A New Sku

Persona 4: Not Much To Say, It Turns Out

2011-09-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

Well, that last thing didn't turn out so great. Let's hope for something a little less... grotesquely malformed this time around. Persona 4 is what prompted me to return to very bad games writing, after all, yet here I see nothing about Persona 4 yet posted on the blog. Don't think it has been a lack of trying on my part -- well, it has largely been due to a lack of trying, but half a dozen attempts have been made to untangle this particularly unwieldy ball of twine. Sadly, the inexorable passage of time has somewhat dulled and fuzzed any perceptive insights I might've once had on the product, and there is little chance I can contrast those illusive insights into something that is not a fever dream.

So this is what I have to say about Persona 4:

Persona 4 is a lot of things, but before anything else, it is a staggeringly competent product. In a world run by a kind and just God, this wouldn't be such a big deal. However, considering the state of the Japanese RPG in the world of 2011, seeing a JRPG that:

Has a sure sense of itself, of what it is attempting to do, of pace and plotting, of basic gameplay mechanics - in short, a raison d'etre
Was released on time and on budget
Is mostly (...mostly) lacking in the kind of abhorrent moe fan service plaguing the Japanese development scene

...well, that's just short of a miracle.

One day, I'll get back to it. (No I won't).

"Bully!" - Theodore Roosevelt

2011-07-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

- THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN EDITED SLIGHTLY SINCE ITS INAUGURAL POSTING.

Bully, the 2006 Rockstar Vancouver PS2 game, is so very close to an unqualified success. At the time of its release, no Rockstar product was even close to Bully in those nebulous and subjective categories at the bottom of, like, an IGN review. It looked better, sounded better, played better, felt more cohesive. It was less self-congratulatory. Yet the experience of playing the thing can be - nay, must be - extraordinarily infuriating, because an open-world game, by definition, is one wherein the game's narrative and the player narrative's can diverge grotesquely, with no consequences. The ludo-narrative dissonance has only grown more pronounced in the aftermath of Grand Theft Auto III, and this, I cannot cotton to.

Bully is set in this idyllic little resort town, one built over the dilapidated remnants of some bustling 19th Century factory town or iron works. The school itself is both highly exclusive academy that caters to the inbred sons and daughters of business tycoons and Senators and reform school for 50's greasers unstuck in time.

Searching for consistency at Bullworth Academy is a lot like looking for a bus stop in a city where you aren't sure if there's a bus line.

So this is kind of where everything begins to crumble. Like, Groton does not share a campus with some Hardass Military Reform School. For every articulate line of dialogue or genuinely moving storytelling beat, there are five incest jokes that are not funny, not original, and not well delivered. For all the refined and clever twists on familiar open world bullshit story mission tropes, there's still all those mandatory races these damn games cram awkwardly between more interesting moments. Each gem of an idea is isolated in a barren, somewhat disjointed simulacrum of adolescence. There is no firmament to bind this place together, to bind all the disparate gamey bits, all the cut scenes, all the absolutely immaculate Danny Elfman-esque soundtrack cues, all the interminable bike races, all the dodgeball games, all that is interesting about it together. Instead, there's a Qix minigame one must master to improve their ability to woo young women. Or there's the sub-Contender (Contender being a little remembered and very awful PS1 boxing game released in 1999) boxing minigame one must master to progress beyond the first quarter of the game's narrative.

While no one has any genuine use for A Separate Peace made manifest in a world of video games, I would have liked to see it woven throughout Bully. If Bully had been A Separate Peace without all that gay subtext and crew team stuff I feel confident I would hate the game much more. Let's face it. That's a horrible idea. Even so, at least A Separate Peace would have generated an active, interested kind of hate. Instead, it's all so "meh" Bully has a lot of genuine things to say about adolescence, about what is just in an environment that respects violence above all, and there's a genuinely unexpected and resonant twist near the end of the story.

The road traveled to that conclusion, all thirty-five hours of it, is largely filled with bike riding and savage beatings -- beatings Jimmy is only tangentially involved in starting, but once shit gets real, there's a lot of knees to the balls and cricket-bat whackings. Jimmy is presented as a bit of a simpleton, willing to go along with almost any preposterous scheme if it involves vandalism or protecting his staggeringly incompetent, drunken English Teacher from a deserved firing. All high school problems can be solved with violence. Girl problems are a little different, and even easier to solve. Flatter, give flowers, and prepare for make-out central. If a girl you've made out with sees you making out with another girl, they'll fight, but they'll forget all about it the next time the roses get broken out.

There's no memory here. Everything is ephemeral, and pointless. Unlike the other high school game I'm going to contrast this with one of these days, swear to God, Persona 4, each day's event's are isolated little vignettes that build a larger narrative like a late period Godard film, or if everyone in Groundhog Day retained some kind of Jungian collective unconscious.

You know what? Go read Tom Bissel's piece on LA Noire at Grantland.com. That's my problem with barely keeping a blog about videogames, a topic I'm not sure I much enjoy right now anyway. Tom Bissel and Chris Dahen and Michael Abbot are just super good at it, and they don't need to make lame jokes like I do.

and for no reason, here's a picture of God Hand.

You know what? Just go play God Hand. That needs to be placed into the western canon, alongside Paradise Lost and Joyce's Ulysses.

Fuck, that didn't turn out at all how I hoped it would. Tough cookies, all 12 of you who read this.

Bully, Persona 4, High School, & The Perils of the Open World: Introduction

2011-05-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Consider the high school. While the advent of the institution as we think of it today is less than a century old, its tendrils have burrowed so completely into our consciousness it seems to have existed forever, outside of time. It is something mandatory, something we view with a mixture of contempt, romance, and bewilderment in our adulthoods. Everything was the most important thing to ever have happened for about 20 minutes, replaced by the next greatest event. After Jimmy Stewart and Robert Michum died, every movie was either set in a high school or calibrated to appear as though everyone in it was in the arrested emotional state of a 10th grader.

High school was a thing that did not exist for most of the medium's history. River City had one, of course. It even organized sporting events. The Garden in Final Fantasy VIII was kind of like high school, for orphaned killing machines. Otherwise, nothing.

Nothing, save Atlus's Persona series. An offshoot of the Shin Megami Tensi franchise, Persona has overtaken its parent and straddles the Japanese RPG world like a colossus.

I started playing Persona 4 shortly after it came out Winter ‘08, smugly assuming I would discover all of its mysteries and defeat the major antagonists well before April 11th, 2011. That was some crazy future-day. A special one, to be sure, the day this sickly, bespectacled teenager (I named him Chris, because that is my name) from the big city was to arrive in a quaint little resort town for the school year, knowing not what terror lay ahead for he to thwart.

Well, I beat Persona 4 a handful of days ago - I do wish I'd have done it on April 10th 2011, because of my largely fictional OCD. The game clock reads 103 hours. That’s, let’s see, about 9 minutes a day of linking my socials and fusing my Jack Frosts with other Jack Frosts. It wasn’t a perfect game - Pac Man Championship Edition CX is the only perfect game - but it brought all the things I adore in the frequently maligned Japanese Role-Playing Game genre into a high school setting.

Persona 4 is not the only game set in a high school that I've randomly played recently. There is also Rockstar Vancouver’s Bully. Released in 2006 for the PS2, this game must have sold well, because I don’t think any secondary marketplace - your Gamestops, your pawn shops - has fewer than 90 copies of it lying around. Like, there’s more copies of Bully than all the Madden games put together.

Let me be upfront: I have huge, irrational problems with Rockstar and their games. I’ve hated their sophomoric jokey tone and their functionally broken camera and aiming mechanics. I've hated the dissonance between the open world, let’s fuck around sandbox aspects and the mainline story missions. I’ve hated the number of those story missions that are simply janky races on ill-defined courses. I’ve hated the half dozen or so impossible roadblock objectives where you have to pilot a goddamn remote control helicopter or whatever that no reasonable person can be expected to satisfactorily complete, but which must be finished to unlock more of the entertaining sandbox stuff, and I’ve hated how smug their entire enterprise reads to a guy who mostly just wants to see dudes with anime haircuts hit each other with swords, be it an RPG, a fighting game, or that dubious moniker “character action”: the Devil May Crys, the Bayonettas, and the like.

Rockstar has started to win me over - Red Dead Redemption told a story worth telling, although in typical Rockstar fashion, our protagonist was required to sometimes act heinously on the behalf of some vile yokel in direct violation of his redeemed character. The wild west setting kept that ludo-narrative dissonance from bothering me as much as it does in Grand Theft Auto. LA Noire sounds pretty neat, and Ken Cosgrove and Peter Bishop are in it.

These Rockstar games are all open world games, promising you the freedom to do all sorts of fun things. Because games should be fun. Fun fun fun free fun. Persona 4 comes from different stock - the dreaded “linear” “Japanese” school of game design. In this case, “freedom” is the hobgoblin of small minds. Outside of Nethack, the games designed by Yasumi Matsuno, Clint Hocking, and that fellow what made Minecraft, Persona 4 gave the illusion that there were more opportunities to push the limits of a game’s systems and mechanics than the stereotypical JRPG, and invested me in its world more successfully than I can readily recall. Bully... well...

NEXT: A LOOK AT BULLY

Holding Pattern

2011-05-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

We are coming up on a year since words have appeared here at A New Sku, an ostensible resource for C.P. Ervin themed commentary on games and their intersection with video, design, and alarmingly ill-conceived meta humor.

Is this most marginal of blogs offline forever? Not at all. In fact, I hope to have a few pretty neat things posting here in the next three months, assuming I can wrangle my mess of notes, asides, jokes and silly ideas into a coherent argument. It can be rough to extract cogent thought from a 15,000 word Google Doc about high schools in videogames, I've learned.

Now the promise is out there. I can't welsh on the 2 of you who still have this in your RSS readers.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince: Cavia's 10 Year Run

2010-07-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

I somehow missed a sad bit of news last week: cavia [sic] ceased to be a going concern. Happily, most of the developers are still employed, as it sounds like the majority of the studio's employees were absorbed into parent company AQ Interactive. While this isn't the most shocking studio closure in history, considering cavia's uneven (to put it kindly) track record and general profitability, this is one that hits close to home.

Cavia took a lot of contract work, pumping out Playstation 2 games with suspect anime licenses. This kept the lights on and the capital flowing into their original intellectual properties - not entirely unlike WayForward, a studio whose profile rose significantly after Scribblenauts' surprising sales. Cavia, alas, had no surprising successes, critically or commercially. I guess Neir seems to have attracted a cult following - deservedly so, considering how wildly ambitious and varied it is - but no developer can survive on cult hits when the HD console space's cost of entry is stratospheric.

So why mourn the passing of this studio? Why should those responsible for Bullet Witch and Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance get any postmortem respect?

A lot of my feelings are divorced from reason, I'll admit. They stem from a simpler time in my life, when all a game needed to impress me was a sweet dragon. As a child, I just loved dragons. I no longer carry such passion in my everyday life for the mythical creatures, but if I see a $4 copy of some game I'd never heard of that obviously is about dragons, I'm buying it. Cavia developed exactly that kind of stupid impulse purchase dragon game, and it was called Drakengard here in America. Maybe I got it in 2005? In any event, to me this PS2 game was an unknown, mysterious thing, dangerous and enchanting. I had no idea what kind of game I was to be playing before I slammed it into my system, and I still don't know what I had gotten myself into.

Seeing the SquareEnix logo cheered me immediately - there's a company that releases high quality games, usually. Formulaic, yes, but quality. And then the cavia logo found its' way onto my television. I liked the name of the studio - even a usually infuriating affect of a company not capitalizing their title, flying in the face of how I expect proper nouns to be presented to me - and I liked the logo: clean, with a stark black/white/red color scheme.

"This augers well!" I thought.

The game is a Dynasty Warriors knock-off. I say this with no enmity - Dynasty Warriors is hugely popular in Japan, and any sane company would try as hard as it could to exploit the market. No matter how much we clamor for innovation, a well made knock-off is what we will spend our money on. This Dynasty Warriors knock-off takes place in some fantastical world with dragons and civil wars and faeries and boulders and lute playing ninnies. There's a princess, who might be a god, or something, and you control her brother (I think he's her brother, but they also imply something incestuous between them, or maybe they're related by marriage... it was all very confusing). About ten minutes into the game, Caim (our protagonist and playable character) merges his soul with that of a dragon. This costs him the use of his voice, further complicating matters of exposition and plot development. The dragon talks to Caim using some kind of telepathy, but everyone hanging around the dude can also hear what the dragon's saying, so maybe sounds are being produced though the magical markings on Caim's tongue, maybe? Oh, and once the dragon starts talking, it sure doesn't shut up. Much of the conversation is philosophical in nature: the dragon asks Caim 900 times why he is such a murderous bastard. Because Caim cannot answer, the discussion grows tiresome. Very, very tiresome.

Drakengard tries to spice up the hack-and-slash-and-hack-some-more repetition common in all Dynasty Warriors clones by inserting a motherfucking dragon into the fray. At nearly any moment, hitting select will summon your flying friend. Caim can mount the dragon (heh) and fly across these preposterously large maps to another area lousy with evil, just incinerating legions of enemies ill-equipped to handle a goddamn dragon. Later in the game, magicians and trebuchets will provide overpowered countermeasures to this death from above, ruining a lot of the braindead fun.

Breaking up these large scale battles, some flying sequences happen. These are reminiscent of those open boss battle levels in Star Fox 64, filtered though Panzer Dragoon's lock-on mechanic and general love of dragon riding. The game, surreal enough as it was, achieves a sort of transcendent nonsensical atmosphere here. My personal favorite moment: when the dragon is attacked by what appear to be flying dressers or silverware cabinets.

I would have loved Drakengard had it not been for one absolutely crippling flaw: the game is sloooooooooow. This fantasy universe must have tremendously heavy air molecules. Caim, a fit young warrior by any standard, is not much of a runner. The glacial pace of this game, a game that absolutely requires some serious manic energy to work, slaughters much of the potential fun.

Which is a shame, because -- dragons! And magic! And a story so confusing it entertains on a basic, campy level! Also: it was clear an insane amount of work went into constructing this bleak, nihilistic fantasy world.

There's something like 80 weapons Caim can acquire, each with a lengthy backstory you can read in between missions. If there's a thing you can do in the game, chances are experience can be earned by doing it. The RPG elements are laid on inelegantly, but with such enthusiasm it doesn't matter. Caim levels up. The dragon levels up. Each individual weapon levels up. The spells associated with each weapon level up. It's impossible to keep track of all this, and ultimately futile - the default sword is about the only thing to use, because by the time the rad lances and maces are acquired, these new, sexier weapons are too underpowered to be of much use. Momentum is the utmost concern during the Dynasty Warriors bits - chaining a few hits together will grant Caim the ability to unleash a powerful thrust capable of knocking to the ground foes nearby. The default sword, having been in use for more of the game than any other weapon, will inevitably be the most momentous weapon available.

Drakengard 2 significantly sped things up - yay! - whilst gutting much of the intriguing story elements - boo! Crucially, the game engine and graphics were not updated or improved up one iota in the intervening 3 years between the games. While the budget for the first game must have been at least moderately large (there's quite a few impressive CG cut scenes), it's pretty clear almost no money was spent making the sequel.

So Drakengard (called Drag-on Dragoon in Japan, which is a much more amusing name if nothing else) holds a weird place in my heart. So does Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a fully functional PS2 third person shooter from Japan that most definitively does not hold up today, but had wonderful pacing and some neat mechanics for the time.

The greatest product cavia produced, however, wasn't exactly a game - it was a tool, a fairly powerful and affordable tool, for the Nintendo DS.

The KORG DS-10 is a fully functional synthesizer modeled after the MS-10, complete with four different emulated drum machines and the ability to use the touch screen to simulate the KAOSS Pad, all for $30 bucks. There's some serious limitations to the software: the step sequencer is basically Fruity Loops, only not as good; while the program emulates two synthesizers, each one is monophonic, so chords are out of the question; because the DS is not a multi-touch screen, the KAOSS Pad is not fully functional; the interface, while classy and modeled after the MS-10, can prove slightly more cumbersome than one may desire; you can't change sequences while they're playing, which is a huge bummer... it's still just $30, one tenth of the price of an entry-level KAOSS Pad. And the emulation of the MS-10 is unreal, coming from a DS cart. While I haven't personally found much use for it in my own musical compositions, mostly because I don't know how to properly deploy flanger effects on the busted ass drum programs I hesitate to say I "compose," it's still a lot of fun to play around with.

So yeah, cavia. I have more things to say about both Bullet Witch and Neir, but those need their own posts, written at a time when I'm less tired.

The Worst Piece of "Jetpack Goonies II" Fiction You'll Ever Read.

2010-04-11T13:33:00.000-07:00

This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever written. Wait, it's worse than that. This is empirically the stupidest, most ill-conceived thing written in the history of man. I can take a kind of pride in creating such a foul block of verbiage, actually.

How do I even set this up? Well, I'd been reading Don DeLillo's gargantuan novel Underworld. It's a solid entry in the "Great American Novel" style: overambitious, unwieldy, oppressive, stunning and wonderfully obtuse. Anyway, DeLillo is famous for his weird, hyper stylized writing style, one of the most immediately identifiable traits in the whole of creation. Maybe I could more readily identify a passage from David Mamet or Henry James - but that'd be about it. It is also a blast to mimic his terse, elliptical writings.

So, while in a state of extreme boredom, I tried to fashion the story of one man's dream to make The Goonies II NES game better with jetpacks in the style of the preeminent wordsmith of the Cold War era.

This was the hideous result.

A kid skips his computer science class. Goes and plays Goonies in the Aladdin's Castle. Says to himself this is the life for me. To entertain, though the medium of computer science.

To make for others what has been made for him, to kill the inchoate nature of being alive and being a teenager.

Goonies ain't perfect, fuck no. Lacking in verisimilitude. Worse. Lacking jetpacks.

His parents laugh in unison, laugh so hard they start coughing on their menthol cigarettes. But they humor him, lend him enough to start something small. Never expect to see that money again.

What doe he do?

This guy, maybe he's a popular fellow, maybe he's not. He's not known, but he strikes something in others. He meets them attending conventions, conferences, tells them what he's got on his mind without overplaying his hand. Mostly, he meets them without seeing them. They are names on the screen. Maybe they're popular men like himself. He's not done so but he would add "or insane." Helps if they're driven. Always men.

Always men at first, but later women. Who share something of his vision. Or lack vision but do not lack perseverance.

Astoria.

This guy has his men. Some women, now. But needs are greater now. He needs to take care of this, his friends and backers and workers. He'll run their lodes best he can, but he's not a businessman. Not now.

Shit. Business.

Business is something else. The money and the greed to generate more money. He and his men have the idea, but the idea is not a Business, man. The idea is the world.

There are layers, here. This guy, he's a popular fellow. That's what everyone says, now, although not him, not aloud. What he is - he's known without being famous, you see, and the clout that comes with that? Nothing like it. He's not compromised. How can you work when you're famous?

How could you live totally unknown?

Working working, always working. Always with his friends, backers, some are calling themselves workers now, just like him - what they've joined to do is make the world.

But they are miles under it now. No matter. The world is there.

He's max on his Visa, his AmEx. Takes mortgages after mortgages on the dead parent's home. Thank God he inherited only this from the dearly departed - not the bad habits. Could have been much worse. Thank God.

Remolded the downstairs and garage and now it looks just like any other office. Computers. Render farms. Prototype is not done but it's proof of concept, and no one has ever seen a better proof. You can work it the other way but nobody does. The video shows you what you need to see.

The coffeepot's always empty and no one ever cleans and brews the next batch when they're done.

How can you readjust Jetpack Goonies before seeing your vision manifested? And now? We can see the basics. The underworld stabilizing what's above. Mechanics are still theory, but sound theory. We've checked them. Against themselves and against the projections. The philosophy behind it is solid. Theoretical still, but look at what we've got. We can see it. There's proof here, now.

Meanwhile, in the foulest depths of the Internet...

2010-01-10T16:14:00.000-08:00

I wrote a decade wrap-up over on my tumblr. I want to make it as difficult as possible for people to find my writing, in any case.

"I Hope That's Not Chris's Blood"

2009-03-22T10:02:00.000-07:00

Here's some thoughts on Resident Evil 4. They're pretty much identical to my feelings re: Resident Evil 5, actually. Why is this series so frustrating to me, and yet still so endearing? One of life's mysteries, I guess. Also, this essay is a goddamn mess. I don't know why I'm posting it.

Resident Evil 4 is winning the lottery a few hours before getting diagnosed with terminal cancer. Resident Evil 4 is a reunion with your childhood sweetheart, now mired in drug addiction and madness. Resident Evil 4 is the affordable, rustic old house with a shockingly low rent and

a wonderful view of the city; Resident Evil 4 is also the roommate who never does the fucking dishes. Resident Evil 4 is large; it contains multitudes.

Resident Evil 4 calls itself a "survival horror" game. You may not understand what a "survival horror" game is; that's okay. Capcom has no idea what the "survival horror genre" is, either (so is it horror to survive?). As the abecedarians [it seems like the most accurate word to use, douche-y as it makes me feel] behind this weirdly compelling marketing-speak nonsense branding, Capcom was the moral compass to all the other developers of "survival horror"-esque games. No, they were more than a compass, they were a role model, like Sandy Kofaux. Just as Kofaux's famous decision to sit out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it coincited with Yom Kippur inspired countless Jewish sportswriters to write identical columns about how brave and inspirational Kofaux was every Yom Kippur, so does Capcom's brave embrace of anachronisms inspire others to embrace anachronism. When one sets out to make gobs of money with a spooky videogame, one must examine the Resident Evil franchise intently. How stingy should one be with ammuntition in the game if one expects a player to survive the horror? How many rubies must one pry from the eye sockets of marble statues? And should there be marble things other than statues, with emeralds instead of rubies crammed into various places? What is the optimal ratio of marble statues to other gem-hiding objects ? How often should these rubies and emeralds be inserted into hidden mantelpieces behind trick bookshelves before a horror can truly be survived?

Nevermind how much the Resident Evil series borrowed from Alone in the Dark. Alone in the Dark never owned these conventions as Resident Evil owns them. Alone in the Dark was so awkward to control, and so ugly, I could never get past the first 20 minutes or thereabouts. If I wanted to survive horror whilst playing Alone in the Dark - hell, if I wanted to tell my friends what happens after advancing past the first couple of spectral encounters - I would have needed serious commitment. I imagine "solving" Alone in the Dark was similar to entering an empyrean realm of joy and enlightenment. I'll never know. I'd get bored watching someone else play Alone in the Dark. I'd rather go off to buy a cheeseburger and some Magic: The Gathering cards or whatever. No, without Capcom's help, the "survival horror" tropes might simply have disappeared, and we'd live in a world where Konami might have implemented something like, oh, let's say functional controls to Silent Hill 2, the undisputed masterpiece of this whole silly genre, and what a tragedy that would have been! Defenders of the tank controls tell us a 'widely believed fact' that busting a player's ability to interact simply with his game "increases the tension and makes the game scary." These mouthbreathers also find the incredibly limited resources scattered obliquely thoughout the game something of a turn-on; the very idea that you cannot save your game without ink ribbons is enough to excite them.

No more! With a simple shift of the camera and a creepy guy willing to sell you massive amounts of weaponry, Resident Evil 4 not "survival horror." It is something else entirely.

It's fair, for one thing.

Every failure to survive the horror is instructive -- and, due to some smart planning on the part of the developers, most scenarios allow for quite a bit of freedom, depending on how adept you are at improvisation and the availability of ammunition, This breadth of options is the best thing about Resident Evil 4, and it's a wonderful consequence of the obstinate, fixed camera's demise.

The change from the pre-rendered backgrounds and frustrating camerawork of RE's past to the more traditional third-person camera found in this game once prompted some internet commentators to declare this a complete break from the bad old Resident Evil ways. Their enthusiam is only partially warranted. Due to the extreme emphasis on shooting gooey things in this iteration of the franchise, that old, German Expressionist-influenced series of pre-rendered rooms would have crippled the game. Seriously, though, this is kind of a clunky and unintuitive half-solution to the problem, not a revelatory departure from the old style.

The function of the Resident Evil camera is to generate a mood -- claustrophobia, creeping dread. Fear, in short. I'd hate to see Shinji Mikami's (now Jun Takoishi's) team of developers allow anyone to program some full, freely adjustable camera, because the shlock horror style shocks of the series depend greatly on shlock horror tactics borrowed from films as old as "The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari," or Bela Lugosi's "Dracula," and as new as, um, "Resident Evil: Apocalypse."

The still-clunky controls also fit the game better than they probably should, because it's clear a lot of thought went into pacing and designing your typical LAS PLAGAS encounters so the specific limitations of the control scheme are moot. This elicits a confabulation of excitement, tension, dread, exhilaration, and an increased sensation of personal self-worth when playing.

It's clear just as much thought went into the first third of the game as did the control scheme. While the game is rigidly linear, each major location where killing's gonna be going down is filled with dozens of options as to how said killing will actually go down. Never are you stuck in a linear corridor with tenticle-headed monsters blocking your forward momentum -- at least, not during those crucial first hours.

Resident Evil games have always cultivated a sense of desperation, but prior to RE4, the balance between the "I don't have enough ammo or herbs and I've got to run though this hallway and GOD I hope I have an ink cartridge so I can save my game," moments, and the "I just got me a big, new gun, and I got plenty of ammo, time for vengeance!" moments was never quite right. Here, again, things are different.

RE4 - which is much, MUCH more action packed than previous games in the series - gives us opportunities to experience genuine power uncommon in this made up genre. Fairly early on, we're treated to a set piece that illustrates what amounts to a philosophical change in "survival horror" perfectly. While riding down a ski lift, or industrial crate transport, or something, I had trouble arriving at my destination until I equipped a bolt-action sniper rifle -- a weapon I had used not once the first 4 or so hours of the game, because, hey, I like to look my kills in the eye as they die. Imagine my delight when a handful of well-aimed shots -- three dead zombies per round, when they were queued single-file --ended the ambush on the little train-car-thing before it started. Not a single injury to myself or my traveling companion during the entire gondola trip -- and around 14 corpses re-corpse'd to my credit. Never were there killing sprees like this in Resident Evils past.

Also, goddamn. This game looks great, and it isn't just flash for the sake of flash; the technical proficiency is married with a perspicacity to the overall atmosphere. Nothing is done just becuase some whiz at tech whipped up a rockin' new shader. It's not showy or gaudy in the way something like Devil May Cry is. It's atmospheric.

Sadly, as I write this review, I admit waning interest in the game. Moving out of the village and into a more traditional RE setting -- a musty castle -- gives me the feeling that, before the adventure is over, I'm bound to see some abandoned laboratories where mad scientists devise unspeakable chemicals. The plot is going to continue along it's convoluted, half-retarded path, and it is likely that I will murder, if that is the word, hundreds more of these quasi-zombies.

So. If a AAA Capcom production of one of their flagship franchises, intelligently updated to both revive a staid product without fundamentally changing it's cadence can lose my interest with an almost admirable, if shocking, legerity -- well, there is a fundamental problem at the core. I think that problem might just be me and my interests. It also might be a problem with the game being too padded with nonsense to extend that length.

But -- there must be a middle path between the mental anguish and pain the Silent Hill protagonists face and the cheesy scenarios our friends from Resident Evil endure. A videogame that manages to be both thrillingly creepy and populist without suffering from Stupid Plot Syndrome is going to be huge. Fatal Frame? Siren? Maybes. I'm pinning my hopes on Heavy Rain, which is unlikely to be a survival horror game per se but will at least have serial killers and stuff in it.

Well. Maybe it's not that. It's just - the Resident Evil formula doesn't feel like homage any longer. It feels like self-plagurization. I've read elsewhere that this is a 20+ hour video game. I'm already starting to sense that the game doesn't have many more tricks up it's sleeves, after that phenomenal first 3 or 4 hours. I'll finish the game if I can find time, because I have faith that there will be a few more bright spots along the way. That I feel obligated to complete it rather than compelled to see the conclusion saddens me.

From the Ledger of the Apothecary

2009-02-02T16:34:00.000-08:00

March 18th in the year 18 of our Lord the Goddess - Our town remains under siege. The fowl archmage Domminous sent his minions to raze our crops a fortnight ago, and despite the best efforts of our stoutest warriors, vile creatures decimated our foodstuffs. Needless to say, my shoppe has been ill-trafficked since. Who has the gold for an apothecary's humble curatives and medicines with the price of bread as it is?

There was but one disturbance at my shoppe today. A spiky haired malcontent, along with a small group of his preposterously dressed friends entered shortly after midday. Having never seen them before, I felt it my duty to investigate, with our town in such distress. They told me tales of their adventures. Upon hearing their unbelievable stories of magic and heroism, I burst into uproarious laughter! These runts told me their aim to defeat Domminous and free the town from his tyranny! It is good to laugh in times as Goddessless as these.

I sold them 4 curative herbs for my usual rate.

March 20th in the year 18 of our Lord the Goddess - Oh, Goddess be praised! Our unlikely saviors were the very angst-riddled young men and hot underage women I had dismissed in this ledger not two days ago! Domminous has been riven from the crypts beneath our town, banished across the sea! How I lament my unbelief in these heros! How I lament my crisis of faith in the Goddess!

I sold them 8 curative herbs at my usual rate.

April 13th in the year 18 of our Lord the Goddess - It has been difficult, but our little hamlet has nearly rebuilt all the thatch huts damaged in the great siege of Domminus. The crops have been replanted, and my little daughter is not afraid of our pet Dzrogoid any longer.

Oh, I forget myself! I saw those young malcontents that saved our little village just last lunar month! They told me they were "grinding" nearby. I sussed that this must have been slang for "hunting," as they produced numerous Rungaard hides to sell me. Young people!

I bought 14 hides at my usual rate, and sold one regeneration potion and 18 curative herbs at my usual rate.

September 8th in the year 18 of our Lord the Goddess - Although our crops were hastily planted late in the season, they are coming up as thick and hearty as I've seen in all my years. Thank the Goddess!

Although I am pleased to see our little town as hearty and healthy as it is, I must admit that it is not good for business. Why, my only customers this year have been those heroic adventures that rid our town of pestilence and cast the vile archmage Domminus aside! If only they returned to our quaint little hometown...

I would sell them all sorts of magicks and potions at my usual rate.

February 17th in the year 19 of our Lord the Goddess - The sky has been blotted black and the island of Islaterra is floating in the sky above our little hamlet. The world is doomed.

Those adventurers came back today, and I sold them 80 mondo curatives and 4 restoration potions at my usual rate.

Not that it matters. The era of Man is ending and the era of Death has begun!

February 18th in the year 19 of our Lord the Goddess - My dour disposition has besmirched my ledger yet again! Another miracle at the hands of that spiky haired young lad and his fair lasses! Islaterra is back in the sea, the sun is back in the sky, and (not to be too self-centered) the large purchase of curatives and restoration potions yesterday has filled my coffers!

Our town threw a large celebration to honor the adventurers, and although we are not as important as cities like Unberpang or Quar the heros deigned to feast with our mayor and participate in a parade. My little one ran next to the enigmatic leader of the group during the festivities and handed him a doll made out of her own hair.

He handed her two gold slivers - my usual rate.

You Best Check Yourself, Fool: Mother 3 Fan Translation Out Today

2008-10-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

I think I know what I'll be doing in the foreseeable future.

I am too excited to type coherently right now. Find it here.

Entertainment Ennui

2008-10-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

The annual deluge of holiday releases has begun in earnest this week, and here I am, sitting at my desk, confused and unhappy, struck by waves of exuberance and complete indifference in equal measure.

Left: Hideo Kojima feels the same exuberance and indifference that I do about videogames, only towards alcohol

Few rational creatures follow the enthusiast press as enthusiastically as I do, and if one were to look at my Google Reader or the list of podcasts I subscribe to in iTunes, one might get the impression videogames consume the entirety of my mental faculties. I read gaming related stuff across the entire alphabet, from actionbutton.net to Michael "Zonk" Zenkie. I read the British PC games blog Rock Paper Shotgun; the last PC game I played was probably Irrational's underrated superhero strategy game, Freedom Force -- which is something like six years old (also, Rock Paper Shotgun's British sensibilities are sometimes lost on me, what with their Dues Ex enthusiasm being waaaaaaay out of proportion with what my experience with the game led me to feel). I just read an essay by some Lucasarts employee about the difficulties of choosing middleware solutions best suited for your development philosophy and project goals on GameSetWatch. Weirder still, I enjoyed reading about middleware.

Does this immersion in games journalism correlate to a similar expenditure of energy into the actual playing of videogames? Well, no. Not really. I'm estimating that, since the beginning of July, I have spent my gaming time with the following:

Metal Gear Solid 4 (beat it; still wondering how I'm going to write about it)
Soul Calibur 4 (3 hours against my friend Onuliak; loved it)
Bionic Commando ReArmed (didn't finish the game; wonderful accomplishment, but the level design in Bionic Commando wasn't all that good, really.)
Mega Man 9 (beat it; going to write something about it later)
Vintage arcade gaming at Ground Kontrol (90 drunken minutes; crazy awesome)
Games played at PAX (???)
Final Fantasy IV DS (beat it; it's Final Fantasy IV, and it's pretty swell)
PixelJunk Eden (played it quite a bit; mixed feelings)

Nothing to sneeze at, that -- serious time that could have been spent in more "productive" ways went into gaming -- but not enough time to develop ideas about the experience. When the zeitgeist shifts as constantly as it does in videogame culture, when every AAA game gets dissected incessantly months before hitting retail, disappearing from the conversation a week later, sucked away in the undertow as the next wave of hype crests, when one posts on blog comments sections and on message boards not because one has something exciting to say but because one does not want to feel left out and because it beats grinding a couple levels out in a remake of a Final Fantasy game one has beaten like 5 times... it's hard to keep up. It's frustrating to keep up.

Yet.

Little Big Planet. Mirror's Edge. World of Goo. New, exciting IP. Coming out in multiple SKUs. New ones, at that.

Fallout 3. Yakuza 2. Persona 4. Chrono Trigger DS. Not so new, but very exciting IP. Games bound to take me about a year to finish. Except Chrono Trigger - not a very long game. But I have been playing Chrono Trigger, on and off, since 1998, and having an opportunity to do so on the bus is reason enough to make with the jazz hands.

Fuck it. I only wrote this post to support Blog Action Day (if the script embed worked, there should be a little thing at the bottom of this post. Click on it, would you?). You guys fight poverty. I'm gonna play me some Blazing Lazers.

MULTIPOINTS

2008-09-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

*First, a clarification courtesy of Dark Age Iron Savior, on the SB forums:

is your name actually chris ervin?

also I randomly skimmed your blog and I must unfortunately comment that the main guy behind the awesome Mr. Driller music, Masaru Shiina, apparently never worked on the Katamari games....although he did compose Tales of Legendia, which is kind of weird.

And yes, my name is actually Chris Ervin. I'm too boring to have a neat hacker alias.

*Today the final episode of GFW Radio went online -- with both Jeff Green and Shawn Elliot leaving Ziff-Davis for assistant producer jobs (at the Sims studio and 2k Boston, respectively), there seems little point in keeping a podcast named GFW Radio going, considering only one editor from the defunct magazine from which the podcast was derived , Ryan Scott, is still at ZD. As someone with little money, abundant free time, and a one-time addiction to talk radio, podcasts are perfect for me, and GFW Radio was one of the better videogame-related ones; it's got nothing on the New York Review of Books new podcast, however. Nonetheless, sad to see it go.

*The series of interviews with Japanese gaming personalities 1up.com has been running lately, espically the one with Kenji Eno, have been far more interesting than the typical Japanese devleoper interview, be it a Time Magazine interview with Sawata or a Gamasutra interview with, um, a Square employee or something.

*Hey, I just beat Final Fantasy IV DS while writing this post! Yay!

The Definitive Word on Braid

2008-09-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

I no longer have a 360, so I have yet to experience Jonathan Blow's little puzzle platformer Braid. I've been following Blow's gaseous commentary on the videogame industry as presently constructed fairly closely (he's more than a little full of himself, but he can still make some interesting points) before I knew anything about Braid. While the game has received extensive coverage and sparked many polarizing message board disscussions, I never felt like I really understood what Braid was all about. That is, until I came across Soulja Boy's review:

That's better than anything Hilary Goldstein's ever done at IGN.

In other news, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom coming to the Wii (in Japan, at least). Sweet.

source: wired's game|life blog

Phantasy Star Online - The #1 Most Acknowledgable Dreamcast Game

2008-09-16T12:57:00.000-07:00

Phantasy Star Online could have been the most influential piece of entertainment in console gaming history. Instead, Sonic Team's magnum opus was dead on arrival; Peter Moore announced Sega's decision to become "platform agnostic," on January 31st, 2001 - the day Phantasy Star Online ver. 2 hit retail shelves. It's espically sad when you consider that PSO version 1 was a buggy mess on the scale of Battlecruiser A.D. 3000 -- how many had the oppurtunity to sink 100+ hours into the first really good PSO game?

Sega had the rather unfortunate proclivity to release their best games on hardware that was either dead, or completely untenable to the requirements of the gameplay. See Panzer Dragoon Saga, widely believed to be the best RPG of the 32-bit era. This is nearly impossible to confirm, however, because Sega pressed maybe 10,000 copies of the game. Until I have at least $150 dollars to spend on a 12 year old Saturn game, I can only assume those hyperbolic GameFAQs forumgoers who have devoted so much of their brain to loving PDS they've forgotten the basic tenants of the English language are right.

See also Phantasy Star Online I & II, widely believed to be the best version of Phantasy Star Online, being released for the freaking Gamecube of all things; the initial investment of, oh, $200+ dollars in modems, peripherals, subscription packages, and lord knows what else, to say nothing of the $50 for the game itself, to experience an online game on the least online-friendly gaming system in the history of forever was maybe a bit too much scratch for the average human to spend. Sega, you broke my heart.

This is depressing - let's get back to the Dreamcast game in question.

I believe PSO was the first real time Rougelike (or Diablo clone) on a home console system worth a goddamn[1]. Although I am sickeningly fond of the kind of mindless grindy loot gathering action-rpg, I never got into Diablo. I didn't enjoy spending a lot of time looking at a series of dank, shitty corridors. Also, it turns out, I find the act of hitting a button repeatedly more kinetic and pleasurable than I find the act of clicking a mouse repeatedly.

I had a predisposition to love PSO, anyway, because the Phantasy Star series is one of my favorites in all of gaming.

I'm still amazed at how well Sonic Team captured the spirit of Tohru Yoshida's designs when transferring them to a 3D environment; despite being a totally different style of game, it is still unmistakably Phantasy Star. The 80's anime look served the game extraordinarily well, both by looking awesome and by connecting the Algol star system's primitive Sega Master System & Genesis appearance to a contemporary system.

PSO lacked only the incredibly sophisticated, ambitious narrative of its' namesake, which is a bit of a shame. Phantasy Star II was a remarkable first attempt at classical tragedy in the videogame medium -- it's still one of the best stories ever told in an RPG -- and to discover the most perfunctory excuses to fetch-quest without any serious overarching storyline in the Phantasy Star universe was disappointing, to say the least. Still, I had a lot of fun in the single player campaign. God knows I spent sophomore year in high school doing little else but play though it, again and again.

Sadly, I didn't play online PSO that often, because online gaming was a seriously janky affair back in 2001, but I have vivid memories of the few time I did get the thing working. Like most slightly monotonous but oddly compelling game genres (the Final Fights and the, erm, Diablolikes of the world), playing cooperatively can exponentially improve the experience. However, the main benefit of co-op gameplay rests largely in the communal environment and in the communication options available to you in said environment. Shit-talking with your friends at the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet inside Chuck-e-Cheeses is an experience one can look back on in their twilight years with nostalgia; playing Final Fight on your SNES (no co-op!) in the garage is just sad, man.

Which makes PSO's masterfully implemented symbol chat system so important, and so great. Using the tools within the game, you could create your own series of symbols or modify pre-existing ones to articulate your thoughts to other players. The symbol chat is still amazingly versatile; given a little creativity, you can create a symbol to express some freakishly deep (usually disturbing, as was my wont) concepts.

So yeah. PSO was the last Dreamcast game I bought (although by no means the last Dreamcast game I acquired, filthy pirate that I am), and the one I feel most needs acknowledging. I demand you acknowledge it. Now!

[1] The other Dreamcast classic Diablolike, Record of Loddoss War, came out after the first version of PSO (I think) -- in any case, I played Record of Loddos War long, long after I got into PSO

Sega is as Sega does

2008-09-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

author's note: It isn't done, but I'm putting it up for you, Jackie.
2nd author's note: I screwed up the HTML markup on the footnotes and I can't fix it. I'm stupid and pudgy :(

Between the 9th anniversary of 9/9/99 (wherein our protagonists Bernie Stolar and Peter Moore launched their quixotic campaign to restore Sega's good name among the general US public before the company's 6+ year streak of bonerheadedness caught up with it); Sega's late-to-the-party stateside release of one of 2006's best PS2 games, Yakuza 2[1]; and this amazing amazing (if slightly old by internet standards) look at Segagaga from Edge Online, I've got Sega on the brain.

I love Sega in the way I'd love a brilliant, slightly crazy, charismatic uncle who spends part of his life painting beautiful watercolor tapestries, and the other part of his life shooting heroin into the veins on his feet. A few years pass, you don't really think about him until you hear from your second cousin that his Grandpa is cleaning up his life and kicking the horse. You ask him, "Oh, is he in NA or another support group?" and your second cousin replies: "No, he just got bought up by Sammy. He won't pull me teeth for drug money any longer, but he also won't stop drawing all these really awful pictures of Sonic with his shitty friends."

And, if Sega was that uncle I just made up, he'd have plenty of things to apologize for, were he ever to join AA and reach the 7th step.

There was inexplicable stuff like the 32x. There was the inexcusable stuff like launching the Saturn the day before E3 1995 under the assumption the PSOne was going to launch at a similar price point (Sega's New Sku was over $100 dollars more, in '95 monies, and who wanted to pay $400 to play a janky Virtua Fighter?). There was the uncannily awful and superfluous stuff, like the very existence of the US Saturn pad. There was that horrendous Virtua Fighter port at launch - a port so bad the 32X was the platform to own for console VF play. Weird parallel: the Dreamcast's most disappointing launch title was also a Virtua Fighter, the 3rd one, a port that Genki had 5 months to program without retail dev kits. There was Three Dirty Dwarves -- oh, God, Three Dirty Dwarves. There was the hassle of buying all the worthwhile Saturn software from DieHard GameFan magazine if you were importing stuff like that back in the day [2]. Games like: Radiant Silvergun; Sakura Taisen; Baroque; DonPachi and DoDonPachi; Lunacy; Liquid Kids; Darius II; SteamGear Mash.

Worst of all, there was the quick, awful death of the Dreamcast.

However, in spite of it all, it must be said: from 1996-2000, Sega's various internal development houses produced more innovative, influential, quirky, and otherwise important ideas for what games can be than any other first party publisher. Right before SEGA went supernova and discovered what happens on the other side of a black hole (you become a pretty awful 3rd party publisher beholden to paccincho mavens Sammy, it turns out) they shone as bright as imaginable. Why, in the history of all first party publishers, that 1996-2000 Sega run may have had the best run, ever!

"Hrmpf!", you say, "what about beloved Nintendo?" My counter-argument is this: Nintendo's greatest run was 1985-1991, when they had a complete monopoly on the videogame market. Despite making so many epochal, titanic breakthroughs in, well, everything, Nintendo had, like, broken federal anti-trust laws and were kind of evil, forcing their licensees to release no more than 5 games a year, for which these third parties deposited huge, non-refundable monies on their "Game Pak" orders. When would these extremely expensive products reach consumer's hands? Well, it would kinda depend on when and how Nintedo felt like paying their ship captain to lug the things across the Pacific. So, imagine you're a third party publisher, publishing in America. Your company is named Qix Panic! You've been subjected to months-long waits between ordering anew second run of, I don't know, Qix, and discovering, three months later, a stack of Qix in Wal*Greens. Sadly, you see these wonderful stacks of your game two months too late; your publishing company folded; the up-front costs to produce these Game Paks were so exorbitant, so high and nonrefundable, and with no income from Qix sales in the last few months, your third party publisher had to fold up shop.

You later go on to invent Gals Panic!, so it's not all bad. But if you publish Gals Panic! for the NES, you better DAMN sure not publish it for any other competing videogame system.

Admittedly, the above is only loosely anecdotal (by which I mean, it's entirely made up), but I have been led to understand Nintendo's draconian policies and heartless money grubbing really damaged a lot of great companies. Vic Tokai sunk because of these shenanigans. Vic Tokai made Clash at Demon Head. To kill Vic Tokai, creators of one of the most awesome games ever, is as morally repugnant as sitting on a kitten until it suffocates and dies.

Nintendo then went on to do what all Japanese companies eventually do: after hitting it big with something like the Famicom, or the Game Boy, they began to crank out fabulously polished if samey sequels to their best franchises, drive that crossover appeal meme into the ground, saying things like "if it's good for the bottom line it's good for the company." This led Nintendo into trouble before, care of the Nintendo 64 -- in Japan, espically. By the time the Nintendo 64 had sunk like Too Human [3], undone by it's unwieldy "let's make this hardware explicitly to run Mario 64" architecture...

Sega was polishing off Burning Rangers, Yu Suzuki's Virtua Fighter RPG that eventually morphed into Shenmue, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Deep Fear (which, to be fair, was not that good), Fighters Megamix (stealing King of Fighters' ideas before Capcom could even dream about it) in addition to exclusive publishing deals for WARP's Real Sound, Enemy Zero, and my least favorite most favorite game of all time, D2.

What I'm saying is, the quality is higher in that early Nintendo run, but the quantity is greater in that Sega run. Weirder, too.

Back to 1996. Mario was at least helping Nintendo stay out of a black pit of financial despair -- and although the game was a revelation at the time, it was still a Mario game, which is to say, not on the forefront of what Schoenberg would call the driving force of art - "progress" - had be lived long enough to see videogames. Those incredible Am2, Sonic Team, Overworks, Smilebit and Hitmaker studios were given much more freedom to develop how they saw fit, even though Burning Rangers and Nights were less likely to make Sega money than a new Ristar game. Were I an executive at this time, I imagine I would have thought something along the lines of "why was Sonic Team -- A TEAM NAMED AFTER SONIC THE HEDGEHOG -- making an astronaut firefighting game?"

Sega's star "mascot," Sonic the Hedgehog and his good friend Jaleel White were nearly absent from the Saturn era, save Sonic R and a port of Sonic 3D Blast!, which was neither 3D nor a blast. It was clear, all the while, that Yuji Naka was not interested in recreating Sonic in three dimentions.

He disinterest was warranted - Sonic is an inherently two dimensional concept, rewarding when running in one direction, and when not, not. Although Sonic 2 had expansive stages, ferreting out secrets and exploring alternate paths though them was tedious, crippled by Sonic's exaggerated inertia and KEWL 'TUDE. Transferring that kind of purposefully sloppy mechanic into three dimensions required a more dichotomous structure similar to the game he did make, NiGHTS: Journey into Dreams.

Of course, to realize this required some game design talent, which Sega of America had very little of. Despite this, they were on the Sonic tip, passing off proof-of-concept stuff as a real game. Oh, also: more than game design talent, a new Sonic project required spending the budget for promotional CES material on promotional material for CES, instead of cocaine -- which happened (allegedly).

Oh, and if your response to that is "Sonic X-treme was actually scheduled to come out and was a real fully fledged game," I have one of Yu Suzuki's forklifts to sell you.

Sonic Team didn't need Sonic, of course, and not just because they had NiGHTs. Their bosses had one thing going for them no other platform holder could claim. Yuji Naka could throw the world's biggest hissy fit upon hearing Bandai's intentions to buy them and get that shit axed because he had a get-out-of-free card. He knew: we can fuck up as much as we want. Okawa-san's got our back.

Isao Okawa, an incredibly rich man who may or may not have worn top hats, was the CEO of Owaka-based CSK Holdings Company; they acquired a majority stake in Sega in 1984. Okawa-san acted as benefactor for Sega, singlehandedly keeping that company solvent during the rough stretches, forgiving massive debts and funding new ventures, seemingly out of the goodness of his heart and his honest belief that SEGA was doing something pretty amazing. Sega would have gone under sometime in the Master System days had Okawa-san been a reasonable businessman and cut his losses -- certainly, he would have been $700 million richer if a bunch of Americans in Hawaii decided to sell something other than coin operated entertainment devices at US Military bases [4].

Okawa is the reason the Dreamcast exists at all. Without the nearly $60 million he pumped into R&D and marketing, without his forgiving $650 million of debt, we would have no context for appreciating an orange swirl on a white background. US street date: 9/9/99 -- the best launch in the history of a videogame console, in terms of the quality and quality of titles available at launch [5]. I went home with Soul Calibur, NFL 2K, and Sonic Adventure that night, and bought Powerstone the next day -- because, for reasons I don't understand, it wasn't available anywhere on 9/9/99. We've seen a few major launches since then: PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Nintendo DS, PSP, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii. As I remember it, they all had one good game, if that, for nearly a year after they hit streets.

Before Okawa-san finally agreed to sell his shares in SEGA to Sammy, that Yakuza-run gang of thieves, in January 2001, the Dreamcast had accumulated a library of quality games, and they did it in a fraction of the time it took the PSOne or PS2. And, thanks to the Naomi arcade board's continued popularity in the boutique shump developer world, one can still find one or two new Dreamcast games coming out every year in ridiculously limited print runs -- GuRev and Cave shooters are usually worth checking out, too, if you're feeling like spending up to $300 dollars on a Dreamcast shump.

HACKNEYED LIST OF 9 DREAMCAST GAMES YOU SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE

9.) Zombie Revenge

This is the story of the game, quoted verbatim from the manual:

The time is the present. A city has been suddenly filled with the souls of the dead. A GOVERNMENT TOP SECRET PLAN U.D.S., Undead Soldier. It was a top-secret plan to utilize the dead for military purposes. Just before it was ready for operation all was thrown into darkness by someone unknown. A year later the city had become the home of the dead. Three of the best AMS agents were sent in, Stick Breitling, Linda Rotta and Rikiya Busujima. They have now been sent out to eliminate the enemy and track down the mysterious leader of this attack, known only as "Zed".

Aside: I could have saved a lot of time transcribing that text had I looked at Wikipedia before booting up the game.

Zombie Revenge is, like, the single best Double Dragon clone of all time, if we omit Double Dragon clones from contention that are, you know, actually good. It's a simplistic, purposefully slow-moving, gory brawler set in the loosely defined House of the Dead universe, memorably captured in Uwe Boll's House of the Dead film [6]. The collision detection is wonderfully, beautifully erratic. You fight the alien from Predator for no reason.

The only thing that could make it better is three player simultaneous co-op, which it really should have!

Okay, the game isn't great or anything, but I had more dumb fun with this than with Rockstar's abysmal State of Emergency. In fact, prior to apparently enjoyable XBLA game Castle Crashers, this may have been the last brawler worth something.

8.) Mr. Driller

Namco's other arcade-to-home conversion for the Dreamcast, Mr. Driller was conceived as a Dig-Dug sequel before someone wisely re-branded it with an incredibly filthy sounding name. As you can likely surmise from the screenshot, it's a bit like Dig-Dug crossed with a Puzzle Fighter-esque color matching mechanic. Your goal is to drill as deeply as possible though real countries until they can't be drilled no more before cute little Mr. Driller runs out of air and adorably dies. Also: don't get hit by falling blocks.

It's a fun, mechanically tight game right there, but my God would it be boring if the only obstacles were only basic, color-matching blocks. You match four, you hit the floor of your tunnel, you go do something better with your life. Luckily, I don't have to imagine a world where Mr. Driller is boring, because three atypical blocks are out there in the tunnels: white blocks, crystal blocks, and X blocks. White blocks don't match with anything, which is why they are the most obvious and annoying piece of garbage in the entire game. Crystal blocks exist in this temporal realm for a few seconds before disappearing into the ether, dropping whatever lode they were bearing before their strange unreality. X blocks take a fuck ton of time to drill though and cost precious oxygen to dispatch, requiring one to use foresight and a bit of a gambling streak to tackle.

Now, what elevates this puzzle game from "pretty good," to "umissable" is the music. I'm not positive, but I'm willing to wager the Katamari Damachy composer wrote the vaguely vaudeville, vaguely jazzy, vaguely hymnal (there's a chorus of children, even -- maybe they assumed that, like Gamera, Mr. Driller gains strength from the singing of children), vaguely completely fucking awesome score.

7.) Rez

It's difficult to write about Rez now, following so many pretentious message board posts and supercilious wankery. Like, imagine if you were at a house party, hanging out on the deck. As your friend passes by you to enter the house, you say a passing comment about, oh, Bob Dylan. Out of nowhere, some random skinny dude comes flying in and begins to harangue you for dozens of minutes about how, like, Blonde on Blonde changed his life from the first second he heard it and how Dylan's just it, man, while constantly asking to bum about four dozen Parliament Lights from you.

I don't want to be that guy, only over the internet and talking about games. There are plenty of other places out there, if that's what you want to read.

I will say, however, that Rez was United Games Artists best game by a country mile - and I love Sega Rally! - ,that Tetsuya Mizuguchi was (and is) amongst the giants in the Japanese development community, and pretty much everyone should give Rez a fair chance before launching your macro that denotes every reason the game is overrated.

6.) Super Magnetic Neo!

Platformers are at the same point today that classic, point-n-click adventure games were at 7 years ago. They're dead. Maybe one comes out every year. Dave Halverson, longtime EiC of GameFan, Game Revolution, and Play magazines, had to leave editorial earlier this year; I assume the man who gave Bug! for the Sega Saturn a 98% couldn't handle working on a magazine without googly-eyed characters.

As I discussed earlier in this now very long post, there's a good reason why the genre is mostly dead -- it just doesn't work so hot in 3D. There is a pretty decent solution to making a 3D platformer, which requires the developers to confine all the action to a single track. The first Crash Bandicoot game is an example of this.

So we'll call Super Magnetic Neo! a Crash Bandicoot-like. There are stages where you guide Neo foward, and stages where you guide Neo sideways. It's incredibly sugary, filled with pastels and bouncy J-pop music, telling Asinine Platformer Form Story #4: Evil Broken Amusement Park.

Oh, also: it's hard. Like, scary hard in places.

But, as the title Super Magnetic Neo would indicate, there's a (fairly obvious but still awesome) twist!

Neo has the ability to create a magnetic field with either a positive or negative electrical charge. These work like science intended them to: opposite charges attract, similar charges repel. It's an easy concept to get your head around, which is good, because there are many many (many) moments wherein Neo is tasked to change polarity, oh, say, 40128 times in a matter of seconds to avoid falling to his death.

It's a bit masochistic, but it's also a lot of fun, in that incredulous way platformers are. Just missing the edge on a jump is a bit frustrating, but it is also incredibly addicting, and Neo balanced these successes and near misses to a satisfying degree. There are those Zen-like moments where your fingers press buttons before you tell them to, and there are enough of them to make this an acknowledgeable Dreamcast game.

5.) Shenmue

Shenmue is a lot of things, but above all else, Shenmue is a lot of things related to drawers.

There are literally hundreds of drawers available for your enjoyment in Shenmue's eerily detailed Yokosuka, Japan. Find them in your house. Find them in one of the local restaurants. Find them in the Mah Jong parlor. You say no one would put a cabinet in a bar frequented by rowdy sailors, notorious throughout the Pacific for their anti-storage prejudice ? You best check yourself, son.

You can open a huge percentage of these drawers once you find them. After you open the drawers, you can look inside of them. Sometimes they are empty. Sometimes they are filled with inessential brick-a-brack. In very rare circumstances, there is something of value to take from inside one of them. You can close the drawers, too, but sometimes, you don't have to close them. But you really should; it's rude not to.

Compare the obsessive attention in Shenmue to its near contemporary, Grand Theft Auto III. In Shenmue, one is stuck by the lavishness attended to every wall texture, every sign, every door, every strand of hair in the game. All of this incidental material came at great monetary cost and had little genuine use to the plot or the central play mechanics. Most gamers -- those expecting to play a game with murder and kung fu -- were bored out of their minds upon discovering a game centered around wandering though a little coastal town, casually collecting information and Space Harrier high scores, driving the occasional forklift, and occasionally fighting random thuggish dudes. They wanted something like GTA III, something with lots of mayhem. Never mind almost all of those superfluous things like empty drawers -- the things that give context and soul to a game -- are absent. In GTA III there's not even an attempt to create verisimilitude; Liberty City is a dull, dead, grey videogame environment. Yokosuka is a goddman city in Shenmue, and bully for it.

Both games come with different approaches towards the same ends. Here's a place, they tell us - go play around in it. One proved to be incredibly successful. The other pretty much doomed it's publisher. I wonder if games would be radically different today if Shenmue succeeded and Grand Theft Auto III tanked. Would "sandbox" games focus less on instant gratification and stupid violence masquerading as freedom if there was a different, more contemplative, more detailed trillion seller to emulate? (Protip: no, they wouldn't. Most people think the more interesting one is boring.)

Also: I kinda like Quick Time Events, when they're implemented properly. Don't understand all the hate I read about 'em.

4.) D2

It's a Kenji Eno game.

3.) Jet Grind Radio

Smilebit's greatest moment, Jet Grind Radio is like the perfect encapsulation of what it meant to be designed by Sega's in-house development teams during the Dreamcast era. The completely unique, internally consistent visual style, complemented by flawlessly planned sound effects and music [7]? Check. The quirky, completely unique gameplay? Check. The intuitive, slightly loose way the game controlled? Check. The unforgettable character design? Check. A little bit of pandering to desirable marketing demographics? Check.

What even is Jet Grind Radio? How would you pitch this game to a marketing executive?
"Well, it's kind of a roller blading game..."

"Great! Can we get one of Tony Hawk's friends on the cover? The kids, they love Tony Hawk!"

"Um, not really, because you're trying to spray paint graffiti messages, hoping to overthrow these other graffiti gangs..."

"Graffiti you say? What's Mark Ecco doing right now? Can we put that rhino logo of his on the cover?"

"You see, we're using this revolutionary new rendering technology called 'cel-shading,' to make the graphics stand out from the competition. It takes 3D rendered objects and turns them all... cartoony, sir. I don't think Mark Ecco wants his retarded rhino screwed with in any way..."

"Cartoons, you say?!? The kids love cartoons from Japan, today! We have graphs that prove it! And you'll never guess what the most popular cartoon in the multiverse right now is -- why, I doubt they've even made an extreme sports graffiti gang war tech demo game out of this property yet! Get me the name of the company that owns those PokeMans rights, and get it to me quick! I've got a coke party to attend! It's gold, I tells ya, gold!"

2.) Skies of Arcadia/Eternal Arcadia

Earlier this year, someone at Sammy must have paused while counting their Yakuza blood money to remember their company still employed one of the greatest scenario designers and RPG developers in history. Maybe he entered some long-fogotten conference room and saw this employee, one Rieko Kodama, eating ramen noodles in the corner and realized "oh yeah, this person made those Phantasy Star and Eternal Arcadia games, maybe we should get her working on something people will actually enjoy, instead of a fucking Altered Beast game for the PS2?!"

I'm a little bitter it's been 8 years between Skies of Arcadia and Valkyria Chronicles, but really? A fucking PS2 Altered Beast game is the best work you can offer this wonderful human?

This wonderful human knows how to create visually compelling worlds and she does this when planning Eternal Arcadia. Skies has the same bubbly, effervescent art design of her Phantasy Star games, replacing all the 80's pop utopianism featured in PSII and IV with brightly re-imagined Age of Exploration stylings. To complement this lovely world, she creates lovely people. Countering the late 90's trend installing mopey teenagers with emo bangs and outfits covered with zippers into the main character, Skies of Arcadia is populated by likable, optimistic protagonists: Aika, Vyse, Fina, Enrique, and especially the duo of Glider and Clara are thousands of times more interesting than another stoic amnesiac in desperate need of a lay.

Her first two tasks satisfactorily tackled, Kodama decides to spin a neat little yarn to occupy her bubbly heros and their effervescent world. It is a good, solid story, entertaining without straying far from the RPG template. And if much of the plot has been co-opted wholesale from Myazaki's Nauscaa and the Valley of the Wind, well - one could chose something worse to rip off.

With that out of the way, Kodama-sama needs to implement the gameplay system, one strong enough to tie everything awesome she's thought of together. Luckily, she knows a lot of people with a talent for doing just that - Overworks! She's one of the project leads there, after all.

Overworks may have a surfeit of ideas to shove into a new RPG, but Eternal Arcadia wasn't the place for 'em. Nothing in the game was done for flash or effect in and of itself: outside the 3D engine and seizure-inducing lighting effects, one could hardly tell that six years past between PSIV and Skies. No flashy CG. No voice acting. No cutting back on the random encounters. No simple, linear dungeons. Even in the staid JRPG genre, where innovation and change creep along with the rapidity of tectonic drift, Skies takes only one risk - but it's a pretty big risk, and the result is awesome fun. But we'll get to those ship-to-ship combat bits in a moment. They'll still be shit hot when we get there.

The usual random encounters are traditional, but fun. Exploring the skies and the dungeons of Arcadia is dangerous business. It is also just a little more tedious than murdering dangerous things ought to be. Adventuring requires a few run-ins with some jerk ass monsters, many of whom look like sperm cells wearing hula hoop belts. All who invade are subjected to turn-based tussles until one side is slaughtered completely. It usually takes just a little longer to finish a combat encounter than I'd like in Eternal Arcadia; I prefer the DraQue style (God, you can tell I'm tired if I'm using Japanese nicknames for videogame series), which has always relied on text to convey the action during fights, letting one play at a very zippy pace. After a few dozen leaden "attack, attack, attack, heal" sequences with Skies of Arcadia's party combat, wherein every action requires you to watch as your characters slowly position themselves on the battlefield in completely arbitrary ways before doing what you fucking told them to, you really want zippy, text-heavy fights.

Kodama and Overworks should do something about those slow battles, but some of her creative juice is harnessed to develop another gameplay system, one unlike any other RPG I can think of at the moment, and one I hope to see again in some form again: ship combat. Kodama recalls her childhood living in Kanagawa prefecture, between Mt. Fuji and the sea, and from this intuits the nature of naval combat is vastly more complicated and slower-paced than the traditional RPG combat she is more familiar with. Instead of copying an existing system from a competing RPG or grafting a dopey action game in the bigger set piece battles, Kodama realizes with a start that one could be true to both the strategy and forethought required in successful naval combat and to the conventions of the JRPG genre.

This is her idea: instead of a typical "you take your turn and I take my turn and I'll gut you before you gut me" turn based combat, why not string four turns into one input period? One must think not only of his current status and weaponry, but also the foe's status, and how the foe's actions in the future will impact one's ship and one's decisions made now! GENIUS!

And the number one Dreamcast game you should acknowledge is...
stay tuned to find out in the future!

footnote 1: If they ever decide to bring Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan! in the US -- and considering the relative lack of Edo period samurai epics exlcusive to PS3 (or many other 3rd party exclusives, for that matter) I see no reason why not -- I have to wonder: what are they going to call it? Yakuza: Before Such a Thing Existed? Yakuza: Birth of the Return of the Yakuza?

footnote 2: I did not do this. I have owned one Saturn, which I bought from a guy in high school I was friendly with, Chase. This is around... 2000, I guess - after the Dreamcast launched, for serious. I think it worked for 2 months after I bought it, he refused to refund any of the money I paid him (which, admittedly, wasn't very much) and we didn't talk too much after that. He wasn't a bad guy -- he just liked Lincoln Park too much, and I'm pretty sure he got into drugs around the same time he sold me the Saturn.

footnote 3: In the sense that neither sold SUPER well, both had some pretty bold ambitions, and neither quite understood the unfair and vicious nature of their consumer base. Well, Dyack might have, simply because he's read books about middle management and somehow took that information and formulated an insane and nonsensical argument about it in the month before Too Human's release. This was a specious simile

footnote 4: While that was a silly sentence, I just want to make clear that Sega was started by four dudes in Hawaii to sell coin-op machines in American military bases. Stuff like vending machines, ticket meters, and amusement devices.

footnote 5: It's unlikely to be surpassed nowadays. In the year between the Japanese launch of the Dreamcast and the American launch, developers, no longer saddled with non-retail development hardware and zero experience developing stuff for a new platform, were able to craft real games instead of up-rezed ports or tech demos. Now that all the platform holders release their shit hot new toys nearly simultaneously in United States, Japan, and Europe, we all have to suffer though fucking Red Steel and Kameo. It was great when only Japan had to deal with that nonsense.

footnote 6: Gabbi and I went to see Mount Eerie at Lewis & Clark quite a few years ago. I had no idea what to expect, having heard no reports of Phil Elverum's live shows, although I assumed he didn't attempt to recreate the records onstage. He came onstage after Thanksgiving and nervously opened a brief, friendly Q & A session with the audience before playing any music. Someone asked him what Anacortes, WA is like."Oh, it's pretty nice when they aren't filming zombie movies there," he said. Apparently, that was where Uwe Boll's House of the Dead "movie" was shot. He went on to explain that he decided to start filming his own zombie film as close to the set of "HOTD" as possible, in protest, and can actually be seen very briefly in the movie, wearing his zombie makeup, which was just the word "ZOMBIE!" written in Sharpie across his forehead.

footnote 7: At least in Jet Set Radio, the Japanese version of this game. American gamers were treated to a different soundtrack with licensed songs, which were unfortunately chosen during that horrible era when every game had the song "Dragula" in it somewhere.

F You, Viacom. Someone, Someone, is Above This

2008-09-11T13:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, I interrupt my irregularly scheduled attempt to write about Sega to inform you that Mark Burnett is getting ready to cast his new reality show -- a ladder competition...

between Rock Band 2 bands.

Hey, I loved Konami's Guitar Freaks when it came out, I still love Dance Dance Revolution, I kinda get Beatmainia. I understand that playing fake instruments with people can be a fuckton of phun. I did it at PAX, even. I played Bass and sang (not close to the microphone, of course -- I just wanted the full Geddy Lee Experience). A guy I thought was Brian Crecente played guitar. It wasn't Brian Crecente, though. That's what he told me, at least. Oh, and the drummer may have been Neil Pert transfered into a small Korean woman's body.
But you know what made it fun? There was real personal interaction, even with strangers, even among a sea of 60,000 other strangers. The zeitgeist of the moment may be Rock Band, but it's PLAYING Rock Band.

The only way this could ever work is if they get elderly public intellectuals on one team; you know, Gore Vidal, John Updike, Robert Silver, William F. Buckl... oh, wait.

I really want to see Gore Vidal try to play Rock Band, now.

Okay, back to different ranting!

[Burnett's 'Band' looking for rockers [Variety, via Game|Life -- photo seems to be from there, too.]

edit: okay, I finally got the damn notifications to work when people comment. I don't know why it took a year, but it did. Expect prompter responses in the future, you lovely few people, you.

5 Days a Stranger; 1 Not Very Good an Essay

2008-08-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

Returning to the adventure game genre after such a long hiatus in preparation for the "Chzo Mythos" summary I'm kinda writing has sent me into flights of Proustian revery, which is why the next four hundred words are not about anything, really.

I'm writing this on a woefully underpowered iBook G4, a laptop in desperate need of retirement after 4 years of heavy use. Today, it is as effective a computer as Pakistan is a democratic government. Still, I've bought into the Apple mystique to the point where I cannot fathom purchasing a Windows machine under any circumstances. Like a jackass. Why, if I was handed legal documentation by a Notary Public Officer guaranteeing a future with lots of sex with beautiful, intelligent women in exchange for buying a Dell, I'm not sure I'd take the deal. Even if the deal required said entourage of attractive ladies to make delicious pancakes for my consumption whenever I desired breakfast.. On second thought, I would buy that Dell if those conditions were met. But I wouldn't be happy about it.

One does not play games on Apple computers anymore. One does not purchase computer games for any platform very often anymore, what with piracy being what it is. Outside of AGS games, "The Ur-Quan Masters," The Battle for Wesnoth, and the occasional flash browser game, I never use my computer for videogame-related entertainment. But there was a time not long ago when I overclocked the shit out of an AMD Athlon processor. I think that was freshman year of college (soon afterward, the computer blew up while I was in Portland -- I don't think I left it on before leaving, but whatever). I bought computer parts from Cedar Mill Computers, and that place had to have been a front business for the Russian mob. At one point, I seriously entertained building a completely open source, Slashdot wet dream of a computer, although I cannot remember what drugs I was using at the time that gave the illusion that I was capable of doing such a thing. I haven't felt that way in seven years; this laptop has functioned much better than any of the wonky, crash-prone beige embarrassments I started building in high school. There is no denying that I am a complete sucker for OSX. The GUI just feels correct -- the resize, minimize & window closing buttons are in the top left hand corner of your windows, as it should be. The finder functionality is infinitely more sensible than explorer's clunky, haphazard organization.

Also, how could anyone not want their Firefox browsers to suck all your virtual memory in seemingly arbitrary intervals? If there's a credible explanation for this "feature" hiding in the flotsam and jetsam of the internets, I would read it.

However, recent developments in the games market have muted some of my Apple-centricsm. Games I find most intriguing rarely get a PowerPC Mac client, or at least a client that requires absolutely no effort to install and run. There is nothing I want to experience more than Tales of Game's Studios Presents: Bakley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden; most likely, it'll have to wait until I get a new Intel powered Mac some day in the far, far future -- with a Windows partition taking up valuable hard drive space. Space that should be occupied by 5 Days a Stranger/

Oh, yes. That.

from fully ramblomatic

5 Days a Stranger looks like an early 90's game developed by Legend or Revolution or some other long-forgetten member in the fraternity of developers not named LucasArts or Sierra. I mention this only because of the aesthetic. In general, the visuals are appealing, with just enough abstract roughness to trigger fond memories of Kings Quest. Objects look like reasonable facsimiles of their inspirations, critical in all point 'n click adventure games. However, some baffling decisions, paramount among them the color palate, actively hamper your ability to read much of the in-game text. The dialogue appears, in traditional LucasArts font, above whoever's saying what has to be said; everything else is grey text centered on the screen, superimposed over the environment. There are moments in which we are expected to read grey text over grey concrete with grey fences looming in the background. This kind of blunder in a rather text-heavy quest is unconscionable; however, I think limitations in the AGS programming tools are more to blame than Yahtzee himself. It's a testament to the overall quality of writing that I strained my eyes to read some of incidental stuff, not just because I expected to find a hint or whatever, but because I was genuinely interested in the story.

The title is not inaccurate, even if it's a bit nonsensical: the world renowned "gentleman thief," Trilby, breaks into the recently vacated DeFoe manor (using an absolutely badass umbrella grappling hook) and discovers himself trapped in the mansion by supernatural forces for five days. There are also, of course, strangers in the same predicament as Trilby, and a series of really awful things happen to pretty much all of them. While all this is going on, horrific things about the DeFoe family are revealed. Like really, really fucked up stuff. Exacerbating the narrative unpleasantness is the worst example I've ever seen of a pixel-hunting puzzle, the second most terrifying type of game-lengthening mechanic in the adventure game genre. Finding that one useful spot you need to progress further in the game is an established trope in this genre, so I would not be so upset had the game not innovated so radically. The puzzle of which I speak required me to turn my mouse sensitivity down so I could scour the landscape more precisely. This is how bad the pixel-hunt is: after accidentally brushing the mouse 1/16th of a centimeter off the hotspot when attempting to click on it, I had to spend 4 minutes trying to realign the cursor to that location again.

from fully ramblomatic

HOW-EV-R, the rest of the detective work is both within the logical parameters of the accursed mansion and make sound narrative sense. There are no "use the mayonnaise jar on the broom-handle" moments, in other words -- one of the puzzles is sort of an extended parody, requiring at least three ridiculous item combinations and the use of one very sarcastic "guide to white magic," pamphlet to solve.

This game would be a competent, if somewhat easy and predictable, freeware adventure title on the strengths of the brain teasers alone. No one would play it if that's all it was, of course. We like adventure games because they tell stories - stories that are very distinctively "adventure game-y," divorced from the Marcus Phenix-iisms so prevalent in our games today. Had Yahtzee slapped some generic motivations and ill-defined personalities for Trilby and the other trapped inhabitants of DeFoe manor, had he not bothered creating the eerie story of one seriously troubled family, I would not be writing about 5 Days a Stranger.

Awesomely, a group of modders began development on a remake of 5 Days a Stranger, using the Source engine. Less awesomely, the project appears to be dead.

So, yeah. Check it out, if you like adventure games. Get it here.

2008-08-14T17:52:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay in the "X Days an Article 'bout Yahtzee's adventure games," but as far as I know Jackie is the only person who reads this blog anyway. :

So the incredibly niche article about 4 year old independent adventure games is going to have to wait a little longer because a few days ago THIS happened:

Yes, I've played the demo of motherfucking Bionic Commando ReArmed about 40 times since it's release. Is that right? Bionic Commando ReArmed... I think it's inter-caped. That is usually a major detriment to success, because very few things are cool enough to be inter-caped; Bionic Commando is one of the few.

At some point I''ll need to get some PSN voucher cards for which to pay Capcom, GRiN, and most importantly Ben Judd.

ALSO while foolishly trying to organize the closet underneath my staircase, I came across a large cache of long-missing NES games. There's still quite a few missing from the overall collection (where's DynoWarz, for example? And do I really want it?) but I feel much more whole now.

Next, I have to track down some of my SNES games, because the only ones avalible to me right now are things like "Killer Instinct and the Mortal Kombat games. Where are those Quintet games I bought? What kind of library is complete without Actraiser, Soulblazer & Illusion of Gaia?

Speaking of Actraiser, I played it for about 2 hours last weekend because Jeremy Parish commanded me to; while it hasn't aged as gracefully as other near-launch SNES games like Super Castlevaina and Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, I really enjoyed it. I wish the side-scrolling bits were just the arcade Rastan, though, because they're clearly going for that Rastan feel, only screwing it up.

Off to get coffee with Jon now; hopefully I'll be back later.

The Yahtzee Mythos: 1 Day an Introduction

2008-08-14T06:54:00.000-07:00

Ben "Yatzee" Cronshaw is a name that, by now, you are likely familiar with. Every Wednesday he publishes a new installment of Zero Punctuation on the increasingly pretentious and turgid but still excellent Escapist website. What Zero Punctuation does is pretty common internet fare -- video reviews, breathlessly delivered by an Englishman-by-way-of-Australia just seething with contempt at all the dumb and predictable things developers continue to shove in their games, complemented by incredibly crude drawings of horrific violence and phalluses -- but unlike most videogame-related humor things, it's astonishingly funny and has garnered a lot of acclaim from the sort of people who acclaim these sorts of things. The primary audience for Zero Punctuation are message board readers and blog commentary writers, the kind of enthusiast blindly loyal to one gigantic monolithic corporation or another - corporations, it should be noted, that care not one whit about their fanboys, so long as money keeps flowing into their coffers -but the humor isn't so niche as to be unintelligible to the lay-person. The humor must have some broad appeal: although they should hate his guts, partisan fanboy-types still flock to Zero Punctuation to watch Yatzee express his universal disdain for their favorite franchises.

Every major videogame blog has caught onto this. The Kotakus and Joystiqs of the world embed the newest episode of Zero Punctuation in blog entries and post that shiznat the second it goes live; far easier to generate those all important ad-revenue generating clicks by repurposing other people's content than it is to write compelling things themselves, I bet! Heh.

It's possible that the like four people who read my blog haven't seen Zero Punctuation yet, however, so I'm going to take a page from the real bloggers and repurpose Yatzee's content right now. After all, I barely write anything, let alone anything compelling! I gotta find a way to generate those clicks, get that ad revenue up, maybe get some ads, make a living off of this... anyway, here's a review of Army of Two:

Eh? Eh?

Well, I still think it's hilarious.

Before Mr. Cronshaw achieved his current level of notoriety, however, he was famous among an even more niche and dorky group of people than Escapist readers -- amateur/indie adventure game scenesters.

A few years ago, Yahtzee created a few random series of games using the Adventure Game Studio (AGS). His first brush with success came when the "Rob Blanc Trilogy," a series of comedy games I'm never going to play because all the graphics were created in MS Paint. Fuck that. I assume they were funny, or at least not egregiously not funny. That's not what I want to talk about, though. I want to talk about Cronshaw's ambitious series of horror games, formally entitled the Chzo Mythos: 5 Days a Stranger; 7 Days a Skeptic; Trilby's Notes; and 6 Days a Sacrifice, because I've played them, all of them, to completion (mostly)!

I fully expected to hate the games, because they're adventure games, and divorced from the syrupy taint of nostalgia, adventure games are a tough sell. Shakespeare was one of the first to denounce these things, memorably writing "An Al Lowe game is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The vast majority of indie adventure game developers are kids who grew up playing Sierra & LucasArts games, where psychologically profiling Roberta Williams or Ron Gilbert was kinda the only way to solve puzzles. In other words, people almost exactly like me, but delusional.

So one must temper enthusiasm when admiring the hefty shelf of virtual awards the AGS community has awarded the Chzo Mythos. Seriously, the AGS community is pretty excited whenever a game doesn't use any of the five pieces of clip art present in every other AGS game on the market. One of the major selling points of 5 Days a Stranger is that Yahtzee did all the art himself, in Photoshop. All the animations, too. Almost no one who makes these little games even bothers to do that. When a community embraces and loves a game because someone bothered to create their own artwork for it, that tells you something. Not that every AGS game I've played is bad -- quite the opposite! -- but some of the better ones are not free and therefore dead to the AGS diehards. I can't understand how upsetting it must be, discovering a developer with the audacity to charge a couple bucks for their really well-done, incredibly interesting rabbinical adventure of mourning and mystery, but that's just the culture we live in today. As we've just seen with Braid, $5 can seem like a staggering amount of money to the sort of dude that bought Halo 3 with the cat helmet.

Before I even started playing any of Yahtzee's oeuvre, I toyed around with a "Zero Punctuation"-style takedown of these little freeware adventure games, only with ponderously slow narration and images of polar bears and walruses maniacally spinning like Spyrographs instead of comedy drawings on yellow backdrops. That'd show Yahtzee how it feels to have someone's hard work demolished in 2 minutes!

However, I dropped that elaborate and not particularly clever plan: firstly, by coming to terms with my own enormous limitations as a voice actor and animator, and secondly, after enjoying 5 Days a Stranger quite a bit. It is evident that Yahtzee has some understanding of game design, which ads some weight to his critiques, and because of this his acerbic ranting on the failings of other games are more than just disposable fun; they are rough sketches of a wise man's brain that hint at the things Yahtzee might want to put in a "real" game if given the time and resources.

Coming in the near future -- like, later today hopefully -- a look at 5 DAYS A STRANGER & 7 DAYS A SKEPTIC

Fake Looking World, But With Actual Death

2008-07-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

After reading this article in Slate, I felt an awful chill run though my body.

A brief summary: Raytheon, a military contractor, believed the current technology utilized in unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator drone needed improvement. The machines were cumbersome to control, and pilots can only see what the UAV's camera can see.

Raytheon hired game developers to create a "Universal Control System," which debuted in Britain last week. From the Will Saletan piece:

The most important upgrade is visual. Multiple wide-screen monitors wrap around the pilot, producing a 120-degree field of vision. They integrate actual video from the drone with an interactive digital replica of the surrounding buildings and terrain. By digitizing the picture, UCS can lay information over it, displaying your available weapons and the location of nearby troops.

In other words, the Universal Control System creates a something that looks alarming similar to a videogame on the fly using real world data. It's like Tom Clancy Air War HAWX, but with real bombs and real death.

Look, it's one thing for the Army to distribute America's Army as a recruitment tool. If you're gullible enough to join the armed services because a couple really kickass Capture the Flag multiplayer sessions made you realize how fun and easy war can be, don't let me stop you. We need brave soldiers like that as far away from me as possible.

Making real war more like videogames, though? Modern combat is already top heavy with depersonalizing technological innovations, but at least someone has to look though a real television monitor at real objects before inputing the commands necessary to obliterate them. A videogame interface is exponentially abstracted from that abstraction; the reason "it's only a game," has been used to defend all sorts of morally repugnant behavior present in the medium is that it really is only is a game. It's not real and it can't hurt you physically or turn you into a murderous psychopath. There are consequences to gaming, both positive and negative, but until now they've been banal negative consequences -- 31 year old virgins with fourteen level 70 WOW characters, dudes flunking out of college because Xenosaga came out and needed to be played to completion finals week (true story: happened to a dorm-mate of mine), that kind of thing.

Of course, this being a mainstream media piece, the dangers of digital entertainment are exploited; Saletan makes it sound like the next generation of American soldiers, weaned on Playstion, are so disengaged from reality that murdering someone via this Universal Control System, to our brave men and women in armed services, will feel just like unlocking an Xbox achievement. Well, he doesn't say that. He compares the experience to setting high scores in arcades -- unaware that high scores and arcades have been dead for at least 8 years now, in the US.

However, this fact remains: war should not be a game. It should not look like a game or reward your achievements like a game. Taking a human life is serious business and it should be treated as such. It'd be nice if our political leaders knew this; perhaps funding to abuse the possibilities of the gaming medium will dry up when the era of the Military-Industrial Complex finally comes to an end.

Not every military application of videogaming is a grotesque misappropriation of technology, however. Have a look at a recent New Yorker article by Sue Halpern on a new PTSD treatment that incorporates a modified version of Full Spectrum Warrior. Here's a video.

MULTIPOINTS

2008-07-22T15:46:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts:

OBLIGATORY HARDCORE GAMER POST E3 Wii COMPLAINT
*I am personally offended that UbiSoft, Activision, and other publishers have chosen to start "boutique" labels catering to a booming new demographic of gamers: stupid people. Already, this demographic has a politically correct title ("casual gamers"), a proclivity for game boxes with family-friendly pastel colors everywhere, and enough copies of Carnival Games to drown like fifteen kitties. And have you ever tried to drown a fluffy, cute little kitty with hundreds of flexible plastic discs? It's hard.

The Wii has not performed as it should have, that is to say, poorly. The system should have at best sold moderately well, mostly to the Nintendo fanboys, who'll buy anything Hudson designs so long as "Nintendo," is slapped prominently on the side of the plastic.

There were potential benefits to this "new-gen" arrangement: Nintendo had an opportunity to become the place developers, slaving away under the auspices of genocidal tyrant companies like EA's and Activision, could stretch their creativity,. While development costs continue to grow at an alarming rate for the HD systems, ensuring a steady stream of Bald Space Marine shooters and sports games to keep the corporate coffers filled, the cost of doing an experimental little thing on Nintendo's strange white box promised to cost next to nothing. And that WiiMote looked so elegant, in stark contrast to the increasingly ridiculous Xbox & Playstation harness-shaped contraptions -- perhaps those financial and input limitations were just the thing to spark some innovative ideas, eh?

*PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFPHT*

As consolation, PSN and the Xbox Live Arcade have gamely stepped it up, providing the kinds of experiences I assumed the Wii would deliver.

The Wii, which should be overflowing with unrealized, epoch-making masterpieces 18 months into it's life-cycle, is today the home of... Ninjabread Man.

And the companies I assumed would throw their creative-types a little freedom to tinker around with gameplay mechanics, narrative presentation, waggle control, and the rest? They secured as many multi-year deals with Hanna Montana as their lawyers let them.

Outside of MadWorld, can you name one high profile Wii game developed by someone living outside of Kyoto?

I PLAY SOME HALO 3 CO-OP AND DON'T HATE IT
*I finally get why Halo is such a monster seller, and it only took me 7 years to understand: game's just dialed in. So far, it is the only console FPS I understand how to control -- the slow, smooth nature of the combat and the tuned analog stick sensitivity are as compatible as peanut butter & chocolate.

Other things I discovered:
*There are a lot of lasers and energy balls and other such nonsense. In a sci-fi shooter, this is par for course. However, Bungie is the only developer that understands that spectral highlighting and particle effects work most effectively when employed with subtlety. Unlike, say, the Metroid Prime series, firing a gun does not fill the screen with light bloom. The brilliance of underselling the flashy graphical effects is that, for once, you can actually see what you're shooting at.

*The shooter genre consists of the same 30 seconds of gameplay repeated over and over again: Move forward - see enemy - shoot enemy - duck behind something - kill enemy - move forward. Bungie gets this, and makes sure those 30 seconds are a lot of fun.

*I can't imagine playing this game solo. Co-op is what made the game fun.

I BEAT METAL GEAR SOLID 4 ONLY TO DISCOVER I LIKED IT LESS THAN METAL GEAR SOLID 3

*I might have more to say about this game later, but the most striking observation I have is as follows: Kojima needs to hire a goddamn editor.

COLUMN: 'Jumping Really, Really High': There's Only One Way to Go: Up!

2008-07-17T05:54:00.000-07:00

['Jumping Really, Really High' is a semi-annual column by professional jumping enthusiast The Dude From the Legend of Kage - pronounced "KAH-GAY" - the protagonist in Taito's seminal arcade and NES title Legend of Kage. In this installment, Dude From Kage comments on the recent innovations in super huge jumping on display at E3 and dispenses some advice for newcomers to the genre.]

The humble jump is a most basic action to perform in a videogame. For many players of games, older ones in particular, jumping is the action performed more often than any other, if we were to add every single jump ever attempted together. That is to say, you've jumped over more things than you have shot with guns, ducked under, punched, hit with sword, and so on in your gaming career.

There is a sensible reason for this. In 2D space, which I have spent my entire career occupying, the jump is the most elegant solution to many design problems creators and players face. Although you in the 3D space may not spend your days jumping constantly to avoid obstacles, you have a major ability unavailable to me - lateral movement. When confronted with a pit in real life, you can just step around it or find an alternate path to your destination. Ninjas and wizards are more difficult to circumvent, but if you attack the problem with patience and dedication, there is nothing those fiends can do to you. I envy this.

What works in real life does not always translate well to your 3D games, of course. The potential for getting lost is a real worry in 3D, and the confusing wireframe maps and tiresome need to control the camera must make finding destinations difficult! I am lucky insofar as my destination is always hundreds of feet to my left or thousands of feet above that river in the second stage. Those ninjas must have taken my gal in one of those two directions; there's no other place for me to go.

In addition, your 3D games are dauntingly complicated. Your playstation or Xbox controller has 8-16 buttons (depending on how the D-pad is utilized) and two analog sticks. Many contemporary games require you to use all of these buttons to do anything neat. Two buttons for my throwing star and sword attacks and a working d-pad to jump 90 feet into the air -- that was all The Legend of Kage needed to be fun. Okay, it could have used tighter controls. Any level design wouldn't have hurt. Otherwise, though -- perfect.

However, videogames are in three dimensions today, with obvious and awesome exceptions like The Legend of Kage 2 - coming to America soon on your DS! This shift briefly put a damper on the jump, because in realistic 3D space, one in which objects appear to have depth and weight, things could look very silly and cheap if no laws of physics get obeyed.

As the main hero in the Legend of Kage, however, the humble jump was merely a starting point. After all, I could uncontrollably leap like 90 feet into the air, throwing ninja stars in 8 directions, limbs akimbo. Indeed, my jumping was truly a marvelous thing to behold.

I am ashamed to admit that I grew cocky in the past 15 years, certain that my record for "most ridiculous jump height" was safe forever. Until 2007, my closest competition was Mighty Bomb Jack, but his crippling addiction to eating things he found on the floor of a castle shattered his hops, his health, and his dreams.

However, in the wake of Crackdown's massive success, a whole slew of 3D superhero games is 'acoming this way: Prototype; Infamous; Spiderman Friend or Foe; Mirror's Edge (sorta) and I'm sure a lot of other dumb games I haven't heard of yet -- games with big jumps.

As an expert in the field of jumping, I have some advice for the developers of these types of games:

IMPRECISE CONTROL TO ENHANCE VERISIMILITUDE - So you know when you jump off, like, a tree branch forty feet up in the air in The Legend of Kage you have absolutely no way to gauge your landing spot? Definitely keep that mechanic in your 3D games. That's what makes it cool.
DESIGN LARGE, ARBITRARY ENVIRONMENTS TO TRAVERSE - Don't worry if the layouts don't make any sense -- force players to move in unintuitive ways. They'll love you for it!
WORTHLESS SWORDS - What kind of jumping game would empower the player with something like a useful melee attack? A jumping game with no balls, that's what.
EPIC CINEMAS - The Legend of Kage was one of the first Nintendo games to open with a cinema. In it, my girlfriend or mother or sister or whatever gets kidnapped by an evil blue ninja. There's no dialog. There doesn't need to be. Remember: whoever plays your games is going to want motivation and production values.
PUT SOME AWESOME KABUKI WIZARDS SOMEWHERE - Those things were awesome.

Listen to my advice and you're game will be remembered 23 years later. It may not be remembered fondly, but it'll be remembered.

2008-07-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

I'm really drunk.

I found this HILARIOUS.

Goodbye, Soulless Corporate Dope Peddlers - Hello, Temp Work!

2008-06-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

Today, I have an appointment at a temp agency. Why did I schedule this appointment, considering that I am currently employed at the nation's largest videogame retailer? Although working retail is never much fun, does it not help to enjoy the product you sell?

Well, yes and no.

Games are cool. I would have no objection, no reason to seek outside employment, if my sole task was that of a shopkeeper, selling goods to eager individuals with genuine use for 0ur products. As anyone who has ever shopped at GameStop before knows, however, the sales associates are not only enabling monetary transactions; they're pestering you ceaselessly to spend money on preorders, warranty plans, club memberships, strategy guides, and all manner of useless ephemera. You may find this behavior obnoxious -- shut up about preorders already, you may think, I shouldn't have to preorder a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 when copies of it are about to become as rare as air molecules! -- but please understand: our jobs are entirely dependent on you purchasing this stuff. You don't sell, your hours get cut. You don't meet quota, you get reamed by your (almost always sleazy) manager.

I would field calls every day inquiring as to the trade-in value of certain games. Guess what? I was absolutely forbidden from answering that question over the phone. Why? Because if a potential customer hears what a pittance our store offers in trade-in value for a two month old game, they are far less likely to drive to the store and trade their game in. The entire business model revolves around inconveniencing the customer for our profit.

Ethical quibbles aside, it is very difficult to maintain my kind of lifestyle while working a part time job in a strip mall. "My kind of lifestyle", of course, is a misnomer -- I live with my parents and spend most of my income on games, beer, and cigarettes -- but still. I invested all my liquid capital in a PS3, limiting opportunities to socialize with other people, and right now I need to interact with humans for my own mental well being.

Hopefully, I'll get a higher paying job, full time work -- then, I will have more disposable income for games, hence a few more articles on the blog. Articles about Pocky & Rocky, the history of pirated fighting games, the PC Engine, the effect gaming can have on serious mental illness, DeJap, Metroidvainias (specifically Cave Story), and more!

I've written around 20 words in each of the above ideas for posts -- just so you know, I may only put things up a few times a month, but I'm constantly agonizing over new, equally awful posts.

Sigh.

Early Metal Gear Solid 4 Impressions (Minus World Edition)

2008-06-20T13:50:00.000-07:00

I've no idea what to make of Metal Gear Solid 4 yet -- is it an excellent, satisfying, mechanically sound experience of tactical espionage action or is it a wildly ambitious, staggeringly uneven examination of every half-developed idea Kojima drew on the back of a Ghost in the Shell trade paperback one afternoon? Can I dismiss it as a $100 million dollar vanity project with gameplay not all that radically different from a 1990 MSX2 game and this archaic approach to cut-scenes straight outta "Silliwood"?

No, no, no, a thousand times no. It's all irrelevant!

MGS4 is nearly an elegy; at a time when every game on the 360/PS3 is flashy, underwritten shooter garbage, the gutsiness, uniqueness -- straight-up Metal Gear-ness of this game is refreshing as hell.

While sometimes very frustrating to play (fuck you, tracking mission in Act II) MGS4 gets the perfect balance between stealth and action better than anyone. After I beat the game, I'll think about organizing my thoughts and posting something here. Then I probably won't do it, considering my output so far.

Random Fun Fact About My Manual Dexterity: This new, improved control scheme is much more logical and sensible, and I am sure most people will grasp the basics with ease. Most people are not me. After 8 or so hours playing, I'm still turning the wrong way all the time. When moving the camera, I need both the x and y axis inverted on the right analog stick -- which really fucks everything up as soon as I hit L1 and start aiming. It's... really weird. Dragon Quest VIII ruined intuitive right stick controls for me, or something.

Sneak Preview of Next Post

What do Pocky & Rocky & a Tiawanese pirate version of Soul Caliber have in common? STAY TUNED!

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend Review, take 3

2008-05-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

I goddamn hate how this review turned out when I wrote it sixth months ago, but I need to get into the habit of throwing up whatever nonsense I have rumbling in my head to get back into the flow of writing things. So here it is, again.

It helps to have a bit of context before delving into (deep breath...) Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legends, so let us enter the WayBack machine for a moment.

I just opened up an old issue of the now defunct Ultra Game Players magazine to remind myself how big Tomb Raider once was. It's the Holiday 1996 issue, actually. A shitty render of Lara Croft's on the cover. She's blowing gunsmoke from her pistol and wearing a very, very ugly red thing on her head. I think it's supposed to be a "Santa Cap", for wont of a better term. It's not the only image of Lara in UGP #92, either; not including gameplay stills or advertisements, Lara's buxom figure appears 9 times, always posing in various uncomfortable-looking positions and environments. I guess she's supposed to look "sexy," but mostly she just looks pained and contorted, never more so than on that cover render with that hideous Santa thing on her head.

On page 78, Lara's first game, Tomb Raider, is reviewed by the erstwhile Patrick Baggatta, of whom I know nothing about. He gave a game that in retrospect was the best futuristic supertruck driving simulator of its era a 9.5. In fact, Mr. Baggatta felt so strongly about Tomb Raider that he awarded it The ULTRA AWARD, which looks similar to a KMFDM album cover. That is respect, right there. If the creepy KMFDM hand award and positive score were fairly normal in mid 90's game journalism, Baggatta ends his review with a heartfelt sentence: "Without question, one of the very best games available... Tomb Raider is a must-have for any system."

I'd call that a ringing endorsement, although getting Tomb Raider to run on an Commodore 64 must have been rough.

Mr. Baggatta lavished some serious hype on the first Tomb Raider game in this issue of Ultra Game Players, but he did something else, too. He explained to his readers how Crystal Dynamics developed such a stellar product. Here is Baggatta's hypothesis as to why Tomb Raider was such a successful game:

"What's most impressive about Tomb Raider, however, is the fact that the game engine was a sure hit from the start and a more fiscally cautious publisher might have rushed the product in an effort to cash in on the novelty factor, but this was not the case."

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. Eidos has done almost nothing but cash in on the novelty factor of the Tomb Raider games, and would have cashed in on the novelty factor of all their other 90's IP if given the opportunity. Games like Fighting Force and Deathtrap Dungeon were clearly designed as franchises; sadly for Eidos and their shareholders, neither game sold very well, perhaps due to their general blandness. Or the subpar gameplay. I'm going to blame the sexist, brain-dead print advertisements. In my opinion, wonderful, long-overdue nadir of Eidos's franchise frenzy may have been the attempt to push Omikron: the Nomad Soul as the first game in a long running series. If David Bowie's OST for Omikron couldn't save it, nothing could. (I'm going to write about that game some other day -- I'm fully aware it's not very good at all, but I still love it).

Eventually, Eidos stopped trying to develop new IP and devoted more resources to Tomb Raider's ad campaigns than towards the games themselves. Just three years after publishing an incredibly daring, different, epoch-making product, Eidos was selling new Tomb Raider games at budget prices. They couldn't understand why gamers had no genuine use for the product, and that is why they are bankrupt today. Well, I will tell you, Eidos, how you fucked this one up: after something like a dozen million Tomb Raider sequels, some slightly worse than the first one, some spectacularly so, Tomb Raider was a mildly retarded 3D adventure game-cum-stone block arrangement simulator with horrid digital control when every single system had two -- TWO -- conspicuous analog sticks. Dave Halverson probably hated it, even, and if Dave Halverson hates a game with platforming elements... wow.

This is important, though - in 1996 Tomb Raider was stupid big. Ginormous sales. Time Magazine articles, Wired cover stories, underrated Angelina Jolie feature films, you name it. I think one can argue that Tomb Raider was the first game to attract mainstream press as a legitimate form of entertainment, however infantile that entertainment may have seemed to the decrepitly old. Had the Tomb Raider series continued to take half as many risks as the first game did, building innovations to the core game mechanics rather than focus-testing and bullet-pointing the thing to hell, we might have even seen Lara develop into a fully formed woman instead of a wet dream with an endlessly repartee of snarky quips, a woman with a real personality, a woman whose actions would drive a narrative directly connected to her character... well, maybe we'd have less embarrassing games in general.

As an old school adventure gamer and JRPG fan, I still have hope in videogaming as a narrative medium. Yeah, but fucking hell: videogame story lines are superfluous drivel, especially action games. If I want a story with witty banter and strong female leads, I'll watch Gilmore Girls, because Lord knows Tomb Raider: Legend can't match up with Lorali and Rory. The Gilmore Girls doesn't involve chasing down some kind of mystical sword before a mostly dead sister gets it, lest Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung's theories on shared subconscious and mono-mythology lead to the destruction of the Earth, or something -- so Tomb Raider has that in it's favor. Or not.

At least Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend gives a passable effort spinning a thrilling yarn. It's just that the yarn spun is kind of disjointed and told in the most histrionic way possible. Luckily, there is not one bald space marine, anywhere. The extraneous story isn't more than a nuisance anyway, because Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend is an exceptional action/adventure title.

Although Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend is exponentially better than the last Tomb Raider game I slogged though (Last Revelation, on Dreamcast), both games rely on the same basic formula:

enter big room

look around big room

accidently step on a pressure plate in the big room, find spikes that instantly kill you

reload

enter big room, step over pressure plate, look for logical route to exit

notice logical route requires Lara to make all sorts of Christ-Jesus crazy jumps and backflips

perform said jumps and backflips; enter smaller room crawling with things that want to kill Lara

kill said things with a shooting mechanic that can't help but feel a little weak

repeat

Now, though, you can do all those formulaic things with control and precision. Crystal Dynamics wisely ripped off many elements, maybe all the elements not copyrighted, they could from Ubi Soft's Prince of Persia series. I guess Ubi Soft borrowed fairly heavily from Tomb Raider when they designed their first good 3D Prince title -- and Tomb Raider was a 3D "re-imagining" of the oldskool roto-scoped Prince of Persia Broderbround games for the Apple II. Everyone steals from everyone; that's why every FPS uses Halo controls.

Crystal Dynamics wasn't just stealing Ubi Soft's good ideas, repurposing them in a different setting. They were stealing other ideas -- sad ideas. In their infinite wisdom, they grafted on some Quick Timer Events for no readily apparent reason. Worse, they screwed the mechanic up. By giving the player absolutely no warning that a QTE is coming up, the player is almost certainly going to die half a second after that first unexpected green triangle pops onto the screen. Even Shenmue, the gameplay of which otherwise revolved around picking stupid looking things up off the ground and looking at them (sidenote: I effing hate Shenmue) warned you whenever some fat kid kicked a damn soccer ball at your face .

There are only a handful of moments where these QTE's crop up in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend, making their inclusion at all perplexing. I mean, if you're gonna put QTE's into your game, shouldn't you actually bother to build gameplay around the damn things?

Outside of the QTE's and the asinine, nonsensical plot, Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend plays a solid game. Some of the middle and late levels are as awesome as a robot programed to entertain children by break dancing until the end of time.

The real selling point is the genius level design. Metriod Prime and the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time are the only two other action/adventure games I can think of off the top of my head that pull off the same vast environmental scale as well as Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend. (NOTE: SINCE WRITING THIS REVIEW, I HAVE FINISHED SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS AND HAVE STARTED ICO, AND BOTH PULL OFF VAST SCALE BETTER THAN TOMB RAIDER) There isn't a lot tomb raiding in this game, but each "tomb" is fully realized, and the different environments require different sets of skills to traverse. The pacing is fairly predictable, alternating the shooty bits with the puzzly bits, but it still works.

The attention to detail in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend is what makes this something special. Three minutes into the game, you can move Lara right up to the edge of a tremendously high peak and stare straight down into the cloudy abyss below. It is a positively vertiginous little moment, a completely unnecessary gesture from the development team, the sort of thing that gamers racing to beat the game so they can post vulgar messages on forums telling the world how much better at videogames they are might never notice. It's a sign that Crystal Dynamics cares again.

Check out Croft Manor for another sign that the people who put this game together love this franchise. Historically, the Croft Manor has been an afterthought tutorial level hybrid Tomb Raider fans barely acknowledge. Not in Legend -- Ms. Croft's mansion is a sizable environment filled with secret passageways and ingenious gymnasiums -- a huge playground that is nearly as exciting to explore as the actual campaign missions.

Patrick Baggatta words, 10 years old now, apply today more than ever-- Crystal Dynamics built a solid engine this time around, and they were given the time and the space to develop a very quality game. That's a long time between quality Tomb Raider videogames, but at least it's been done again.

Prince of Persia

2008-05-22T13:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, I try not to get hyped for screen caps -- but oh my God, the new Prince of Persia game is everything I've ever wanted, visually, from a videogame.

On Metal Gear Solid 4's Hype & How It Freaks Me Out

2008-05-21T15:25:00.000-07:00

Apropos of nothing, I'm now, finally, properly hyped for Metal Gear Sold 4. The extraordinary, all-encompassing wall of hype finally penetrated my cynical defenses. What was once a healthy, socially acceptable enthusiasm has metastasized into something else, something dangerous.

I am not one for launch days. The Sega Dreamcast launch was the first, and until now with the 80GB MGS4 bundle, only time I ever pre-ordered and got anything day-and-date. I was like 15 back then and today I'm really wondering where the hell I got the $200+ I dropped at GameCrazy on 9/09/99. I also bought a Neo-Geo Pocket Color around then, too. Yikes. I guess I was pretty flush in cash before all the drinking, cigarette smoking, and general adult-being.

There is something very intoxicating and unhealthy about launch day hype, this partially marketing-manufactured, partially intrinsic streak of madness in most gamer-types that engulfs the community at large every few months. While I don't want to compare the launch of Grand Theft Auto 4 with the rise of Nazism, I kinda just did. All objectivity gets thrown out the window about a month before street date and in the first couple of weeks thereafter. No one can talk or write about a GTA without succumbing to the scourge of hyperbole. Nuance, balance, willingness to hear dissenting opinions, everything valuable and interesting and critical -- all the non-stupid reasons I check out message boards -- become scarce. After the level of discourse falls into bitter inanity, it seemingly can take forever before composure is regained (admittedly, nuance, balance, et al. can be pretty sparse on NeoGAF, &c under any circumstance, but right around the time a heavily promoted, AAA franchise hits, it really goes to hell.)

For some reason, I'm usually immune to this kind of (oh god I'm gonna say it) frothing demand. I figure the big mega-budget titles are going to be about as rare as air molecules in the used-game section six months later, where I will gladly snap them up for less money. I'd like to think I get a clearer picture of a game's true merits if I'm distanced from the hype avalanche.

That said, no fucking way I'm not playing MGS4 June 11th at 11:59 PM in the parking lot of the GameStop that employs me (assuming my store is holding a midnight launch, although I don't know why we wouldn't looking at the pre-orders). I'll bring the TV there and set it up beforehand; you can't expect me to wait until I get home, can you?

In unrelated news, I'm a little sad I sold my 360, because Ninja Gaiden II looks enjoyable enough to merit the fragility, loudness, questionable aesthetics , paying for online gaming bullshitery, all-shooter lineup and all the other problems I had with the system. The main problem was, it wasn't my DS, which I cannot see the PS3 usurping as my primary gaming system either.

Until I get an HDTV. Then, who knows.

More About Bucky O'Hare

2008-04-24T05:48:00.000-07:00

Returning again to Bucky O'Hare for the NES...

Before I wrote that terrible little retrospective on Bucky O'Hare a few months ago, I half-heartedly tried to dig up some information about the development team at Konami responsible for creating, against all odds, a very solid NES game about a space-faring rabbit and a fat kid. While I wasted my time at Wikipedia, however, I managed to forget that Eric-Jon had already answered this question for me over a year ago, a few months before the IC forums fell victim to ridiculous internet drama and exploded. I want to warn you beforehand how totally ridiculous (and in retrospect stunningly obvious) the people who made this game were.

I remembered those halcyon days when I saw this GameSetWatch article by Todd Clolek. I suggest you read it if you want to learn even more about Bucky O'Hare (you don't really want to learn anything more about Bucky O'Hare at this point, I know. But you should!)There's information on another Komani Bucky title in the article -- an arcade game much like The Simpsons that I desperately want to play now.

Bucky O'Hare's pedigree is outstanding because many of the key members of soon-to-exist Treasure were the principle programmers and artists on the game. Yeah, that Treasure. The developer behind:
Gunstar Heros, Guardian Heros, Sin and Punishment, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Bangai-O, and a personal favorite of mine, Alien Soldier, a game with 25 incredibly short levels and 31 incredibly awesome boss fights.

Masato Maegawa,, Bucky O'Hare's director and lead programmer, is the founder of Treasure. He must have left Konami around the same time this licensed game hit store shelves -- Treasure was formed in 1992 -- and there is every reason to believe getting assignments like this one, on top of the pressure to make yet another Contra game after yet another Contra game, was a major catalyst to his departure.

I can see a few of Treasure's trademark design here in an embryonic state: short levels with lots of checkpoints; great boss fights; wackiness (although in Bucky O'Hare's case, the weirdness is external, a direct result of its license; the greatest Treasure games have a very unique ascetic far removed from Bucky O'Hare by virtue of being vibrant and interesting instead of garish and moronic).

There are a few moments that betray this game as pre-Treasure, however. Asinine, memorization-heavy subchapters and unavoidable instant deaths -- two things notable by their absence in the 16 & 32-bit Treasure classics -- are constant, frustrating obstacles. The game somewhat offsets this nonsense by placing dozens of checkpoints in every stage. You do not ever have to replay long segments of the game just because a fucking robotic snake arbitrarily took a zig when you thought it was going to zag, thank God. Other Treasure signatures are missing. You won't find a convoluted control scheme that takes forever to master or some gameplay mechanic involving colors, for instance. It is a shame, too, because the Treasure fanboy contingency would be talking this game up like it was the second coming of Jesus, with import copies going for hundreds of dollars on eBay, if Bucky could turn purple and shoot little purple bullets.

So there's another silly idea of mine that GameSetWatch already did. They've taken a good chunk of my blog ideas, which would be mysterious and sinister if it wasn't so apparent that GameSetWatch and Gamasutra are eight hundred kinds of smarter than I am. Anyway I highly doubt Simon Carless or Christian Nutt or even Brandon Sheffield, whose hand I have shaken, pay any attention to me whatsoever.

Remembrances of Thefts Past

2008-04-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

With much of the internet succumbing to Grand Theft Auto IV monomania this past week, I've been feeling unwelcome. It's like I'm at a party where everyone is debating wether T-Pain is the best musician of all time or the best musician of an infinite number of unimaginable parallel universes. What am I supposed to say at a party like that? "Yeah, T-Pain's alright, I guess, but let's not get carried away here"?

I may be indifferent to this hype today, but I did once love a Grand Theft Auto, back when Rockstar North was DMA.

In 1997, I played a whole hell of a lot of the first game. I had to; there was no in-chapter save function in the first game, and those chapters could be looooooooooong. The weird thing about the first game is that, despite it's simple gameplay, Commodore 64-like graphics, and bothersome overhead camera wildly zooming about, the game just clicked. Like Lego blocks. The entire experience felt old-school in the extreme, but it still seemed incredibly innovative. I've come to believe the engine that drove the first GTA straight into my heart was its sense of scale: the diminutive stature of your little 8 pixel ruffian contrasted fabulously with the cities exponentially larger than other 90's action games. The crudeness of the presentation mirrored the crudeness of the premise. It was sweet.

Then things changed.

I never played much GTAIII -- I got stuck on the first mission that forced you to chase down and shoot someone -- and I've never even been in the same room with Vice City on. I assumed they were good games, of course. Eventually I tried very, very hard to play San Andreas.

This might not be the consensus on the internet, but my God, that game was a fucking mess.

There were dozens of neat little ideas -- ride your BMX bike! eat and work out to change your appearance! shoot hoops! break into homes! fly UFO's! There is trouble stuffing a gigantic game like SA full of gimmicky minigames and sidequests: they didn't have the resources to fix the annoying shooting mechanics, the largely uninteresting settings of cities and countryside (because L.A. is not an interesting place to play around in, it really isn't), or the general jankyness of the animation and crudeness of the ascetic style in the game.

Oh. And there was a mission involving R.C. Helicopters and explosives. If you enjoyed that mission, you're clearly a bad human being.

Because SA was so "wacky" and "funny" (there were moments, but that game thought it was way funnier than it actually was), and because you could "literally do anything!" (as someone recently said to me at a party -- I believe he had a college degree, which is something you cannot literally or figuratively get in GTA: SA), everyone overlooked the games imperfections. I might have been able to see past them as well if the game did any one thing extraordinarily well -- if the driving was a lot of fun (I hate the way cars handle in the 3D GTA series), or the shooting, or one of the minigames even. Instead it did some things very well, some things atrociously, and a lot of things sorta "meh."

My complaint is not a common one, I'm sure. "Make Grand Theft Auto more like an Amiga game again!" I scream, and no one listens, and no one cares.

BREIFLY LOOKING AT TWO OLD GAMES WITH NEW SEQUELS

2008-03-23T02:55:00.000-07:00

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.

A HIND D?! A REVIEW OF MGS3

2008-03-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

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 web^tm," 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

2008-03-19T11:15:00.000-07:00

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

Ziff-Davis Files Bankruptcy While I Write About EGM

2008-03-05T18:32:00.000-08:00

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.

gary gygax

2008-03-04T14:02:00.000-08:00

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.

HARD CHOICES FOR HARD PEOPLE: A GUIDE FOR HARDWARE LOYALISTS IN THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES

2008-01-30T05:19:00.000-08:00

So I had this really bad idea after watching the Florida returns on the C-SPAN tonight. I was eating fajitas at the time; perhaps, so engrossed in those delicious mexican treats, I couldn't recognize a dumbass idea if it hit me with Rudy Guliani's derailed campaign.

Well, this was the idea: considering the utter nonsense I've seen on forums regarding this "console war," drivel, mayhaps these energetic, engrossed folks could use some political guidance! So I tried to come up with a voter's guide for those so engrossed in the console war they feel compelled to vote for the candidate that most exemplifies their chosen platform.

I haven't done a very good job so far, but if I keep sitting on unpublished blog drafts I'll never get anything up here. So fuck it, here's the first part. Hopefully it'll be done before Super Tuesday, but I'm incredibly busy this week. So. We'll see.

We know it's hard to follow the political landscape when you spend most of your time on NeoGAF accusing major publishing outlets of various biases and the rest of your time photoshoping despicable things to post on 4Chan. However, there's this upcoming thing that's much bigger than that Everybody Votes channel on Wii coming up: Super Tuesday.

Sadly, you haven't been following this race too closely: the holiday NPD's are fresh in your mind; some jackass named PlasterGearRaypist or whatever keeps posting bullshit, misleading lies about some hardware specs which proves definitively your console of choice is underpowered and maybe bi-curious; another guy started a thread postulating that the SaGa franchise is the greatest of all time; some troll keeps dismissing your favorite hardware platform as "st00pd lik teh Virtually Boyz." Alas, there are only so many hours in the day, and national politics could eat into the hours you spend getting into asinine arguments on message boards. So when you get to the polling booth, you may think it's alright to just go off your gut reaction when you slam your pencil though that punch card.

Watch out, though! If you vote for the wrong canidate, you're practically admitting... you bought the wrong system.

So, let's say say you're a member of the Sony Defense Force, but you're leaning towards Hilary Clinton in the upcoming Democratic Primary in your state. Are you sure Hilary is as feature complete and exciting as your 60 GB launch system?

And you, Nintendo fanboy, voting for Barack Obama? Are you sure he's a symbol of unfailing perfection, just like every Nintendo idea ever?

You over there, running Gary's Mod on your customized Linux box, who are you voting for? Romney? McCain? Joe Biden? Who? (Actually, we both know you're voting for Ron Paul. So never mind).

How can you know which candidate supports your system? Believe this: your favorite candidate is staring you in your pasty, blissfully unaware face already! See, in this year's primary campaign, every candidate shares many attributes with your preferred gameplaying machine, whichever it may be. You mightn't have realized this, either because you're a rational and well-rounded human being capable of compartmentalizing your political views from your fanboyism or (and this is far more likely) you haven't realized that your skill at spewing nonsensical, vitriolic hogwash is useful outside message boards.

Luckily, we are here to help you. We've spent like ten minutes thinking this though, and we can definitively tell you what candidate your fanboy bias will capture your heart.

SONY

Barack Obama is your cat, kittens. Much like St. Kutaragi, Obama is an inspirational figure, someone with a vision of a perfect, peaceful, beautiful future where everyone is united in common, cancer-destroying good.

The Cell processor is like a physical manifestation of the title of Obama's autobiography, the Audacity of Hope.

Although Obama pretty much offers an identical set of policy decisions with his main Democratic Party competitor, he's as interested in building a community of consensus and civility (just like Home will!) He is also a smoker, and the PS3 has a smoke filter accessory out there in Japan right now. So suck it, 360!

PSP fanboys should take a close gander at Fred Thompson, even though he dropped out of the race fairly recently (you can write in on these ballots, unlike those daily gameFAQs polls). Thompson was the presumed frontrunner before he even entered the race, based on his Q rating and penchant for saying inane things like "Well, you can't catch a catfish with a toothpook," while his supporters oohed and awed at his intellectual bravery [*note: Thompson almost certainly never said that catfish thing].

So was the PSP.

After entering the race, he kinda napped a lot and didn't do much of anything.

Sort of like the PSP.

OLD REVIEWS REVISED. AGAIN. NCAA '07

2007-12-08T15:51:00.000-08:00

Instead of working on any sort of new content for this blog, I'm revisiting some of the old reviews I did on the Gamespot User Reviews page, cleaning them up, adding pictures and swear words, and the like.

So here's my NCAA 07 for the Xbox 360 review. The first draft was selected as one of three "reviews of the week" by the Community Contributions Union when first published. Then I tried to edit the review a little bit and the formatting got all screwed up and... urgh.

Gamespot is persona non grata (if a website can be that) after the Gerstmann fiasco, anyway.

Anyway:

If football is a metaphor for war, NCAA 07 for the Xbox 360 is a metaphor for football.

Let us refine this syllogism.

Do you remember the last game of American Football you watched on television? Let us specify further, as many of us watch games in noisy bars - do you remember the last game of American Football you HEARD on television or radio? Invariably, the play-by-play and color guys frequently invoked the images and symbols of armed conflict - coaches are "generals," linemen "struggle" in the "trenches," quarterbacks "hit their targets" with "pinpoint accuracy," linemen "crush" running backs with "brutal tackles."

It's not just the announcers, of course. The players are just as steeped in the vocabularies and cadences of military conflict: Kellen Winslow Jr. infamously declared himself "a fucking soldier!" while attending University of Miami (or "the U") a college many people mistakenly believe is a state penitentiary.

Better, less annoying players express the same sentiment in more articulate, less terrifying ways. Recently, with the esprit de corps of a veteran platoon, Ricky Manning Jr. and a handful of UCLA players attacked some dude with a laptop at a Denny's. This group of players - a "band of brothers," if you will - brutally pummeled this guy because they believed he engaged in "nerd activities" that greatly offended their code of honor.

Or something like that. The whole incident was pretty surreal.

I am not trying to scare you away from NCAA '07 by suggesting that Ricky Manning Jr. will hunt you down and pummel you for playing games - although you never know, he's pretty batshit crazy. I'm trying to make a point.

Athletic competition has always been linked with military conflict, from the Athenian Olympics to Celebrity Fit Club - hell, the physical trainer on that show is a former drill sergeant. The best soldiers on the battlefield usually possess the same skills as the best football players: raw athletic ability; a knack for making quick decisions; loyalty to comrades; respect for the chain of command; and a quixotic sense of honor and duty. Men of this sort would be superfluous, even dangerous, during that brief period of unipolar American supremacy if it were not for the glories of the gridiron - glories, ironically, substantially greater than the glories available to them on the battlefield.

This is the important thing to realize: football is an abstraction of war. Which makes NCAA 07 an abstraction of an abstraction.

Creative people would use this opportunity to explore the inherent tension in any videogame of a real sport; look to Japan, where the best-selling baseball simulations star a race of obese, deformed men with gigantic heads. And these are licensed games, too: imagine an American basketball game, licensed by the NBA, in which LeBron James looked like a generic Bobblehead Doll all the time. [Note: Konami's Power Pro Baseball is out in the US now.]

EA Sports is working in the opposite direction, valiantly striving towards photorealistic player models, fluid lifelike movement, and flawless recreations of all the Division I football stadiums in the country. They are striving to develop a perfectly accurate physics engine. They are striving to re-create every aspect, from recruiting to discipline to running practice, that a college head coach must deal with every week. They haven't stopped to wonder if this is actually a good idea.

Now, don't get me wrong, there should be realistic football games on the market - games that both look and feel like real football games, if only to satisfy the onanistic joy of letting really fat people play something just like the real game. EA Sports, in my opinion, isn't the company to do it, because the conventions and rules of the Madden gaming experience have become so entrenched, change seems heretical (see the backlash the "realistic" passing cone generated in Madden '06). But, while we are nearing a time when every EA football player will look EXACTLY like the real deal, we're stuck in the Uncanny Valley with this edition.

What is the Uncanny Valley? To give you an idea of what I mean, let me tell you a story about Sensible Soccer. It is a series of soccer games popular in Britain. In one of the earlier games in the series, a collection of pixels meant to represent a famous black footballer (I think it was Ince) appeared more like a white midget with a grotesquely large ginger colored afro.

That is comedy. If this same gaffe were to happen today, it would be tragic.

Although EA does at least get the race correct for all the college football stars, and in some cases went to considerable effort to make the in-game models look just like the real players, it looks janky, a graphical abortion as outlandish as the old Sensible Soccer scenario.

Each player has a detailed face and a few different expressions, none of which look natural. A sacked quarterback looks almost exactly like a frowning clown. Cornerbacks follow the arc of a pass with the cold, lifeless eyes of a shark. No one quite moves their jaw. We are getting close enough to photorealistic graphics that the unrealistic flaws actually make this game look WORSE than the PS2/Xbox versions. And the inconsistent frame rate doesn't help matters any.

The game plays pretty much exactly like last year's Xbox game, with a few minor changes. The button mapping has changed significantly (resulting in numerous unintended juke moves, in my experience). The passing game still doesn't feel right, and running still feels too easy to me. To stop anyone, you're gonna have to throw 8 defenders in the box. Screen passing seems more effective than last year. The kick meter adopted the Tiger Woods analog golf swing approach, so whoopee for that, I guess. Jumping offsides is easier than ever, thanks to a "jump snap" button. The audible system has been overhauled and actually works now. The "stadium pulse" has been replaced with a "momentum" bar, an awkward and heavy-handed way to introduce "old man mo" into the game. Plus, paying the $10 more gives you an opportunity to complain to your friends about all the missing features, including create-a-school, career mode, &c available in the cheaper PS2 iteration.

This is just so depressing. We now have what are essentially supercomputers lying on our living room carpets, and EA Sports cannot think of anything better to do with all this power. The things I hate about all the Madden engine games from the PS2 onward feel like they've entered into the hallowed canon of great game design. I think that, with a few minor tweaks to the player models, EA could rename the game "Inertia Truck Football War" and no one would be the wiser. The (wonderful) Temco Bowl for the NES is closer to NCAA 07 than NCAA 07 is to accurately recreating the experience of watching (or playing in) a real college football game.

There isn't anything wrong with abstraction. At least there isn't anything inherently wrong with abstraction. I would rather have this abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction to quench my thirst for violence than face the cold reality of a real war zone. But don't pretend football and war are the same thing - and don't pretend NCAA 07 and a real college football game are the same thing.

FINAL SCORE: A STARS WARS TRADING CARD GAME INSTRUCTION BOOKLET

The Princess is in another castle!

2007-11-11T01:00:00.000-08:00

I've done a fairly poor job getting this project up and running, haven't I?

Let's just pretend we're in pre-alpha right now.

And work is being done, both editorially and in the art direction. The target date for the revamp (or more accurately, the vamp) and launch of another unnecessary videogame e-zine: February 22, 2008.

I'll still throw up some random reviews, editorials, and game-related observations before then, hopefully on Sunday evenings. We'll see, of course. I've underachieved many times before.

Anyway: my review of Bucky O'Hare for the NES will be up tomorrow, if I can find the time to revise the text and capture some screens.

I WILL BONK YOUR ASS: A REVIEW OF SHADOW OF ROME

2007-10-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

Shadow of Rome is a wonderfully evocative title for a videogame. It suggests an ancient and mysterious world, lousy with back room conspiracies and torrid adulterous affairs occurring inside vast, majestic coliseums and Senate halls; a time of corruption and deceit, of violent justice, of venal senators and murderous Caesars.

The box art is not as wonderfully evocative as the title, but it is packed with archetypal images: fire, gilded armor, those funny Roman solider hats. The cover image of an imposing Centurion with malice burning in his eyes looks kind of terrible, but its composition reminds me of a promotional poster for one of those great sword and sandal epics of the 50's, usually starring Kirk Douglas or Charlton Heston. Let's pretend that ugly render is Heston, actually. Now that is a cover with some gravitas. Pretend Heston towers over a gladiatorial arena, casting his long shadow over the entire structure. Flames flicker in the distance.

Looking at that box excites me. I have spent most of my life playing games filled with effeminate men-children moping their way though turn based combat, and while I regret nothing in my past, now that I'm a grown man, I should be playing games made for grown men like me. Placing the disc in my PS2, I'm prepared to enter a world of majestic brutality, of pagan rituals and of glorious excesses, all recounted in dactylic hexameter.

Yes, I am ready to enter the Rome I heard so much about in my high school Western Civilization class. After 10 minutes of playing this game, I realize something doesn't seem quite right.

copyright IGN.COM . I don't have any screen capture technology yet, sadly.

The Rome depicted in Shadow of Rome does not evoke the great histories of Nepos or Sallust. Suetonius never mentioned, in his histories of the Caesars, the great challenges in governing a nation of staggeringly dense citizens. This game gave me newfound respect for ancient civilization; to realize Rome struggled valiantly against the overwhelming stupidity of its citizens and still manage to reach such heights is to realize what a sad and beautiful world we live in.

So, Shadow of Rome suggests an era ruled by moronic people and illustrates this historically questionable thesis with those involved in the central conflict of the game. Standing for all that is rotten in the omniverse is a very loud group of conspirators vying to wrest control from the just and righteous citizens of Rome. Opposing them are the two stupidest people in the whole of the ancient world. They alone can set things right after Julius Caesar's murder.

You control the two stupidest people in the entire empire, Agrippa and Octavianus. Agrippa's father has been framed for the murder of Julius Caesar by a devious group of senators. Octavianus is cousin to the recently murdered Caesar, and a friend of Agrippa.

Considering the disparity between our protagonists, theirs is a surprising, unlikely friendship. If judged solely by his actions, Agrippa is a murderous sociopath, a man who takes great pleasure in brutality, bathing himself in blood amid the deafening cheers of approving spectators. This is but one side of his personality, however; he's a warrior-king with a soul made of puppy dogs and butterflies at heart. Most of the time, as the bloodthirsty masses cheer his murderous rampages, Agrippa hoists his hands skyward in triumph, leaving the impression that he's a pretty calloused dude. It is a bit difficult to take his boring soliloquies about the horror of war and his bombastic anti-violence speeches to the assembled masses seriously after all that. Agrippa is large and contains multitudes, I guess.

In contrast to the manly, hairy Agrippa, Octavianus is a slight, gorgeously coiffed, fey Roman boy. Although he is spoken of as weak, he still looks like he could bench press two elephants at once. I assume this is a byproduct of the weirdo art design in this game. Unlike his friend Agrippa, the opportunity to murder never arises in Octavianus' missions, but he can be forced to bonk his enemies on their heads with one of the thousands of vases lying about his levels. Yeah, I know. That is pretty fey.

The game beings in earnest after Agrippa, for rather unlikely reasons that I can't remember now, choses to become a gladiator to clear his father's name. The game is played from Agrippa's perspective, mostly. His levels are usually fights to the death inside a variety of nearly identical arenas. This works in favor for the game; Agrippa has already slaughtered hundreds of people before Octavianus even looks at a vase. This is as it should be.

Be forewarned: during these coliseum matches, Agrippa is going to break hundreds of maces, but that is nothing compared to how many swords he's going to shatter, which number in the thousands. The blacksmiths must have been awful in ancient Rome. Every successful *thwack* damages every weapon he swings. Even the massive, imposing broad sword with the gold inlay and the jagged spikes of terror jutting out every which way -- a sword so large Agrippa requires both hands to even lift the damn thing -- falls apart with alarming rapidity. To break a weapon, especially one picked up five seconds beforehand, is to be enraged by the weapons fatigue system.

There is one object that will never bring rage to anyone, however. Agrippa is going to find a lot of gigantic rocks in these coliseums, and there is no way you can tell me these boulders don't totally rule. As weapons, they aren't particularly useful. As objects of amusement, they're unparalleled. Agrippa walks like a cripple whilst toting this geological marvel, leaving him incredibly vulnerable and pulverable. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. You have a goddamn 250 lbs. boulder to throw at people, and when you hit them, they die in the most heinous ways. It's great.

The best part is, you can really throw that rock at anyone, even the spectators.

Throwing dangerous things at those who patronize your business may not be the wisest idea, unfortunately. Antagonizing them is of no benefit to Agrippa. They want to like him; they follow his bloody exploits intensely. If he murders with flair and élan, the rabble excitedly pelts him with food and weapons. Now, these wonderful accouterments they're throwing into the arena are clearly meant for one person and one person alone, but there's no honor among the condemned. Agrippa gets a lot of his stuff stolen -- it's the heat of battle, all is fair in love and war, whatever. Well, that's just wrong. Agrippa's going to find those who eat his food, and then Agrippa's going to go after them with those aforementioned brittle weapons, and he's going to sever the arm off whichever fool took his things, and after he gets his bread back, Agrippa's going to beat that jerk to death with his own severed arm. That'll teach 'em to steal.

Teaching lessons such as the one above rule nearly as much as hitting people with rocks.

Agrippa kills in a handful of different places, in a handful of different scenarios. As he makes a name for himself, he travels across the empire, killing every single person he meets, which may not be beneficiary to whoever follows Julius Caesar as emperor: citizens generally look down upon those who gain office though the exploits of a single psychopathic guy in a tunic. However, as soon as Agrippa gets into the first chariot race, he discovers it is retarded and impossible.

Octavianus seems a bit less happy than his boulder wielding compatriot, even though he possesses some really gorgeous hair. His missions are like glorified Nancy Drew adventures, with lots of searching for the truth behind Julius Caesar's death. Time is not on Octavianus' side: if he cannot solve this mystery before Agrippa's father is executed, you just know Agrippa's really gonna freak out and deliver sermons about the sanctity of life while eradicating entire townships. Luckily, Octavianus has a foolproof plan to discover what lies at the heart of this murder mystery: by hiding vases behind his back until he sees a chance to bonk someone on the head, the shaky alliance between those who conspired to murder the emperor will crumble. Somehow. Until this plan comes to fruition, however, Octavianus must use stealth and cunning to advance to the next bonkable person.
Wisely, the developers of Shadow of Rome have given Octavianus the ability bonk just about anyone, including completely innocent shopkeepers and orphan children. It is as close as Octavianus can get to hitting people with rocks, and it is nearly as awesome.

Understandably, this epidemic of bonkings around the Forum creates a minor panic, and security is tight. Perhaps this extra security emboldens the haughty conspirators to throw caution to the wind and just go wild, loudly congratulating each other, telling anyone nearby how great their conspiracy is. They won't talk about anything really incriminating while in public, but they will say things like this:

"Boy, I hope no one finds out I'm meeting BRUTUS on THE SENATE FLOOR in ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES to talk about HOW WE TOTALLY DIDN'T KILL CAESAR!"

Then, in twenty minutes, sure they are safe, the conspirators will go into more detail. These are the only times when Octavianus can't bonk someone with a vase, no matter how often he tries.

Octavianus really needs access to Agrippa's rock hurling catapult. I don't know if he'd put vases instead of rocks inside of it, but no matter. To know the the rock-hurling catapult is to love it -- it can really hit the hell out of anything.

Neither Agrippa or Octavianus is much fun to control. I read claims that Agrippa is capable of many dozens of different attacks on Gamefaqs. This is a big, fat lie. Rather, Agrippa may be capable of many dozens of attacks, but under my guidance, he is not. I find my chances of performing one of the more esoteric maneuvers improves dramatically after I stop trying to perform the required button combinations and start wailing on my controller with reckless abandon. At least throwing rocks is pretty easy.

Octavianus handles somewhat better simply because there is less action during his missions. Also, they're incredibly easy. In the rare cases where my desire to bonk someone results in my getting spotted by guards, I've managed to lose them by running around in circles for half a minute, or by hiding in vases too large for me to use in my bonking. I can jump into a vase while a guard is literary looking RIGHT at me and avoid any prosecution for my antisocial behavior. Still, the rush isn't as great as it is with Agrippa. Octavianus does not attack people with their own limbs; therefore, he is less interesting to control than Agrippa.

Both are possible to maneuver with some degree of grace. The Chariot, on the other hand, is ingeniously designed to handle with no semblance of grace, or rationality for that matter. The Chariot is as awful as the killing with the rocks is awesome.

I cannot stress enough how little fun the Chariot races are. There is no connection between the commands you input into the controller and the actions the chariot takes on the television. All the while Agrippa is pelted with arrows from unseen archers. Passing these stages is a matter of luck and patience, and because I lack both of those qualities, I never finished the game.

The chariot looks very stupid, but the rest of the game has a nice, polished look about it. It doesn't look very realistic, but I didn't think it would after looking at the cover. Character models are huge and muscular, but all the humans in the game suffer from atypical body types; everyone has weird head sizes, stubby legs, remarkably thick torsos. Some of the effects are pretty neat, especially the geysers and geysers of blood and viscera.

The extreme nature of the combat is by far the best thing Shadow of Rome has going for it. The tactile sensation of lobbing some poor virtual criminal's head off is among the best the PS2 has to offer. The basis of the combat system relies on the pressure applied to the square button: the longer it is held, the more vigorous the resultant attack. What little strategy there is in combat revolves around timing your weak and fierce attacks. Ancillary weapons can be picked up, but they're mostly useless. Also, you cannot carry both a boulder and a little throwing dagger, so what's the point?

Some people might get offended by this wanton carnage. These people, mostly virgins, should calm down. Shadow of Rome's gore is far too surreal to be taken seriously. Capcom somewhat pointlessly gave you an option to tune the visual aftermath depicted to your preference. I did turn all the blood off, once, and discovered a much more pedestrian game play experience when I did so.

Shadow of Rome is not exactly a good game. It is sometimes repetitive and frustrating, and sometimes it is way too simplistic to be much fun at all. It is also an embarrassingly, unintentionally weird retelling of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, filtered though that unique Japanese view of Western culture. Discounting the chariot for a moment, the game alternates between otherworldly bloodletting and insipid information collecting without ever meshing the two disparate styles in a satisfying way, unless something radically changes after the Chariot race.

But... but... I'm helpless when faced with this game's charm. I cannot accept the objective truth: Shadow of Rome is a bad game. Yet, in spite of the game's many flaws, I spent an entire summer playing it. The only sensible explanation behind the game's appeal has everything to do with the ridiculous violence and little to do with the game itself. I wish it was deeper than that, but it isn't.

You know what, though? If I want depth, I'll go play a hardcore SRPG or something. If I want to experience a satisfying narrative experience, I'll play Indigo Prophecy and quit before reaching the third act. Shadow of Rome, while lacking both storytelling prowess and deep gameplay, does remind me how fun killing people with gigantic axes can be, and sometimes that's more than enough to recommend it.

old conversation about Sambo Master

2007-10-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

tim:

Perhaps I should post the final track on the album. For once it's nice to listen to an album that doesn't "come full circle." Rather, it rides up a ramp and keeps going.

Yamaguchi's desperation is different than Ian Curtis's, though. I can't quite put my finger on why. I can't quite analyze it; I can only give examples.

Nonetheless, when I talked to him last, he seemed like there was nothing wrong with him in the world. That (second-to-)last song, "and you will sing a new song, for all that comes between us" is like a great (not-quite-)happy ending, where the girl who loves the absolutely crazy guy in the dark romantic thriller finally says something that makes him realize what he really means to her. This album is different from Closer because it's about love, not death. It's just that . . . there's a lot of death in love. There's a lot of out-shutting to be done. That's why most songs on here deal with the absolute fear of losing the entire world when you devote yourself to one person.

Yamaguchi has used the word "futari," meaning "two people," in five song titles in the last two years. I don't think there's not a reason for this. This album title is about "you and me" -- "the two of us." All of his songs are about himself and "you," only unlike Western music, where "you" is just a general term for the person the singer is in love with or hates (an exception would be Springsteen, in whose case "you" is "everyone in the world listening to this song, even if it sucks"), "you" in a Japanese song has to be positioned very well if it's even going to sound linguistically right. "You" plural, in this language, is five syllables.

Yamaguchi is singing someone in particular; stories have been running through the internet lately about how he froze up and just gawked at the female interviewer on a television show a few weeks ago, so it's kind of rumored he doesn't have a girlfriend, nor has he . . . ever. He's so rock and roll that he doesn't even have sex and drugs. The first two records saw him

1. being a punk-rocker
2. making great, slightly-warmer-than-usual super-power-pop-rock songs

Now he's realized that he doesn't want to be a pop star, so he took the darker path. In a way, I think this album is more personal than the others because halfway through it just snaps and breaks and then . . . yes, it goes up the ramp. If it seems like it doesn't want the listener to understand it, maybe that's just the sacrifice it's making for trying to understand the listener. By the end, it seems to understand everything, and it becomes kind of . . . something to fear.

The "tambourine song," which I sent to the Gmail list back when it was released as a single, is track 15 of 18, and it comes in right where it's supposed to. Track 13 is a reworking of "an insperable pair," which was track three of the single. Tracks 1 and 4-14 were recorded in one session, supposedly, which accounts for Yamaguchi's throat condition in the re-recorded (studio live!!) track 13. Holy lord it's scary as hell. That entire song was a little key experiment. The performance of it on the album is nuts, especially when the superchorus (my friends Kama Boiler!!) comes in. That superchorus signals that . . . something has changed.

What I like most about Sambo Master is what most people don't like at all -- Yamaguchi never uses pretty words for pretty words' sake. That, and he reuses the same phrases over and over again. It's less an example of his lack of imagination and more an example of his appreciation of continuity, like in an American comic book "universe" or something. I don't know why it gives me that feeling -- in music that is everything except kitschy, thinking about it is best done kitschily, I guess.

Time for lunch.
-----

chris:

Yeah, I sensed that Sambomaster is singing about this almost hopeless kind of love. That kind of love was in my mind - there's been a thread about Neutral Milk Hotel's In An Aeroplane Over The Sea running, and I can hear some similarities in vocal delivery between that record and the two songs here.

What I'm curious about: Yamaguchi sings about a personal, specific "you," the second person singular sort of "you". It's different in Japanese than English, because he is not using a proper noun to identify the "you," - Paul McCartney's Michelle, Jeff Mangum's 'Comely,' who must be Anne Frank - and I assume it means something different than "she," or "the girl," or other third person singular nouns. It's... well, we have first, second, and third person pronouns. I don't know anything about Japanese grammar.

I'm just trying to figure out how to accomplish the same effect in English, to address someone in song like that. Is it like how Bob Dylan would write those spiteful, bitter, hilariously mean break up songs in the sixties? There was a guy who loved to throw out proper nouns for atmosphere- but it's just like Dylan, not to name the target of his lyrics. But they were clearly directed at one person alone.

That, and he reuses the same phrases over and over again.

Fucking awesome. When it's done right. There's the 'Pink Floyd,' method: rigidly focused on a concrete narrative. There's the 'Destroyer,' method: writing an entire catalog that continually references itself to the point there's an internet drinking game (which has dozens of rules: drink when there is an "Invocation of a cliche or idiom, however dismantled," or when there's "Recycling or referring to lyrics of another Destroyer song; drink twice if it's a song on the same album; also drink twice if they're from pre-official releases We'll Build Them a Golden Bridge or Ideas for Songs," etc.)

And there's the... Neutral Milk Hotel method. "Aeroplane" effects the people it effects because it builds the themes in the first four songs for the rest of the record - to the point where the penultimate couplet can make Toups and I cry, sometimes.

If it seems like it doesn't want the listener to understand it, maybe that's just the sacrifice it's making for trying to understand the listener. By the end, it seems to understand everything, and it becomes kind of . . . something to fear.

I didn't say that the two songs I heard seemed like they didn't want to be understood. They're just too busy, or too personal, to let me in. Nothing here is purposefully abrasive. What makes Sambomaster such a conundrum is how contradictory this record sounds. I think Yamaguchi has so many things he absolutely must communicate, but he doesn't know how to overcome his weird little idiosyncrasies. It's not empathetic; that's what terrifying about it.

That's what makes not knowing the lyrics so frustrating.