My Perfect Console

Over the last couple of months I’ve been blown away by My Perfect Console, a podcast by Simon Parkin. Simon hosts a new guest each week and asks them to assemble their perfect console consisting of five games that are important to them. It’s been really interesting to hear how games reach across industries, continents, and generations, and how much they mean to so many people. I’ve particularly enjoyed episodes where I know very little about the guests, trying to map their connections and relationships with games to my own. If you’ve not listened, I would highly recommend that you take a look at the episode list and just pick one that catches your eye, I’m certain it won’t disappoint.

As I’ve become more familiar with the format, I thought it might be a fun exercise to try and construct a perfect console of my own. As Simon would say, I’ve ended up picking games that act as waypoints in my life, not necessarily my favourite or most played games, but the ones that remind me of specific moments or those that shaped my gaming tastes.

Sonic The Hedgehog – 1991

Playing Sonic The Hedgehog is my earliest gaming memory. I remember my uncle buying his Sega Mega Drive from a Makro thirty minutes down the road, setting the box on the kitchen table, and wiring it up to my grandparents pokey old CRT. When I would visit after school or at the weekend, it was never long before “SE-GA” would ring through the house.

Sonic the Hedgehog is a 2D side scrolling platformer with an emphasis on speeding through the screens left to right, chasing down Dr Robotnik across six stages to foil his plans and prevent him from gathering the six chaos emearlds. A feat that I don’t think I ever accomplished, which explains why I can only recall the music from the first two stages.

As well as Sonic, I had access to a few other games on the Mega Drive. “Desert Strike”, a helipcopter themed shoot-em-up, “James Buster Douglas Knockout Boxing”, a Western port of Final Blow where Buster Douglas had been hastily added as a counter to “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!”, and “John Madden Football ’93”, where I first tried and failed to understand the concept of an NFL playbook. While I did poke around with those games, only Sonic could really hold my attention, it’s vibrant levels and catchy soundtrack worming it’s way into my child brain.

Despite never actually finishing it, Sonic sparked an obsession that had me reading sonic magazines, watching sonic cartoon shows, and years later buying the ill-fated Dreamcast so that I could play Sonic Adventure. It wasn’t long before I was playing games across other platforms, but hogging my uncle’s Mega Drive is where it all began.

Goldeneye – 1997

The Nintendo 64 was the first console that I ever owned, a Christmas gift that was held back, making the surprise all the more special. It came bundled with a copy of Goldeneye. A first person shooter where the campaign missions loosely mirrored the events of the film (released two years earlier).

I didn’t have much knowledge of the Bond franchise back then, to me he was just a guy with a square head and lots of guns, but that didn’t stop this game from becoming an obsession for me and my family. Gatherings would quickly descend into outrage over who had picked Oddjob, or the hillarious chaos of a “slaps only” deathmatch. Goldeneye was a game of extremely niche skills, wrestling with the controller, discretely reading the other players’ screens to work out where they were (while standing right up to the wall so your own position remained a secret), and learning when to jump out of the hidden vent on Facility to ambush unsuspecting foes.

Although multiplayer was where it was really at, that didn’t stop me from repeating the campaign several times over. I really like games that have you replaying levels to complete additional challenges (maybe that started here) and Goldeneye was packed with cheats to unlock – paintball mode, big head character models, etc. Maybe not the most exciting of rewards but there was certainly a thrill to unlocking one, pushing yourself to complete levels as quickly as possible, something that was much harder when you couldn’t search for the speed run solution on YouTube.

Despite modern re-releases, I’ve never felt the pull to go back. To me Goldeneye is a game that is locked to that hardware, with it’s awkward controls and offline multiplayer. Locked to that time, playing for hours with my family while we tried (and failed) to cover up our own corner of the screen.

Monster Hunter Freedom 2 – 2007

Monster Hunter Freedom 2 wasn’t my first exposure to the series. I had already sunk hundreds of hours into Monster Hunter Freedom and had even tried the PlayStation 2 original, but it was the second portable iteration of Monster Hunter that I think holds the fondest memories for me.

Monster Hunter is maybe the most aptly named video game franchise, the premise is exactly as you would expect. Using a variety of weapons (which act as character movesets) you’re tasked with hunting monsters that are putting your village in danger. Your reward for doing so are rare items and monster pieces that can be used to create stronger weapons and armour, with those you can hunt greater monsters to obtain rarer rewards, which can be used to make even stronger weapons and armour, with those you can… I think you get the point.

The loop is a satisfying one. Monster Hunter is a series that has no traditional progression system – you’re not levelling up or opening up a skill tree, you do unlock stronger equipment, but the real way of improving is to practice fighting the same monsters over and over. You’ll need to learn their behaviours and attacks, bring the right weapons and armour to give yourself an edge, but also make sure that there is still room in your pack so that you can carry away some loot. The armour and weapons you equip become a visual shorthand for how accomplished you are, morphing from a hodgepodge of pieces to full sets crafted from a single monster, but to get the rarest pieces you’ll need to hunt a LOT of monsters.

These games are co-operative up to four players locally, and that’s the magic element that earns this game a spot on my list. To fight the toughest monsters and earn the highest rewards, you’re going to have to team up with a group of hunters who know their stuff. MHF2 landed at a time in my life where a group of my friends all had access to a PSP. Evenings, weekends, and spare hours in the sixth form common room were all gobbled up by this game. I think I’ve played every iteration since, and although graphical fidelity, and online multiplayer make Monster Hunter more appetising, MHF2 was the magic installment for me.

Dark Souls – 2011

My excitement for Dark Souls came from playing it’s predecessor Demon’s Souls, but I don’t think I was prepared for just how much of a significant step forward Dark Souls would be, nor how influential it would prove to be throughout the gaming industry.

Dark Souls is a third person action games set in Lordran, a ruined kingdom beset with enemies and bosses for the player to defeat. You explore the world fighting your way through groups of enemies and gaining experience (souls), which act as your currency for levelling up, upgrading equipment, and trading with merchants. If at any point in your adventure you die, the souls you carry are dropped as a bloodstain near that spot, and you are spawned back at the last bonfire (basically a checkpoint) that you rested at. If you can fight your way back to those souls then you can reclaim them, but if not, they are lost for good. This tension of exploring new frontiers and then getting knocked back is at the heart of Dark Souls, you creep through an abandoned world looking for a bonfire to rest at. The catch being, that when you rest, the world is reset and the enemies are all placed back in their opening positions, waiting for you to stumble past once again.

That’s the basic DNA of most FromSoft games (or indeed the Soulslike genre), but what elevates Dark Souls from the rest is it’s delicately intertwined map, and the safe space at it’s heart – Firelink Shrine. Dark Souls is a quiet game, music is saved mainly to add drama and tension to the many boss fights, but when you’re in the wider world, traversing the dangers of Lordran, sound is only generated by the world itself and the characters who occupy it. That quiet only reinforces the sense of isolation, you’re alone in a hostile and dying world, pushing your limits and your patience as you try to progress. Then you stumble across a lift or staircase and the familiar mournful tune of Firelink Shrine starts playing. A signal that you’re back to you safe space to rest and restock, before you venture out again.

That wasn’t strictly the case for me during my first playthrough in 2011. I was sharing a flat with a friend who was also playing Dark Souls, and we were able to discover the game together. Shouting hints and discoveries between our adjoining wall and feeling secretly disappointed when the other would complete a boss first time and rush ahead (at least that was how I felt!). Dark Souls was a transformative game for me, and became a benchmark by which I would unfairly measure new games for years.

Super Hexagon – 2012

Super Hexagon is a game that pulls relentlessly in opposite directions. It is simple and complex, meditative and bombastic. Your sole inputs are also in opposition – rotate clockwise, or rotate anti-clockwise.

You’re controlling a triangle that rotates around a hexagon as lines spawn to block your path. Your aim is to last for at least 60 seconds. One collision and it’s game over, so you spin your cursor between obstacles for as long as you can manage. The colour draining from the world around your screen as the movement gets faster. Weaving left and right to the thrumming of Chipzel‘s incredible soundtrack, colours strobing to the rhythm. Eventually you fail. “Game Over”. The music cuts, but only until you click to go again, which you will do almost immediately, the music barely missing a beat.

I first played Super Hexagon on iOS, it would keep me awake through the long and noisy night shifts I was working at the time. These were not the perfect conditions to learn the patterns of high speed cascading obstacles, but it was the perfect game to lose myself to for minutes at a time, helping eek away those long hours at the end of a shift. That was 2012, but I will still frequently play this game. Part of the fun is showing it to new people and watching them try to comprehend the swirling colours as something that can be controlled. A larger part of it is the challenge of trying to squeeze through a few extra seconds and stretch my best time as far as it can go. Super Hexagon is a simple game in nature, but executed at such a high level that it’s easily one of my favourite games. That it was created by a one person development team, Terry Cavanagh, only adds to my appreciation of this fantastic game.