Retro-games – that most vacuous of terms. It means Space Invaders and Ikaruga, Monkey Island and Super Monkey Ball, Donkey Kong and Super Mario 64, Game & Watch and Neo-Geo Pocket Color, 1975 and 1999, Pong and Virtua Tennis, Centipede and Final Fantasy VII.

It means nothing; Other than perhaps functioning as a blanket label for all those games you can’t buy in Tesco right this minute. Essentially it classifies everything older than right now as obsolete – and, were you to apply such a term to films and music, you’d be comprehensively regarded as a clueless, cultureless retard.

Whenever you hear a marketing man use the word ‘retro’ it’s for one of two reasons: either he wants to lend his product an inferred modern frisson by classing everything that has gone before as superseded, or he wants to play on your maturing male sentimentality. In other words, he wants to sell you the future or the past depending on how it suits him. And so we end up with mixed messages, an unhealthy disregard for videogames past and a devaluation of good gameplay – whichever era in which it was born.

But great gameplay remains great gameplay in the same way good music remains good music – even as tastes move on and technology allows music to be recorded and executed in ever more unimaginable ways. Whether you’re playing Pac-Man or Halo all you are essentially doing is moving your thumbs fractions of inches to push beams of lights around a screen in the quest for entertainment. If it was genuinely good for that then, it will be genuinely good at that now.

So on that score Gradius Collection is only ‘retro’ in that the five games collected (Gradius I – IV plus the lesser know PlayStation-only Gradius Gaiden – for five times the freelance fee right?) were birthed a while back.

Indeed, with the first title being released in 1985 and the last in 1998 this collection highlights the inefficiency of the roomy ‘retrogaming’ pigeonhole. Still, in terms of mechanics, gameplay, innovation, form and function these are fresh games, still brilliant, still fun, still challenging, still rarely bettered and, as they’re displayed in glorious PSP widescreen, still contemporarily beautiful. And as they sit in each other’s company in this generous package (only Gradius V is missing from the mainstream Gradius/Nemesis chronology) it’s clear that theirs is a quality that will continue to endure long after the PSP is consigned to its own inevitable retrograded status.

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Over at Gamasutra the ever and increasingly brilliant Jim Rossignol nails the holes and dangers in current mainstream media attitudes and representations of videogames.

“The British news report programme ‘Tonight With Trevor MacDonald’ delivered an ill-considered attack on gaming habits yesterday, with a program designed to highlight the ‘epidemic’ of game addiction,” he reports.

“Wheeling out various acne-riddled, overweight children and teenagers to illustrate the problems of obsessive gaming, the program attempted to illuminate the issue with a series of unsavoury and unrepresentative anecdotes, such as one Dutch gentleman who urinated in a bottle so that he didn’t have to leave his PC, and a child who screamed and bawled if he had his games taken away from him. (His gamepad was actually snatched out of his hands in the clip shown, presumably to deliberately provoke the worst reaction possible for the camera.)

“The program was, as such loaded reports tend to be, an attempt to portray a minority of gamers as somehow representative of (or even tenuously connected with) the vast, toilet-trained, non-suicidal majority of people who enjoy games. The pleas of ‘helpless’ parents were, I’m afraid, a little pathetic. Unplug the consoles, enforce some household rules. Third party interventions are far from a necessity here…”

It’s an excellent piece that ably unmasks the greater and more terrifying spectre of calculated hysteria so much British television news currently trades in. This brings to mind a recent post on John Walker’s blog in which he rants gracefully about our current British news teams and their vapid reporting.

Of most interest are the videos he posts of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann – a pit-bull of a news commentator on the programme, Countdown with Keith Olbermann. These clips throw into sharp relief the guff that currently passes for, firstly reporting, and secondly editorial commentary in the vast majority of British broadcasting newsrooms these days.

Believe it or not Olbermann started on ESPN where he was a fantastic sports broadcaster. A salary dispute with the company – as a rising star he wanted the same money as such luminaries as Berman and Patrick – led to his resignation and a subsequent job with FoxSports. After a few years he moved into news journalism and it’s clear from these clips that he’s really found his vocation, excellent as he is at analysis and commentary and being just as hard on the left as he is the right in the search of The Truth.

As one of my US friends said when I mentioned our increasing need for a Brit Olbermann: “You can borrow him, but we’ll need him back.”

*er, the title is a reference to the glorious film Network, any concerned but cinematically-maleducated friends/ readers.

This week I’ve started reading Douglas Coupland’s latest – jPod.

Upon learning the lead protagonist’s favourite videogame is Chrono Trigger I felt a burst of admiration for, solidarity with and understanding of Coupland’s prize character – all shattered a second later with the follow-up words, “on Playstation”.

Now I was repulsed towards, disorientated by and confused as to why he would not have picked the original and superior Super Nintendo version. What kind of man is this? Next, dismay to realise that not only would I pick up on such an inconsequential detail, but that this thing would upset me.

Finally, hopeful wonder at whether Coupland wanted to engender these exact emotions in readers like me – that this gentlest of shading of character development was to show that his hero has excellent but flawed tastes to the well-played amongst his audience.

Now, as I write this, steady guilt that already this might have been a life better spent…

Final review for a big old series that I’ve been following for a few years now since reviewing the first game for edge magazine. It’s a good ending to a tortured series and much of my conclusion is in the undercurrent of the first paragraph. I tried a trick with the conclusion to the review that works quite well I think and gets the points across. Still, even though Takahashi’s dream was never quite fulfilled, this is about as much as one could hope for.

Please bear with this. While a review of the finale to a three-part epic J-RPG science-fiction saga might seem irredeemably tedious to all but the most unflinchingly geekish consumer,there are lessons herein that are important to the rest of gaming. Ideas that should and shouldn’t be repeated and, remarkably, beneath the rubble of this prematurely destroyed series, the pleading whisper of a good game trapped in a fallen framework.

Originally intended as a six-part run of games that would be released over no less than three console generations spanning a decade, the Xenosaga vision has been mercilessly downsized in recent times. Indeed, with declining sales as the story has progressed it was perhaps debateable as to whether we’d see any form of conclusion to this, Tetsuya Takahashi’s lovingly crafted universe. So, there’s some sense of relief for fans in this, the final (foreseeable) Xenosaga game: they at least made it to an end.

But first, a brief history of time.

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While nobody seems quite confident enough to pin down what ‘Art’ is in less than 20, 000 words these days, I’ve been happy to adopt the outlook of one of my university philosophy lecturers for the last few years. He summed up artistic worth quicker and clearer than I am about to retell, but hopefully you’ll catch his meaning through my awkward filter.

He argued ‘Art’ is composed of three elements: idea, execution and technique; in that order of importance.

Firstly the idea. Good art facilitates (not forces) me to see the world, or an object, or a thought or myself in a new or different way by presenting some kind of idea. This might be through magnifying a tiny element of an object to reveal something about the bigger picture you’d never perceived before or by representing a scene in such a different way as to give it new meaning or significance or by juxtaposing stuff that normally doesn’t sit together.

The better the idea the more likely the art will move me forward in thinking. On this basis a straight watercolour landscape painting looking to recreate as faithfully as possible a real-life scene is less artistically worthy than an idea-rich impressionist sunflower that emphasises different elements of what a sunflower is and in doing so perhaps allows me to look at sunflowers in a new way.

This is offset by the idea’s execution (the better the execution the more effective the artist is at conveying – or deliberately partially obscuring – his point) and finally the artist’s technique, on which the effectiveness of that execution often rests. Technique is important as, after all, different artists might represent the same idea in different ways, and technique is the modifier that makes one more effective in communicating that idea than the other.

So good art is a complex mixture of these three interrelated factors.

I like this definition as it helps me to critically pin down quality in any creative medium.

It also helps hone the question of what is/ isn’t art by broadening the pool to encompass all human creative endeavour (anything that takes and idea and presents it) while clearly drawing the line between what is good creative expression and what is vacuous. So instead of asking the mostly useless question ‘Are videogames Art’ we’re now inclined to ask ‘Which videogames are art and what do they say to us’.

The best artistic videogames combine a good idea (by this I don’t mean a gameplay mechanism but an new angle on some aspect of life) with exquisite execution and competent technique. Some major on one of these factors but the greats demonstrate all of them.

Banksy, the graffiti artist with a head full of subversion and an eye for the macro canvas is always entertaining. His work on the West Bank last year is awe-inspiring (he was allegedly threatened at gunpoint numerous times during the exercise) and the stone carving of a caveman pushing a shopping trolley he planted in the British Museum lasted three days before being removed (and then absorbed by the museum as an artefact).

His latest idea isn’t nearly as good as these. Banksy has replaced Paris Hilton’s new album with a doctored version of his own remixes all with new titles such as Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?

He has also changed pictures of her on the CD sleeve to show the US socialite topless and with a dog’s head. A spokeswoman for Banksy said he had doctored 500 copies of her debut album Paris in 48 record shops across the UK.

She told the BBC News website: “He switched the CDs in store, so he took the old ones out and put his version in but left the original barcode so people could buy the CD without realising it had been interfered with”. HMV and Virgin as well as independent record stores.He visited cities including Bristol, Brighton, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow and London, she added.

Now, as an idea this is a little weaker than the usual stuff – it’s hardly the most original point and, as Popjustice maliciously point out: “Banksy’s profile is never AT ALL dependant on press attention from riding on the coat-tails of other people’s work in an unimaginative retread of a tradition which is at least 50 years old”.

What is fun is the response of HMV and Virgin’s spokespeople – who both responded like good little post-modern multinationals. “It’s not the type of behaviour you’d want to see happening very often,” said the HMV Man.

“I guess you can give an individual such as Banksy a little bit of leeway for his own particular brand of artistic engagement.

“Often people might have a view on something but feel they can’t always express it, but it’s down to the likes of Banksy to say often what people think about things. And it might be that there will be some people who agree with his views on the Paris Hilton album.”

Whether that was said through gritted teeth or not I’m not sure – but still, hats off for playing things intelligently.

So now the hunt is on for Banksy’s Paris Hilton project – limited to 500 copies. Banksy’s works sell for a lot of money and already the ones that have cropped up on ebay (and have now all been removed by the website) are/ were demanding top prices.

But, desirability and value aside, using the parameters set out at the start: Art?

You can buy Banksy’s fantastic book Wall and Piece here for the very low price of £13.20 (at time of writing)

Retentitive readers might remember a Chewing Pixels post from a month or so ago when I posted a discussion about mtvU/ Reebok’s philanthropic web game Darfur is Dying. It was so hard to shake those thoughts that I decided to interview the creator Susana Ruis about the game and the wider implications of its existence. Her answers are so concise, clear and illuminating that I really hope they get a fair read from just some of Eurogamer’s passers-through – especially those in the business of game creation. But then, as friend Ste Curran pointed out when I looked to him for some comfort with my mildly egocentric concern that nobody might read furthur than the first paragraph: just about nobody reads anything. Please, just this once, read all of this.

Susana Ruis: We did not set out to entertain but rather to inform, engage and motivate. Early on in the process, we were inspired and driven by what Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof wrote for his New York Times column in a piece detailing pro-Darfur activity in American campuses. He writes of the “way generations of Americans acquiesced in one genocide after another – only to apologize afterward and pledge ‘Never Again’. So out of the miasma of horror that is Darfur, something uplifting is taking place. Ordinary Americans are finding creative ways to respond to the slaughter, so that they personally inject meaning into those traditionally hollow words: Never Again.”

This genocide can be stopped. Our world has the collective resources to end this suffering, but it takes personal and political will that is lacking. We hope “Darfur is Dying” will continue to motivate more individuals to take action to help end the killing and suffering in Sudan.

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