The Challenge Vortex
By: Kotsopoulos

    A video game is a thing of beauty, all of the attributes of a game: play control, graphics, story line, and above all else, challenge make a game into an epic. However, lately, games have taken a turn for the worse.
 
     In the last few years, a marketing war began between Sony and Nintendo. Sure this has been going on for the last 8 years or so, but when Nintendo released its equalizer, the Nintendo 64, it changed the rules. Game play and story was what Nintendo had prided them on, Sony had the graphic capability and the extra memory to fool around with.
 
     All of the sudden, the N64 gave Nintendo the shot in the arm: a system with graphic capabilities almost equal to the 'stations to keep the afloat. Sony continued and brought along Square and Capcom for the ride. The Playstation used most of their cards to hammer their competitors into the ground to no avail. It was like a bar fight, the two initial guys who bump into each other get their friends into it and one breaks a beer bottle for the lethal edge.
 
     The graphics were what brought the game to the store, and Sony had the best, Nintendo released their expansion pack and with the extra memory to play around with, the graphics came along, clearer, crisper and more realistic than ever. With the extra four Megs of graphic power, Nintendo let Rareware out of the bag. Nintendo's bottle just got bigger and sharper with games like Jet Force Gemini and DK64. The style was breathtaking, Donkey Kong sprang to life and Mizar was ready to rumble. Sony retaliated with Final Fantasy 8. The package was sweet; the content was not as tasty.
 
     There you have it. The entire set-up to the downfall of challenge in games today. Many people bought the games solely on the graphics and when you got it home, you smacked yourself for beating it in 3 minutes. You see, all of the focus of these two monolithic companies was on graphics, not where it counted. So the dumped some key attributes, challenge is the main one. If they wanted more challenge, they would need to add a stage or program the bosses with greater moves and attacks, causing some memory loss, which could be tossed into the stockpile of the graphics division. Each company threw every chair they had at each other, only to get the bartender angry.
 
     The games were jammed with nothing but tedious side quests each more time consuming than the last. Final Fantasy 7 was just the tip of the iceberg. Training and breeding all of those chocobos was fun, the rewards were sweet but the time it took was overwhelming. The final boss was, to say the least, a cinch. A Knights of the Round for Jenova, a Knights of the Round for Sephiroth's first form and two Knights of the Round mimicked for the second and you can see the ending fly by.
 
     Jet Force Gemini showed that Rareware wanted replay value, but instead got a critter chase. All the ship parts and the tribal chasing were hurtful the first minute you read it. At least the boss supplied a challenge... until you got the pattern memorized.
 
     Final Fantasy 8 was a little more challenging but had a plethora of side quests. The final boss was not even time consuming, but really fun to fight. A quick Renzonuken from Squall and a Lionheart finisher would take out Griever and Ultimessia-Griever and when you abuse Zell's duel limit break at 12 seconds, you can drop the final form quite quickly. The ending was scrumptious and I wish i had enough memory on my computer to download it but then gain i can just beat the game again.
 
     DK64 at least had a reward for cleaning out the island for his 201 golden bananas: a killer ending, but the cons outweigh the pros. Reentering each level with each character two or three times is quite tedious.
 
     Challenge has taken a downfall ever since graphics became the big thing in the industry. It's time to get on you knees and pray, because challenge is on it's last set of legs, and the age of visual stimulation is in the cop car taking the companies to jail for disruption of the peace.?