I was inspired to write this the other day after accidentally discovering an old game I liked WAY back when, Space Colony, was put on Steam. And not only was it put on Steam it was remastered and, to use Early Cuyler: “HD-ified and Steam-a-fon-a-fide.” I only discovered this when I looked on Steams front page and it suggested I check it out. I thought:


“It couldn’t possibly be the Space Colony…could it?”


And damned if I was shocked to see it was released in April of 2015, remastered for modern HD graphics and resolutions and some missions, some made by the community, were added to the game.


Now I’m not saying Space Colony was one of those games that “redefined a genre” or “game defining” or “best game ever” when it came out in 2003. It was (hereby referred to as “is”) a sci-fi Sims (without the endless DLC to get the basic’s of the previous back in the next installment) that you can control (somewhat, you can’t make your own colonists, you control a bunch of them all with different personalities and needs) to run a base on a planet. Gather food and supplies, get robots running, make your colonists happy, make money, make a bigger colony, continue, etc.

Again, it didn’t make huge waves back when it came out, it was a unique take on the “Sims” type genre and it was good for what it is but this isn’t specifically about this game, it’s about the time period, between 2002 and 2005.


If I haven’t said this before, I’ll say again, I am very picky about the games I want and buy. I wish I could be simpler sometimes, following the masses every year as a new Call of Duty comes out with a 4 hour single player campaign, then spend about the next 900 hours playing the multiplayer calling everyone noobs and how someone’s mother enjoyed sexual congress with me last night until the next C.o.D. came out the next year saying it’s “the best since the last one.”


Or being one of those who see’s all the AAA games and immediately pre-ordering everything then getting burned when it turns out they didn’t even finish it or it’s filled with bugs but still saying “they didn’t have time to finish, it’s okay I’ll buy the unfinished DLC that I have to buy separately that you worked on in concert with the base game but decided to cut it out and have me buy it later.”

I will be honest, there is one game that’s coming out that I’m on board for (*cough* Fallout 4 *cough*) but maybe the whole “birthday gift” thing can apply here. YAY loopholes in my standards.

<.b>Anyways getting off point, my long winded point here is this. If you look at today’s modern games and game companies through rose tinted glasses and think it’s the perfect holy land and nothings wrong with it, then I suggest you stop reading this now and go watch or read something else. The rest, as you can see, there are many problems going on with today’s games. I’m not saying ALL games out there are bad or busted or anything like that. But the stereotype, lack of a better descriptive word fails me, of the gaming industry as a whole nowadays seems to be generally bad.


The most recent Batman game is a prime example of this, promising/showing the best of the best of an action/hero game, then delivering a game so bad they had to stop selling it for awhile. But, if they stopped selling it for a couple weeks, why was it that every TV channel was still shoving that game in my face and to go out and buy it now?


That’s one particular game example, another is separate DLC. This doesn’t just belong to one game, a lot of game companies, specifically AAA companies, do this. I was thoroughly annoyed when Mass Effect 3 launched and “From Ashes” was a Day 1 DLC. There excuse was “it was worked on by another team and we didn’t know it was gonna be ready in time for the launch” but then obviously was ready in time and it was added as separately, instead of just adding it to the base game. As everyone could agree, if it had been a weapon pack or skin pack, we all would’ve been “meh” but it was a character, with a lot of story to tell, and background to the overall story of Mass Effect.

These examples aren’t just me bitching about the current state of the gaming industry, since I’ll leave that to Wiggin for an article or a video, this is about the overall quality and love of games nowadays.


It seems like games, even AAA ones, are just being thrown in our face as “hey have this, enjoy” then a short time after that being told “you didn’t have fun with that did you? Cause we got ANOTHER one that’s better with (insert something you wanted in the first game and it’s in the second.) I know the previous game is not even a year old yet, but spend AAA money to get this new one, it’s worth it, totally, all the commercials on TV make it worth it.”

The quality of a game, not how shiny it is but how good it is, makes us love a game. And by love I don’t mean “OMG it has my favorite voice actor” or “It totally has this one insane level that makes everything worth it,” I mean love as in you see this game, it has some flaws: it’s graphics aren’t the highest of the high, one or two voice actors phoned it in, the story is a bit lackluster, but overall you can’t see yourself NOT having a good time with it.


My first game love was Half Life. I loved playing it again and again. Granted I would’ve played it more but the last couple of levels when you’re in Xen are really tough so I usually played up until then. The game was my first true FPS, previously it had been Trespasser, the really bad FPS game based on Jurassic World and you control your arm with your mouse. That game has an odd place in my heart but Half Life let me discover FPS’s.


From that Half Life to Battlefield 1942…Oh yes. Everyone’s favorite grandfather now, defining that WWII didn’t just have to be stuck on a beach and traverse the countryside alone as a soldier in Medal of Honor, you could drive vehicles, fly a plane, bomb with said planes, spot people, artillery people from across the map with said spotting, get a player to bombard a beach with artillery from a battleship, you know what I’m talking.

What about RTS’s you say? Well, I originally saw the game Homeworld on the back case of, who knew, Half Life. I never played it at the time but when I discovered a Battlestar Galactica mod (re-imagined and original for those wondering) for Homeworld 2, I had to get it. Being a sci-fi lover that game filled all the boxes for love. But then there was another RTS, what could it be?

Command and Conquer: Generals.

Yes another timely classic that I look back on and fall in love with all over again. C&C purist would say it was a horrible game cause of the whole game mechanic but it wasn’t, they’re just butthurt cause of the “non-classic interface.” All C&C games, (up until C&C 4) have been fantastic, but Generals made me truly love classic RTS. And when they were making a “Generals 2” which turned into…something else I don’t know but then failed because so much negative feedback, I was sadden on two fronts there. 1) It went from “Generals 2” to just “C&C game” which sounded like it was becoming a F2P E-Sport type game but obviously no one wanted that and 2) another C&C game was canceled.

I mention all these games not only to say I love said games and my growing history, but also to bring you to my overall point.


What do all these games I mentioned have in common?

Ignoring Half Life and Homeworld 1, all these games were made from 2002 onward. I only mention Half Life and Homeworld 1 as affront to the sequel which came out in 2004 and 2003 respectively. But point is this: There were SO many good games back then, I only just scratched the surface here, that it seems like they’re making a resurgence.


Gaming companies, again as the stereotype, seem to be making “food” nowadays. Make one now, make another later that’s slightly better but don’t actually change the formula or take a risk, the previous one is “out of date” or “spoiled” and needs to be thrown out.


But game companies of old use to make games like sculptures. Made with love, sugar, spice, maybe something not so nice, but they made the game out of love, to make the best game they could possibly make at the time. Some of them probably never knew of any of there games lasting anywhere as long as they have today. The original Half Life is still played, along with the original Homeworld, Battlefield 1942, and if anyone out there knows of the game “Battlezone,” both it and it’s sequel still have a modding community that keep it alive to this day and it came out in 1998, that’s 17 years, 17!!!!

Again back then, these games and others came out and we played them and we loved them. All of them had there flaws, none of them were perfect, but we loved them for some reason or another.
Can we say that about any game that’s come out in the last couple years?

Half Life 3 HAS NOT been confirmed so we’ll move on from there.
Many battlefields came out, majority of them good, but the last two, have problems. Battlefield 4 came out with horrible bugs although they took a risk and tried to change things up a bit, which admire, but fix your bugs first and Hardline doesn’t even know what the hell it is.


Homeworld got a remastered edition and it’s fantastic. They didn’t just add HD graphics, they got the original voice actors to redo there lines, better quality music, redone interface, AND included the original games all in one package. THAT is how you do a remastered edition.

But again, we’re going back to that era, that “loving” era of games, and bring it to the modern times. Why are they doing this? Well one reason is money, of course, but another reason is these are games, good games that deserved to be upgraded. As long as you’re keeping the core of the game the same, giving it HD graphics and better sound effects won’t stop the love of the game.


You can’t bring back Leonardo da Vinci and have him remaster the Mona Lisa with HD paintbrushes in Photoshop. (What-a does this-a button do? *delete all*) Even though they shouldn’t Hollywood still remakes movies, and seems to do nothing BUT that nowadays, but sometimes that pays off. (It seems the new Mad Max made everyone happy.)

Homeworld, Space Colony, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, they’re all getting/have been redone. Who knows what’s next in the remastering plans. I’d love to see a modern Battlezone 2, or C&C Generals with Company of Hero’s details. And it all comes back to those “classic” games from that loving era where games were games and made with love instead of a scheduled time sheet with an expiration date. They meant a lot to the people that made them and meant a lot to the people who played them and thanked the developers, programmers, musicians, for such a great game.

Now I’m standing on my soapbox.


If modern gaming companies took a page out of the past and saw how we loved these old games, they wouldn’t even have to do such drastic reconstructing internally. Just give the programers and developers a fair amount time to make a game they want to make. I know making money is the goal but when making a good game, it should be a secondary goal. If your game is good, if you put hard work into, it’ll be worth whatever you price it as and people will buy it if it’s good. If you’re just aiming for a certain “section of the pie” then stuff like “we haven’t fixed the bugs yet” or “it’s still not polished yet” fall on deaf ears to people in the board room. They want share of money and they want it now.


Don’t be afraid to be honest with the public. If you set a date for release then did something programming-wise that needs to be in the release that royally broke the game, tell the people “hey sorry, we’ll have to delay it until such a time when it’s ready.” A broken game should NEVER be launched just because that’s the window set up by the advertising section of the game to have the commercials come out and you have to change date on them. You don’t launch a ship with holes in it and say “we’ll fix it when it’s in the water” and you don’t buy a car with no tires and say “I’ll pick up tires on the way home.”


I know it’s about the money and investment return and the “higher ups” don’t seem to care about the quality but they should. If a gaming company comes out again and again with broken or unfinished games, people WILL eventually stop buying there games. If we treat games as simply a product to be moved like you would say lumber. Well the lumber mill orders logs to be milled, if one logging company they call on always brings crappy, termite infested, broken wood, they’ll stop calling on that company to bring them log. If a gaming company comes out with nothing but unfinished games, never supported after launch or how well they treat they’re community, people will stop buying there games and the idiots at the top will be asking “why do you hate us? We spit out so many games you should be happy and want to buy from us.”


That’s exactly the reason right there. There is a major disconnect from the workers on the game and the people that fund the game. I would like to think, barring horrible working conditions, that the programers that make modern games today really do love making there games and want it to come out perfectly and it’s made with love. But the higher ups want them to hurry the hell up and get the game out whether it’s done or not.

If these great games of the past were so great, made with love, and have a big following, it would be awesome to give some old classics a facelift. That and who knows what these remasters can also spawn for today’s games. Some new game being made looks back at an old game in remastered format and goes “that game had a good idea, lets do that.” Or even a possible sequel for games that deserved one…Firefly Studios, I’m looking at you. Space Colony 2 with freeform 3D graphics and more Venus and Stig.

So enjoy the remasters, you younger folk that don’t know how good you have it, enjoy them as well and gaze upon classic awesomeness. And here hoping some minor…revolution?…happens in the modern gaming scene. Here’s hoping the modern gaming companies look at these old timers that have withstood the test of time and gotten a major upgrade and they go “let’s make games we love. That was fun wasn’t it?”

Here’s hoping…

Half Life 3 confirmed…no I mean Space Colony 2 confirmed…no crap I mean…aww screw it.