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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's fair, for one thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I kinda thought Adams was dead, incidentally.

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Ziff-Davis Files Bankruptcy While I Write About EGM

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

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

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

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

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

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

EGM: The Sendai Years (1989-1996)

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

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

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


courtesy of Magweasel

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

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

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

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

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


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