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.

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.

More About Bucky O'Hare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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