Sunday Thoughts: Onwards & Upwards

Two years ago I, like most other gamers in the world, played Grand Theft Auto IV and was sucked into the wonderful world of Liberty City. A few weeks later I was lucky enough to find myself in Brooklyn for a course I was taking. My time in the borough was a great one and was certainly enough to let me know that Rockstar had nailed the look of the place but it’s not till now, two years later, that I’ve been able to return, properly explore the iconic Manhattan island and realise that when people say GTA IV perfected its digital city that they absolutely meant it.

As my group and I decided upon where to visit the question was posed, “Where can we find a museum? Isn’t there a famous art one?” I instinctively replied, “Yes! There’s one in Central Park.” I shot up some homies there in GTA IV. An hour later, we arrived at the Met and sure enough, it was there. Constantly, throughout the day I was able to gauge my location and decide upon the right direction to walk due to my time in New York’s console counterpart.

As I emerged from the sprawling metropolis on the lower east side, I found myself under the highway I’d experienced many a chase on during GTA IV’s latter levels. As predicted, walking in it’s shadow to the south of the island brought me to the ferry I knew would power past the Statue of Liberty. From the vessel I could spot the park where the army set up base in Prototype and the exact buildings I used to swing over in the better Spiderman games. It’s an indescribably strange feeling.

But seeing it all suddenly made me realise just how far games really have come. A blocky Empire State Building and a couple of skyscrapers used to be all that was needed for the player to understand their setting and understand the world they are in. Even games as recent as 2006′s Liberty City Stories or last year’s Chinatown Wars could get away with just some incredibly loose landmarks to set the scene. Nowadays however, we’ve reached the point where some time in a digital world can give you all the knowledge you need to find your way around for a day.

We’ve come a long way in a short time and it makes me smile because it’s in moments like these when you actually sit and reflect on it all that you truly appreciate where the industry has taken itself in the past few years. And I mean /really/ think about it. It’s easy for us to acknowledge that technology has come on a bit in the last few decades. This weeks celebration of Pacman’s 30th anniversary showed us that.

Because nowadays it’s too effortless for us to watch an E3 reveal and get caught up in the excitement of a game only for it’s main selling points to have worn off on us by the time its release comes round. A game that makes a jump in graphical power will always delight us in their trailers, but come the time we can slip it into our consoles, we’ve already moved our attention to the next big thing. New mechanics and revolutionary gameplay, surprisingly, suffer the same fate.

Despite everyone’s moaning and groaning about annual franchises and unimaginative sequels, I feel like we’re somewhere good. So again, I’ll ask you to take a moment and look back on some of your favourite games from the past few years and think about how many of them have raised the bar and, even in a simpler form, how many of them would have been possible even a year or two before their release. Realising all of this, I can’t help but look forward to my future as a gamer.