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The 100th Post Celebration!
On the 16th July 2015 this site went live, albeit tied to a WIX domain but that waqs the day that we first discussed the topic of Dopefish! This was the alpha stage, early access if you will and since we have been on a huge amount of journeys together! The legal history of King Kong and the dark legend of Polybius or BEN Drowned are just a few of the places we've been to! We defended E.T. on the Atari 2600 and we looked at the impossible art on the Commodore 64 and why it actually wasn't impossible! With so many adventures under our belt where do we go from here? Finally do a post about the Pong consoles? Journey into another important game in history? Yes actually, not important to the industry but important to why we're here today!
There are quite a long list of games that, over the years I've poured hours and hours into, many with friends or on my own, learning to survive in whatever the pixelated world can throw my way. Whilst managing my time between the alluring world of RuneScape or trying to get the weekly pin in Club Penguin (I was young!) I found a vein of gold! On my new PS2 I was gifted the classic game Star Wars Battlefront, a game that changed everything! You could say that it was a game-changer, no? Ok then, this is the game that brought me from the MMO world of RuneScape back to the console world, with force! Star Wars Battlefront will forever, probably, go down as my favourite game of all time! For me, there will be no other and here's why!
Video games put us in control of the hero, or anti-hero, as you embark on a quest to slay a dragon, save the universe or survive to the end of whatever horror may lie in your way! In one game you're Mario stomping on Koopas to save the princess and another you're Sora trying to stop the Heartless and the Nobodies or trying to seal the door to Kingdom Hearts. We are the heroes, we're not the player on the other side of a screen, we are in the worlds the developers are trying to put us in! Whether we're Gordon Freeman in Half Life or Ratchet in, well, Ratchet and Clank we are the one who the game's chosen one, or ones! So why Star Wars Battlefront? Why not Battlefront 2? Star Wars Battlefront, the original, places us in the form of, not the hero or villian, not any character in the Star Wars universe, we are, effectively, no one important! Sure you might get 70 kills and take 4 command posts but you never hear of the droid who did that in the films!
This game stands apart for the simple fact that you really are you, your character goes through no development in the game, all you do is fight and die to win the battle. Being the nameless soldier allows us make ourselves the hero! Our little Stormtrooper is the hero of a story that we write ourselves and not one that we are given to follow. It's us who can make or break a battle, the victory of a battle is not imperative to the continuation of the game, a battle is a place that we can make ourselves the Stormtrooper that could! Rather than being given a script to read off of we can, like in many open world games, create our own story and that's why Star Wars Battlefront will always be my all time favourite game!
Hold up though, Star Wars Battlefront 2 was all of that and more! The game was bigger and better! The 501st legion, the huge amount of new maps, we were the centre of the main places in the Star Wars universe! Hero battles, hunts, becoming a Jedi or Sith Lord, or Bounty Hunters or Rebels or whatever else! That is the issue, however, with Battlefront 2: the Jedi or whoever else made us a major player in the Star Wars universe. We were no longer the hero that we could write ourselves to become, after a certain amount of kills we could become a powerful being slaying all who stand in our way! Yes this feature could be turned off but to me, this is what seperated the two games for my personal game experience! I was never a fan of space battles, so in the Instant Action aspect of the game I flat out ignored them and the 501st legion storyline didn't last too long. The heroes were the only real thing that distinguished the two games, removing this option made Star Wars Battlefront 2 a glorified map pack!
There's another side, however, a side which harbours a more personal note, one put best by Peanut Butter Gamer on his love of Majora's Mask! He stated that Majora's Mask came from a time when he was ready to be impressed by video games, the same is true for me and Star Wars Battlefront. Has there been better games since? Of course! No matter what, however, this game will always be the one that made me love the industry, the platform of entertainment and video games as a whole! In terms of story this game is hugely lacking, most games today are massively story driven, something that gamers today want! We've moved on from the stage that two players in the arcade shooting video game's first ever guns at eachother was enough to keep us glued to the screens! Look at titles like Halo or Destiny: story-driven games that keep us coming back for more! Star Wars Battlefront, however, stands apart from this, LucasArts did a Nintendo and through the storybook out the window! Putting us in the universe of Star Wars is enough to fire our imaginations to create our own stories, we weren't just in the Star Wars universe, Battlefront allowed us to live there!
All of that makes Star Wars Battlefront my favourite game of all time and why this adventure into gaming history, for me, is worthy of our 100th post! This last 100 posts have taken us to a huge number of places, from the Festival of Horror to the origins of games like Grand Theft Auto, we've taken on the obscure to the titans of the industry! We've looked at Nintendo's unknown console and how it changed the Chinese video game market and looked at the sad fall of Atari. Who knows where we'll end up next, out of space? In a deep dark cave? Who knows, what we do know, however, is that any video game can make itself our personal favourite of all time! All we have to do is be ready to accept it when we come across it gathering dust on our shelves or as an impulse buy from GAME!
