Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I’m a self proclaimed pack-rat and collector, but if I ever had to sell my gaming collection to feed my family these are the games I’d hang onto. If my wife let me, anyway.

Ah, the good ol’ days of the Dreamcast. My fondness for this system knows no bounds, as it was responsible for introducing me to the “next gen” of gaming back in ’99. Pretty much all of my favorite genres today were introduced or refined for me on this system: racing, sports, fighting, platforming and MMO’s.  Yes, you read that right, MMO. Phantasy Star Online was the first MMO I ever played and it was my gateway drug to EverQuest, City of Heroes and the mighty World of Warcraft. I suppose these days you’d call PSO more of a Co-Op game than MMO, since your parties consisted of only 4 people, but you could log in over SegaNet (I loved Sega’s ISP, it was so much better than AOHell) and interact with hundreds of other people in the game’s lobbies before landing a party and setting off for adventures. I have great memories of dungeon crawling with friends until late hours of the night, grinding out XP and hunting for rare weapons and upgrading our MAGs.

I still fire this up on my second Dreamcast (connected to my PC monitor via VGA adapter) and play my 71st level HUcast. Graphically the game still looks nice and is a lot of fun even if you can’t play it online anymore. Someday I’ll hit level 100 and then retire the game for good. Or start a new character and let the grindfest begin anew.

I noticed this recently when reading some online FAQs while playing Final Fantasy XII. The walkthrough talked about kiting, about casting ‘bubble’ on your tanks, and about aggro. Sigh. I’m not arguing that the whole tank/dps/healer system isn’t effective – it obviously is designed to be the most efficient way to defeat monsters. But what I’d like to see is a game that’s designed to disallow or defeat what has become the dominant party configuration, simply because too much of the same thing gets old.

Recently, when reading PC World’s article 10 Reasons You Must Play Torchlight, I noticed the usage of the terms “tank”, “ranged DPS”, and “nuker”. That’s what made me start thinking about this whole thing. Sure, I’m MMO-phobic. I’ll admit that. But that’s not the only reason I’m squeamish about these terms. When games force you to abide by these mechanics, it removes your ability to be creative. Even Borderlands has a tank (Brick) and a healer. (Roland) The other characters, I suppose, could fall into the DPS role.

Compare this to the somewhat older set of RPG roles: fighter, magic-user, cleric, thief. While there are certainly some analogies between these, (fighter=tank, cleric=healer) they really are different. A magic-user and fighter are both very good at dealing out damage, and a cleric can often do close to as much. But the fighter can take more hits. The magic-user and thief, while they can’t do high damage as consistently as a fighter, can generally do higher damage in the right situations: spells are generally limited, and backstabbing can be tricky to accomplish.

I’m not sure that I’m trying to make a point with this analysis, I’m primarily sharing a stream of consciousness. Perhaps tank/dps/healer is just the new fighter/magic-user/cleric/thief. Maybe in another decade the system will be revamped again and we’ll see caller/swarmer/pillar or maybe fetishist/raconteur/ninja/pirate/jai alai player.