3.23.2008

BREIFLY LOOKING AT TWO OLD GAMES WITH NEW SEQUELS

I've been playing a lot of PS2 games lately, because I missed a great many of the platform's best games during the bulk of its' lifecylce. I didn't have access to one until 2005, really, because I had fully invested myself in the Gamecube. I mean, completely fanboy nuts invested myself. I went so far as to convince myself that Star Fox Adventures was among the best adventure games I'd played -- my God, was it not -- and that there were enough quality RPG's to satiate my appetite for that genre. Why, it even had a Final Fantasy game! It was a janky Diablo clone that had very few ties to canonical Final Fantasy motifs, sure, but it was a Final Fantasy game.


Yep. I really did think that game was good, once.

I could convince myself of a great many things between 2002-2004, as those of you who know me personally can attest.

Also, I see no reason to (re)enter this hardware generation until I've gotten an HDTV, because I've played Ubisoft games on the 360 in SD and strained my eyes something awful just reading on screen text.

Most importantly, I haven't been able to find my DS in a few weeks. That thing might actually be my favorite console of all time, honestly. I left it somewhere creative, no doubt. Etrian Odyssey was still in the cartridge slot, too.

Hopefully, the DS will show up again soon, because I'd rather not fork out another $160 dollars and countless hours of my life remapping all those dungeons and getting slaughtered by FOEs just to say I finished one of the hardest games I've ever attempted to play. Although it might be worth all that money to hear that glorious Yuzo Koshiro score again...

Anyway, back to the PS2 games I've been gorging myself on -- two of which, God of War and Devil May Cry 3, I have to discuss right here right now. It's almost timely, too, with a new game in each franchise recently released on different systems that I don't own. That makes this post a New Sku first!

God of War is a solid action game with absolutely stunning production values. It also has a certain aesthetic style that I completely loathe, and it's killing a lot of the enjoyment I could see myself enjoying were this not the case. And the game balance is slightly off. On the default difficulty setting, there are a few different attacks that feel crazily overpowered and make the game a breeze to play.

Basically, God of War feels like a Mortal Kombat of character action games, big and bloody and stupid and mean spirited. It's more balanced and technical than any MK game I've spent time with (there's nothing as overpowered as, say, Scorpion's spear toss/uppercut combo here), but some of the attacks are just ludicrous. Whenever you see a group of enemies, just Hold L1 + Square or Triangle. You'll kill 'em all in no time.

The game also forces you to do some pretty morally repugnant things and treats them as if they were just the raddest most brutal and awesome ideas ever thought up by anyone. I'm thinking specifically of a puzzle that requires Kratos to murder a screaming prisoner in some crazy fire-spewing vice thing to continue advancing in Pandora's Temple. I got the feeling that David Jaffe and his team in San Diego were hoping to elicit the following reaction: "Dude, this game is so brutal you have to listen to a dude scream for minutes as you kick him towards his death!"

It's brutal and violent, and that's sometimes kinda cool, but there's no soul behind that violence. It's like some callow thirteen year old telling you about how Hostel was the greatest movie of all time because some dude gets his nuts cut off and the camera doesn't cut away at all.

Devil May Cry 3 (I'm playing the Special Edition, with it's readjusted difficulty settings and improved continue mechanic, btw) has a completely different, insane style that I like a lot better than the style in God of War. For example, there's a boss battle in DMC3 against a prostitute made out of bats who, when defeated, turns into an electric guitar that Dante plays like fucking Steve Vai while fireworks explode all around him. I find stuff like that extremely awesome.

I also really enjoy the lite RPG aspect of the game. Kill enemies, collect red orbs. Use red orbs to buy shit between levels. It's just like Dragon Quest, but with guns. In addition, you're given the choice between four different "styles," before each level starts (more become unlocked later on). As you kill stuff, you gain experience in whatever style you've chosen. This lets you tailor your game to the style you most enjoy playing, and that rocks.

However, there is no way to beat this game without some good old fashioned RPG-style grinding. You have to return to levels you've beaten already to collect more red orbs and more experience if you hope to stand a chance in the 17th level, because you're going to need a lot of life orbs. Killing a prostitute made out of bats is radical once; killing her again, along with every other boss in the game one after another with no real money to stock up on health items between each fight, is not.

I haven't finished either game yet (although I think I'm fairly close to the end in God of War, and if I have to face a gauntlet of every boss in DMC I'd say it's safe to assume that I'm pretty close to the finale), so I'll reserve final judgment until then. Also, it's 3:00 AM. I'm going to bed.

Happy Easter, everyone.

3.19.2008

A HIND D?! A REVIEW OF MGS3

Here's another one of the user reviews I wrote for Gamespot. Eventually, all those reviews will be up here, excepting the complete garbage I wrote early on. Here at New Sku, "the slowest growing, least popular videogame blog currently on the webtm," I won't just recycle without adding anything -- I'm not Square-Enix -- so we can expect improved grammar, better formatting, extensive profanity and jokes about cystic fibrosis

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. It's more a clothesline to hang footnotes on than a review proper.




'Snake Eater,' is a weird game. Really weird. Remarkably, unsettling, unfailingly weird. Do not let any person tell you different.

Yet I have been reading some other reader reviews here at Gamespot and have been surprised at how little attention this issue has received. Comments like this statement in user megjur's review are ubiquitous: "I'd love to tell all about the story , but I'd hate to spoil it so let just say it's better than ever."

I wonder how one spoils a story that makes no cogent sense.

'Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater,' was developed and produced by Japanese Konami employees under the guidance of Hideo Kojima. In my imagination, this videogame was developed to be a deliberate accident, something like a John Cage composition, as conducted by Kojima.

Kojima strikes me as a bright, idiosyncratic guy. I would call him a 'postmodernist developer' if videogames were done with modernism. He's one of the few producers with a distinctive style. Casual gamers know the name. I think he is really sick of making videogames. If that is true, it is a shame, because - well. I like his games. [1].

I want to believe this game is a farewell to the entire Metal Gear franchise. It is a perfect way to end the series, coming as close to wrapping up all the loose threads as possible in a series as lousy with convoluted plot twists as this one. I'm striking Metal Gear Solid 2 out of the official canon, however, because MGS2 is more like an elaborate joke than a videogame. It's a really great joke, though!

This is my pet theory: everyone involved in the Metal Gear franchise at Konami was told to build the game as though it were a mega-budget 80's thriller (I'm thinking of Red Dawn, the second greatest Patrick Swayze film of all time, when I say this[2]). After this task was completed, Kojima and his team began a much more difficult task: to radically obscure any hint of authenticity - turning reality into something oblique and abstract, breaking all the conceits of 'stealth action' realism in as many subversive ways as possible without calling broad attention to their gambit.

I can almost hear Kojima cackling madly though a tear in space and time from the moment the 'opening credits' segment begins, complete with a brassy James Bond-esque theme song. The cinematic aspiration-traditionalist videogame design dichotomy inherent in every Kojima production is evident right off the bat, here.

MGS3 is soaked in allusions, many of them allusions to other Konami games. However, the history of cinema is evoked more often, and just as heartfelt. Even saving your game (done with the familiar 'codec' system fans of previous MGS games may recognize[3]) calls up your cute companion 'Para-Medic" who will tell you (playing as Naked Snake) a little story about a 'real life' movie, everything from Godzillia to the Magnificent Seven to schlock drive-in films.

A large percentage of game time is devoted to cut scenes. 'Cut Scenes' is something of a four letter word to some gamers, and to place the non interactive sequences spread throughout the course of MGS3 in the same category as the nonsensical drivel that nearly every other PS2 game provides us with is incorrect.[4]. The cut scenes, or whatever they are, are not very game-like, and they aren't 'movie-like' either. Stringing all the cut scenes together and watching them, start to finish, would make for a repetitive, confusing, and somewhat inexplicable film. The best comparison to MGS3's non-interactive bits are the collected writings of Kobe Abe & William Gaddis & Thomas Pynchon: outrageously hilarious events with deadly serious ideas hiding underneath.

I'm most reminded of Gaddis' 'The Recognitions,' a novel that tells a story (most novels tell stories, right?) of one Wyatt Gwyon, a masterful forger of great painters. Sort of [5]. 'The Recognitions' explores the struggle to define authenticity in a world like ours - and, after we've determined what is authentic, it asks us to ponder the value of authenticity. Why, exactly, is authenticity important?

Which brings us back to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. This game cheerfully smashes the authentic and the absurd together, like demolition derby cars. MGS3 is the sort of game where you are free to utilize sensible and prudent stealth tactics while wearing a gigantic fake crocodile head. It is the sort of game that, with a straight face, can insert a megalomaniac Russian general who can shoot electricity out of his hands for some reason or another. A game in which The Boss, Snake's mentor turned traitor, appears to be younger than he is. This is a game that tries to implement militarily accurate solo jungle operations in such a videogame-y way that it succeeds almost in spite of itself.

More so than most videogames, Metal Gear Solid requires you to play "The Right Way," to get the most out of it. "The Right Way," to play Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is similar to "The Right Way," espoused by Larry Brown [6]: move slowly, listen to your superiors, don't worry too much about the logic of your superiors' thinking, and make damn sure to play good defense. One can, of course, set the game's difficulty to "Super Easy," run around with a gun that never jams and has unlimited ammo, wearing the most outlandish costumes and eating the most outlandish things [7], and have fun. You'll be abusing the system, and you'll look like a deformed mongoloid while abusing said system, but you'll have fun.

I do not abuse the system. I take all this stuff real seriously. I do not sneak around with an alligator mask on my head very often. I camouflage Snake appropriately at all times. I almost always restore my last saved game when I mistakenly blow my cover, not because I am worried about seeing a 'GAME OVER' screen[8], but because I felt like I had let Snake down, in some way. I empathize with him, and with Boss, and with all the Fear and EVA and the virtual families of the guards I do kill [9]. I feel this way because game creates such a sense of atmosphere that even the most outlandish events seem reasonable in these Russian jungles. [10]. By "sense of atmosphere," I don't simply mean the graphics and sound effects are phenomenal (although they are phenomenal). I'm referring to the meticulous placement and use of graphics and sounds. The world of Snake Eater could pass for a real geographic location in the real world. The dense foliage of the jungles; the functional and nondescript architecture of the Soviet facilities; the dank caves... intellectually, I am aware this world has been set up and tweaked to stimulate the most enjoyable gaming experience possible by a bunch of people more talented than I am. Doesn't matter; when I turn out all the lights, put on my headphones, and sit in front of my little Daewoo television, I am in 1965, in that jungle.

All the Metal Gear Solid games have this immersing quality to a degree, but the verisimilitude I've been writing about is closely related to the obvious effort the folks at Konami have put into researching their game. Snake Eater has an obsession with technical detail, made blatantly obvious in the extended conversations between Ocelot & Snake. These non-interactive bits are shockingly precise - "this gun does these things when held this way" Snake will tell Ocelot - and a creepy fetishistic streak creeps into the narrative. While undeniably cool-sounding, this kind of trivia can feel showy, even hypocritical, given the subtext of the game's plot.

Snake Eater is, after a fashion, an examination of the mechanisms that drive patriotism and loyalty. Ultimately, at the end of the game, these mechanical processes lose out to a triumph and celebration of the strange bonds and friendships all humans accrue in their lives. John Lennon does not make an appearance on the Snake Eater soundtrack, but there are a few ghostly signs of the dead Beatles' hippie world-view tucked underneath all the macho gun-porn.[11] By treating weaponry and violence like a fetish, the subtext is undercut - but only slightly. The characters in this game are largely military personnel. Of course these people would love guns and bombs and scientists willing to make them more, bigger guns and bombs. Boss is redeemed though violence, not by her rejection of it.

There is only one major flaw in the way this story is told, and it has been a pet peeve of mine since I started reading manga, watching anime, and playing Japanese videogames. Snake never fails to repeat new information given to him in the form of a question. Major Tom (I don't care if he changed his handle, he's f'ing Major Tom) will say: "Snake, listen closely. There's a robot that shoots nuclear warheads somewhere in the wastelands of Russia. Then Snake will say: "A robot that shoots nuclear warheads?"

Tom: "Yes Snake. We believe it is northeast of your current location."
Snake: "Northeast of here?"
Tom: "Yes Snake. I don't have to tell you how important it is to find and destroy this weapon."
Snake: "Destroy the weapon? How do I do that?"
Tom: "Use your training, Snake."
Snake: "Training. Got it. Crab Battle."


This goes on and on and on[12], adding maybe a full hour of time to your game clock. I don't know any Japanese, so I am not sure why this phenomenon reoccurs so often, but there must be a good reason for it.

Now, the interactive bits (also known as 'the game proper') are not without flaws, but I find them to be endearing flaws, like how a slight imperfection in your lover's body makes them all the sexier in your eyes. After playing other, more western stealth action games, the myopic, old-skool overhead perspective is very irritating. To counterbalance this limitation, the developers have given Snake superhuman resistance to physical energy and pain; even on "Hard" difficulty, Snake can take a good 20 bullets before collapsing and dying. This does not constitute "stealth action" so much as it constitutes "stubborn game design."

Meanwhile, the much vaunted new "realistic" additions to the franchise during its' development: namely, the need to hunt and eat food in the jungle, and the required self-doctoring of injuries suffered in battle, as well as the ability to camouflage Snake to best blend in with his environment[13], come across as tacky and poorly implemented. In the middle of a heated gun battle, Snake should not be allowed to pause time to remove a bullet from his shoulder with his knife.

Que serra, serra.

Snake Eater is still very fun to play, both "The Right Way," and the "Crocodile-Headed Mass Murderer Way." It is just a dated game. I like dated games. I'm odd that way. Snake Eater is just as much fun to watch, if you enjoy the near-miss as much as you enjoy the unqualified masterpiece.

FINAL SCORE: A SHOEBOX FILLED WITH ALL THE COLLECTABLE CARD GAMES I PLAYED WHEN I WAS A KID.

footnotes:
[1] - Except Boktai, which was really stupid in both concept and execution.
[2] - What is the best Patrick Swayze film of all time? Roadhouse. And it is not even close.

[3] - ...and hate.

[4] - I still have no idea what the hell was supposed to be going on in Devil May Cry 3, and I've logged dozens and dozens of hours into that game.

[5] - Or is it? Gaddis is a pretty difficult read.

[6] - Larry Brown is a vagabond basketball coach notable for his tendency to quit jobs as soon as he has a chance & his creepy devotion to former North Carolina head coach Dean Smith. Not that there is anything wrong with that; give me Smith over John Wooden and Phog Allen and Allen Rupp and especially Mike "I swear I'm not actually a mouse, really!" Kyskvskiwinskiwizzi (I purposefully misspelled that name, by the way, because I hate Duke, and therefore hate him by proxy).

[7] - I had a roommate that exclusively fed Snake rotten food. He loved spinning Snake around in the menu screen until Snake puked the poisoned food back up. Admittedly, I thought this was funny as hell.

[8] - Rumor is, Kojima wanted to release the game with the following feature: death is permanent. Dying automatically would wipe any MGS3 saved games from your memory card - actually "killing" your progress in the game. Knowing him, he wasn't going to advertise this 'feature' until the game was out -- I imagine he would do his best to keep the secret, Rayden-style (remember MGS2: Sons of Liberty?). This is such a mischievous and evil maneuver that I can think of very few parallels in gaming history. I love it.

[9] - I've always been uncomfortable killing beings clearly meant to be humans in videogames, and I usually think I'm alone in this way. But I'm going to ask something of you, dear reader: I want you to try this experiment sometime when playing Grand Theft Auto or MurderDeathAwesome or whatever. Pretend that every human you kill has a family to take care of. A wife, expecting. An ill uncle to take care of. A boyfriend who was planning to pop the question later in the day. A stack of half-finished poems that could revolutionize the literary world. Then pull the trigger.

[10] - Except for that RPG thing that fires nuclear warheads.

[11] - Plus, if you play the game backwards at half speed on an old belt-driven turntable, you can clearly hear Lennon say "Paul is dead."

[12] - And on.

[13] - Yeah, it's a bunch of compound fragments strung together. Just be happy there are not any dangling participles around.

Rabbits Kinda Fucking Suck: A Retrospective on Bucky O'Hare

Bucky O'Hare is quite possibly the ugliest creature to star in an eponymous animated series. Ever.


There he is: one gigantic puke-green rabbit rocking a ketchup-red admiral's uniform.

His irises are pink. He may only have one, gigantic buck tooth. Instead of whiskers, he has what appear to be glued patches of his own body fur affixed to the sides of his face.

His grotesque appearance belies no indication of his intelligence and cunning. The average Saturday morning cartoon horror show cannot ever forget his disfigurement when it's surrounded by playful, proportional children. Bucky was better than that. He wisely surrounded himself with other mongoloids to heighten his self-esteem. Creatures like: Deadeye Duck, a four-armed waterfowl with a taste for haberdashery; Jenny, a cat (I think it's a cat, at least) notable primarily for her ridiculously huge pink hair; Blinky, a neurotic, always-say-die robotic cyclops; and some fat kid from San Francisco.

I mean -- goddamn. A group of investors gave a bunch of stoners a fair bit of money to create... this?

Bucky O'Hare is fairly typical of early 90's Saturday morning cartoons, I guess, in that it looks ugly and cheap, and it tells a paint-by-numbers sci-fi story. The only distinguishing feature between Bucky O'Hare and something like E.X.O. is the... intriguing character design. Bucky focuses on the adventures of one wise cracking space rabbit; almost every other sci-fi cartoon show of the era chronicled the adventures of square jawed white dudes.

Sadly, the "furry inspired" artwork was about all the cartoon had going for it. Bucky returned, again and again and again to jokes that were resoundingly not funny. Before one even got to those lame jokes, of course, one had to endure a theme song that was so fucking awful, no English words exist to describe it.

Where did he come from? According to that most reliable of sources, Wikipedia, Bucky O'Hare started as a short-lived underground (or unpopular -- it's never made explicit) British comic book in the late 70's. After a decade of silence, someone optioned a TV series about the hideous mammal for some reason (drugs?), also short-lived and unpopular. Neal Adams, oddly, had something to do with the animated series. He also owns the Bucky O'Hare IP today.

I kinda thought Adams was dead, incidentally.

Obviously, a franchise of this caliber requires all manner of licensed products, and luckily for it Konami was in the middle of a furious fight with Capcom to prove, once and for all, that license games were not always garbage. Both companies were both pretty obstinate, actually. It didn't matter how stupid the license was so long as Capcom or Konami was on the case!

Capcom set the standard with Duck Tales, which I always thought was overrated intellectual property... although I may be alone in this assessment. The NES Duck Tails game is still a lot of fun to play today, though! It's a very solid platformer with great control. Also, the music on the Moon level is so, so good.

Konami one-upped Capcom in the inane license department a few years later, viciously jacking many signature elements from Capcom's flagship series, Mega Man. and grafting them onto, you guessed it, the Bucky O'Hare franchise. And so in 1992 (nearly a decade after the Famicom launched in Japan, if you can believe it) I got Bucky O'Hare for the Nintendo Entertainment System for my 8th birthday. It was the last NES cartridge my parents ever got me.



Christ, I loved that game in 1992. I didn't care about the license; I hadn't seen a single minute of Bucky O'Hare until I started researching this retrospective. No, I loved Bucky because every stage was divided into short sub levels, or "acts." Some acts were no more than 10 seconds long. On the ice planet, you were required to navigate the body of an enormous mechanical worm-toad-thing to reach the next area in the level. This worm/toad always moved in the same pattern, but it was this batshit crazy pattern that sometimes curled back on itself in most unexpected ways. The closest analogue to this section I can think of right now is the frantic "outrun the lava" bit in Mega Man 2, on Quickman's stage. Disregard for a moment that this exact set piece was completely stolen by the Bucky O'Hare team elsewhere in the game. I would die a lot in Mega Man 2 on Quickman's stage, and throw hissy fits in the months prior to discovering that I could equip the weapons of defeated bosses -- I wasn't a bight kid. Bucky prompted no such hissy fits; because there were so many checkpoints, I felt compelled to retry those tricky bits until I mastered them, instead of kicking my NES.

Three or four months ago, Bucky O'Hare was booted up again after a few of my oldest friends and I had consumed great quantities of beer, irish coffee, and I think some paint thinner. At the time, I felt like the game held up far better than I had ever expected it to, and so I decided to write something about the game right there and then.

After finishing my rough draft, I booted up Nestopia to grab some screen captures, so the essay would have some graphical élan. As I played the game on my laptop (with a Playstation 2 controller, I hasten to add), I realized how drunk we actually had been.



The game is competent, sure, and the frequent checkpoints make playing the game a whole lot more fun than some earlier NES titles, but there were a lot of competent platformers available for the NES in 1992. There were also extraordinary platformers: Metroid; Castlevania 3: Simon's Quest; the Mario games; Adventure Island 4; the list goes on for some time. Hell, the cobbled together cash-in nonsense of Mega Man 4 & Mega Man 5 play a little better than Bucky, and those games don't play all that well. By that time, and for reasons known only to the developers, Mega Man moved like his robot body was covered in molasses.

In lieu of the traditional "beat the boss, steal his arm, kill his friends with it," mechanic employed by Mega Man, Bucky could call upon his grotesque friends after rescuing them at the end of each level. Each one of them was supposed to have a unique style of attack and "charge attack," that behaved in a roughly analogous way to Mega Man's badass gun-arms. Trouble was, Bucky's friends were not badass robotic arms. They were ugly fucking sprites with stupid ass powers.

Bucky, he had a little pea-shooter that also gave him the ability to jump very high. So what does Deadeye Duck bring to the table? Well, a little pea-shooter... capable of shooting in three directions. His gun also let him jump very high. Blinky didn't have a gun -- he could lob balls of something out of his back -- but instead of jumping really high like his mutant friends, Blinky floated really high. The pink haired cat and the fat kid did more interesting things with their charge attacks -- she used telepathy, he fired a gigantic laser -- but their roles were compromised by their weak legs. I blame the very hidden layers of sexual tension between them; when you're some fatass kid with a laser capable of committing some rad genocide, you're bound to get a little weak in the knees around mutant kitties.

I've learned a valuable lesson from all of this, however: only play games when drunk.

ROUNDUP RANKING: A BOX OF PUFFINS' CEREAL, WHICH I KINDA LIKE SOMETIMES, EVEN THOUGH IT CUTS THE ROOF OF MY MOUTH





3.05.2008

Ziff-Davis Files Bankruptcy While I Write About EGM

I was planning on doing a large History of Videogame Magazines series at some point in history, for two reasons:

one: I love videogame magazines. I've been an avid consumer of them from the moment Nintendo Power appeared in my mailbox; I have at least one copy of all the major books throughout the years, from the august Electronic Gaming Monthly to the short-livedGame Buyer and Incite magazines (God, Incite was such a fucking awful magazine). I was reading Edge before it was cool, man. I've bought all the publications that Dave Halverson's been associated with, even though, in GameFan magazine, he gave Bug! a 98%.

Although the market for these gaming magazines is rapidly disappearing in this wacky Web 2.0 world, there is something about the amalgamation of glossy paper and glue that feels authoritative. It brings to mind a simpler era I'm nostalgic for, a time before NeoGAF and New Games Journalism, a time when it was okay to just scan images from Famitsu for a cover story, when new and exciting things happened to grammar and spelling.

two: I wanted to get my history published in some two-bit hack fanzine, complete with interviews and graphics and stuff. The emergence (or to put it more accurately, my awareness) of GameSetWatch's magweaseling
column renders my idea irrelevant and stupid, because Kevin Gifford does such a better job than I ever could.

Today could mark the beginning of the end for print gaming magazines. Chris Kolher's Game|Life blog reports that Ziff-Davis Media, Inc. filed for bankruptcy. ZD publishes my two favorite mainstream books, EGM and Games for Windows Live (formerly Computer Gaming World), and although the game group (the two print magazines and the 1up.com website) is not supposed to be affected by this filing, it's no secret that ZD had been trying to get out of the game publishing world -- it attempted to sell the game group last year, and while many companies were eager to snatch 1up.com, none wanted the print publications along with it.

So, in honor of Ziff-Davis' bankruptcy filing, I'm going to take a short look at the history of the first "real" games magazine I ever saw, Electronic Gaming Monthly. Note that this article may contain gross inaccuracies, because I no longer have many EGM's lying around to reference and most of the "gossipy" information is stuff I remember hearing on either EGM Live* or Player One podcasts.

EGM: The Sendai Years (1989-1996)

Twin Galaxies is responsible for a lot of joy in my life. Without it, there would be no King of Kong, one of the great documentaries of the modern era. No one around to organize classic gaming tournaments. Above all, there would be no home for a high-school dropout with a serious enthusiasm for old games, like Steve Harris.

In late 1988, Harris used some money he earned hosting a videogame tournament to start Electronic Game Player, which lasted four whopping issues and is exceedingly rare today. Luckily, a small magazine distributor in Chicago saw the potential in EGP and gave $70,000 to Harris to start a new magazine -- Electronic Gaming Monthly -- for which the distributor (whose name eludes me at the moment) would act as the sole distributor. Harris named his publishing house Sendai, after the capital city in the Tōhoku region of Japan. Why he did this, I do not know.

The first issue debuted in the spring of 1989, as a one-off buyer's guide. It did well, and the magazine was launched properly that summer. I know almost nothing about the earliest of the early days -- Steve Harris was EIC for a while, then Ed Semrad took over (we'll get to him in a minute), no one bothered to hire a copy editor, Ken Williams made his debut as Sushi-X -- a pretty blatant swipe of Famitsu's mystery reviewer Taco-X, not that stealing ideas (and images) from Famitsu was a rare occurrence then -- and much merriment was brought to the sick children of America when their parents bought them a copy of EGM to make the chicken pox more bearable.


courtesy of Magweasel

The first issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly I read was issue 46. I was in like second grade. God, I loved every garish thing about it. Unlike Nintendo Power, this magazine had information about upcoming games, which was an incredibly novel concept at the time. It felt fresh and edgy. There was an except of a terrible Street Fighter II comic printed in the back that maybe had a shot of Chun-Li's panties.

After the 50th issue, the magazine underwent a pretty significant redesign. Every game preview was accompanied with a "The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly," section that rarely told you what was good, bad, or ugly about it. The issues released in the holiday season were of insane size; if I remember correctly, December 1994 was nearly 500 pages long. Compare that to the current EGM's -- I'd guess the standard EGM today is 100 pages.

Ed Semrad was the EIC at the time. Before EGM, he wrote a videogame column in the Milwaukee Journal. Most reports indicate that was an incredibly weird, angry man, with a gigantic son or son-in-law who was at the office in Lombard, IL quite frequently. Chris Johnston, the former news editor at EGM, stated that he never once saw Ed Semrad play anything; Andy Baran was the guy who primarily wrote the reviews under Ed's name in the Review Crew. Occasionally, Ed would write something when he felt very strongly about an issue, such as the Virtual Boy. He wrote a review for at least one VB game, slamming it. Funnily enough, Ed Semrad had a detached retina and therefore couldn't play anything on a system requiring stereoscopic vision. And so on.

Oh, and Sushi-X was Ken Williams. That's pretty much all I know about the Sendai days.

Stay tuned for part 2, which may or may not ever be written!


sources used in article include: wikipedia, mag weasel, chris johnston's "egm chronicles," [link], information gleaned from podcasts, and my own spotty memory.

3.04.2008

gary gygax

I must break the monastic vow of silence to remark upon the death of a most influential figure in gaming history, Gary Gygax. He is most famous for appearing on Futurama in the first "What if?" machine episode as a member of Al Gore's special envoy tasked with protecting the space-time continuum --also, he created some tabletop game called "Dungeons & Dragons." His creation led to widespread virginity among a certain kind of teenage male, fucking 9000 sided dice, collectable card games, and eventually, computer role playing games like Wizardry -- and because the entire Japanese RPG genre would not exist without Wizardry, I mourn Mr. Gygax's death.

I have played very little of the tabletop game. Actually, I think I only played D&D once, at Jon Clay's house with Ford Walker and... someone else? I do remember creating an incredibly surly dwarf named Sal Magicpants, famous for his recklessness in battle and his refusal to use any sort of healing magic on the grounds that healing was for pussies.

However, the influence of Dungeons & Dragons runs -- nay, gallops -- though the games I played as a teenager. I was into PC gaming in the late 90's, back when PC's were viable gaming platforms and I had more patience for bullshit technical problems and nonsensical adventure game puzzles (like that goddamn cat hair mustache puzzle in Gabriel Knight III. That singlehandedly killed the entire genre.)

I had few friends during my freshman and sophomore years of high school, but I did have a fairly expensive computer I built myself (with help from Mr. Katz). We bought the parts from a sleazy Russian guy at the now defunct Ceder Mill Computers. The machine had a penchant for crashing whenever the GPU was asked to render anything more complex than Bejeweled. I loved it.

One of the first things I acquired for that machine was Baulder's Gate. I played the hell out of it -- although how much time I spent swapping discs in relation to playing the actual game is an open question.

That was the sole canonical D&D experience I've had. However, look at this list: Fallout, Fallout 2, Ultima Online, Diablo II, Dungeon Siege, Myth, Myth II, and, er, Vampire: The Last Crusade. That was what I did in high school. I played those games; fucking hell, I solved many of those games. I almost never finish games, but those with the Gary Gygax influence were of such quality (other than Vampire: The Last Crusade, which was terrible) I just couldn't quit on them.

So, Mr. Gygax, thank you for retarding my social life inadvertently -- I was not ready to interact with girls in 1999, and you helped me pass the time I would have otherwise spent masturbating, further delaying my eventual ascent into semi-maturity.