every other game on this list is that I simply do not have the leadership skills for these games. It’s a shame because I look at the concept, and I can see where fans of the genre have so much fun, and I know I would have fun with it too. The difference is that they all know what they are doing, and all I’m trying to do is send my entire fleet off blindly towards the enemy, which rarely ever gains me a victory. I can’t really fathom any better tactic than to surround the enemy from all sides, and attack with brute force. Like I said, I’m not a commander; I’m more of a grunt. However, I do have one exception to the rule, and that is the wonderful world of the Sims. I love playing Sims, controlling the simple mundane lives of virtual people, and ordering them around or simply relaxing and spying on my little families…

At number 3, which is just deep enough to where you can’t see your hand anymore, we have Sports games. I don’t think I would have even added sports games to this list at all, but the reason I put them so low to the ugly golden turd is because every year there are like 5 games for the same sport, and they barely differ from one another. In fact, this genre has very few saving graces, such as the games that don’t take themselves too seriously like Mutant Football, Blitz, and NBA 98. I do enjoy a few sports games, but for the most part, they are all the same bullshit. The only sports related game I ever find myself playing is Golf and Tennis. I hate to watch them, but they are so simple, it’s strangely addictive to play them. Golf games come in many different forms in the presence of Hot Shots and Mario titles, and Tennis has the same advantages with games like Virtua Tennis and TopSpin. I played NBA Live 98 on Playstation when I was a kid, and most of the fun came in the form of cheat codes. The games are completely fine by themselves, but why do you have to have several titles released that are exactly the same? I was never raised around the concept of sports, so I never gained any incentive to play the games, so this genre gets a well earned and fair stay at the middle of my Low 5.

At number two, we reach just inches from the golden turd buried up to your arm in pig crap, occupied by the genre that is known as the Fighting game. It’s a little strange that even though Brawlers ended up on my number one spot, that fighting games would be so close to the bottom. I can’t understand it either, but it might have something to do with the ridiculous number of fighting games that have been released over the years, and the usual practice of having complicated move systems, such as hitting up 5 times, backing up twice, hitting punch, kick, and grabbing your balls while you spin around and whistle Dixie while a teenage drunk driver shoves his cock up your ass to shoot a fireball out from under your bangs. Your typical fighting games include titles such as Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Soul Caliber. All of these games have huge fan bases of guys and girls who racked up several days worth of hours at the arcades playing these quarter eaters, and they strike fear into the hearts of guys like me, who can’t even get a foot in the door for a decent chance. Of course, I never liked these games, because whenever I do try to play a fighting game, it always comes down to the fine art of button mashing, which rarely gains me a KO, and if it does, I always die in the third round anyway.

I do have an exception to the rule, and these games are omitted from the fighting genre, simply because they don’t follow the same formula over and over again. I am speaking of course of the Super Smash Bros. series of games. These games have a genre all their own, which I like to call ‘Sumo Rules’. For those of you who might not be familiar with what I mean by that, it’s actually very simple. It’s a lot more fun trying to knock somebody off the stage by racking up percentage points which makes them fly farther the higher the number gets, than it is to simply punch someone in the face until they wuss out and fall over. I also find this method fairer for newcomers to the genre than the traditional fighting game. Not to mention Smash bros. is the perfect party game, and that alone separates its greatness from traditional fighters. My only complaint; Why the hell are there so many fans of fighting games where 20 new fighting games come out each year all exactly the same, and yet a game like Smash only comes out once every console generation when they have an equally solid fan base? I demand more sumo rules games in the future, and until my wish is granted, fighting games shall remain buried in pig crap as far as I’m concerned.

Finally, the moment you have all been waiting for. The lowest of the low, the bottom of the barrel, the greasy golden turd, what could it possibly be? Well, I think this is the best choice I could have come up with, because I’m guessing that about 99 percent of folks who read this will agree with me. This genre was created in the early nineties, when computers and video game consoles were adapting to the magic of Compact Disk technology. In order to show off the capabilities of this curious new technology, an entirely new genre was created to showcase what these new systems were capable of. Ladies and gentlemen, may I now present to you, the golden turd of Gaming genres… FMV GAMES. FMV, or Full Motion Video, was mainly lazy gimmick software, featuring a video that was smaller than the screen with terrible video quality, abysmal acting, and the most terrible gameplay that can be found almost anywhere, as well as being showcased almost entirely on Sega’s Sega CD and Saturn. The typical kinds of FMV games are in three categories; QTE games, Light Gun, and Multimedia Editing games.

QTE, short for Quick-Time Event games were prominently an example of interactive television, requiring the player to hit buttons at the right time to continue playing. If you hit the wrong button or are too fast or too slow, you lose. Not all of these were bad, but for the most part, they should never have taken off. It was a fun experiment when Dragons Lair first used it on Laserdiscs in arcades, but the video game community quickly jumped on to the fad, running it into the ground before it ever had a chance to make any difference. A few games in this category are Space Ace, Time Gal, and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (Sega CD). Light Gun FMV games are a mixed bag. As I stated before I am a huge fan of light gun games, and FMV light gun games were fairly common during the outbreak during the early 90’s. In fact, I think this is the only genre that still uses FMV’s from time to time today, and the use of FMV technology certainly did give light gun games a good push. I think the best example of FMV light gun games is the cult classic Area 51.

Finally, Media Editor games are just that. The player is given a scenario such as mixing a music video together or even something a little more creative, such as playing as Kevin from Home Alone, watching a house full of gaggling girls, and setting off traps to save them from mysterious men wearing black. The game I just described is Night Trap, the cult classic in this genre. For the most part, replay value of FMV games is moderate, to very low. I can see how light gun games can bring you back because campaigns can last a few hours. Once you get used to Night Trap, you can beat it in less than 30 minutes. The entire genre is a mixed bag, but the examples I have given are the only verified decent games, floating atop an ocean of crap. It’s no wonder FMV games have died out, and today’s games don’t need to use live action video anymore because we are frighteningly close to emulating 100 percent a real person with polygons.

Well, that’s it for my very first High 5/Low 5 list. I would like to give honorable mention to the Gauntlet series which by itself almost made an appearance as the genre for dungeon crawlers for its awesome multiplayer.

Also, I award the slash award to Platforming games. This is because, let’s face it. Sonic and Mario platformers were the shit. However, Busby ruined the scale.

Do you have your own idea of how my list should have turned out? Did your favorite genre end up on my Low 5? Feel free to share your own list in the comments either here on DA, or on facebook!

~AshFoxX

R.I.P Ric, we miss you.