Best Of 2007 Retrospective: The Video Game Renaissance

Today Tim Beringer is taking you into a world of gaming. Seriously, there was a shit load to do in games this year. As Tim found out in his adventures throughout 2007, you never know where the next fix will come from. So uh…maybe we shouldn’t be selling our hand helds prematurely. One thing is for certain, video games kicked our collective asses in the past 12 months.

But we’ll let Tim tell you of the renaissance that was 2007. Grab your scotch and cigar, take a seat in the corner chair and enjoy our continuing series of 2007 Retrospectives.

The Video Game Renaissance
By Tim Beringer

After 2007, whenever I think of video games, all I’ll be able to think of is something that a friend of mine said to me. When discussing video games he would light up and exclaim that “we are living in a video game renaissance.” Of course he was referring to the excitement he felt about being able to get his hands on Pokemon Pearl, but he was making a valid point. The console war raged, exciting franchises were born, game play was taken to new levels and controversies arose. For us it was especially exciting because we were living in the heart of the video game and technology culture.

Alright, so I was only in Japan for the first week and a half of 2007. We were living in South Korea, but once you get into any of the underground video game markets in Seoul all bets are off. When I first moved there in mid 2006 all I had to play on was my PS2, and all I was interested in doing was playing through the entire Prince of Persia series and getting Final Fantasy XII. I wanted to spend time getting acculturated and seeing the places I’d been studying about in my five years of undergrad. Once I started getting around though, I found myself spending copious amounts of time at the TechnoMart of Gwanghamun and Electronic Markets of Yongsan looking at all the games I wasn’t playing and talking to people about what next gen console I was going to get.

Two days before the first light of 2007 I had received my 360 from an E-Bay auction. It was supposed to be a special “custom painted” Halo 3 Xbox which turned out to be a bunch of stickers on a premium 360, but I was still happy to see it. At that point I was so angry with Sony for letting Jack Tretton speak to the public without a stupid-filter that I was never going to be anything but a Microsoft loyalist. Gears of War was a rush of pure adrenaline for me and the promise of Halo 3 would send me into nerdgasms. Then I got to taste Virtua Fighter 5 and simply had to have it. From there I got something new with every one of my paychecks.

By the time I returned to America from my year working overseas I had a DS Lite, Xbox 360 and my prized PS3. I had also bought and sold a PSP in that time. It’s not that I suddenly re-discovered video games. It was that this year had more than enough going on in the electronic entertainment market that I had no choice but to stay on top of what nasty things Jack Tretton had to say about Peter Moore and Nintendo in general. I absolutely needed to get that copy of Ninja Gaiden Sigma when it was released in Japan so I could tell my friends back home how awesome it is the whole while rubbing the fact that they couldn’t get it for another month in their land locked faces. There were so many reasons for me to be more on top of things than I had ever been.

On Myspace I had to create a new profile because everyone on my friend list was sick and tired of reading blogs where I made jokes about the PS3 looking like it could house a small family. My friends and family had no clue who Hideo Kojima was or why I was so excited to see some guy named Solid Snake grabbing soldiers’ groins. My attitude even changed towards the PS3 this year. I still think it could stand to lose some weight, like an entire Sally Struthers worth, but my initially venomous attitude towards the next gen console softened.

This entire year in gaming was a living being that changed its mood from day to day. The three contenders in the console war came out this year showing their strengths, weaknesses and idiocies. It’s so hard to decide on any one moment that stands out in the past year because living in this “renaissance”, every day has been exciting.