Realism. Every new generation of sports games has an updated roster, better graphics, and a more realistic feel. Football coaches run simulated plays on Madden to see if they would work. Real hockey players can play as themselves on a TV on their tour bus. Even people who aren’t professionals can now create themselves as a player in the games (of course, the most overpowered player in the league… why not?). Always wanted to be the star running back of the Minnesota Vikings? Now you can.

The realism boat took off with the first Madden game on the Sega Genesis. Madden (the man, not the game) insisted that both teams have to correct amount of players on the field. This changed the entire game. This changed the entire genre. There is now a demographic of gamers that buy no games other than sports games. They buy the latest version of Madden and NCAA and NBA Live, and little else. They may play the occasional Halo deathmatch, but they know what they like and they will not be swayed. They know all the stats of their favorite team and, for many gamers, this is as close as they will ever get to experiencing a Super Bowl as a key member of their fave team.

Now, if there are only a few members on a team (a la NBA Jam or NFL Blitz), the game is considered an arcade game. If there are the right number of people on each team, the game is a sports simulation. Like Gran Turismo, Madden is trying to be the Real Football Simulator. There have been many times when a person across the room would see a current-gen sports game on TV and confuse it with an actual, live broadcast. That’s realism.

Unfortunately, with EA buying the exclusive rights to produce games for the NFL, other game developers have had to use creative methods of making money with football games. Going the arcade route is one way, or you can go the All-Pro Football route and use retired legends of the game who happen to not fall under the NFL’s copyright, apparently. These games are all considered inferior to the “official” products, however, much like buying a third-party controller from Mad Catz instead of the real deal. Non-official games have had to use differing tactics than going head-to-head with Madden, such as excessive violence (Blitz: The League) or a roster of old-school fan favorites (All-Pro Football 2K8). Maybe someday there will be another contender for the throne like NFL 2K5, but, so far, it’s not looking like it.

Gamers want the official, real deal. “Pure” sports games are all about the realism. That’s why people play them. That’s why people will continue to play them long into the future.

I have been cutting into my sleep to play some sorely missed games, and it’s nice to know that Half-Life 2 is still just as cool as it was years ago. Next up, Shadow of the Colossus. Another game that was, is, and always will be amazingly terrific and magically delicious. But don’t worry, I’ll be back to writing genre essays tomorrow.

Fighting games are all about one-on-one competition. Having the skills to best somebody in a match, whether you’re online or sitting next to them on a couch or at the national EVO Tournament, is a huge ego boost. Winning a fair fight against a peer gives you a great sense of accomplishment and power. Losing hurts, too, though, but it makes you want to try harder, to practice, to become better, to be the best.

There have been many fighting games over the years, from Street Fighter to Guilty Gear to Dead or Alive to Marvel Vs. Capcom to Tekken, and they’ve all shared one thing in common: two people enter, and one person leaves. There is a lot of testosterone flowing around the fighting field with all the one-upsmanship inherent in the battles. The well-balanced fighting games are never about button mashing – they about about counter attacks, blocking, canceling, and waiting for your chance to strike with a well-placed combo.

Super Smash Bros., while technically a fighter, is more of a party game that you pull out to play with a bunch of friends. “Pure” fighting games like SFIV won’t allow you to win if you merely mash buttons. I think that’s the appeal. To be good at fake fighting, just like real fighting, takes a lot of practice. There are strategies all over bookstands and the Internet about how to be and beat the best in the world (including this humorous but ultimately accurate Ken flowchart). The national champions know all about how to best utilize their distance from their opponent, their combos and special moves, and their blocks and counters and throws. Just the fact that people can devote hours a day to one game says there must be something important there. Many fighting games have the “easy to learn, difficult to master” appeal, and, hopefully, they won’t go away.

Racing in a game is like racing in real life without the fear of getting dismembered. There is a remarkable sense of speed (especially when in first-person) and you can receive a large adrenaline rush just like if you drove a fast car in real life. Still, the difference, like I said, is that you won’t get dismembered like you could (and probably would) if you were an illegal street racer or a NASCAR driver.

Your palms will get sweaty. You will blink less. You will lean towards the screen, hoping to see around the next bend more effectively. You will learn to power slide and feel like you could pull it off in real life (it’s not as easy there, though). Your blood will pump and you will scream at anyone that walks between you and the screen. Your split-second reflexes will be tested, and you might crash into a wall and die. But that’s okay. Hit Start, then select “Restart Race.” No prob.

Nothing can compare to the reality of cruising down a city street at 80. It’s dangerous and irresponsible and scary and intense and fun for Type-A personalities. In video games, you are not shackled by society’s morals or speed limit signs. You are free. Drive 120. It’ll be fun, I promise.

Adventure games are the oldest genre that really mattered. Super Mario Bros. revitalized the game industry in 1985 after hundreds of awful games like E.T. on the Atari 2600 nearly destroyed it. The crap games were buried in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and turned into a parking lot. Mario, and other adventure games like it, live on.

First off, there is a difference between action and adventure games, but they tend to play similarly. There are usually more bad guys to fight in action games (think Donkey Kong or Sonic the Hedgehog) while adventure games tend to focus more on exploration (Metroid and Castlevania). However, the controls, demographic, and appeal of both action and adventure games are very similar. I will probably switch the terms action and adventure back and forth throughout. So sue me.

The things that separate action/adventure games from other genres are the fantastical settings, the memorable, often colorful characters, and the opportunity to explore the world and always be able to find something new right around the corner. Also, there’s often some platforming, but it tends to feel like more of an afterthought nowadays. This wasn’t always the case.

Platforming games that require the player to make precise jumps and perform specific actions to advance have fallen out of favor. On the 8- and 16-bit systems, nearly every side-scolling action game required at least some platforming: Mario, Donkey Kong Country, Sonic the Hedgehog. Now, however, all the platformers that are left really are kids’ games (especially Disney games). Maybe this is because platforming is seen as simple and uncomplicated kids’ stuff, but other games like Mirror’s Edge have shown that with the right setting, running and jumping can be just as harrowing as old-school shooters like R-Type and Defender.

In adventure games, an interesting setting is required. Beyond Good and Evil, Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Metal Gear Solid, Tomb Raider. You might be traipsing through a lush jungle, or you might be scaling over rooftops, or you could be on a freighter in Alaska, but you need to have a setting that sets your game apart. Even real-world-setting adventure games like Bully or Leisure Suit Larry have aspects of reality distorted or maimed to cater to the fact that this is a game. Unlike an FPS, you are not your character. You merely control them, and you listen to their story instead of being the star of your own.

The characters are really what sell the game though. If you have a generic main character like, say, Jet Brody from Fracture or whoever that guy with cornrows was in Haven: Call of the King, then people aren’t going to buy or remember your game. If your main character is a bright orange bandicoot, people might pay attention. Until your games start to grow stale, then they’ll quit caring. Sorry, Crash! The kind of traits that make a good main character will have to be another post, but let’s just say that they need to be memorable to the players in order to make them want to buy a sequel. The game industry is a business, so you have to create cool characters to even have a chance of succeeding. Or you can make a plumber with a red hat and make millions… somehow. Hm.

Finally, the exploration aspect. My favorite level in Super Mario Bros. by far was Level 6-3. You know the one. The ice world. Nothing changed except the color palette but it made that one two minute level different from the entire rest of the game. That’s memorable. If you have the first five hours of the game set in one huge city, then you break out of the walls a la Final Fantasy VII, you discover a whole huge other world. You aren’t giving the player these experiences – he is discovering them for himself like they have always been there. You can always find something new, and that’s why adventure games will never go out of style.

This one’s easy: music games let you party like a rock star. You invite a bunch of friends over for Guitar Hero or Rock Band and you can all be guitar legends or rock out on drums that go clack clack instead of boom boom or sing terribly off-key renditions of Alanis Morissette. Even if you are terrible at real music, set the game to easy or no-fail mode and you can feel like you are actually playing Free Bird in front of millions of screaming fans.

The games are the same basic formula as DDR – you match the notes flowing down (or up) the screen, and you rack up bigger and bigger combos as you play better. It’s strange that by merely including a plastic guitar instead of a dance mat, the entire genre took off. Best Buy and Wal-Mart even have whole aisles now dedicated to the ever-increasing amount of hardware you need for these games. I don’t think it was the peripherals that helped launch companies like harmonix into the stratosphere; I think it was the music.

DDR is techno music, house music, and trance music, with a few current pop hits sprinkled throughout. Guitar Hero is rock. Not only that, it’s good rock. When the original Guitar Hero came out on PS2, nobody knew it would take off like it has. People would say, “Oh, another game that costs $90 because you have to get a fancy controller with it.” Until they played it. The game had songs from everyone from Queen to Ozzy to Incubus to Pantera to the Stones. At first, every song on the game was a cover, but they were remarkably good covers. Harmonix really knew their stuff. Maybe their musical chops had been honed with Frequency and Amplitude, or maybe it helped that they were all musicians in real life. But they could tell the difference between a song that you’d want to listen to on the radio and a song that you’d like to play fake guitar to. When they found one that had both qualities, they would stick it in the game.

One thing not great about music games is the overlapping songs. There is 50 years of rock ‘n’ roll history to choose from, so why do we get a dozen songs that are the same on two games released barely month apart? I can understand band overlap – who doesn’t want to be Kurt Cobain? – but making people pay almost 200 more dollars to play songs they’ve already played is almost criminal.

It’s true: playing Guitar Hero is not the same as playing real guitar, and if people actually practiced real instruments as much as they played games there would be a lot more starving artists on the streets begging for your change with their guitar. However, the drums are very similar to real life. You have a bass pedal and you use real drum sticks to play real drum songs. Move the pads a little farther away from each other and you have a real drum set. How many drummers for bands in the future will have gotten their start on Rock Band? We’ll see.

Even though it’s not the same as the real thing, playing fake guitar can be just as challenging as real guitar. You can’t fake your notes. You can’t play power chords instead of full bar chords. you can’t tune to Drop D to make songs simpler. You have to hit every not that comes at you without making mistakes if you want the top score. Play Through the Fire and Flames on expert then try to tell me that it doesn’t take real practice and real skill to be good at fake guitar just like real guitar.

With the invention of the Internet, face-to-face interaction in games has been, shall we say, stifled. Music games are bringing that back. Sure, you can play on the ‘net with people on the other side of the world, but there’s nothing like having your own Rock Band rockin’ out in your living room, spilling beer all over your mom’s couch. It recalls the days of the Halo LAN parties for the original Xbox, before Live had really taken off. Face time with like-minded peers has been lacking recently, not only in the game industry, but in other aspects of life as well. Its nice that, even in this troubled economy, you can still have some friends over for a good time. Thanks, music games.

The biggest appeal of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre is the sense of immersion. You are in the game. You are the character shooting Nazis, or zombies, or gangsters. You see the world through their eyes because their eyes are your eyes. You connect in a very real way with your avatar because you are the one saving the girl, or killing the bad guys, or, in some cases, killing the good guys.

You get to be someone without limits or morality if you choose. You can be the hero, or you can waste your time writing your name in the wall with bullet holes. Movies are passive; the violence in them is seen and not actually experienced. In games, especially FPS games, you on the couch are the one perpetrating all sorts of heinous acts by your own actions. This fact is one of the reasons legislators blamed Doom for the Columbine shooting… but socially normal people can tell the difference. No matter how immersive a game is, when you turn it off, you’re back in the real world. Sure, you might be a little sweaty and your adrenaline will be pumping, but you can tell the difference. Games are the best (legal) form of escapism on the planet. Everybody wants to get out of their own skin sometimes… what better way then to get into someone else’s space boots and mow down some aliens?

There are three things people expect, want, and need out of every role-playing game: a solid story, a good amount of playtime, and a sense of growth/progress through the game.

First, the story. Think of the most memorable storylines in video games. Think of the characters you connected with the most. Think of the time Aeris died. These are all in RPG’s. When you spend eighty hours of your life in a fictional world, there had better be some people there that you can’t live without. With the growth of technology, the power to tell stories with increasingly dramatic panache helps keep RPG nerds glued to their screens far into the early hours of the morning. We see things in the characters we wouldn’t notice at first glance as we become better acquainted, like moving in with your girlfriend of three months. You notice little character quirks and flaws you wouldn’t see at first, but instead of becoming disgusted, it makes your characters/girlfriends feel even more real and important to us. Gamers usually don’t play RPG’s for the battle system. They play to see and be in control of their own epic story. They finish the games to see what transpires between real, believeable characters. People don’t care about the characters in Halo; if your sidekick dies, big deal. If you play FFVII and you have an integral part of your party snatched away after 30 hours of playtime, you get mad. That connection makes RPG’s interesting, and they will continue to be long into the forseeable future.

Next is the length of the game. No other genre (excluding games you can play online ad nauseum) makes you expect sixty hours of playtime as almost the average. At $60 a pop, that’s a whopping dollar per hour. In today’s economy, gamers and people in general are trying to get the biggest bang for their buck. When Fable came out with its paltry 15-hour length, people actually got livid over its length. I know people that would not buy a fifteen-hour-long RPG because they expect more game. But Metal Gear Solid 2 was about that long including ten hours or so of dialogue, and people flipped over it and would gladly pop down fifty bones for it while Fable sat next to it on the shelf, a sad and neglected step-child that nobody loves. It took me 100 hours to complete Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with all 1250 achievement points (including the expansion). That one game took a year and a half.

A year and a half.

Name a game in another genre in which you can discover something new a year and a half after you started playing it. There aren’t other games with this kind of longevity. Another reason RPG’s are special.

Finally, the sense of growth. In nearly all RPG’s, your characters level up, get stronger, and get all around better as the game goes on. You uncover new abilities, or you can jump higher and run faster, or you are merely more capable of exploring farther into the world. This aspect of RPG’s harkens all the way back to games like Dragon Warrior on the original NES. There was one save point, and it was in the castle in which you started the game. In order to even venture into the wilderness very far, you had to build your strength fighting weak slimes and bats and rats until you could make it more than three steps from the castle without having to run back to the Inn. But you got stronger. After a few hours, you find that you can turn bosses that once gave you a hard time into jelly with one whack of your trust Iron Broadsword. You become able to heal yourself without retreating to a town. You find stronger weapons and armor on the corpses of fallen foes and you become increasingly more mighty. Eventually, your powers rival those of the gods. You feel cool in real life because your game avatar can beat the pants off any wandering monster with a simple push of the A button. That power makes RPG’s great.

The growth aspect of RPG’s is so influential that even games such as Call of Duty 4 use it in their online play. You use a gun long enough, you get better with it, and you get more powerful guns. Metroid and Castlevania have been using the power-up-then-go-to-a-previously-inaccessible-part-of-the-world formula for decades. Without growth, there is only stagnation. People know this. Game developers know this.

Even my blog has growth. I’m past 50 posts! Ba-DOOP! Level up. RPG’s are awesome, and I just showed you why.

Before I start my huge blogging extravaganza, I have to make a point. I have been writing in this thing basically every day for almost two months, and it takes all my non-working time. Since I started a video game blog, I haven’t had time for video games. Sweet irony! I’ve played Fallout 3 once since I bought it back in November. ONCE! I miss my games and their sweet escapism. But I started this, and I have an obligation to continue. I’ll just have to cut into my sleep schedule I guess. I can sleep when I’m dead. There’s games in heaven, right? And up there I can even 5-star “Through the Fire and Flames” on expert. I rock!

Tomorrow I will be starting, you guessed it, a multi-part feature. “Neat!” you say, or “What is this all about?” For the next however many days I choose, I will break down, “What makes genre X so interesting?” There are many new games blending genres into blockbuster games, but back in the day, there were pure RPG’s, pure FPS’s, and pure racing games. I’ll examine the aspects of each that created a loyal following for particular gamers. Some people only buy Madden each year, while others only really enjoy JRPG’s. Why? Hopefully, I’ll explain it very eloquently while defining the aspects that need to be present in the Perfect Game. Not the perfect game of all time – people’s tastes are far too divergent. But at least I can get close for the genre. I hope.