If it weren't for the majority of people who were born at the end of Generation X and the beginning of Generation Y, this debate wouldn't exist. I say this because we were the first generation to be brought up having wide access to televisions...and the fact that most of us wanted more interaction with it rather than being passive sacks of meat slowly roasting in the lovely radiation that it brought into our lives...much like the hotdogs at 7-11.

Every medium has had at one point, neophytes and veterans that love to go back and forth debating entertainment value versus artistic value. Consider this my entry to be added to the ever increasing pile of games as art discussion. Even though the videogame medium isn't new, it was only recently that our beloved game industry surpassed profits that rival that of the movie industry. Yup, what was once a niche market has become mainstream and with it...more arguing.

I love videogames. I love art. However but I can't pretend to know what art really is. Hell, so many people don't even realize that the definition of the word is so subjective as to be completely misunderstood by many who would use it to further one side or the other.



There is just something about how the whole argument for or against games as art that I find completely revolting...to the point of hating the whole fucking mess. It gets so bad sometimes that I will purposely miss out on some excellent games because of the relentless battles of whether it is/isn't art.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe videogames can be art, regardless of its entertainment value or sheer transparency as a work of pulp. My biggest problem is that people want to have a laser-beam focus on certain games or an aspect of them that they want to consider works of art...I don't think it's that simple, you can't pick one game and have it be THE example while not allowing all others a fair shake.



Let's start with classic gaming. I can see the inherent beauty in classic games like Donkey Kong, Frogger, and even Burgertime. I'm not talking about the simple piles of pixels that make up the image you see on the screen (which to sprite junkies like myself are art), but in the manner in which you (as the player) interface with the machine. Even the guts of the arcade cabinet itself have a beauty that many people would argue whether it's art or not.

Even with all of the arguments I just brought up, it seems that nobody wants to debate classic gaming at all. They're on an untouchable pedestal where it 'just isn't fair' to drag into the debates that focus on more recent games on sleeker hardware.

The most commonly used example that I hear about is Shadow of the Colossus. It's already one generation behind but for most of us gamers, that SHOULDN'T matter. It's an excellent game and is gorgeous to look at. My biggest complaint about them citing Shadow is that these people are using a good game on a sexy piece of hardware for their argument about which games should be considered art. It's the same as bringing up Andy Warhol's Soup Can paintings...or Godwin's Law. It's so common that I feel that you've already lost the argument.



All of the posturing and fighting over something so trivial as to whether you see it as art or not is in my opinion, ridiculous. When you become so focused on classifying the merits and artistic value of a game, you tend to become so shortsighted as to not pay attention to the other aspects that make the game up.

Personally I don't see there ever being an end to the debate, but more or less an agreement between the both sides to disagree with each other. It's happened with all forms of mass media over the years, whether it be heavy metal music, comic books, or Fox News.

I wish that people could approach the arguments with a bit more of an open mind instead of having set variables that need to be filled in order to classify it one way or another. Word.

Let me get this out there right now. There is in my mind, no better example of a platforming game and no "Mario" game that comes as close to perfection than Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo. I love this game like no other, and I'm sure that there are thousands if not millions of gamers out there who would agree with me. However there is something serious that occurs when I play it that makes me despise myself entirely.

Well, RevAnt hasn't put up the Monthly Musings for December just yet (I'm assuming is forthcoming)...I thought maybe I could sneak this one under the radar of the astute readers of Destructoid, even though it's really the first of the month.



I read the title of November's musings and thought immediately of something that I'm sure nobody touched on, Battletoads. Ok, hear me out, 'do the wrong thing' shouldn't necessarily be doing evil or violence in order to push a story along, but for me it was what guys like me had to do with our limited game collections in the late 80s/early 90s.

If there's one genre of games I think is getting the shaft over and over again that made me fall in love with gaming in the first place, it would have to be the beat 'em ups. These games were just notorious for eating a roll of quarters faster than a German in a Mentos commercial. The funniest thing is that many of us didn't seem to mind doing so.

I wince when I think of all the cash that I've dumped into the arcades in my formative years playing these games, all of that cash that could have gone to something more worthwhile like delicious snack foods or maybe saved in my own pocket so I could afford more cartridges for my Sega Master System or my Nintendo. The biggest offence are the ones that I had beaten so many times before but I continued to play and play over and over again.

Tonight's list are just those, the games where you too might remember playing through multiple times, but wouldn't mind going back and doing it all again...there's no better word to describe them than classic.

Back in the great days of my youth almost 19 years ago, when the NES was king and I was a portly little quiet kid. A kid who escaped everyday to the Mushroom Kingdom and Dracula's Castle to avoid my boring existence as a grade school child. I had very few friends and a non-existent home life so video games became a coping mechanism to help my personal development and became my best friend.

The NES in today's world is considered archaic, dilapidated, old, and maybe even silly; to me, it was the best game console ever made (until the SNES that is). Many of the games that were there to be enjoyed were ones you had to beat within the time-span from when the power button was pressed to the on position to the time when you either:

A) Accidentally Hit the Reset Button
B) Had a Power Outage (prevalent in the south)
C) The Connection Between Cartridge and NES Failed
D) You Hit The Power Button

If you didn't beat the game in that span of time, you had to start over from the beginning, usually World/Level 1-1.

There were some games that did come with more advance features such as Battery Backup (which is now starting to fail in some of my older games ;__:) or Password Features that were great as long as you write it down exactly as it appeared, if not, back to World 1-1 Noob! There was however a way around this problem, the NES didn't generate heat much at all, the power supply did, so many of us started to leave the NES on all night long while we slept.

I can remember going home from school on Friday night playing all day until I couldn't possibly go any further, shutting off the TV, the lights and everything else only to have the square cyclopic red eyeball of the NES stare at me all night like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey threatening to kill me while I slept. Today's list deals with those few games that forced me to do so on many occasions, I'll see you at the end.

Chrono Cross is just one of those games that deserve more dissection and more attention from the gaming world even though I'm sure it's been done before by many other contributors and writers here on Destructoid. This was perhaps the final RPG on the PlayStation that I fell in love with, seeing how it was released weeks before the PlayStation 2 was released in the American market.