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

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

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:

1. Metal Gear Solid 4 (beat it; still wondering how I'm going to write about it)
   
2. Soul Calibur 4 (3 hours against my friend Onuliak; loved it)
   
3. Bionic Commando ReArmed (didn't finish the game; wonderful accomplishment, but the level design in Bionic Commando wasn't all that good, really.)
   
4. Mega Man 9 (beat it; going to write something about it later)
   
5. Vintage arcade gaming at Ground Kontrol (90 drunken minutes; crazy awesome)
6. Games played at PAX (???)
7. Final Fantasy IV DS (beat it; it's Final Fantasy IV, and it's pretty swell)
8. 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

*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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

['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.

I'm really drunk.

I found this HILARIOUS.

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

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)

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

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:

1. enter big room



2. look around big room



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



4. reload



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



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



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



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



9. 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.