Games of the Abstract Introduction

 This will be a short introduction, but to give you an idea of why I am covering video games on a blog originally for films, I have recently become interested again in them, and if the British Film Institute now includes an occasional article on the medium on their website in 2021, I feel I can on my amateur one can too.

This will cover a variety of video games, usually older titles as this desire to return to this hobby is that, despite having grown up with the medium in the nineties to mid-2000s, there is a large part of it I completely missed, sadly with some of the games most interesting to me even then missed and now rare. I will cover other areas, but do not expect new games, entirely a tangent from my usual writing that will also cover the unconventional and the misbegotten.

And it will tie into the main part of this blog for many reasons. There are many weird games, many dead ends and many curiosities. The period I have mentioned on, though I intend to move around, is a fascinating era called the "Fifth Generation of Video Games", a period of so many failed tangents in the history of video gaming as much as innovative aspects we would bring into the modern day. It was a huge era in terms of change, when polygons became more important than sprites (i.e. 3D over 2D, despite the latter today being beloved as an art form). Early attempts at innovating in areas like online play, multi-media content, and with the PC its own island, genres like first person shooters finding themselves and on their way to the genres that sell today. A lot is sadly not as readily available as it should be, lost to time or even never released in the West for the Japanese side of many consoles.

So much of it too is directly or indirectly tied into cinema and other mediums in weird and even morbidly misguided ways. This was of course the era of the full motion video (FMV) games, interactive movies, games using digitised figures, attempts at being adult and gruesome, and a lot of real filmed footage with over the top acting. This does not even take into consideration the strange void of licensed games: only in the nineties do you have an adaptation of White Men Can's Jump (1992), a video game tie-in to the basketball comedy with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, which was released for the Atari Jaguar, one of the many consoles doomed in this era, transitioning to polygons and many attempting to figure out where to go next, which also ended the legacy of a legendary video games companies from the eras before.

Just the nineties into the mid-2000s is full of ill-advised ideas, likely a lot of politically incorrect content, the ends of legendary companies like Sega in the hardware industry, the birth of those who succeeded even if it took the Sixth Generation (Microsoft and Sony), and a lot of oddities, gems and mistakes, even Nintendo making ill advised ideas. It is worthy, as a tangent, to cover, especially as I openly admit I was never a good "gamer", merely someone who grew up playing them, and now as I dust off old consoles, wishing to return to them and seeing a plethora of content as in my usual content. The reviews with be irregular, referring back to that fact I am not a great player and it may take a while to get through titles, but I feel it is apt to cover them. Like the regular Cinema of the Abstract, this is as much to dig into another medium and find its curiosities too.