OLD REVIEWS REVISED. AGAIN. NCAA '07

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!

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

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

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.