How The Game Is Played

Who says Java games have to be big?

I'd like to take a moment to spotlight a very interesting competition going on right now: The JavaUnlimited 4K Game Competition

This is the second 4K competition JavaUnlimited has held and the results of the first one were suprisingly creative and fun. There is an entire thread on JGO just examining what makes 4K games so much fun to write and to play. To my mind it falls into the same area as why Classic Games are experiencing such a resurgance.

The fact of the matter is that while games have grown exponentially more complex, expensive, and hard to create over the years, they haven't necessarily gotten much more fun. Simple games provide an outlet at a very core level of our mind, basic pattern matching and simple reaction timing. They don't ask us to spend months to figure them out nor do they require teams of artists to realize. In the end, they don't require us to work at playing the way modern games do.

If you haven't played any classic video games in awhile, you really should. Grab one of the many emulators such as MAME or JEMU and score some ROM images. (Please don't ask me where to get ROM images, That is technically illegal and Sun would not appreciate my distributing such information directly or indrectly through my blog.) Or do a google on "Classic Games" and try some of the many clones out there. Then ask yourself what percentage of your play-time playing a modern game is spent really having fun, versus the percentage of the time you just spent with a classic game that was spent having fun.

We have reached an age of over-production in the game-space. We can do almost anything we ever dreamed of doing in a game... but does that necessarily mean we should? Maybe in reaching for the stars we've lost our footing. I think its worth revisiting these old-style games and at least asking that question.

My final comment. In Java we have also now reached the point where we can do almost any kind of game, from fast First Person Shooter to 3D Real Time Strategy. But in the elation over our new found power, lets not forget the joys of the simpler things in life!

Long live the 4K games!

Posted at 01:57PM Dec 17, 2005 by gameguy in Java  |