The seventh generation of consoles was unkind to a lot of seminal Japanese game developers. Be it the advent of HD gaming and its more expensive demand on visual fidelity, the sudden emergence of Western game developers onto the console scene and taking over, or Nintendo’s new focus on a non-gaming crowd, it was a time when many of the most prominent publishers and studios of the 90’s were left scrambling to maintain relevance, appeal to a Western audience, and abandon much of what had made them a success in the first place.
Capcom is one of the most prominent examples of such attempts to appeal to the young new Western gamer. The reinvention of old icons such as Bionic Commando into a gruff, mean looking soldier with an edgy attitude and unnecessarily dark past; handing off new successes like Dead Rising to Western studios for sequels that failed to capture self-aware wackiness that the first wave of fans fell in love with; chasing co-op trends by forcing them into their Resident Evil franchise, in addition to spending unreasonable amounts of time and money on a nonsensical campaign filled with so much explosive noise but meager substance. There were still occasional gems such as Dragon’s Dogma being released under the publisher, but most players that discovered the studio on the NES, Super Nintendo, PlayStation, or even in the arcades were becoming increasingly disappointed, disenfranchised, and seemingly abandoned.
Somewhere around the turn of generations, however, as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sailed into the sunset and the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were leaving port, Capcom had changed course. While I think it’s a simplification to blame outsourcing to foreign studios as the cause of Capcom’s losses, I do believe the shift back to internal development has forced Capcom to tighten their belts, refocus, and simply do what they do best. The release of Resident Evil VII in 2017 was effectively the start of a brand new era for the company, and now, four years later, I feel as if we’re seeing them truly hit their stride. It is possible that Capcom has never been as good as they are now.
I don’t know the last time I spent so many hours playing games in a single year as I had this one, but it still wasn’t enough to get to all the titles I yearned to play. Admittedly, 2021 was overall a more positive experience for me than 2020 had been despite continued struggles to better balance mental health and all that other lame junk. Whether I’ve steadily been doing better on that front or the greater quantity of top notch releases are the primary reason it was a better year remains a mystery. All I know is I’ve even had a good time with some of the year’s greater let downs or disappointments.
That I became more invested in streaming games may have also contributed to my enjoyment. I was able to exercise some creativity in overlays, broadcasting myself creating the sort of cartoonish artwork that I hadn’t been drawing in a long time, and even figuring out a method of transitioning the Eh! Steve! Podcast to video. It has allowed me to connect with others via the platform, and has now given me a way to collaborate with Shamus Young. While a good chunk of my gaming time is still done as a solitary experience, streaming has helped me remain social, which has been especially useful as the old Destiny 2 fireteam has all but disbanded.
What I wish to discuss, however, are the games that really helped shape this year for me. Before I discuss specific releases or studios, I’d like to go over some of the broad strokes of games discovery, gaming habits, and my approach to purchases and games completion. This is the year that I’ve put my money where my mouth is in terms of declarations of what is and isn’t a better manner to spend one’s time, and it has ultimately contributed to why I’ve felt all the more positive towards the hobby in 2021. It will be interesting to look back at the end of next year and see if many of these habits will have only grown or will continue to ring true.
I vaguely remember one school morning when I, a pimple-faced freshman in high school, met up with one of my closest friends for our usual round of pre-homeroom chatter. With a mocking grin on his face, he informed me that Microsoft was making a “Direct X Box”, a brand new console to compete with Sony and Nintendo. His laughter and dismissal were understandable at the time, for conventional wisdom held that, much like political parties, no third system could possibly survive. We had watched as the Atari Jaguar went extinct, were barely familiar with the existence of the 3DO before it crashed and burned, had witnessed the SEGA Saturn barely make a name for itself next to the N64 and Sony PlayStation, and were mourning the inevitable demise of SEGA as a console manufacturer. The Dreamcast was failing to make a dent in the market while all eyes were on the PlayStation 2 and upcoming Nintendo Dolphin. Your best bet was to dethrone one of the top dogs just as Sony had done against SEGA, and there was no foreseeable way that Microsoft could kick either Sony or Nintendo to the curb.
This was nothing to say of Microsoft’s reputation at the time. We were in the middle of the disastrous Windows ME, perhaps the most buggy and crash-happy operating system I’ve still ever used in my life. You were more fortunate to be running Windows 2000 instead, though it, too, fell victim to the dreaded Blue Screen of Death on a fairly regular basis. For a bunch of young punk teens that were witness to the birth of the Internet age, however, we were also becoming increasingly aware of the limitations and inconvenience of Microsoft’s proprietary measures. MS Paint was vastly inferior to any other image editing program, be they free like GIMP or more costly like Adobe Photoshop and its affordable Elements line. Windows Media Player was an unnecessarily large application both in screen real estate and resources, swiftly replaced by the likes of Winamp for music by most. This was not long after Microsoft was taken to trial for an attempted monopoly by bundling their Office software, and were effectively seen as an evil, world consuming empire of gluttonous greed.
Nonetheless, I shrugged my shoulders and told my friend I’d wait and see what they did. We still did not have enough information on what the system would look like, how it would differentiate itself, and what games would be on it, and until Sony came along with the PlayStation no one expected SEGA to be conquered by a new challenger so easily.
Four years later, this time a taller, hairier, and somewhat less pimple-faced freshman in College, I had packed both my Xbox and GameCube to occupy my dorm room for gaming. The PlayStation 2 was left at home to gather dust, for all I had cared.
Comments