You never really hear about PS3 homebrew, do you? After hacking my PS3, I found out why. It's a fucking pain in the arse.
If you know where to look, and join a private discord, you can find people modding old PS3 games. I almost found myself motivated to pursue this when I found out that fans have brought back MGS4's online mode, but that didn't feel like something I needed. Apparently, having the whole of Revolver and Magical Mystery Tour as Rock Band DLC was.
I guess it speaks to how earnestly I love The Beatles. They weren't just a bunch of guys who played good songs. When they emerged out of the early sixties, they were like a whole new kind of person. They broke the conventions of what an adult was supposed to be, and with their wit, intelligence and compassion, made all those guys look ridiculous. They made it okay not to live for the expectations of society or your family name, but your passions. Maybe you're not a fan of the band personally, and that's fine, but I think if you have any interest in pop media, fringe political thought or the embrace of foreign cultures, I think you owe some gratitude to The Beatles' influence. I can't imagine there would be a videogame industry without The Fabs. (This is beside the point, but did you know all those Atari 2600 cover artists were Yellow Submarine animators?)
Playing PS3 Rock Band in 2024 at all is a pain in the arse. If you didn't buy all the equipment 15 years ago, and held onto them for the following decade and a half, you have some very expensive eBay purchases ahead of you if you want to get in on this. I've still got a couple of the guitars, but thanks to multiple house moves, and weird, malicious flatmates who may not have appreciated my vocals on Debaser, those USB dongles were long gone. And it's not as if you can just buy any old dongle. With very few exceptions, they will only pair with their specific controller. And I have one of those fancy George Harrison Gretsch Duo Jets that you couldn't even buy in highstreet shops. I'm not willing to readily give up how much I spent on the dongle when it finally showed up for sale. Unless you're emulating (and seriously, if you're new to all this, please consider emulating), there's no new devices that are compatible with the PS3 games. Harmonix remedied this a little bit with the release of Rock Band 4, which supported full song exports for the previous games (which require DLC keys that are no longer purchasable) and are still playable on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles today, but one-off games like The Beatles Rock Band, which didn't allow you to transfer their highly-valued content to other titles, are still trapped on PS3, Wii and 360, with all their awkward "it made sense at the time" quirks.
So, hacking. I'm not confident I can recall the process well enough to provide even the most rudimentary of tutorials, but if you're going to hack your PS3, you'll need to be on a specific outdated firmware release, and it matters what kind of PS3 you have. You can utilise custom firmware on original PS3s and some slim models, but if, like me, you currently own a "superslim", you'll have more limited access to homebrew software. You can still do it though, with the Homebrew Enabler software ("PS3HEN"), but it's just a little more awkward. Each custom song needs to be transferred to the PS3 via FTP software (something that the installation guidelines only give a cursory mention of, and I hadn't used since college), you may need to make a direct Ethernet connection between your computer and PS3, and you'll need to keep every track in a special folder on your PC to use an executable to recompile the full tracklist each time you want to modify it. You also have to transfer over a special bit of software to make the game modifiable in the first place, and in the haze of everything I tried and retried, I really can't remember how I did this. This isn't a casual undertaking.
I'd argue Harmonix are one of the most under-valued development studios out there. Even in their smaller games, like Super Beat Sports, that nobody cares about, they're stuffed to the brim with extra modes and optional content. Rock Band was an insane logistical undertaking. Not only are thousands of songs accurately transcribed for multiple instruments and difficulty settings, but the on-stage bands are authentically animated, too. They made enormous bespoke electric drumkit controllers and sold them to American normies. By the peak of all their energy and ambition, on Rock Band 3, they were even including tracks for two backing vocalists, "Pro Guitar" mode (which would have you plug in either a midi-compatible electric guitar or a special, expensive plastic one with buttons on every string of every fret, to play the real guitar parts) and keytar, and barely anybody was playing the game like that. That doesn't even scratch the surface of how much of an undertaking it was to acquire the licences to an incredible range of pop and rock songs from a huge number of different publishing houses, and re-sell them. Of course, modders don't have to worry about the legal aspect, but it's just as ambitious for them to attempt reverse engineering the game to play home-made content and match the level of quality that Harmonix established.
There are amateurish custom Beatles Rock Band DLC tracks out there, but they're not the ones made by the core TBRB Customs devs. For the most part, you'd really struggle to tell them apart from the official Harmonix ones without prior knowledge. Sure, they have to lean on the handful of environments that were established for the original game, some of the surreal Pepperland visuals wear a little thin when applied to multiple songs, and in a post-Get Back world, Twickenham and Apple Studios seem like crucial Beatle locations, so it's a shame that they haven't been incorporated, but man, they managed to hack the Magical Mystery Tour bus into this. Would you have even the slightest idea how to make your PS3 games do that? They've been pretty clever, utilising the established assets to animate each new song, and the multiple costume changes during Glass Onion's callbacks are a particular treat.
TBRB Customs have set themselves the goal of creating custom DLC for every studio-recorded Beatles album, including the Past Masters singles collections and Giles Martin's remix album, Love. It's a lofty ambition, and the team have approached the to-do list with a completionist mindset. Frustratingly, this means that many of the most wanted tracks have been held off on for now, while we're stuck pissing around for the files for Sie Leibt Dich and Hold Me Tight. So far, there's been a huge number of tracks from With The Beatles and A Hard Day's Night, but no All I've Got To Do or You Can't Do That, and I personally find that extremely distressing. No Baby's In Black, no Hide Your Love Away, no Bad Boy, upsettingly few White Album songs - we're promised them in the future, but apparently, there were no new releases in the whole of 2023, and the team's recent focus has been on making previous tracks available for the Wii version of the game. I really want to believe they'll complete the tracklist, but I worry their energy may run dry when they see how many years they'll need to devote to the process.
There's also the fact that the modders seem to be young American Beatles fans. The kind who cried over 2023's Now & Then and think all of Paul McCartney's solo career is worth paying attention to. They don't have the same interest in the back catalogue as us slightly older fans who still think John was the big Beatle to like, despite the things he's alleged to have done after hearing of Nixon's reelection. They're insular and memey, and if you look into the more amateurish Anthology and Solo Career projects, you'll have to wade through some rake of Spongebob shit to get some comparatively rough content. It's very annoying that they've made a custom track for George's terrible White Album off-cut, Circles, while we're still waiting for Happiness is a Warm Gun, but I shouldn't upset the babies too much while they're working so diligently on my precious Rock Band DLC.
There's always a bit of a fear of custom Rock Band stuff. The most hardcore fans seem to be those who never got over Through the Fire and Flames, and not just guys who really like songs. While the focus in this DLC has been on matching Harmonix's precedent, there's still a wee bit of that Guitar Hero elite in here. We were never supposed to play the tape loop at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, and I think you know this. Please take your job more seriously, unpaid hobbyists.
Many have approached the custom content as a thing strictly for emulators, and sensibly, it's the only way I can recommend a fan to go through this rigmarole. That strips out so much of Rock Band's appeal for me, though. For me, accessibility was such a draw to these games. I've played them at house parties with exchange students who really struggled with conversational English, but were delighted to see those falling note icons and become part of the band. If fellow Big Bad Beatleborgs are over, I can show them my special game that has twice as many songs as anybody else's copy, and we can delight in playing the whole of the Long Tall Sally EP. Nobody should go through the embarrassment of having to navigate a docked Steam Deck in front of another person. Now I've got everything set up, Beatles Rock Band is just as inviting to casuals as it was in 2009. I can grumble about minor details or the trajectory of the project, but really, it's so cool that any of this is possible.
If you know where to look, and join a private discord, you can find people modding old PS3 games. I almost found myself motivated to pursue this when I found out that fans have brought back MGS4's online mode, but that didn't feel like something I needed. Apparently, having the whole of Revolver and Magical Mystery Tour as Rock Band DLC was.
I guess it speaks to how earnestly I love The Beatles. They weren't just a bunch of guys who played good songs. When they emerged out of the early sixties, they were like a whole new kind of person. They broke the conventions of what an adult was supposed to be, and with their wit, intelligence and compassion, made all those guys look ridiculous. They made it okay not to live for the expectations of society or your family name, but your passions. Maybe you're not a fan of the band personally, and that's fine, but I think if you have any interest in pop media, fringe political thought or the embrace of foreign cultures, I think you owe some gratitude to The Beatles' influence. I can't imagine there would be a videogame industry without The Fabs. (This is beside the point, but did you know all those Atari 2600 cover artists were Yellow Submarine animators?)
Playing PS3 Rock Band in 2024 at all is a pain in the arse. If you didn't buy all the equipment 15 years ago, and held onto them for the following decade and a half, you have some very expensive eBay purchases ahead of you if you want to get in on this. I've still got a couple of the guitars, but thanks to multiple house moves, and weird, malicious flatmates who may not have appreciated my vocals on Debaser, those USB dongles were long gone. And it's not as if you can just buy any old dongle. With very few exceptions, they will only pair with their specific controller. And I have one of those fancy George Harrison Gretsch Duo Jets that you couldn't even buy in highstreet shops. I'm not willing to readily give up how much I spent on the dongle when it finally showed up for sale. Unless you're emulating (and seriously, if you're new to all this, please consider emulating), there's no new devices that are compatible with the PS3 games. Harmonix remedied this a little bit with the release of Rock Band 4, which supported full song exports for the previous games (which require DLC keys that are no longer purchasable) and are still playable on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles today, but one-off games like The Beatles Rock Band, which didn't allow you to transfer their highly-valued content to other titles, are still trapped on PS3, Wii and 360, with all their awkward "it made sense at the time" quirks.
So, hacking. I'm not confident I can recall the process well enough to provide even the most rudimentary of tutorials, but if you're going to hack your PS3, you'll need to be on a specific outdated firmware release, and it matters what kind of PS3 you have. You can utilise custom firmware on original PS3s and some slim models, but if, like me, you currently own a "superslim", you'll have more limited access to homebrew software. You can still do it though, with the Homebrew Enabler software ("PS3HEN"), but it's just a little more awkward. Each custom song needs to be transferred to the PS3 via FTP software (something that the installation guidelines only give a cursory mention of, and I hadn't used since college), you may need to make a direct Ethernet connection between your computer and PS3, and you'll need to keep every track in a special folder on your PC to use an executable to recompile the full tracklist each time you want to modify it. You also have to transfer over a special bit of software to make the game modifiable in the first place, and in the haze of everything I tried and retried, I really can't remember how I did this. This isn't a casual undertaking.
I'd argue Harmonix are one of the most under-valued development studios out there. Even in their smaller games, like Super Beat Sports, that nobody cares about, they're stuffed to the brim with extra modes and optional content. Rock Band was an insane logistical undertaking. Not only are thousands of songs accurately transcribed for multiple instruments and difficulty settings, but the on-stage bands are authentically animated, too. They made enormous bespoke electric drumkit controllers and sold them to American normies. By the peak of all their energy and ambition, on Rock Band 3, they were even including tracks for two backing vocalists, "Pro Guitar" mode (which would have you plug in either a midi-compatible electric guitar or a special, expensive plastic one with buttons on every string of every fret, to play the real guitar parts) and keytar, and barely anybody was playing the game like that. That doesn't even scratch the surface of how much of an undertaking it was to acquire the licences to an incredible range of pop and rock songs from a huge number of different publishing houses, and re-sell them. Of course, modders don't have to worry about the legal aspect, but it's just as ambitious for them to attempt reverse engineering the game to play home-made content and match the level of quality that Harmonix established.
There are amateurish custom Beatles Rock Band DLC tracks out there, but they're not the ones made by the core TBRB Customs devs. For the most part, you'd really struggle to tell them apart from the official Harmonix ones without prior knowledge. Sure, they have to lean on the handful of environments that were established for the original game, some of the surreal Pepperland visuals wear a little thin when applied to multiple songs, and in a post-Get Back world, Twickenham and Apple Studios seem like crucial Beatle locations, so it's a shame that they haven't been incorporated, but man, they managed to hack the Magical Mystery Tour bus into this. Would you have even the slightest idea how to make your PS3 games do that? They've been pretty clever, utilising the established assets to animate each new song, and the multiple costume changes during Glass Onion's callbacks are a particular treat.
TBRB Customs have set themselves the goal of creating custom DLC for every studio-recorded Beatles album, including the Past Masters singles collections and Giles Martin's remix album, Love. It's a lofty ambition, and the team have approached the to-do list with a completionist mindset. Frustratingly, this means that many of the most wanted tracks have been held off on for now, while we're stuck pissing around for the files for Sie Leibt Dich and Hold Me Tight. So far, there's been a huge number of tracks from With The Beatles and A Hard Day's Night, but no All I've Got To Do or You Can't Do That, and I personally find that extremely distressing. No Baby's In Black, no Hide Your Love Away, no Bad Boy, upsettingly few White Album songs - we're promised them in the future, but apparently, there were no new releases in the whole of 2023, and the team's recent focus has been on making previous tracks available for the Wii version of the game. I really want to believe they'll complete the tracklist, but I worry their energy may run dry when they see how many years they'll need to devote to the process.
There's also the fact that the modders seem to be young American Beatles fans. The kind who cried over 2023's Now & Then and think all of Paul McCartney's solo career is worth paying attention to. They don't have the same interest in the back catalogue as us slightly older fans who still think John was the big Beatle to like, despite the things he's alleged to have done after hearing of Nixon's reelection. They're insular and memey, and if you look into the more amateurish Anthology and Solo Career projects, you'll have to wade through some rake of Spongebob shit to get some comparatively rough content. It's very annoying that they've made a custom track for George's terrible White Album off-cut, Circles, while we're still waiting for Happiness is a Warm Gun, but I shouldn't upset the babies too much while they're working so diligently on my precious Rock Band DLC.
There's always a bit of a fear of custom Rock Band stuff. The most hardcore fans seem to be those who never got over Through the Fire and Flames, and not just guys who really like songs. While the focus in this DLC has been on matching Harmonix's precedent, there's still a wee bit of that Guitar Hero elite in here. We were never supposed to play the tape loop at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, and I think you know this. Please take your job more seriously, unpaid hobbyists.
Many have approached the custom content as a thing strictly for emulators, and sensibly, it's the only way I can recommend a fan to go through this rigmarole. That strips out so much of Rock Band's appeal for me, though. For me, accessibility was such a draw to these games. I've played them at house parties with exchange students who really struggled with conversational English, but were delighted to see those falling note icons and become part of the band. If fellow Big Bad Beatleborgs are over, I can show them my special game that has twice as many songs as anybody else's copy, and we can delight in playing the whole of the Long Tall Sally EP. Nobody should go through the embarrassment of having to navigate a docked Steam Deck in front of another person. Now I've got everything set up, Beatles Rock Band is just as inviting to casuals as it was in 2009. I can grumble about minor details or the trajectory of the project, but really, it's so cool that any of this is possible.
You have chosen to read my Princess Peach: Showtime! review. This is on you, now.
I think it's worth reflecting on how Peach wasn't really even a character in the original Super Mario Bros. She was a destination. The MacGuffin you needed to reach in order to rightfully claim you'd won the game. The idea to expand beyond that in any way was largely an act of convience, as Fuji TV's Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic was rebranded as the second Super Mario game. They needed a roster of four heroes, and there had only been four sentient things in the Mushroom Kingdom that weren't enemies. They took the spritesheet for Lina and drew "The Princess" on top.
I don't point this out to demean or belittle Princess Peach. Far from it. The act of repurposing and rebranding is at the very core of what videogames are. Mario, himself, was the result of seeing what could be done with an unwanted Radar Scope arcade board, and missing out on the opportunity to use Paramount's Popeye characters. OXO, Tennis for Two and Spacewar! were all experiments to see if large-scale supercomputers designed for complex business calculations and global warfare could be used for the purpose of fun. Peach has quite rightly earned the title of Princess of Videogames. A direct descendant of the cathode-ray tube amusement device.
From her first playable appearance in Super Mario Bros 2, she was treasured by little sisters, cartoon studios, and boys who valued the float-jump more than the societal pressures of homophobia and gender stereotypes. By Mario 64, her significance to the Mushroom Kingdom was fully fleshed-out, positioning the entire game within her castle, and illustrating her unwavering benevolence, ethereal presence, and also, her sense of fun with the introduction of her personally-commissioned Secret Slide. She was a true representative of videogames, and a welcoming presence for audiences who may have felt uninvited to the games gang.
In 2024, I feel Nintendo are more aware of the weight of their history. Back when they last tried this, with 2005's Super Princess Peach, there was an air of carelessness. It was a throwaway game, fobbed off to Chubby Cherub/Shrek: Reekin' Havoc devs, Tose, and launched to a market whose respect for Nintendo had already taken a beaten from the likes of DK: King of Swing, Super Mario Ball and Classic NES Series: Ice Climber. Now, Nintendo treat Peach with due reverence, having her host Universal Studios meet-and-greets in her own personal bandstand, as the highlight of millions of holidays. People are thrilled to meet her, regardless of how much spaghetti she's made for them.
Right now, we're in a very odd period for the Mario brand, overall. Nintendo have embraced the idea that there's no unified vision of what Mario is. In the last year, we've had a mainline 2D entry closely modelled on the art direction of Masanobu Sato, a major Hollywood movie that denied post-1994 backstories and reinstated the NES-era US canon, a remake of a very of-its-time mid-nineties Mario RPG, and the announcement of the remake of a very distinctly eccentric fan-favourite GameCube RPG. Mario has become Mr. Video again, appearing in all sorts of different projects, merely as a comforting presence. He's a doctor and an artist and a kart racer and an umpire and we're not supposed to take any of it very seriously.
The dynamic sits awkwardly in relationship to why New Super Mario Bros took its iconography so seriously in the first place. Back then, it was a relief to see the series discard all the bullshit and get back on target, reinstating what was Real Mario Shit. Goombas were Goombas again, and if there were any weird offshot baddies, fans would need to adopt such convoluted nomenclature as "Mega Para-Biddybuddies". It felt like the programmers had taken more control, with the world defined by hard parameter references. There's a stiffness to that approach that I have a lot of affection for, and it was the lifeblood of the Wii U era (particularly in Europe and Japan). It brought us closer to the logic of the software, subconsciously making us better equipped to appreciate and understand it. It was fiercely objective. It's easy to see why this approach wouldn't resonate with the wider public, though. If Nintendo wanted to catch on to mainstream appeal, they'd need to foresake the concrete utility of their playing pieces and expand their surface-level appeal. During the promotion of the New Super Mario Bros sequels, developers explained that Peach hadn't been made playable in the game because of how her float-jump would affect the balance of the level design. In Showtime, she doesn't even have the float-jump.
Ah - Here we are.
I don't really like Princess Peach: Showtime very much.
I could come out with excuses, justifications, characterisation discrepancies... I just think it's boring to play. Levels are formulaic and repetitive, there's little dexterity to its gameplay, the rewards system feels like you're playing the game wrong if you're not constantly digging at the scenery to find every hidden item, performance and presentation is way below where it ought to be for a game with this focus, yada yada yada... I don't think it really matters. I just didn't want to play the game very much. The first couple of days I had it, I was telling myself I was too busy to calm down and enjoy it. I spent multiple days away from it before completion, and only went back to it out of obligation. I really wanted to care less, and not bother coming back.
As much fondness as I may have for the character, I'm clearly not the target audience for this. And I don't mean to imply that it's a game strictly for young girls, either. But it probably is for fans of recent Yoshi games. I'm certainly not one of them. As I dodder around, looking at the nice artwork, but wondering what I'm supposed to be getting out of it. It's a bit of a shock to see Mystical Ninja's Etsunobu Ebisu come back to a directing role to make something so devoid of spark or humour. Though the different costumes grant Peach a range of diverse abilities, the structure of each introductory level is largely the same, and the bulk of her more intricate actions are automated. In a move that recalls Metroid: Other M, all core actions have been distributed between two face buttons, and if there's anything particularly acrobatic or impressive, it doesn't often feel like you were very involved in performing them.
Showtime is fun in theory. The level themes are bold and exciting, Peach's costumes and in-character voice clips are cute, there's a lot of great art and punny design. I saw one review compare it to Kirby and the Forgotten Land and became incensed. That's a game that loves being a game. It celebrates the medium, embraces all the tropes that come with being a platformer, and sets up young audiences to embark on a future, exploring many wonderful videogames. Showtime is like Paper Mario with all the jokes, strategy and compelling gameplay stripped out. It's an RPG without story or combat. If you wanted to dedicate a budget to having a team design a bunch of charming adventures for Princess Peach to go on, I can totally get behind that, but why make this game when your passions and energy were better suited to a series of YouTube shorts, or a pop-up book?
There's definitely things I wanted to like. I felt like I should have liked. There's several parts of the concept that feel like they're paying off on things they established with Peach's character years ago. The fact that Odyssey ended with her setting off to explore the world in a bunch of cute outfits feels like it was leading up to an idea like this. They're making a game with Cowgirl Princess Peach, for god's sake. How haven't I come away raving about it? It's just all so tame. Mermaid Peach sings underwater to guide helpful fish, and that sounds like something I should have adored, but they never take the next logical step with one of those trademark Nintendo Switch vocal themes. Why didn't they want this game to be brilliant?
Something that surprised me is how bothered I was by the stageplay concept. The notion that to some level, this was all pretend. That Peach is taking on the role of a character for each level. Her voice sounds different for a bunch of them. I don't really feel like this is a game about Peach. It's about her playing the part of generic characters. I didn't feel any sense of drama until the very end, when she emerges outside of the Sparkle Theatre, as herself. It was the first thing since the intro that the game was trying to convey as authentic. Maybe if I just believed in the game - like there was a real throughline that meant each level was an important new part of a story - I wouldn't have been so bored with it. You really don't have to do a lot to get me with this stuff. I honestly found myself crying when I first heard Odyssey attempt to finally convey Peach's perspective on her relationship with Mario. Is this what a good story has to offer a game? As it is, it felt like I'd bought a colouring-in book, and for some bizarre reason, it was important that I finish every page.
This is very much a 'me problem'. I hope I've established my criticisms as fiercely subjective. I can see some folk getting a lot out of this. I've heard some say that they loved Yoshi's Woolly World. I certainly don't want to convince Nintendo that people don't like Princess Peach games. It's just that I had to play through Sexy Parodius and Third Strike before I'd gotten through this, just to remind myself that I do enjoy playing videogames.
I think it's worth reflecting on how Peach wasn't really even a character in the original Super Mario Bros. She was a destination. The MacGuffin you needed to reach in order to rightfully claim you'd won the game. The idea to expand beyond that in any way was largely an act of convience, as Fuji TV's Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic was rebranded as the second Super Mario game. They needed a roster of four heroes, and there had only been four sentient things in the Mushroom Kingdom that weren't enemies. They took the spritesheet for Lina and drew "The Princess" on top.
I don't point this out to demean or belittle Princess Peach. Far from it. The act of repurposing and rebranding is at the very core of what videogames are. Mario, himself, was the result of seeing what could be done with an unwanted Radar Scope arcade board, and missing out on the opportunity to use Paramount's Popeye characters. OXO, Tennis for Two and Spacewar! were all experiments to see if large-scale supercomputers designed for complex business calculations and global warfare could be used for the purpose of fun. Peach has quite rightly earned the title of Princess of Videogames. A direct descendant of the cathode-ray tube amusement device.
From her first playable appearance in Super Mario Bros 2, she was treasured by little sisters, cartoon studios, and boys who valued the float-jump more than the societal pressures of homophobia and gender stereotypes. By Mario 64, her significance to the Mushroom Kingdom was fully fleshed-out, positioning the entire game within her castle, and illustrating her unwavering benevolence, ethereal presence, and also, her sense of fun with the introduction of her personally-commissioned Secret Slide. She was a true representative of videogames, and a welcoming presence for audiences who may have felt uninvited to the games gang.
In 2024, I feel Nintendo are more aware of the weight of their history. Back when they last tried this, with 2005's Super Princess Peach, there was an air of carelessness. It was a throwaway game, fobbed off to Chubby Cherub/Shrek: Reekin' Havoc devs, Tose, and launched to a market whose respect for Nintendo had already taken a beaten from the likes of DK: King of Swing, Super Mario Ball and Classic NES Series: Ice Climber. Now, Nintendo treat Peach with due reverence, having her host Universal Studios meet-and-greets in her own personal bandstand, as the highlight of millions of holidays. People are thrilled to meet her, regardless of how much spaghetti she's made for them.
Right now, we're in a very odd period for the Mario brand, overall. Nintendo have embraced the idea that there's no unified vision of what Mario is. In the last year, we've had a mainline 2D entry closely modelled on the art direction of Masanobu Sato, a major Hollywood movie that denied post-1994 backstories and reinstated the NES-era US canon, a remake of a very of-its-time mid-nineties Mario RPG, and the announcement of the remake of a very distinctly eccentric fan-favourite GameCube RPG. Mario has become Mr. Video again, appearing in all sorts of different projects, merely as a comforting presence. He's a doctor and an artist and a kart racer and an umpire and we're not supposed to take any of it very seriously.
The dynamic sits awkwardly in relationship to why New Super Mario Bros took its iconography so seriously in the first place. Back then, it was a relief to see the series discard all the bullshit and get back on target, reinstating what was Real Mario Shit. Goombas were Goombas again, and if there were any weird offshot baddies, fans would need to adopt such convoluted nomenclature as "Mega Para-Biddybuddies". It felt like the programmers had taken more control, with the world defined by hard parameter references. There's a stiffness to that approach that I have a lot of affection for, and it was the lifeblood of the Wii U era (particularly in Europe and Japan). It brought us closer to the logic of the software, subconsciously making us better equipped to appreciate and understand it. It was fiercely objective. It's easy to see why this approach wouldn't resonate with the wider public, though. If Nintendo wanted to catch on to mainstream appeal, they'd need to foresake the concrete utility of their playing pieces and expand their surface-level appeal. During the promotion of the New Super Mario Bros sequels, developers explained that Peach hadn't been made playable in the game because of how her float-jump would affect the balance of the level design. In Showtime, she doesn't even have the float-jump.
Ah - Here we are.
I don't really like Princess Peach: Showtime very much.
I could come out with excuses, justifications, characterisation discrepancies... I just think it's boring to play. Levels are formulaic and repetitive, there's little dexterity to its gameplay, the rewards system feels like you're playing the game wrong if you're not constantly digging at the scenery to find every hidden item, performance and presentation is way below where it ought to be for a game with this focus, yada yada yada... I don't think it really matters. I just didn't want to play the game very much. The first couple of days I had it, I was telling myself I was too busy to calm down and enjoy it. I spent multiple days away from it before completion, and only went back to it out of obligation. I really wanted to care less, and not bother coming back.
As much fondness as I may have for the character, I'm clearly not the target audience for this. And I don't mean to imply that it's a game strictly for young girls, either. But it probably is for fans of recent Yoshi games. I'm certainly not one of them. As I dodder around, looking at the nice artwork, but wondering what I'm supposed to be getting out of it. It's a bit of a shock to see Mystical Ninja's Etsunobu Ebisu come back to a directing role to make something so devoid of spark or humour. Though the different costumes grant Peach a range of diverse abilities, the structure of each introductory level is largely the same, and the bulk of her more intricate actions are automated. In a move that recalls Metroid: Other M, all core actions have been distributed between two face buttons, and if there's anything particularly acrobatic or impressive, it doesn't often feel like you were very involved in performing them.
Showtime is fun in theory. The level themes are bold and exciting, Peach's costumes and in-character voice clips are cute, there's a lot of great art and punny design. I saw one review compare it to Kirby and the Forgotten Land and became incensed. That's a game that loves being a game. It celebrates the medium, embraces all the tropes that come with being a platformer, and sets up young audiences to embark on a future, exploring many wonderful videogames. Showtime is like Paper Mario with all the jokes, strategy and compelling gameplay stripped out. It's an RPG without story or combat. If you wanted to dedicate a budget to having a team design a bunch of charming adventures for Princess Peach to go on, I can totally get behind that, but why make this game when your passions and energy were better suited to a series of YouTube shorts, or a pop-up book?
There's definitely things I wanted to like. I felt like I should have liked. There's several parts of the concept that feel like they're paying off on things they established with Peach's character years ago. The fact that Odyssey ended with her setting off to explore the world in a bunch of cute outfits feels like it was leading up to an idea like this. They're making a game with Cowgirl Princess Peach, for god's sake. How haven't I come away raving about it? It's just all so tame. Mermaid Peach sings underwater to guide helpful fish, and that sounds like something I should have adored, but they never take the next logical step with one of those trademark Nintendo Switch vocal themes. Why didn't they want this game to be brilliant?
Something that surprised me is how bothered I was by the stageplay concept. The notion that to some level, this was all pretend. That Peach is taking on the role of a character for each level. Her voice sounds different for a bunch of them. I don't really feel like this is a game about Peach. It's about her playing the part of generic characters. I didn't feel any sense of drama until the very end, when she emerges outside of the Sparkle Theatre, as herself. It was the first thing since the intro that the game was trying to convey as authentic. Maybe if I just believed in the game - like there was a real throughline that meant each level was an important new part of a story - I wouldn't have been so bored with it. You really don't have to do a lot to get me with this stuff. I honestly found myself crying when I first heard Odyssey attempt to finally convey Peach's perspective on her relationship with Mario. Is this what a good story has to offer a game? As it is, it felt like I'd bought a colouring-in book, and for some bizarre reason, it was important that I finish every page.
This is very much a 'me problem'. I hope I've established my criticisms as fiercely subjective. I can see some folk getting a lot out of this. I've heard some say that they loved Yoshi's Woolly World. I certainly don't want to convince Nintendo that people don't like Princess Peach games. It's just that I had to play through Sexy Parodius and Third Strike before I'd gotten through this, just to remind myself that I do enjoy playing videogames.
The real benefit of living in the future isn't the high-end 4K videogames we get. It's that legacy publishers are desperate enough that they'll let the world play all their killer Japan-only shit.
Hebereke is one of the best games on the Famicom/NES. Easily in my top 5, anyway. It's a full-blown Metroidvania with the sensibilities of Parodius. Stuff that used to get lumped together under the umbrella of "mad Jap games", that I now appreciate as "funny guys making good jokes". There's no backstory to any of its weird characters, or much of a plot. It's just daft stuff jumping around and crows that take explosive dogshits on you. I can enjoy serious, lore-heavy, socially relevant games as much as anybody, but shit like this is definitely my comfort zone. Hebereke's characters don't even seem like they've been designed with the game in mind. In the years following, they've appeared in puzzle games, stupid experimental titles and for much longer than you'd expect, yonkoma manga characters in the back of games magazines. They're just silly doodles, and we don't really care about who they are. In the game's intro, Hebe starts explaining the backstory and gives up halfway, resolving "Y'know what? I really can't be bothered. Read the backstory in the manual or something." Beautiful.
This release just as half-baked and crummy. It's the Famicom game running in an emulator. There are modern conveniences, like a rewind and save system, but it's all fairly rudimentary. There's also an Achievements system, that I was quick to disable in the settings. The most jarring thing is the Japanese text. You can switch between English and Japanese in the menus, but everything in-game has been left untouched. They have bothered to do a full translation of everything in it, but you access this by watching each scene play out in Japanese and then browse to a menu to view the new English dialogue boxes. I'd suspect that if the emulator can track player progress well enough to implement an achievement system, overlaying the dialogue boxes with English text wouldn't be outside the realm of possibilities, but I guess Sunsoft didn't really think of that, and we're stuck playing a barely-localised game.
There had been an English version of Hebereke before, but that was one of those awkward early-90s localisations. Released in limited numbers in limited territories, Ufouria: The Saga basically stripped out all the humour and mad shit from the game, replacing it with bland toyetic filler. Curiously, Ufouria doesn't appear in this version, even though screenshots, artwork and full scans of the German manual do. I'm not going to cry over not getting access to a version of the game I like less, but I do think it's a shame for those with a fondness or nostalgia for this specific wart on videogame history. I grew up in the PAL region too. I remember the hazards of navigating the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, with the Sonic Team, Fleetway, Archie, AoStH and SatAM continuities all fighting for dominance on toy packaging and pillowcases. I don't like sacrificing Lylat Wars for the technically superior Star Fox 64. We probably should be able to play Ufouria, even if I'm never ever going to turn it on.
Hebereke's design mainly benefits from its simplicity. There are none of those vertical shafts of endless platforms that you see in early Metroid. It's much more modest than that. If you know where you're going, you can access any spot on the map within a couple of minutes. Over the course of the game, you'll encounter other characters who will join your party, and each of them come with their own abilities. You'll have to switch between them on the Select menu, but this isn't too much, right? People like Mega Man. Sometimes, when you're switching characters to get past blocked-off areas, or exploit a mechanic to bypass an area quickly, it can feel liberating. There are instances where it feels a little over the top. Only one of your characters can walk on ice, but they have the crappest jump, so you sometimes have to take the run up as O-chan, switch to another character for the jump, and switch back for the landing. It might have been nice to shortcut this by dedicating each shoulder button to switching to each character or something, but again, this is a fairly untouched Famicom ROM. I don't mind this stuff, personally. I've completed Game Gear games on original hardware. I do worry about the appeal for those who have never used a floppy disk before, though.
It's a breezy, silly little game, and its eccentric charm carries a lot of it. One of your guys is a ghost who hits himself in the head with a hammer, and his eyes fly out and attack enemies. There's a tough boss in a suit of armour, and when you successfully break it, there's just a big dumb cat standing there, waiting for you to kill it. I really like Hebereke. I like coming back to rough, old games every now and then, to keep my values in check, and there's few that I have a better time with. If you're going through the heavy-hitter NES games, and you're stuck looking at stuff like Zelda 2 and Startropics, maybe give Hebereke a shot first.
Hebereke is one of the best games on the Famicom/NES. Easily in my top 5, anyway. It's a full-blown Metroidvania with the sensibilities of Parodius. Stuff that used to get lumped together under the umbrella of "mad Jap games", that I now appreciate as "funny guys making good jokes". There's no backstory to any of its weird characters, or much of a plot. It's just daft stuff jumping around and crows that take explosive dogshits on you. I can enjoy serious, lore-heavy, socially relevant games as much as anybody, but shit like this is definitely my comfort zone. Hebereke's characters don't even seem like they've been designed with the game in mind. In the years following, they've appeared in puzzle games, stupid experimental titles and for much longer than you'd expect, yonkoma manga characters in the back of games magazines. They're just silly doodles, and we don't really care about who they are. In the game's intro, Hebe starts explaining the backstory and gives up halfway, resolving "Y'know what? I really can't be bothered. Read the backstory in the manual or something." Beautiful.
This release just as half-baked and crummy. It's the Famicom game running in an emulator. There are modern conveniences, like a rewind and save system, but it's all fairly rudimentary. There's also an Achievements system, that I was quick to disable in the settings. The most jarring thing is the Japanese text. You can switch between English and Japanese in the menus, but everything in-game has been left untouched. They have bothered to do a full translation of everything in it, but you access this by watching each scene play out in Japanese and then browse to a menu to view the new English dialogue boxes. I'd suspect that if the emulator can track player progress well enough to implement an achievement system, overlaying the dialogue boxes with English text wouldn't be outside the realm of possibilities, but I guess Sunsoft didn't really think of that, and we're stuck playing a barely-localised game.
There had been an English version of Hebereke before, but that was one of those awkward early-90s localisations. Released in limited numbers in limited territories, Ufouria: The Saga basically stripped out all the humour and mad shit from the game, replacing it with bland toyetic filler. Curiously, Ufouria doesn't appear in this version, even though screenshots, artwork and full scans of the German manual do. I'm not going to cry over not getting access to a version of the game I like less, but I do think it's a shame for those with a fondness or nostalgia for this specific wart on videogame history. I grew up in the PAL region too. I remember the hazards of navigating the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, with the Sonic Team, Fleetway, Archie, AoStH and SatAM continuities all fighting for dominance on toy packaging and pillowcases. I don't like sacrificing Lylat Wars for the technically superior Star Fox 64. We probably should be able to play Ufouria, even if I'm never ever going to turn it on.
Hebereke's design mainly benefits from its simplicity. There are none of those vertical shafts of endless platforms that you see in early Metroid. It's much more modest than that. If you know where you're going, you can access any spot on the map within a couple of minutes. Over the course of the game, you'll encounter other characters who will join your party, and each of them come with their own abilities. You'll have to switch between them on the Select menu, but this isn't too much, right? People like Mega Man. Sometimes, when you're switching characters to get past blocked-off areas, or exploit a mechanic to bypass an area quickly, it can feel liberating. There are instances where it feels a little over the top. Only one of your characters can walk on ice, but they have the crappest jump, so you sometimes have to take the run up as O-chan, switch to another character for the jump, and switch back for the landing. It might have been nice to shortcut this by dedicating each shoulder button to switching to each character or something, but again, this is a fairly untouched Famicom ROM. I don't mind this stuff, personally. I've completed Game Gear games on original hardware. I do worry about the appeal for those who have never used a floppy disk before, though.
It's a breezy, silly little game, and its eccentric charm carries a lot of it. One of your guys is a ghost who hits himself in the head with a hammer, and his eyes fly out and attack enemies. There's a tough boss in a suit of armour, and when you successfully break it, there's just a big dumb cat standing there, waiting for you to kill it. I really like Hebereke. I like coming back to rough, old games every now and then, to keep my values in check, and there's few that I have a better time with. If you're going through the heavy-hitter NES games, and you're stuck looking at stuff like Zelda 2 and Startropics, maybe give Hebereke a shot first.
2001
They will never make a better rhythm game than Gitaroo Man
INFINITY==================
Not in a hundred-million years!
===============IMPOSSIBLE
When I've been away from Gitaroo Man, I always have a tentative worry. Does it still hold its power? Have I lost it? By the end of Flyin' To Your Heart, I'm back in. I am the True Gitaroo Man. "We've forgotten this sound for so long!"
Gitaroo Man seems self-aware in a way that its contemporaries don't. I don't just mean in its fun, jokey tone. It knows how to be an hour-long game. Each level presents a new storybeat, and a distinctive musical genre in this shonen anime fairytale musical, introducing enough to keep each idea fun and peppy without ever detailing anything too deeply. It's bright, exciting and fantastical, and that brief running time is the key to so much of that.
The thing that draws you in is how good the music is. It's proper game music. So often, I'll play a music game, and feel let down over how little thought was put into the music. They're often either not very musical, or negligent of how they'll feel to play. Gitaroo Man's music is brilliantly structured for gameplay, with distinct phrases for the moments they're complementing, and the whole thing's so inherently videogamey. Levels are split up into CHARGE, ATTACK, DEFEND and ENDING phases, with the music working so well to convey the drama of each section. Charge sequences have you building your life bar, calmly gaining strength through long, sustained notes. Defend stages have you dodging vicious staccato attacks, that come in the form of rapid button prompts that zoom in from each side of the screen. Attack and Ending phases are the catharsis, with you taking revenge, sustaining long notes to do maximum damage, but if you miss any entirely, that's a knock against you. You've got big Street Fighter life bars at the top of the screen. I don't think there's any piece of imagery you could conjure that could so effectively illustrate the nature of a battle to videogame players. The gameplay mainly takes the form of following "trace lines", which are big bendy lines that converge onto the centre of the screen. You have to react to each one, right on the beat, and follow their bends with the direction of the analogue stick. Bending guitar notes swoop and curve around the screen, in synchronisation with the music, and when you're playing well, you feel like you're nailing a solo, trying your best to resist making Steve Vai faces. It's a similar system to Keiichi Yano's later Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents games, but it feels so much more aggressive with all of the prompts zooming into the middle of the screen. It's combat, it's war!
There's a crucial hook to the game, and something that's deeply undervalued in it. Gitaroo Man adapts to how well you play. It has about a million alternate music bars up its sleeve, determining which would be the best to throw at a player of your skill level. In most levels, you'll very rarely hear the same song twice. I've been returning to Gitaroo Man over and over again for around 20 years, and I still don't think I've heard every bit of Bee Jam Blues hidden on the disc. It's exciting every time, and really encourages multiple playthroughs. This stuff rarely gets talked about, but it's a real feat of both game design and musical composition. You never feel like a phrase is being pulled out from a list of suitable candidates and loaded in. It's all seamless, and given its response to your skill level, it feels both rewarding and emotional. It's the feeling of getting lost in a solo. I have little doubt that the lukewarm response to Project Rap Rabbit's failed Kickstarter pitch was on the fault of the public's ignorance towards this aspect of Gitaroo Man.
It's clear that the game never would have been made without the precedent set by PaRappa the Rapper, and back when PS2 games were all at the same RRP, I can see why so few would have been willing to take a chance on something they'd already dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan novelty, but Gitaroo Man is so much more thoughtfully designed and satisfying to play. 326's artwork doesn't have the broad appeal of Rodney Greenblat's funny animal people. Ignoring the wild rendering techniques of PaRappa and just focusing on what the artists drew, Gitaroo Man's designs are weirder, and pulls more from eccentric 70s robot toys and gag manga. Everything's covered in colourful dials and buttons, and all the faces are bizarre. The visual style is both geekier and cooler than PaRappa, and I've really grown affection for it over the years, but who doesn't love Puma?
The game is so aware of its length. It knows how to use ten levels to tell a Hero's Journey. It never gets too full of itself, or takes itself too seriously, but that doesn't prevent it from doing something beautiful. The story is broad, silly and simplistic, but that's great for a short, E for Everyone game that you'll come back to again and again. The adventure takes the form of one of those Wizard of Oz-style dream scenarios, only a little more ambiguous, where we're returned to the status quo at the end, but one where the hero has learned their lesson. For me, the real ambiguity is in whether or not we're supposed to think U-1 punched Kazuya in the face.
The downsides? Uh... the compression in the FMV cutscenes is a little much. The game makes a great argument for concave analogue sticks, as you might find your thumb sliding a lot on an official Dualshock 2. I don't like that you have to navigate to the Options menu each time you want to load a save... Look - not only is this a 2001 PS2 game, it's a fucking KOEI game. It's amazing that the game came out nearly as slick as it did, drowning out developer talk from the Kessen offices next door.
Gitaroo Man was lightning in a bottle. I don't think we'll ever get a better collaboration of game designers, concept artists and musicians again, and if we do, it won't be with this budget or freedom. I mean, unless the Splatoon team decided it was time to do a narrative-focused Squid Sisters rhythm action spin-off. I don't know. Maybe Nintendo don't have the guts to become the hero.
INFINITY==================
Not in a hundred-million years!
===============IMPOSSIBLE
When I've been away from Gitaroo Man, I always have a tentative worry. Does it still hold its power? Have I lost it? By the end of Flyin' To Your Heart, I'm back in. I am the True Gitaroo Man. "We've forgotten this sound for so long!"
Gitaroo Man seems self-aware in a way that its contemporaries don't. I don't just mean in its fun, jokey tone. It knows how to be an hour-long game. Each level presents a new storybeat, and a distinctive musical genre in this shonen anime fairytale musical, introducing enough to keep each idea fun and peppy without ever detailing anything too deeply. It's bright, exciting and fantastical, and that brief running time is the key to so much of that.
The thing that draws you in is how good the music is. It's proper game music. So often, I'll play a music game, and feel let down over how little thought was put into the music. They're often either not very musical, or negligent of how they'll feel to play. Gitaroo Man's music is brilliantly structured for gameplay, with distinct phrases for the moments they're complementing, and the whole thing's so inherently videogamey. Levels are split up into CHARGE, ATTACK, DEFEND and ENDING phases, with the music working so well to convey the drama of each section. Charge sequences have you building your life bar, calmly gaining strength through long, sustained notes. Defend stages have you dodging vicious staccato attacks, that come in the form of rapid button prompts that zoom in from each side of the screen. Attack and Ending phases are the catharsis, with you taking revenge, sustaining long notes to do maximum damage, but if you miss any entirely, that's a knock against you. You've got big Street Fighter life bars at the top of the screen. I don't think there's any piece of imagery you could conjure that could so effectively illustrate the nature of a battle to videogame players. The gameplay mainly takes the form of following "trace lines", which are big bendy lines that converge onto the centre of the screen. You have to react to each one, right on the beat, and follow their bends with the direction of the analogue stick. Bending guitar notes swoop and curve around the screen, in synchronisation with the music, and when you're playing well, you feel like you're nailing a solo, trying your best to resist making Steve Vai faces. It's a similar system to Keiichi Yano's later Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents games, but it feels so much more aggressive with all of the prompts zooming into the middle of the screen. It's combat, it's war!
There's a crucial hook to the game, and something that's deeply undervalued in it. Gitaroo Man adapts to how well you play. It has about a million alternate music bars up its sleeve, determining which would be the best to throw at a player of your skill level. In most levels, you'll very rarely hear the same song twice. I've been returning to Gitaroo Man over and over again for around 20 years, and I still don't think I've heard every bit of Bee Jam Blues hidden on the disc. It's exciting every time, and really encourages multiple playthroughs. This stuff rarely gets talked about, but it's a real feat of both game design and musical composition. You never feel like a phrase is being pulled out from a list of suitable candidates and loaded in. It's all seamless, and given its response to your skill level, it feels both rewarding and emotional. It's the feeling of getting lost in a solo. I have little doubt that the lukewarm response to Project Rap Rabbit's failed Kickstarter pitch was on the fault of the public's ignorance towards this aspect of Gitaroo Man.
It's clear that the game never would have been made without the precedent set by PaRappa the Rapper, and back when PS2 games were all at the same RRP, I can see why so few would have been willing to take a chance on something they'd already dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan novelty, but Gitaroo Man is so much more thoughtfully designed and satisfying to play. 326's artwork doesn't have the broad appeal of Rodney Greenblat's funny animal people. Ignoring the wild rendering techniques of PaRappa and just focusing on what the artists drew, Gitaroo Man's designs are weirder, and pulls more from eccentric 70s robot toys and gag manga. Everything's covered in colourful dials and buttons, and all the faces are bizarre. The visual style is both geekier and cooler than PaRappa, and I've really grown affection for it over the years, but who doesn't love Puma?
The game is so aware of its length. It knows how to use ten levels to tell a Hero's Journey. It never gets too full of itself, or takes itself too seriously, but that doesn't prevent it from doing something beautiful. The story is broad, silly and simplistic, but that's great for a short, E for Everyone game that you'll come back to again and again. The adventure takes the form of one of those Wizard of Oz-style dream scenarios, only a little more ambiguous, where we're returned to the status quo at the end, but one where the hero has learned their lesson. For me, the real ambiguity is in whether or not we're supposed to think U-1 punched Kazuya in the face.
The downsides? Uh... the compression in the FMV cutscenes is a little much. The game makes a great argument for concave analogue sticks, as you might find your thumb sliding a lot on an official Dualshock 2. I don't like that you have to navigate to the Options menu each time you want to load a save... Look - not only is this a 2001 PS2 game, it's a fucking KOEI game. It's amazing that the game came out nearly as slick as it did, drowning out developer talk from the Kessen offices next door.
Gitaroo Man was lightning in a bottle. I don't think we'll ever get a better collaboration of game designers, concept artists and musicians again, and if we do, it won't be with this budget or freedom. I mean, unless the Splatoon team decided it was time to do a narrative-focused Squid Sisters rhythm action spin-off. I don't know. Maybe Nintendo don't have the guts to become the hero.
2021
I appreciate NSO's week-long trials. They're liked being lowered into hell and then hoisted out before it consumes me completely. I don't respect Vampire Survivors. I get it, though. It's a simulacrum of a game. It's satisfying to move the analogue stick in a circle for thirty minutes and watch the upgrades come flooding in. As an unabashed timewaster, it's pretty effective, but that's not the nature of this, is it? I will never play it again in my life. I know it's what awaits me afterwards.
1987
Metal Gear's biggest crime is putting people off from giving Metal Gear 2 a proper go.
This is a very rudimentary version of this concept. Practically a prototype. They haven't learned all the beats yet. Screens exist as their own self-contained states, resetting after you walk into a new one. The radio only works on a handful of screens, and there's little indication of where you ought to be using it. There are also so many leaps in logic and entirely hidden primary objectives, that a walkthrough becomes a requirement. At one point, with no hints or guidance, you need to find an item by exploding your way into a secret room, and unlike the version of this puzzle that appeared in an incomparably superior sequel, the walls are not a different colour.
This was made on a tight schedule from inexperienced staff, and it doesn't do a lot of the things that fans of the later games may be looking for. If Zelda 1 seems too barebones for you, you ought to remember that game was from world-class pros who'd already made Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong. If any of the staff of Metal Gear 1 had worked on anything before, it was stuff like Magical Tree and Monkey Academy.
Still here? What the game has to offer is atmosphere. It's very much an 80s videogame, but the theming is so much grittier than anything that tried to cover the topic of war or militaries. Outer Heaven is a dark, depressing location. It's all these wide, unpopulated corridors, weird pillars and army trucks. Like it was a third world factory that had been gutted and repurposed by a would-be dictator, or something. Of course, it's all just playing pieces in an action game, but there's a lot of space for headcanon. Indoors, it's unlit and under constant patrol from guards, and outside is covered with landmines and attack dogs. It feels precarious and desperate. There's constant suspicion and danger, and the THEME OF TARA completes the package beautifully.
Metal Gear has a bunch of ideas. Most of them take the form of one-use items, but they're ideas nonetheless. You disguise yourself as the enemy to gain entry to a building, gain a parachute to drop into a blocked-off courtyard, and most iconically - hide inside a cardboard box to bypass security cameras. Using a remote-control missile to blow up a generator for an electrified floor? That's been part of Metal Gear since 1987, baby. There's also a ranking system, based on how many hostages you've freed, determining how much health and ammo you can have - something that's secretly still in the series as late as MGS1 (when Snake eats a ration after a boss and gets a bigger life bar). These little ideas break up the simplistic gameplay, and when it works well, it stops feeling like the Tiger LCD game it often resembles and becomes a top secret mission.
It's easy to see why Kojima thought he'd be better suited to text-based adventure games than free-roaming action games, as the flights of fancy don't often complement the core gameplay, but there is a bit of the explorational appeal that would be developed in later Metal Gears, the Zelda sequels, and games like Metroid and Resident Evil. There's always a bit of excitement to discovering a new key card, wondering which of the previously inaccessible doors you'll be able to open. It's tangible progress, and it feels dead cheeky bypassing each subsequent clearance level in this regimented military fortress.
Does it hold up without association with the later games? I mean, it does as an MSX2 game. Games of this vintage don't often offer Metal Gear's depth, unless they're RPGs, and most of those are far more tedious and scrappily designed than this. I refute the notion that old games can only be appreciated for their historical merit. Super Mario Bros 3 is brilliant fun, whether you're playing it on a NES or discovering it for the first time on the Switch. People were happy to pay full-price for it as GBA title, 15 years after its original release, and rightfully so. Metal Gear requires much more patience and open-mindedness to play. Yes, there's an appeal for series fans to see the first time many of its ideas were attempted, but that only takes you so far. This is a very bullshitty old game. Checkpoints are only logged at each elevator entrance, and there can be a hell of a lot of progress between each visit. Metal Gear TX-55 itself needs to be defeated by memorising a 16-part sequence of which leg to place each explosive on, and if you get any part of it wrong, you have to start over. And the "plot"? Even in this post-Subsistence localisation, it only amounts to about five dialogue boxes, and you won't know which of them are supposed to be significant unless you've heard how those moments are mythologised (and massively expanded upon) by the sequels. We've osmosised ideas about Gray Fox and Big Boss and Outer Heaven over the years, but the reality is no match for the legend, I'm afraid. Don't let anyone tell you you're missing out on a crucial part of the series if you skip this one.
It will add to your appreciation for the later games, though, if only because you'll see how much better these ideas can be done. And people who have played both MSX Metal Gears tend to be far kinder to MGSV's ending than those who only know the Solids. If you're a big fan of the series, I won't tell you not to play this. Just make sure you stick with it, at least until the first boss. I promise it picks up after that.
This is a very rudimentary version of this concept. Practically a prototype. They haven't learned all the beats yet. Screens exist as their own self-contained states, resetting after you walk into a new one. The radio only works on a handful of screens, and there's little indication of where you ought to be using it. There are also so many leaps in logic and entirely hidden primary objectives, that a walkthrough becomes a requirement. At one point, with no hints or guidance, you need to find an item by exploding your way into a secret room, and unlike the version of this puzzle that appeared in an incomparably superior sequel, the walls are not a different colour.
This was made on a tight schedule from inexperienced staff, and it doesn't do a lot of the things that fans of the later games may be looking for. If Zelda 1 seems too barebones for you, you ought to remember that game was from world-class pros who'd already made Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong. If any of the staff of Metal Gear 1 had worked on anything before, it was stuff like Magical Tree and Monkey Academy.
Still here? What the game has to offer is atmosphere. It's very much an 80s videogame, but the theming is so much grittier than anything that tried to cover the topic of war or militaries. Outer Heaven is a dark, depressing location. It's all these wide, unpopulated corridors, weird pillars and army trucks. Like it was a third world factory that had been gutted and repurposed by a would-be dictator, or something. Of course, it's all just playing pieces in an action game, but there's a lot of space for headcanon. Indoors, it's unlit and under constant patrol from guards, and outside is covered with landmines and attack dogs. It feels precarious and desperate. There's constant suspicion and danger, and the THEME OF TARA completes the package beautifully.
Metal Gear has a bunch of ideas. Most of them take the form of one-use items, but they're ideas nonetheless. You disguise yourself as the enemy to gain entry to a building, gain a parachute to drop into a blocked-off courtyard, and most iconically - hide inside a cardboard box to bypass security cameras. Using a remote-control missile to blow up a generator for an electrified floor? That's been part of Metal Gear since 1987, baby. There's also a ranking system, based on how many hostages you've freed, determining how much health and ammo you can have - something that's secretly still in the series as late as MGS1 (when Snake eats a ration after a boss and gets a bigger life bar). These little ideas break up the simplistic gameplay, and when it works well, it stops feeling like the Tiger LCD game it often resembles and becomes a top secret mission.
It's easy to see why Kojima thought he'd be better suited to text-based adventure games than free-roaming action games, as the flights of fancy don't often complement the core gameplay, but there is a bit of the explorational appeal that would be developed in later Metal Gears, the Zelda sequels, and games like Metroid and Resident Evil. There's always a bit of excitement to discovering a new key card, wondering which of the previously inaccessible doors you'll be able to open. It's tangible progress, and it feels dead cheeky bypassing each subsequent clearance level in this regimented military fortress.
Does it hold up without association with the later games? I mean, it does as an MSX2 game. Games of this vintage don't often offer Metal Gear's depth, unless they're RPGs, and most of those are far more tedious and scrappily designed than this. I refute the notion that old games can only be appreciated for their historical merit. Super Mario Bros 3 is brilliant fun, whether you're playing it on a NES or discovering it for the first time on the Switch. People were happy to pay full-price for it as GBA title, 15 years after its original release, and rightfully so. Metal Gear requires much more patience and open-mindedness to play. Yes, there's an appeal for series fans to see the first time many of its ideas were attempted, but that only takes you so far. This is a very bullshitty old game. Checkpoints are only logged at each elevator entrance, and there can be a hell of a lot of progress between each visit. Metal Gear TX-55 itself needs to be defeated by memorising a 16-part sequence of which leg to place each explosive on, and if you get any part of it wrong, you have to start over. And the "plot"? Even in this post-Subsistence localisation, it only amounts to about five dialogue boxes, and you won't know which of them are supposed to be significant unless you've heard how those moments are mythologised (and massively expanded upon) by the sequels. We've osmosised ideas about Gray Fox and Big Boss and Outer Heaven over the years, but the reality is no match for the legend, I'm afraid. Don't let anyone tell you you're missing out on a crucial part of the series if you skip this one.
It will add to your appreciation for the later games, though, if only because you'll see how much better these ideas can be done. And people who have played both MSX Metal Gears tend to be far kinder to MGSV's ending than those who only know the Solids. If you're a big fan of the series, I won't tell you not to play this. Just make sure you stick with it, at least until the first boss. I promise it picks up after that.
Hideo Kojima's career is fascinating, and it's not something you can hope to find out about from "The Official Version". You kind of have to dig into old interviews, and have first-hand memories of long-delisted websites and discarded promotional material. GW has erased the ugly details, but I can't say goodbye to yesterday, my friend. Kojima thrived on the sidelines. He was originally hired as a project planner on Konami's MSX team, in the offices that the management didn't pay much attention to. The high-stakes positions were all working on Famicom and arcade games, and Kojima spent the first decade of his career in the shadows, catering to a small, enthusiast market with Japanese home computer releases and text-heavy adventure games. It's easy to over-romanticise this era. It wasn't easy. There was a lot of mismanagement and the expectation for relentless crunch, with many members of staff spending days on end in the office without leaving, but the games that came from those teams were pretty special. They were purposefully constructed, delivering a clear worldview and commenting on the ethical dangers of scientific developments in a politically unstable world. Then MGS1 was a huge international success, and all eyes were on Kojima.
From the early days, it was clear that Kojima had a unique confidence and self-belief. Some may call it ego or even narcissism, but it's what gave him the drive and ambition to attempt blending dense, socially relevant stories with traditional videogame action. When the bulk of the Japanese games industry was still hiding behind publisher-insisted pen names, Kojima opened Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake with an introductory credits sequence, naming each member of staff, saving himself for the biggest credit. It made sense. MSX2 owners who'd played Metal Gear and Snatcher knew that there was a rare quality to Hideo Kojima's games, and Metal Gear 2 was the promise of the Kojimiest game yet. Policenauts would similarly promote itself on the name of its director, delving into the production process with behind the scenes books and bonus discs that were fairly uncommon forms of game merchandise in the mid-90s. Before MGS1 had made the west aware of him, Kojima was putting his face on soundtrack CDs. He wanted the spotlight, but he didn't know how demanding it would be of him.
Metal Gear Solid 2 was announced, and was propped up as the game for the new millennium. The one thing that would chrysalise the medium into a new form. In tandem with the growing interest in the internet, the significance of home computer ownership was really taking hold. DVD players and digital TV services were selling themselves on "Interactive" features, reportedly blurring the line between audience and participant (we didn't know at the time that the peak of this technology would be Beehive Bedlam). Sony were convinced that Windows PCs were too technical and business-focused for mainstream adoption. There would be no overlap between the computer and the living room. The word at the time was that the PlayStation 2 was going to be the thing to take people into this new, interconnected era, and traditional forms of entertainment would become a memory of the 20th Century. The promise of the "interactive movie" that had been dangled towards early adopters of CD-ROM, finally coming to fruition. From Final Fantasy X to Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, and perhaps most ridiculously of all, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, many new titles were selling themselves on the promise to bridge the gap between these mediums, but for many, MGS2 seemed like the best bet to accomplish it. That's a lot of pressure for a game where you navigate boxy rooms, avoiding blue vision cones.
Metal Gear Solid 2 trailers were bold. Not only were they promising a game with unforeseen levels of interactivity, but wild narrative swings. We were told Solid Snake was dead. We were told he was the leader of the terrorist organisation putting the world at ransom. We'd anticipated a game that would radically shift our perception of the prior one. When we eventually bought the game, we swallowed the bitter truth when a mysterious Navy SEAL popped up with David Hayter's voice, taking fire at a horny vampire.
Reading pre-release interviews with Kojima, it's clear that he was as convinced by the potential as anyone else. He talks about character movement being impacted by changing wind direction, the integration of voice-recognition and online support. The end results are so compromised that you might not even notice them in the game. The network support got nipped and tucked at so much that in the end, it became an online competition for the opportunity to have your name appear on an in-game dog tag, and a browser-only leaderboard system where you could post your completion stats after you finished. The voice support, adding user-expression to the long, dense CODEC calls? That's the ability to press R2 to have your character audibly think a weird retort. "WHATEVER!" These are the limitations of not only the PlayStation 2 in 2001, but the ability of a Japanese development studio to deliver an action game on new hardware in a three-year project.
MGS2 couldn't live up to those initial ambitions. It didn't fully satisfy those dreaming of something new and transcendent. It was MGS1 again with extra buttons. But oh, what buttons!
MGS2 has so many cool little stealth moves to play around with. You get a real sense of your own ingenuity as you figure your way through each section. VR Missions was everything that MGS1 gameplay could offer. The developers knocked their heads against the walls, spinning its systems off down every conceivable avenue. The frustration of these limitations directly inspired the techniques players could make use of in Sons of Liberty. Players would be able to interact with guards much more intricately, threatening them at gunpoint, disabling walkie-talkies, injuring specific limbs, and shaking them down for extra supplies. Snake and Raiden could roll (or cartwheel), hang from railings, and pop out of cover, ready to fire. Most crucially, you could now aim from a first-person perspective, allowing for much more deliberate action in shoot-outs, or just fuck about with the set dressing to see how many clips KCEJ recorded for the sound of shooting a frying pan with different guns. Shenmue had set a new precedent for how interactive a 3D world could be in a game, and MGS2 picked up the baton to explore how that degree of tangibility could benefit Metal Gear. Hardcore fans who had bought Zone of the Enders solely for the opportunity to play a small section of this game would become intimately familiar with all the quirks and potential of its gameplay, hungry to see how they would be explored in the full campaign. I'm not convinced the Big Shell was the best possible pay-off for these hopes.
It isn't just the fact that players got to spend more time with their favourite muscle man that makes the Tanker section so beloved. It's very purposefully designed to explore MGS2's mechanics, and refreshingly, it borrows little from the structure of the MSX games. Metal Gear had already spent multiple generations reworking and refining the same, familiar setup, and it was exciting to see the series do something different. There's no hostages, no NIKITA puzzle, no underwater facility entrance. It was doing new things, taking out security cameras, shaking down guards for supplies, and sneaking past an audience of a hundred soldiers during a speech. It was exciting. But those old tropes were waiting for us, just around the corner. Justifying themselves via a metatextual reflection upon the previous game.
MGS2 is discussed in hushed, reverential tones these days. If something seemed weird or stupid, you obviously didn't get it. It had been relatively easy to understand a story about genetic inheritance, but memetic inheritance seemed far more abstract. Snake was a son of genetic inheritance, being a clone of the world's most prized soldier, and Raiden, the son of ideological inheritance, with Solidus killing his parents and fostering him as his own brainwashed soldier. Every action he takes is accompanied by a question of how he's being manipulated, and by whom. There's an awkward balance in the game being both radically incisive and incredibly schlocky videogame trash. Whenever it did something too absurd or outright crap, we took faith in the notion that nothing was quite what it seemed. Like there was a hidden truth that would make it all cohesive and brilliant. It was up to us to find it, and if we couldn't figure it out, we could always just pester Kojima and Konami to produce a much more pandering sequel. Full of retcons, underwhelming reveals, and relentless goalpost shifting. Was there ever value in MGS2's outlandish paranormal activity? Did Kojima ever have an answer before his arm was twisted enough to yell "nanomachines" in response to every question? Are we ashamed of our words and deeds for ever thinking the whole of Shell 2 was agonisingly tedious?
Discussing MGS2's story is a sticking your hand in a can of worms and finding a worm-filled rabbit hole at the bottom. A dense, purposefully confusing, and often prescient script. It also has roots in Kojima's 80s action game design, where storybeats are mainly included to intrigue its audience enough to continue playing. Kojima's handwritten script is filled with footnotes, explicitly referencing the Hollywood blockbusters he ripped each idea from. MGS2 was the point where much of Kojima's games became dictated by the promises he'd made in press interviews and pre-release trailers. MGS4 staff have talked about spending months solely working on moments to include in trailers, and then retroactively having to build the game around those moments. That approach started here. Shallow instances of mindblowing spectacle, engineered to shift product with little concern for the long-term impact. Ocelot's arm, Vamp's superhuman abilities, basically everything to do with Dead Cell - they're weird twists, and typically just for the sake of having a weird twist. Vamp's gay relationship with US Marine Corp commander, Scott Dolph, appears to be entirely a sophomoric in-joke targetted at Kojima's then-personal interpreter. MGS2 is simultaneously an earnest musing on the nature of propaganda in the digital age, and a very stupid videogame with absurd arcade game bosses. I don't want to make out like all the silliness is purely problematic or mishandled. There's moments of fun and whimsy I enjoy. Slipping on birdshit and the guard taking a leak off the side of the Strut L. Fatman. It's not the focus, but the old frivolous MSX personality is still here. Just muffled by all the pretension surrounding it. On your first playthrough, you don't know whether you can just enjoy something as a daft joke, or if it's hiding some deeper layer of significance. MGS1 had one foot in gaming's history and another in its future, and MGS2 attempts the same, with messier results in either respect.
The game's English writer, Agness Kaku, has discussed the thankless job of attempting to make MGS2's weird, convoluted script sound engaging through its translation. A lack of reference material, character limits, and heavy rewrites from Konami resulted in the game we have today. It's also clear that she doesn't have much regard for Kojima's script, and attempted to inject it with a richer sense of character and more entertaining dialogue. Many gamers would feel take strong objection to someone, particularly a woman, tinkering with the script from a visionary of Kojima's status, but the bulk of MGS2's most beloved English lines are embellishments on Kaku's part, and her political and literary knowledge lined her up well for the subject matter. However, Konami's insistence on literal translations of certain lines, paired with her personal distaste for Kojima's writing, made the final script fairly patchy and inconsistent. As talented a voice director as Kris Zimmerman is, there are lines of dialogue that are delivered in very odd ways, suggesting the cast didn't really understand the intention behind them. By contrast, Kaku's work on Katamari Damacy presents quite an interesting dynamic. That was a similarly text-rich game, but one with a much more playful tone, and a less demanding writer. She was allowed to completely rewrite the game with very little direction, and the final result was a delight. Katamari writer/director, Keita Takahashi has gone on to learn English at a high level and now lives in San Francisco, where he's expected to speak it as his main language. I wonder if he's ever gone back to look at the English version of his PS2 game.
Metatextually, MGS2 benefits from a constant feeling of distrust. To know whether or not you're seeing the real version. There's an additional distrust of censorship thanks to the game's Q4 2001 release date, the story of terrorists causing destruction and political instability off the coast of New York City, and public sensitivity to the subject matter at the time. Following September 2001, there had been late-stage edits to the game, and as an audience, we can't be sure how compromised the final release is, but even without the real-world parallels, the game is filled with themes of how lies spread and ideas take hold. From the once-tortured child soldier, Raiden, to Peter Stillman's faked disability, to Otacon's disturbing family history, every character in the game has an uneasy relationship with the truth, denying their personal trauma to the world. By the Big Shell portion of the game, there's a question over whether they're real at all, or merely a projection of an elaborate AI construct. Sections of the game that are teased - boss fights with Fortune and Ocelot, as well as the bulk of Shell 2 - go unfulfilled. Raiden breaks through enemy security by lying about his identity, pretending to be one of them, adopting their uniform, and manipulating their body to trick a retinal scanner. Raiden's first quest in the game - disabling a series of explosives - turns out to be an elaborate decoy, while Snake discovers the real bomb off-screen. Snake is playing the real game, and Raiden is still in the VR replica. The Solid Snake game that had been heavily promoted at trade shows and plastered on magazine covers for years beforehand didn't exist. It was all just part of the simulation. This is the dynamic of MGS1 and 2.
The truth of the situation only comes through in the ending.
"It doesn't matter if they were real or not, that's never the point."
"Don't obsess over words so much."
"Everything you felt, thought about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is your choice..."
Kojima couldn't make something that transcended the medium of videogames. The Emotion Engine was merely a new CPU, comprised of silicon soldered to a circuit board, and shipped to millions of homes within SCE's new electronic toy. When the PS2 became something people could touch and own, the best it could do was play rushed versions of TimeSplitters and SSX that would soon be rendered obsolete by their immediate sequels. The dream was over. The boundaries were brought into stark focus. Metal Gear Solid 2 would be little more than The New Metal Gear Solid, despite the discussion, obsession, interpretation and reinterpretation it would provoke. With the constant focus from fans, it became more than it was. Value was seen in it, and thus, it was there.
Metal Gear Solid 2 changed my relationship with videogames, and not in ways that either its developers, or I, may have hoped. It made me aware of the inherent limitations. Before it, the future of videogames seemed like a boundless, infinite expanse. They could be anything. They could transcend physical limits. They were another dimension. A world of pure imagination. Afterwards, I became aware of just how tethered they were to reality. They were the result of project plans, processing speeds, staff sizes, managerial oversight, limited talent and budgets. They became infinitely smaller. Less significant. Cute. They didn't reflect the limitations of their creators' imaginations, but their ability to deliver a project with realistic expectations. It levelled the playing field. Now, MMOs, which promised entirely new worlds for players to live in, were dragged back to the same context as Pong. It made me realise what a game was. I came to the other side of that, and still loved it. To call it a disappointment is denying the growth that we needed to take. As fans, creators, and an industry. We're currently living through the investor class catching up with PS2 gamers, getting hyped for Final Fantasy XI, kidding on like we're going to spend all our free time in the fucking Metaverse. We all need to accept reality, and learn how to live in it. To appraise videogames with maturity. Let's all calm down and see how big a score we can get on Dig Dug today.
From the early days, it was clear that Kojima had a unique confidence and self-belief. Some may call it ego or even narcissism, but it's what gave him the drive and ambition to attempt blending dense, socially relevant stories with traditional videogame action. When the bulk of the Japanese games industry was still hiding behind publisher-insisted pen names, Kojima opened Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake with an introductory credits sequence, naming each member of staff, saving himself for the biggest credit. It made sense. MSX2 owners who'd played Metal Gear and Snatcher knew that there was a rare quality to Hideo Kojima's games, and Metal Gear 2 was the promise of the Kojimiest game yet. Policenauts would similarly promote itself on the name of its director, delving into the production process with behind the scenes books and bonus discs that were fairly uncommon forms of game merchandise in the mid-90s. Before MGS1 had made the west aware of him, Kojima was putting his face on soundtrack CDs. He wanted the spotlight, but he didn't know how demanding it would be of him.
Metal Gear Solid 2 was announced, and was propped up as the game for the new millennium. The one thing that would chrysalise the medium into a new form. In tandem with the growing interest in the internet, the significance of home computer ownership was really taking hold. DVD players and digital TV services were selling themselves on "Interactive" features, reportedly blurring the line between audience and participant (we didn't know at the time that the peak of this technology would be Beehive Bedlam). Sony were convinced that Windows PCs were too technical and business-focused for mainstream adoption. There would be no overlap between the computer and the living room. The word at the time was that the PlayStation 2 was going to be the thing to take people into this new, interconnected era, and traditional forms of entertainment would become a memory of the 20th Century. The promise of the "interactive movie" that had been dangled towards early adopters of CD-ROM, finally coming to fruition. From Final Fantasy X to Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, and perhaps most ridiculously of all, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, many new titles were selling themselves on the promise to bridge the gap between these mediums, but for many, MGS2 seemed like the best bet to accomplish it. That's a lot of pressure for a game where you navigate boxy rooms, avoiding blue vision cones.
Metal Gear Solid 2 trailers were bold. Not only were they promising a game with unforeseen levels of interactivity, but wild narrative swings. We were told Solid Snake was dead. We were told he was the leader of the terrorist organisation putting the world at ransom. We'd anticipated a game that would radically shift our perception of the prior one. When we eventually bought the game, we swallowed the bitter truth when a mysterious Navy SEAL popped up with David Hayter's voice, taking fire at a horny vampire.
Reading pre-release interviews with Kojima, it's clear that he was as convinced by the potential as anyone else. He talks about character movement being impacted by changing wind direction, the integration of voice-recognition and online support. The end results are so compromised that you might not even notice them in the game. The network support got nipped and tucked at so much that in the end, it became an online competition for the opportunity to have your name appear on an in-game dog tag, and a browser-only leaderboard system where you could post your completion stats after you finished. The voice support, adding user-expression to the long, dense CODEC calls? That's the ability to press R2 to have your character audibly think a weird retort. "WHATEVER!" These are the limitations of not only the PlayStation 2 in 2001, but the ability of a Japanese development studio to deliver an action game on new hardware in a three-year project.
MGS2 couldn't live up to those initial ambitions. It didn't fully satisfy those dreaming of something new and transcendent. It was MGS1 again with extra buttons. But oh, what buttons!
MGS2 has so many cool little stealth moves to play around with. You get a real sense of your own ingenuity as you figure your way through each section. VR Missions was everything that MGS1 gameplay could offer. The developers knocked their heads against the walls, spinning its systems off down every conceivable avenue. The frustration of these limitations directly inspired the techniques players could make use of in Sons of Liberty. Players would be able to interact with guards much more intricately, threatening them at gunpoint, disabling walkie-talkies, injuring specific limbs, and shaking them down for extra supplies. Snake and Raiden could roll (or cartwheel), hang from railings, and pop out of cover, ready to fire. Most crucially, you could now aim from a first-person perspective, allowing for much more deliberate action in shoot-outs, or just fuck about with the set dressing to see how many clips KCEJ recorded for the sound of shooting a frying pan with different guns. Shenmue had set a new precedent for how interactive a 3D world could be in a game, and MGS2 picked up the baton to explore how that degree of tangibility could benefit Metal Gear. Hardcore fans who had bought Zone of the Enders solely for the opportunity to play a small section of this game would become intimately familiar with all the quirks and potential of its gameplay, hungry to see how they would be explored in the full campaign. I'm not convinced the Big Shell was the best possible pay-off for these hopes.
It isn't just the fact that players got to spend more time with their favourite muscle man that makes the Tanker section so beloved. It's very purposefully designed to explore MGS2's mechanics, and refreshingly, it borrows little from the structure of the MSX games. Metal Gear had already spent multiple generations reworking and refining the same, familiar setup, and it was exciting to see the series do something different. There's no hostages, no NIKITA puzzle, no underwater facility entrance. It was doing new things, taking out security cameras, shaking down guards for supplies, and sneaking past an audience of a hundred soldiers during a speech. It was exciting. But those old tropes were waiting for us, just around the corner. Justifying themselves via a metatextual reflection upon the previous game.
MGS2 is discussed in hushed, reverential tones these days. If something seemed weird or stupid, you obviously didn't get it. It had been relatively easy to understand a story about genetic inheritance, but memetic inheritance seemed far more abstract. Snake was a son of genetic inheritance, being a clone of the world's most prized soldier, and Raiden, the son of ideological inheritance, with Solidus killing his parents and fostering him as his own brainwashed soldier. Every action he takes is accompanied by a question of how he's being manipulated, and by whom. There's an awkward balance in the game being both radically incisive and incredibly schlocky videogame trash. Whenever it did something too absurd or outright crap, we took faith in the notion that nothing was quite what it seemed. Like there was a hidden truth that would make it all cohesive and brilliant. It was up to us to find it, and if we couldn't figure it out, we could always just pester Kojima and Konami to produce a much more pandering sequel. Full of retcons, underwhelming reveals, and relentless goalpost shifting. Was there ever value in MGS2's outlandish paranormal activity? Did Kojima ever have an answer before his arm was twisted enough to yell "nanomachines" in response to every question? Are we ashamed of our words and deeds for ever thinking the whole of Shell 2 was agonisingly tedious?
Discussing MGS2's story is a sticking your hand in a can of worms and finding a worm-filled rabbit hole at the bottom. A dense, purposefully confusing, and often prescient script. It also has roots in Kojima's 80s action game design, where storybeats are mainly included to intrigue its audience enough to continue playing. Kojima's handwritten script is filled with footnotes, explicitly referencing the Hollywood blockbusters he ripped each idea from. MGS2 was the point where much of Kojima's games became dictated by the promises he'd made in press interviews and pre-release trailers. MGS4 staff have talked about spending months solely working on moments to include in trailers, and then retroactively having to build the game around those moments. That approach started here. Shallow instances of mindblowing spectacle, engineered to shift product with little concern for the long-term impact. Ocelot's arm, Vamp's superhuman abilities, basically everything to do with Dead Cell - they're weird twists, and typically just for the sake of having a weird twist. Vamp's gay relationship with US Marine Corp commander, Scott Dolph, appears to be entirely a sophomoric in-joke targetted at Kojima's then-personal interpreter. MGS2 is simultaneously an earnest musing on the nature of propaganda in the digital age, and a very stupid videogame with absurd arcade game bosses. I don't want to make out like all the silliness is purely problematic or mishandled. There's moments of fun and whimsy I enjoy. Slipping on birdshit and the guard taking a leak off the side of the Strut L. Fatman. It's not the focus, but the old frivolous MSX personality is still here. Just muffled by all the pretension surrounding it. On your first playthrough, you don't know whether you can just enjoy something as a daft joke, or if it's hiding some deeper layer of significance. MGS1 had one foot in gaming's history and another in its future, and MGS2 attempts the same, with messier results in either respect.
The game's English writer, Agness Kaku, has discussed the thankless job of attempting to make MGS2's weird, convoluted script sound engaging through its translation. A lack of reference material, character limits, and heavy rewrites from Konami resulted in the game we have today. It's also clear that she doesn't have much regard for Kojima's script, and attempted to inject it with a richer sense of character and more entertaining dialogue. Many gamers would feel take strong objection to someone, particularly a woman, tinkering with the script from a visionary of Kojima's status, but the bulk of MGS2's most beloved English lines are embellishments on Kaku's part, and her political and literary knowledge lined her up well for the subject matter. However, Konami's insistence on literal translations of certain lines, paired with her personal distaste for Kojima's writing, made the final script fairly patchy and inconsistent. As talented a voice director as Kris Zimmerman is, there are lines of dialogue that are delivered in very odd ways, suggesting the cast didn't really understand the intention behind them. By contrast, Kaku's work on Katamari Damacy presents quite an interesting dynamic. That was a similarly text-rich game, but one with a much more playful tone, and a less demanding writer. She was allowed to completely rewrite the game with very little direction, and the final result was a delight. Katamari writer/director, Keita Takahashi has gone on to learn English at a high level and now lives in San Francisco, where he's expected to speak it as his main language. I wonder if he's ever gone back to look at the English version of his PS2 game.
Metatextually, MGS2 benefits from a constant feeling of distrust. To know whether or not you're seeing the real version. There's an additional distrust of censorship thanks to the game's Q4 2001 release date, the story of terrorists causing destruction and political instability off the coast of New York City, and public sensitivity to the subject matter at the time. Following September 2001, there had been late-stage edits to the game, and as an audience, we can't be sure how compromised the final release is, but even without the real-world parallels, the game is filled with themes of how lies spread and ideas take hold. From the once-tortured child soldier, Raiden, to Peter Stillman's faked disability, to Otacon's disturbing family history, every character in the game has an uneasy relationship with the truth, denying their personal trauma to the world. By the Big Shell portion of the game, there's a question over whether they're real at all, or merely a projection of an elaborate AI construct. Sections of the game that are teased - boss fights with Fortune and Ocelot, as well as the bulk of Shell 2 - go unfulfilled. Raiden breaks through enemy security by lying about his identity, pretending to be one of them, adopting their uniform, and manipulating their body to trick a retinal scanner. Raiden's first quest in the game - disabling a series of explosives - turns out to be an elaborate decoy, while Snake discovers the real bomb off-screen. Snake is playing the real game, and Raiden is still in the VR replica. The Solid Snake game that had been heavily promoted at trade shows and plastered on magazine covers for years beforehand didn't exist. It was all just part of the simulation. This is the dynamic of MGS1 and 2.
The truth of the situation only comes through in the ending.
"It doesn't matter if they were real or not, that's never the point."
"Don't obsess over words so much."
"Everything you felt, thought about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is your choice..."
Kojima couldn't make something that transcended the medium of videogames. The Emotion Engine was merely a new CPU, comprised of silicon soldered to a circuit board, and shipped to millions of homes within SCE's new electronic toy. When the PS2 became something people could touch and own, the best it could do was play rushed versions of TimeSplitters and SSX that would soon be rendered obsolete by their immediate sequels. The dream was over. The boundaries were brought into stark focus. Metal Gear Solid 2 would be little more than The New Metal Gear Solid, despite the discussion, obsession, interpretation and reinterpretation it would provoke. With the constant focus from fans, it became more than it was. Value was seen in it, and thus, it was there.
Metal Gear Solid 2 changed my relationship with videogames, and not in ways that either its developers, or I, may have hoped. It made me aware of the inherent limitations. Before it, the future of videogames seemed like a boundless, infinite expanse. They could be anything. They could transcend physical limits. They were another dimension. A world of pure imagination. Afterwards, I became aware of just how tethered they were to reality. They were the result of project plans, processing speeds, staff sizes, managerial oversight, limited talent and budgets. They became infinitely smaller. Less significant. Cute. They didn't reflect the limitations of their creators' imaginations, but their ability to deliver a project with realistic expectations. It levelled the playing field. Now, MMOs, which promised entirely new worlds for players to live in, were dragged back to the same context as Pong. It made me realise what a game was. I came to the other side of that, and still loved it. To call it a disappointment is denying the growth that we needed to take. As fans, creators, and an industry. We're currently living through the investor class catching up with PS2 gamers, getting hyped for Final Fantasy XI, kidding on like we're going to spend all our free time in the fucking Metaverse. We all need to accept reality, and learn how to live in it. To appraise videogames with maturity. Let's all calm down and see how big a score we can get on Dig Dug today.
This review contains spoilers
I think Yakuza 8's tone is best summarised by a multipart sidequest, where an old man asks you to comfort his dying wife by finding a way to make it snow in Hawaii. By the end of it, Kasuga is on a rooftop throwing handfuls of shaved ice with a gang of naked nappy fetishists.
Fun is fun. It is. It can be difficult to enjoy when we're more interested in the serious stuff, though. For Kasuga, Yakuza 8 really works. After all the homeless villages, abandoned buildings and sewer dungeons of 7, it's great to see him having fun in friendly, sunny Hawaii, pressing the Aloha Button to befriend everyone in town with his infectious enthusiasm. This is still an RPG, which only makes sense for the man who found his role models in Dragon Quest. It's really weird to use this game to attempt to tell a very significant chapter in Kazuma Kiryu's story at the same time.
I'm not saying they did a bad job of it. Just weird. In its later sections, the story gets quite relentless in recalling events from previous entries, and paying homage to the earliest games. So it's weird that he's doing it all as an RPG, imagining aggressors as Dragon Quest-style monsters, forming a party of Ichiban Kasuga's friends, and keeping everyone who ever held a personal significance to his past at a distance. It never really convinced me. I didn't fear for his life. They'd surely be doing better by Kaz if these were to be his final moments.
Yakuza 8 also pairs Kasuga against a new rival character of dubious morals. It's easy to see what they're doing. Kasuga inherited Kiryu's earnesty and selflessness, and Majima's larger than life personality. That leaves Yutaka Yamai with Kiryu's seriousness and Majima's unpredictable scariness. The two have a fairly similar dynamic, and it could feel like we're retreading old ground before long, but it still feels fresh right now. It's still surprising when scary Yamai goes against the odds to do a favour for Kasuga. With Majima, there was always a sense that it was fun for him to keep Kiryu-chan around, and maybe he was toying with him. If Yamai does it, it's because there's more humanity to him than he lets on. I don't know how deep you can mine that, but it didn't take long for Majima's shtick to get comically worn out, either. That kind of worked, though, as he became a lovable irritant against Kazuma's stoicism. I guess Yamai could serve to pull Kasuga back in line if he's going off the rails, but that's all up in the air at this point.
Anyway, story and tone aside, the game is fun! That's what they're going for, here. Bright, cheerful holiday setting. There's a Crazy Taxi homage food delivery minigame, a Pokémon Snap parody where you photograph wandering perverts, and an enormous number of big daft sidequests. It's quite happy to get loud, stupid and obnoxious, but it works when it's paired with characters you really like and believe in. Even the most lowbrow public event can be fun if you've got good friends with you. Again, this is more Kasuga's game than Kiryu's, though the message of opening up and putting your trust in others does play into his story, even if it's a little awkward in a game that's this Kasuga-hued.
It's a bit all over the place, really. A game this enormous lies on its variety, but it undermines the tonal shifts quite often. There's serious stuff here, and curiously, a lot of overlapping themes with MGS1. The failings of nuclear waste disposal, the discovery of a vengeful brother, and a new generation of soldiers/yakuza in a world that no longer needs them. Besides that, it's quite refreshing to see a Yakuza take on American culture, with its racist police and cruel disregard of the homeless. It's fun to see these topics covered by a series with this kind of poetic melodrama and infallible heroes.
Seeing a Yakuza game that primarily takes place in an English-speaking country is a real sign of how far the series' global popularity has come. They've incorporated American writers and voice talent in a way that would have seemed inconceivable back in their struggling PS3 days. There's a fairly absurd conceit that pretty much everyone in Hawaii is a fluent Japanese speaker, and the game pretty much forgets the dynamic of non-English speakers exploring an American city after a few hours. The Japanese audio track has a fairly awkward approach to it, really. Characters who are written as bilingual sometimes have separate actors for their English and Japanese dialogue. A few of the bigger characters have their Japanese actors record both parts, and some of them are supposed to be native-born American citizens. Suffice to say, they're not very convincing, and the subtitles are doing a lot of heavy lifting. If you want to play a version of this game with fully coherent English dialogue, there's a full voice track just for you. I'm just glad these games give global audiences a reason to become Akio Otsuka fans.
Even if they don't really work for Kazuma's part of the game, I still find the RPG parodies cute. Some of the Pokémon stuff, about how Hawaii is a "different region", "blessed by the Sun and the Moon" made me smile. They're working overtime, not only translating in-jokey dialogue for Japanese fans who know Pokémon, but turning them into jokes based on how the franchise has been presented in the west for the last 25 years. Yakuza localisation staff ought to have the same level of societal respect as astronauts and medical scientists, and I'm totally in their camp when they do something corny and absurd like explaining that Sujimon are dubious figures who make people around them "Super Jittery". Thousands of white guys know how to play mahjong because of the boundless effort of these professionals. We should embrace their sweatiest reconstructions of stupid Japanese puns.
Yakuza 8 is huge, features multiple cities, and a bunch of optional content. There's one that overwhelmed my playthrough, though, taking me out of the thrust of the story for almost a full week-
DONDOKO ISLAND
Dondoko Island introduces itself as a straight-up Animal Crossing: New Horizons clone. It's a tropical holiday resort that you have to help to rebuild. You catch fish and insects, chop down trees, break rocks and construct furniture to sell to the shop. It makes no secret of its inspiration. It's a blatant parody. The shop even swaps out its three pieces of furniture on display each day. It's once the grounding has been established that it really shows its true form. You're attempting to make the island as pleasant for visitors as possible, to get cash. This isn't Animal Crossing. It's an old Maxis/Bullfrog PC sim game on top of Animal Crossing. It's frighteningly addictive. Each day is a rush to collect resources, construct souvenirs and attractions for the visitors, and defend the island from fly-tipping pirates. There are actual real-time fights in this, though they're simplified to one-button attacks and dodges to keep things snappy. You have a life-bar, and if the enemies do too much damage, you might want to call it an early night to fully recover. You'll also want to upgrade your tools to fight and mine more efficiently as you make the most of each day. The days last about 10 minutes a piece, and feels ever more frantic as your resort and visitor numbers expand. Got to fill out that daily checklist, gather the resources for that dream project and maybe even fix up your house a little, if you somehow find the time somewhere. You try to be as efficient as possible, but there's no chance you're getting everything done. Thankfully, there is a definite end to the expansion and subplot. A point where you can call your work done, and return to the main story. Even after that, though, it remains one of the easiest sources of income in the game. When you're short of scratch for a new weapon, it's very easy to jump back on Dolphine and sink a few more days into island management.
Yakuza 8 is fun. It's mock-significant, and having finished it, I don't know how much of its story will have long-term impact. We got a few new characters out of it, and some more depth to their relationships, but they continue to kick the can down the road with Kazuma Kiryu's hypothetically inevitable departure. I never felt like Kasuga's crew were the most important people in Kazuma's life, or that the new baddies really held that much personal significance to him. If we're going to get Kazuma Kiryu stories, they'll need to be in Kazuma Kiryu games. As good as it may be, it just doesn't fit into an Ichiban Kasuga one. I never thought I'd end this asking for another Kazuma Kiryu game, but we're not ending his story like this.
Fun is fun. It is. It can be difficult to enjoy when we're more interested in the serious stuff, though. For Kasuga, Yakuza 8 really works. After all the homeless villages, abandoned buildings and sewer dungeons of 7, it's great to see him having fun in friendly, sunny Hawaii, pressing the Aloha Button to befriend everyone in town with his infectious enthusiasm. This is still an RPG, which only makes sense for the man who found his role models in Dragon Quest. It's really weird to use this game to attempt to tell a very significant chapter in Kazuma Kiryu's story at the same time.
I'm not saying they did a bad job of it. Just weird. In its later sections, the story gets quite relentless in recalling events from previous entries, and paying homage to the earliest games. So it's weird that he's doing it all as an RPG, imagining aggressors as Dragon Quest-style monsters, forming a party of Ichiban Kasuga's friends, and keeping everyone who ever held a personal significance to his past at a distance. It never really convinced me. I didn't fear for his life. They'd surely be doing better by Kaz if these were to be his final moments.
Yakuza 8 also pairs Kasuga against a new rival character of dubious morals. It's easy to see what they're doing. Kasuga inherited Kiryu's earnesty and selflessness, and Majima's larger than life personality. That leaves Yutaka Yamai with Kiryu's seriousness and Majima's unpredictable scariness. The two have a fairly similar dynamic, and it could feel like we're retreading old ground before long, but it still feels fresh right now. It's still surprising when scary Yamai goes against the odds to do a favour for Kasuga. With Majima, there was always a sense that it was fun for him to keep Kiryu-chan around, and maybe he was toying with him. If Yamai does it, it's because there's more humanity to him than he lets on. I don't know how deep you can mine that, but it didn't take long for Majima's shtick to get comically worn out, either. That kind of worked, though, as he became a lovable irritant against Kazuma's stoicism. I guess Yamai could serve to pull Kasuga back in line if he's going off the rails, but that's all up in the air at this point.
Anyway, story and tone aside, the game is fun! That's what they're going for, here. Bright, cheerful holiday setting. There's a Crazy Taxi homage food delivery minigame, a Pokémon Snap parody where you photograph wandering perverts, and an enormous number of big daft sidequests. It's quite happy to get loud, stupid and obnoxious, but it works when it's paired with characters you really like and believe in. Even the most lowbrow public event can be fun if you've got good friends with you. Again, this is more Kasuga's game than Kiryu's, though the message of opening up and putting your trust in others does play into his story, even if it's a little awkward in a game that's this Kasuga-hued.
It's a bit all over the place, really. A game this enormous lies on its variety, but it undermines the tonal shifts quite often. There's serious stuff here, and curiously, a lot of overlapping themes with MGS1. The failings of nuclear waste disposal, the discovery of a vengeful brother, and a new generation of soldiers/yakuza in a world that no longer needs them. Besides that, it's quite refreshing to see a Yakuza take on American culture, with its racist police and cruel disregard of the homeless. It's fun to see these topics covered by a series with this kind of poetic melodrama and infallible heroes.
Seeing a Yakuza game that primarily takes place in an English-speaking country is a real sign of how far the series' global popularity has come. They've incorporated American writers and voice talent in a way that would have seemed inconceivable back in their struggling PS3 days. There's a fairly absurd conceit that pretty much everyone in Hawaii is a fluent Japanese speaker, and the game pretty much forgets the dynamic of non-English speakers exploring an American city after a few hours. The Japanese audio track has a fairly awkward approach to it, really. Characters who are written as bilingual sometimes have separate actors for their English and Japanese dialogue. A few of the bigger characters have their Japanese actors record both parts, and some of them are supposed to be native-born American citizens. Suffice to say, they're not very convincing, and the subtitles are doing a lot of heavy lifting. If you want to play a version of this game with fully coherent English dialogue, there's a full voice track just for you. I'm just glad these games give global audiences a reason to become Akio Otsuka fans.
Even if they don't really work for Kazuma's part of the game, I still find the RPG parodies cute. Some of the Pokémon stuff, about how Hawaii is a "different region", "blessed by the Sun and the Moon" made me smile. They're working overtime, not only translating in-jokey dialogue for Japanese fans who know Pokémon, but turning them into jokes based on how the franchise has been presented in the west for the last 25 years. Yakuza localisation staff ought to have the same level of societal respect as astronauts and medical scientists, and I'm totally in their camp when they do something corny and absurd like explaining that Sujimon are dubious figures who make people around them "Super Jittery". Thousands of white guys know how to play mahjong because of the boundless effort of these professionals. We should embrace their sweatiest reconstructions of stupid Japanese puns.
Yakuza 8 is huge, features multiple cities, and a bunch of optional content. There's one that overwhelmed my playthrough, though, taking me out of the thrust of the story for almost a full week-
DONDOKO ISLAND
Dondoko Island introduces itself as a straight-up Animal Crossing: New Horizons clone. It's a tropical holiday resort that you have to help to rebuild. You catch fish and insects, chop down trees, break rocks and construct furniture to sell to the shop. It makes no secret of its inspiration. It's a blatant parody. The shop even swaps out its three pieces of furniture on display each day. It's once the grounding has been established that it really shows its true form. You're attempting to make the island as pleasant for visitors as possible, to get cash. This isn't Animal Crossing. It's an old Maxis/Bullfrog PC sim game on top of Animal Crossing. It's frighteningly addictive. Each day is a rush to collect resources, construct souvenirs and attractions for the visitors, and defend the island from fly-tipping pirates. There are actual real-time fights in this, though they're simplified to one-button attacks and dodges to keep things snappy. You have a life-bar, and if the enemies do too much damage, you might want to call it an early night to fully recover. You'll also want to upgrade your tools to fight and mine more efficiently as you make the most of each day. The days last about 10 minutes a piece, and feels ever more frantic as your resort and visitor numbers expand. Got to fill out that daily checklist, gather the resources for that dream project and maybe even fix up your house a little, if you somehow find the time somewhere. You try to be as efficient as possible, but there's no chance you're getting everything done. Thankfully, there is a definite end to the expansion and subplot. A point where you can call your work done, and return to the main story. Even after that, though, it remains one of the easiest sources of income in the game. When you're short of scratch for a new weapon, it's very easy to jump back on Dolphine and sink a few more days into island management.
Yakuza 8 is fun. It's mock-significant, and having finished it, I don't know how much of its story will have long-term impact. We got a few new characters out of it, and some more depth to their relationships, but they continue to kick the can down the road with Kazuma Kiryu's hypothetically inevitable departure. I never felt like Kasuga's crew were the most important people in Kazuma's life, or that the new baddies really held that much personal significance to him. If we're going to get Kazuma Kiryu stories, they'll need to be in Kazuma Kiryu games. As good as it may be, it just doesn't fit into an Ichiban Kasuga one. I never thought I'd end this asking for another Kazuma Kiryu game, but we're not ending his story like this.
1996
Every time I hear the "Shakira Shakira!" in Hips Don't Lie, I think of the caged Marios in this modified Speedy Gonzales bootleg.
This review contains spoilers
Back on Splatoon 2's FinalFest, I was in Team Order. Not only did it strike me as the preferable moral choice, it also seemed like the less hacky threat to theme the next game around. I don't think there's a Nintendo baddie who wouldn't align themselves with Team Chaos, and it seemed easy to picture how that would pair with Splatoon's colourful, forever teenage aesthetic. I wanted to know what an orderly Splatoon would be. It seems the developers were fairly inspired by the curious prompt, too, as they pretty much ignored the divine authority of SplatFest results to deliver this vision as a bit of DLC.
Side Order has a pretty conservative approach to random elements, and that's both a good and bad thing. While I was pretty cold to the idea of Nintendo's new generation of developers handing over the game design tools to an algorithm, the levels here are all tailored with the same care they've traditionally put into the series' single-player content. There just isn't all that much of it. This is billed as a mode that you can play endlessly. One run through Side Order takes roughly half an hour, and the bulk of any two runs will be spent on the same stages. The variables are meaningful, and help to build skills you can carry over to the main multiplayer content, but I don't know if it'll have much meaningful impact outside of Splatoon's active playerbase.
Each run through Side Order asks you to select a pre-made weapon loadout and presents you with 30 floors of a tower to beat. Each one presents you with a random selection of three levels to pick from, each marked with their own difficulty rating and completion rewards. Levels each come with one of five objectives, and all involve either chasing or defending a target while fighting off oncoming enemies. It's fun, but it doesn't really offer the variety or complexity of a typical single-player campaign. I don't think anybody outside of the most hardcore fans will play through it with every loadout.
The thing is, Splatoon gets to use its characters, aesthetic and themes as a crutch. For the most engaged fans who lap up this stuff, this side of the DLC makes up for the relatively shallow pool of content. There's a lot of direct callbacks and narrative ties to previous games and a good amount of Splatoon deeplore stuff. It just seems to repeat a lot of the same beats we've already seen, and the only people who will care about this aspect of the content are the same people who will be bothered by those things.
It's a big showcase for Splatoon 2's pop duo, Off the Hook, with Pearl acting as a Bowser's Fury-style drone partner, taking out swarming enemies and shouting out words of encouragement as you play. She's a pretty good fit for it, really. It was kind of funny to see Marie take a similar role in Splatoon 2, trying to inspire action without losing her cool, but if Splatoon wasn't so committed to its characterisation, she'd have been hooting and hollering like Pearl throughout it. Dialogue and unlockable written content relentlessly reinstate how much Marina and Pearl love each other, though despite the burgeoning enthusiasm from a significant segment of the fanbase, it appears we're not going to see explicit confirmation of a gay relationship in a game from the publishers of Tomodachi Life anytime soon.
Playing through Side Order with different weapon loadouts (each one themed around a familiar Splatoon character, of course) will unlock further weapons, in-game cash to spend on upgrades, and entries from Marina's diary. These act like the Squid Sister Stories did in the runup to Splatoon 2, offering us a little insight on Marina's perspective following Team Chaos's victory, but it's relatively perfunctory. Marina's a fairly pristine character, uniquely talented in a range of interests, and full of love for everyone. It's hard to imagine her doing something maliciously. The developers have far less conviction in pinning her as a villain as they did for Callie in Splatoon 2, putting a lid on the possibility before you even see Side Order's opening titles. It's a little underwhelming, but I respect the team's commitment to established characterisation before everything else. We might get less exciting stories for it, but when the fans watch the concerts, they fully believe in those dancing fish people. You don't want to mess with that.
I'm a little anxious that the politics have taken a bit of a backseat in Splatoon now. Pikmin 4 was guilty of the same, and I really don't want it to be something Nintendo shies away from. Octo Expansion took a really big swing on this stuff. Not only did it deliver a fairly earnest anti-racist message in a way that really complemented the established characters and setting, I was fucking thrilled with how it put the game's ecological message into stark view. Implying that there's something to be learned from the energy and passion of the youth movement of the late sixties, by homaging Planet of the Apes' post-apocalyptic revelation with its sunken Statue of Liberty, but also presenting it in the most Splatoon way possible, with you grinding around it on midair ink rails to a thumping soundtrack and rapidfiring at Lady Liberty's pulsing weak spots. It's difficult for me to think of any part of a videogame that I love more than Octo Expansion's final hours. I was with Splatoon since Day One, and this was the perfect way to tell me that my good will had paid off. Presenting the oncoming climate emergency and subsequent extinction of the human race, not only as a solid fact, but a rollercoaster with popstars and dualwielded uzis. There's nothing like that in Side Order. Just a loose implication that dogmatic authoritarianism is a flawed attitude. It feels pretty lame by contrast. I don't know if anybody else gets as much out of this side of Splatoon, and I don't think they can repeat that high. I just feel obliged to keep prodding the developers to get radical again.
That's not to say that Side Order makes no meaningful progress on the story. Following up on the liberation of the Octoling army, we're given some insight into who those people were and how their lives have changed since. It's significant to our understanding of Marina, and shows commitment to the continuity. It didn't stir me too much, personally, but if there had been so much as a comment from a Squid Sister, I know I'd have been far more invested.
Completing Side Order gives players the ability to set Splatoon 2's Inkopolis Square as their main hub. It's kind of weird to be seeing nostalgia for a game on the same console, but with all the signs that the Switch may be wrapping things up, there is a bit of ennui in going back to the 2017 stuff right now. As a big fan of Zelda, Mario and Splatoon, that year was a complete thrill ride for me. Not only was there excitement for this new console, we were giddy for a version of Nintendo that put all its focus on a single platform. There seemed to be a massive new title every month, for a while. As remarkable a system as it became, I think it's fair to say it didn't really carry on that same trajectory for long. With Tears of the Kingdom, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and the Mario Kart 8 DLC, it feels like Nintendo have just been trying to repeat those 2017 successes, rather than continue on that journey of invention. Splatoon 2 is good, Splatoon 3 is good, and Side Order is good, but Octo Expansion had me thinking the series would change and get far more ambitious. I don't think that's happened. It's like we've seen everything it can be, and all we can expect now are minor tweaks. I still want Portal 2/Resident Evil 4 structure in single-player Splatoon. I just have far less faith it's going to happen, now.
I'm the kind of fan who paid for this as soon as possible to get access to the Splatoon 1 hub. Of course this is what my criticism is going to look like.
Side Order has a pretty conservative approach to random elements, and that's both a good and bad thing. While I was pretty cold to the idea of Nintendo's new generation of developers handing over the game design tools to an algorithm, the levels here are all tailored with the same care they've traditionally put into the series' single-player content. There just isn't all that much of it. This is billed as a mode that you can play endlessly. One run through Side Order takes roughly half an hour, and the bulk of any two runs will be spent on the same stages. The variables are meaningful, and help to build skills you can carry over to the main multiplayer content, but I don't know if it'll have much meaningful impact outside of Splatoon's active playerbase.
Each run through Side Order asks you to select a pre-made weapon loadout and presents you with 30 floors of a tower to beat. Each one presents you with a random selection of three levels to pick from, each marked with their own difficulty rating and completion rewards. Levels each come with one of five objectives, and all involve either chasing or defending a target while fighting off oncoming enemies. It's fun, but it doesn't really offer the variety or complexity of a typical single-player campaign. I don't think anybody outside of the most hardcore fans will play through it with every loadout.
The thing is, Splatoon gets to use its characters, aesthetic and themes as a crutch. For the most engaged fans who lap up this stuff, this side of the DLC makes up for the relatively shallow pool of content. There's a lot of direct callbacks and narrative ties to previous games and a good amount of Splatoon deeplore stuff. It just seems to repeat a lot of the same beats we've already seen, and the only people who will care about this aspect of the content are the same people who will be bothered by those things.
It's a big showcase for Splatoon 2's pop duo, Off the Hook, with Pearl acting as a Bowser's Fury-style drone partner, taking out swarming enemies and shouting out words of encouragement as you play. She's a pretty good fit for it, really. It was kind of funny to see Marie take a similar role in Splatoon 2, trying to inspire action without losing her cool, but if Splatoon wasn't so committed to its characterisation, she'd have been hooting and hollering like Pearl throughout it. Dialogue and unlockable written content relentlessly reinstate how much Marina and Pearl love each other, though despite the burgeoning enthusiasm from a significant segment of the fanbase, it appears we're not going to see explicit confirmation of a gay relationship in a game from the publishers of Tomodachi Life anytime soon.
Playing through Side Order with different weapon loadouts (each one themed around a familiar Splatoon character, of course) will unlock further weapons, in-game cash to spend on upgrades, and entries from Marina's diary. These act like the Squid Sister Stories did in the runup to Splatoon 2, offering us a little insight on Marina's perspective following Team Chaos's victory, but it's relatively perfunctory. Marina's a fairly pristine character, uniquely talented in a range of interests, and full of love for everyone. It's hard to imagine her doing something maliciously. The developers have far less conviction in pinning her as a villain as they did for Callie in Splatoon 2, putting a lid on the possibility before you even see Side Order's opening titles. It's a little underwhelming, but I respect the team's commitment to established characterisation before everything else. We might get less exciting stories for it, but when the fans watch the concerts, they fully believe in those dancing fish people. You don't want to mess with that.
I'm a little anxious that the politics have taken a bit of a backseat in Splatoon now. Pikmin 4 was guilty of the same, and I really don't want it to be something Nintendo shies away from. Octo Expansion took a really big swing on this stuff. Not only did it deliver a fairly earnest anti-racist message in a way that really complemented the established characters and setting, I was fucking thrilled with how it put the game's ecological message into stark view. Implying that there's something to be learned from the energy and passion of the youth movement of the late sixties, by homaging Planet of the Apes' post-apocalyptic revelation with its sunken Statue of Liberty, but also presenting it in the most Splatoon way possible, with you grinding around it on midair ink rails to a thumping soundtrack and rapidfiring at Lady Liberty's pulsing weak spots. It's difficult for me to think of any part of a videogame that I love more than Octo Expansion's final hours. I was with Splatoon since Day One, and this was the perfect way to tell me that my good will had paid off. Presenting the oncoming climate emergency and subsequent extinction of the human race, not only as a solid fact, but a rollercoaster with popstars and dualwielded uzis. There's nothing like that in Side Order. Just a loose implication that dogmatic authoritarianism is a flawed attitude. It feels pretty lame by contrast. I don't know if anybody else gets as much out of this side of Splatoon, and I don't think they can repeat that high. I just feel obliged to keep prodding the developers to get radical again.
That's not to say that Side Order makes no meaningful progress on the story. Following up on the liberation of the Octoling army, we're given some insight into who those people were and how their lives have changed since. It's significant to our understanding of Marina, and shows commitment to the continuity. It didn't stir me too much, personally, but if there had been so much as a comment from a Squid Sister, I know I'd have been far more invested.
Completing Side Order gives players the ability to set Splatoon 2's Inkopolis Square as their main hub. It's kind of weird to be seeing nostalgia for a game on the same console, but with all the signs that the Switch may be wrapping things up, there is a bit of ennui in going back to the 2017 stuff right now. As a big fan of Zelda, Mario and Splatoon, that year was a complete thrill ride for me. Not only was there excitement for this new console, we were giddy for a version of Nintendo that put all its focus on a single platform. There seemed to be a massive new title every month, for a while. As remarkable a system as it became, I think it's fair to say it didn't really carry on that same trajectory for long. With Tears of the Kingdom, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and the Mario Kart 8 DLC, it feels like Nintendo have just been trying to repeat those 2017 successes, rather than continue on that journey of invention. Splatoon 2 is good, Splatoon 3 is good, and Side Order is good, but Octo Expansion had me thinking the series would change and get far more ambitious. I don't think that's happened. It's like we've seen everything it can be, and all we can expect now are minor tweaks. I still want Portal 2/Resident Evil 4 structure in single-player Splatoon. I just have far less faith it's going to happen, now.
I'm the kind of fan who paid for this as soon as possible to get access to the Splatoon 1 hub. Of course this is what my criticism is going to look like.
I've got to come clean, here. I'm not really into most horse racing games. I mean, I like the idea, but pretty much everything I've tried has been really stat-heavy and management focused. They generally seem tailored towards those who are heavily invested in gambling, and following the fine details of what makes a reliable bet, rather than those who just want to play a nice horsey game. There are exceptions. Obviously, I'm really into the horse stuff in the Zelda and Red Dead Redemption games, if I'm ever lucky enough to come across a Final Furlong cabinet, that's a great day, and for all the convoluted design elements that comprise Bomberman Fantasy Race, there's a really fun arcade horse racing game at the heart of it (even if the horses are cartoon kangaroos and bipedal rhinoceroses). For a straight-up good horse racing game, though, I've never found anything that could compete with Pocket Card Jockey.
Its premise is actually quite relatable for me. Your protagonist wants to be able to win horse races, but has no aptitude for it. They're better at card games. Through a deal with god, you're allowed to compete in horse races via the medium of quick-fire games of solitaire.
This isn't just a fun facade to put on the front of a card game, though. It's not like a licenced pachinko or pinball machine with funny animations. This is a horse racing game first, and a solitaire game second. You choose a good horse based on their natural statistics, develop their skills as much as you can in each race, and attempt to carry them through a career before they grow too old and get sent to the farm to produce offspring. Between each game of solitaire, you'll need to decide where best to line them up with the rest of the pack to maintain speed and stamina, while sticking close to the inside lane for oncoming corners. You're making decisions as a jockey, and relying on your abilities as a card shark to stay competitive.
The solitaire stuff is dead simple, but deliberately so. Cards are arranged randomly in the tableau in front of you, with you drawing cards at random from your deck. If your drawn card is one number higher or lower than the one on top of a stack, you can remove it from the game. Clear the board quickly, and your stamina loss will be negligible. Don't clear it in time, or run out of cards before all the cards are removed, and you'll really feel the impact. One bad hand can ruin an entire career, and you'll be struggling to make anything of your horse before it's time to move to a new one.
It's how frequently your focus is shifted that makes Pocket Card Jockey so addictive. In the heat of each solitaire game, your whole attention is on drawing the right numbers, and looking out for good sequences of cards to leave on the table for a big combo down the line. Then you zoom out, and you're back to the race, watching stats and trying to find the best place to set yourself. Then you zoom out further, and you're looking at your horse's career, trying to pick the best races to put them in, and buying items to boost their abilities. And you can zoom out further still, trying to make sure you've got a good horse waiting for you afterwards, and picking out good breeding pairs. There's constant distractions, but that sense of momentum never goes away. It's all headed in the trajectory of becoming a champion.
This is all well and good, but what really holds Pocket Card Jockey together is its charm. If you hadn't known already, this is a Game Freak joint. While they're, understandably, most known for Pokémon, I feel their true character comes through most in their independent games, like Jerry Boy, HarmoKnight and Pulseman. They're relentlessly creative, and have a history of consistently lovable titles with great art, music and writing behind them. Pocket Card Jockey is a surprisingly funny game, and can blindside you with its dialogue and characters, while maintaining a friendly, unassuming appearance. It isn't afraid to go full shonen anime for the more intense races, transporting your steed into a neon-filled techno dimension as you rapidly draw cards looking for a 7 to place on a board full of 6s and 8s. Something like this could easily become dry and predictable, but Game Freak have enough tricks up their sleeve to make sure you're always having a good time.
Pocket Card Jockey was initially a 3DS eShop game, and was later revived as the Apple Arcade mobile title, 'Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On'. That's the game that's been ported to Switch. There isn't too much to distinguish between the two games, with the bulk of content, including the script, horses and races, being pulled from that original 3DS entry, though the fully modelled 3D races are a flashy new tweak. There are some low-level changes to the ruleset beyond that, but after a race or two, you'll forget all about them. The real change is how the game has been reconfigured for a single-screen format, and subsequently, a home console. The sacrifices are comparable to Splatoon or Mario Maker's Switch sequels, without a second screen to provide useful information. It also plays a lot slower with a pad than a stylus, with a lot of the design clearly tailored towards a touchscreen, though you don't have to give that up if you're playing in handheld mode. The controls have been mapped quite carefully for those who do opt for the big screen experience, though, and there's a real satisfaction in flicking the right analogue stick to draw a new card. It's not a game that works as well here as it did on the 3DS, but they're trying their best.
Be honest with yourself, though. Are you really going back to play your 3DS on the reg again? If you are, good for you. I'm sure you'll enjoy the original. For the rest of us, we're much more inclined to turn to the Switch when it's time to play a game, and it's great to have Pocket Card Jockey as one of our selectable games. It's welcoming, cheap, compelling, and sessions can run from five minutes to all day, depending on what you're willing to put in to it. Look at my top five favourite games, and you'll see that four of them are available to play on the Switch. In a robust library of all-time classics, it's really great to see Pocket Card Jockey come into the fold.
Its premise is actually quite relatable for me. Your protagonist wants to be able to win horse races, but has no aptitude for it. They're better at card games. Through a deal with god, you're allowed to compete in horse races via the medium of quick-fire games of solitaire.
This isn't just a fun facade to put on the front of a card game, though. It's not like a licenced pachinko or pinball machine with funny animations. This is a horse racing game first, and a solitaire game second. You choose a good horse based on their natural statistics, develop their skills as much as you can in each race, and attempt to carry them through a career before they grow too old and get sent to the farm to produce offspring. Between each game of solitaire, you'll need to decide where best to line them up with the rest of the pack to maintain speed and stamina, while sticking close to the inside lane for oncoming corners. You're making decisions as a jockey, and relying on your abilities as a card shark to stay competitive.
The solitaire stuff is dead simple, but deliberately so. Cards are arranged randomly in the tableau in front of you, with you drawing cards at random from your deck. If your drawn card is one number higher or lower than the one on top of a stack, you can remove it from the game. Clear the board quickly, and your stamina loss will be negligible. Don't clear it in time, or run out of cards before all the cards are removed, and you'll really feel the impact. One bad hand can ruin an entire career, and you'll be struggling to make anything of your horse before it's time to move to a new one.
It's how frequently your focus is shifted that makes Pocket Card Jockey so addictive. In the heat of each solitaire game, your whole attention is on drawing the right numbers, and looking out for good sequences of cards to leave on the table for a big combo down the line. Then you zoom out, and you're back to the race, watching stats and trying to find the best place to set yourself. Then you zoom out further, and you're looking at your horse's career, trying to pick the best races to put them in, and buying items to boost their abilities. And you can zoom out further still, trying to make sure you've got a good horse waiting for you afterwards, and picking out good breeding pairs. There's constant distractions, but that sense of momentum never goes away. It's all headed in the trajectory of becoming a champion.
This is all well and good, but what really holds Pocket Card Jockey together is its charm. If you hadn't known already, this is a Game Freak joint. While they're, understandably, most known for Pokémon, I feel their true character comes through most in their independent games, like Jerry Boy, HarmoKnight and Pulseman. They're relentlessly creative, and have a history of consistently lovable titles with great art, music and writing behind them. Pocket Card Jockey is a surprisingly funny game, and can blindside you with its dialogue and characters, while maintaining a friendly, unassuming appearance. It isn't afraid to go full shonen anime for the more intense races, transporting your steed into a neon-filled techno dimension as you rapidly draw cards looking for a 7 to place on a board full of 6s and 8s. Something like this could easily become dry and predictable, but Game Freak have enough tricks up their sleeve to make sure you're always having a good time.
Pocket Card Jockey was initially a 3DS eShop game, and was later revived as the Apple Arcade mobile title, 'Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On'. That's the game that's been ported to Switch. There isn't too much to distinguish between the two games, with the bulk of content, including the script, horses and races, being pulled from that original 3DS entry, though the fully modelled 3D races are a flashy new tweak. There are some low-level changes to the ruleset beyond that, but after a race or two, you'll forget all about them. The real change is how the game has been reconfigured for a single-screen format, and subsequently, a home console. The sacrifices are comparable to Splatoon or Mario Maker's Switch sequels, without a second screen to provide useful information. It also plays a lot slower with a pad than a stylus, with a lot of the design clearly tailored towards a touchscreen, though you don't have to give that up if you're playing in handheld mode. The controls have been mapped quite carefully for those who do opt for the big screen experience, though, and there's a real satisfaction in flicking the right analogue stick to draw a new card. It's not a game that works as well here as it did on the 3DS, but they're trying their best.
Be honest with yourself, though. Are you really going back to play your 3DS on the reg again? If you are, good for you. I'm sure you'll enjoy the original. For the rest of us, we're much more inclined to turn to the Switch when it's time to play a game, and it's great to have Pocket Card Jockey as one of our selectable games. It's welcoming, cheap, compelling, and sessions can run from five minutes to all day, depending on what you're willing to put in to it. Look at my top five favourite games, and you'll see that four of them are available to play on the Switch. In a robust library of all-time classics, it's really great to see Pocket Card Jockey come into the fold.
2024
Man, it's something else to vanquish a white whale. Tomb Raider was one of the first 3D games I ever played, and I've always had a real respect for it, but christ was it fussy. On PS1, where you're dealing with save crystals, load times, fairly limited draw distance and 1MB memory card read/write speeds, it takes a special kind of patience to make it past St Francis' Folly, and once the marvel of playing a game in 3D started to wear off, fewer and fewer people were willing to pass the threshold.
This kind of thing is what the Nintendo Switch has been all about, for me. How miraculously it can reframe impenetrable, pisstaking old games and make them fun again. I'm so glad that someone decided they ought to put the old Tomb Raiders on this thing.
For all the frustration and tedium that the original game has come to represent, it's difficult to see the Official UK PlayStation Magazine 10/10 that lies beyond all of that. Not only is the game a real technical achievement, there's a great sense of character to Tomb Raider 1 that drifted away as the wider media got overexcited about big boobs. An air of elegance to the consistent control system, the ambient, synthesised choral soundtrack and these huge, labyrinthian caverns hiding elaborate ancient relics. That isn't everything, though. There's a balance between this side of the game, and the game's absurd Hot Wheels playset from Hell stupidity. Aqueducts swarming with crocodiles, and elaborate ancient traps protected by starving lions and furious gorillas. Despite how deeply the series' lore has been mined, I didn't see any credit for the inexplicable cowboy boss beyond "the cowboy". The game's filled with big, mad, daft stuff, and I love it.
Tomb Raider was a massively influential game. It's easily forgotten, given how much the industry propped up Mario 64 as "The 3D Game" a year later, but I don't think you get an Ocarina of Time without Core Design's influence. When developers were still figuring out what verticality could offer a game, here's Lara Croft backflipping into elevated passageways and swandiving from slides. Compare that to mid-nineties 3D adventures like Descent or Jumping Flash, and you really have to marvel at how confidently Core were able to take on this design challenge. It's all owed to how strict its controls are, borrowing from cinematic platformers like Another World and Flashback. When jumping lands you in the same spot each time, you know the most interesting spots to place each successive platform. Level layouts are consistently clever and imaginative, but it never forgets that human beings are playing the game. There's a balance between strict, Sokoban-style logic puzzles, and wild spectacle. Sometimes they just let you chill out in a big room to look at a neat sphinx.
There's a solid sense of progression through each of the game's levels, and it gets freakin' bananas by the end. Starting out running through cold, undecorated caverns, and ending up in a giant gold pyramid, with fleshy, pulsing organic walls. Tomb Raider speculates that beyond the Aztec blowpipe traps and rusted old switches, there are 20th century living dinosaurs, roaming under our feet, cordoned off in a special jungle room, behind an elaborate clockwork water puzzle. They've been there all along, but no explorer in human history was clever enough to get past Level 2 until Lara came along. I love this stuff.
The Quality of Life stuff in this 2024 release is fairly conservative, but beautifully exploitable. You can save anywhere now, and don't have to worry about memory card management to do so, but I'd argue the more meaningfully transformative addition is the Photo Mode. Click in both analogue sticks, and you'll have full control over the floating camera. Not only can you take rockin' shots of the game's low-poly crocs, you can use it to scout out passageways and dangerous trap sequences whenever you like. Not having a map screen is kind of crucial to the Tomb Raider experience, but being able to quickly check underwater to see if you missed a switch or item, instead of clambering down from the tricky precipice you're standing on, is such a relief. Use it judiciously, and it doesn't make the game feel any less perilous or thrilling, but it takes out so much of the busywork.
I love Tomb Raider. In no way would I ever recommend it to anyone who doesn't already have a strong taste for this era of game design, though. Everything takes so fucking long. If you have to push a block multiple times, it's going to be a long night, my friend. For as strong a design principle as the restrictive grid-based structure is, it also turns a lot of the experience into an overwrought sequence of wobbling into the correct position. Every mandatory switch you need to pull needs to be successfully wobbled towards before you can activate them, and in puzzles with multiple switches, this can be agonisingly tedious. There are the optional "modern controls", but I'd suggest using them would be akin to driving a car with your face. Don't look at Tomb Raider as if it's a big blockbuster action game for fans of thrills. You have to be a very boring old prick to stick with this shit.
I'm really glad I did, though. Tomb Raider is a very different idea of how to design a 3D game, and it makes a great argument for doing it this way. Sure, these principles lead to the all-time studio crushing embarrassment that was Angel of Darkness, but they also gave us everything Fumito Ueda's ever made. There's such a rich sense of satisfaction to successfully navigating the game in a way that Crystal Dynamics have never managed to replicate. In a world filled with Yellow Paint and Unlock Everything DLC packs, you need a little Tomb Raider 1 to remind you what a game can be. We were heroes, once.
This kind of thing is what the Nintendo Switch has been all about, for me. How miraculously it can reframe impenetrable, pisstaking old games and make them fun again. I'm so glad that someone decided they ought to put the old Tomb Raiders on this thing.
For all the frustration and tedium that the original game has come to represent, it's difficult to see the Official UK PlayStation Magazine 10/10 that lies beyond all of that. Not only is the game a real technical achievement, there's a great sense of character to Tomb Raider 1 that drifted away as the wider media got overexcited about big boobs. An air of elegance to the consistent control system, the ambient, synthesised choral soundtrack and these huge, labyrinthian caverns hiding elaborate ancient relics. That isn't everything, though. There's a balance between this side of the game, and the game's absurd Hot Wheels playset from Hell stupidity. Aqueducts swarming with crocodiles, and elaborate ancient traps protected by starving lions and furious gorillas. Despite how deeply the series' lore has been mined, I didn't see any credit for the inexplicable cowboy boss beyond "the cowboy". The game's filled with big, mad, daft stuff, and I love it.
Tomb Raider was a massively influential game. It's easily forgotten, given how much the industry propped up Mario 64 as "The 3D Game" a year later, but I don't think you get an Ocarina of Time without Core Design's influence. When developers were still figuring out what verticality could offer a game, here's Lara Croft backflipping into elevated passageways and swandiving from slides. Compare that to mid-nineties 3D adventures like Descent or Jumping Flash, and you really have to marvel at how confidently Core were able to take on this design challenge. It's all owed to how strict its controls are, borrowing from cinematic platformers like Another World and Flashback. When jumping lands you in the same spot each time, you know the most interesting spots to place each successive platform. Level layouts are consistently clever and imaginative, but it never forgets that human beings are playing the game. There's a balance between strict, Sokoban-style logic puzzles, and wild spectacle. Sometimes they just let you chill out in a big room to look at a neat sphinx.
There's a solid sense of progression through each of the game's levels, and it gets freakin' bananas by the end. Starting out running through cold, undecorated caverns, and ending up in a giant gold pyramid, with fleshy, pulsing organic walls. Tomb Raider speculates that beyond the Aztec blowpipe traps and rusted old switches, there are 20th century living dinosaurs, roaming under our feet, cordoned off in a special jungle room, behind an elaborate clockwork water puzzle. They've been there all along, but no explorer in human history was clever enough to get past Level 2 until Lara came along. I love this stuff.
The Quality of Life stuff in this 2024 release is fairly conservative, but beautifully exploitable. You can save anywhere now, and don't have to worry about memory card management to do so, but I'd argue the more meaningfully transformative addition is the Photo Mode. Click in both analogue sticks, and you'll have full control over the floating camera. Not only can you take rockin' shots of the game's low-poly crocs, you can use it to scout out passageways and dangerous trap sequences whenever you like. Not having a map screen is kind of crucial to the Tomb Raider experience, but being able to quickly check underwater to see if you missed a switch or item, instead of clambering down from the tricky precipice you're standing on, is such a relief. Use it judiciously, and it doesn't make the game feel any less perilous or thrilling, but it takes out so much of the busywork.
I love Tomb Raider. In no way would I ever recommend it to anyone who doesn't already have a strong taste for this era of game design, though. Everything takes so fucking long. If you have to push a block multiple times, it's going to be a long night, my friend. For as strong a design principle as the restrictive grid-based structure is, it also turns a lot of the experience into an overwrought sequence of wobbling into the correct position. Every mandatory switch you need to pull needs to be successfully wobbled towards before you can activate them, and in puzzles with multiple switches, this can be agonisingly tedious. There are the optional "modern controls", but I'd suggest using them would be akin to driving a car with your face. Don't look at Tomb Raider as if it's a big blockbuster action game for fans of thrills. You have to be a very boring old prick to stick with this shit.
I'm really glad I did, though. Tomb Raider is a very different idea of how to design a 3D game, and it makes a great argument for doing it this way. Sure, these principles lead to the all-time studio crushing embarrassment that was Angel of Darkness, but they also gave us everything Fumito Ueda's ever made. There's such a rich sense of satisfaction to successfully navigating the game in a way that Crystal Dynamics have never managed to replicate. In a world filled with Yellow Paint and Unlock Everything DLC packs, you need a little Tomb Raider 1 to remind you what a game can be. We were heroes, once.
1983
Have you ever heard anyone under 40 tell you they're a fan of Donkey Kong Jr? They're full of it.
There's superficial reasons to be fond of Jr, clearly. The "Junior" sequel concept is a charming piece of 80s ephemera, and it's arguable that there was no better mark of Miyamoto's early success than when his concept had a direct influence on the franchise he was initially inspired by. It's also more Donkey Kong, and it plays similarly to the first game. You can picture the arcade scene as Donkey Kong veterans developed techniques and shared strategies. That was an era when hard games were in vogue. I remember the old guard's lukewarm response to Sonic 1 because it didn't take a full week of retries to get through Scrap Brain Zone. Of course they liked Donkey Kong Jr.
The thing is, Jr isn't nearly as coherent as Donkey Kong. You can look at a Donkey Kong screen and intuitively know what to do. Even the Pie Factory doesn't take much trial and error to figure out. In Junior, everything moves constantly. So much of this lush, natural jungle is operated on conveyor belts and pulley systems. You'll lose so many Credits as you figure out the routes and precise timing required to get through each screen. Just be glad Mario is a hero these days. He makes quite a vindictive villain.
I think the central hook of Donkey Kong Jr. are the vines. They're fun to work with. Hold one and you'll climb half-speed, while climbing with one in each hand gives you twice the speed while making you vulnerable to twice as many Snapjaws. They feel like the game's core innovation. I kind of wish they had a little more focus here, though. This was still the age of QIX and Pipemania. Simple games with one core mechanic that could be explored through increasingly challenging levels in a snappy, satisfying little game. Tying this to Donkey Kong comes with the expectation of variety though, and no other idea in the game is nearly as much fun to work with. Most of the time, it feels like Ice Climber horseshit. There's a good chance this game will remain a struggle for you well after your tenth playthrough.
They became one of the most reliable publishers in the industry immediately afterwards, but a Nintendo success in the early 80s was a rare gem. Try five random pre-Super Mario Bros titles from them, and feel your respect for Balloon Fight grow immeasurably. Alongside Clu Clu Land and Urban Champion, you can see why Donkey Kong Junior used to be one of the safest Famicom purchases. If you learn all the tricks, you might appreciate the higher difficulty. Once you become familiar with the original game, you can play through its three or four levels over and over again without trying. Its algorithms are too predictable, and your strategies become iron-clad. Junior has bullshit with a moving vine that's only graspable for a split-second, and Nintendo's worst trampoline ever.
Of course, it's fair to have affection for Donkey Kong Junior. We all like seeing him driving a funny little car in Super Mario Kart. It doesn't live up to the original, though. It's easy to see why Nintendo were so eager to run away from it once its original generation of arcade fans grew bored of it. Mario Bros has become the real sequel, and it's a far superior platformer, exploring the potential of running and jumping far more compellingly. These days, Mario is nice, Donkey Kong is nice, Nintendo make good games. Let's just forget this ever happened.
There's superficial reasons to be fond of Jr, clearly. The "Junior" sequel concept is a charming piece of 80s ephemera, and it's arguable that there was no better mark of Miyamoto's early success than when his concept had a direct influence on the franchise he was initially inspired by. It's also more Donkey Kong, and it plays similarly to the first game. You can picture the arcade scene as Donkey Kong veterans developed techniques and shared strategies. That was an era when hard games were in vogue. I remember the old guard's lukewarm response to Sonic 1 because it didn't take a full week of retries to get through Scrap Brain Zone. Of course they liked Donkey Kong Jr.
The thing is, Jr isn't nearly as coherent as Donkey Kong. You can look at a Donkey Kong screen and intuitively know what to do. Even the Pie Factory doesn't take much trial and error to figure out. In Junior, everything moves constantly. So much of this lush, natural jungle is operated on conveyor belts and pulley systems. You'll lose so many Credits as you figure out the routes and precise timing required to get through each screen. Just be glad Mario is a hero these days. He makes quite a vindictive villain.
I think the central hook of Donkey Kong Jr. are the vines. They're fun to work with. Hold one and you'll climb half-speed, while climbing with one in each hand gives you twice the speed while making you vulnerable to twice as many Snapjaws. They feel like the game's core innovation. I kind of wish they had a little more focus here, though. This was still the age of QIX and Pipemania. Simple games with one core mechanic that could be explored through increasingly challenging levels in a snappy, satisfying little game. Tying this to Donkey Kong comes with the expectation of variety though, and no other idea in the game is nearly as much fun to work with. Most of the time, it feels like Ice Climber horseshit. There's a good chance this game will remain a struggle for you well after your tenth playthrough.
They became one of the most reliable publishers in the industry immediately afterwards, but a Nintendo success in the early 80s was a rare gem. Try five random pre-Super Mario Bros titles from them, and feel your respect for Balloon Fight grow immeasurably. Alongside Clu Clu Land and Urban Champion, you can see why Donkey Kong Junior used to be one of the safest Famicom purchases. If you learn all the tricks, you might appreciate the higher difficulty. Once you become familiar with the original game, you can play through its three or four levels over and over again without trying. Its algorithms are too predictable, and your strategies become iron-clad. Junior has bullshit with a moving vine that's only graspable for a split-second, and Nintendo's worst trampoline ever.
Of course, it's fair to have affection for Donkey Kong Junior. We all like seeing him driving a funny little car in Super Mario Kart. It doesn't live up to the original, though. It's easy to see why Nintendo were so eager to run away from it once its original generation of arcade fans grew bored of it. Mario Bros has become the real sequel, and it's a far superior platformer, exploring the potential of running and jumping far more compellingly. These days, Mario is nice, Donkey Kong is nice, Nintendo make good games. Let's just forget this ever happened.
Here's your hook - LUNLUN SUPERHEROBABYS DX was developed by a mother for her six children. What's the development story behind your last videogame purchase? You feeling good about yourself now, huh?
LUNLUN SUPERHEROBABYS DX is a very unusual game, and there's not a lot of documentation on it online (particularly not in English), but when I mentioned I was playing the game on Twitter, I was retweeted by the legend, LunLun Games herself, giving me a little more insight into this curious home project.
£4-ish on the eShop, the description tells us that Baby Lunlun has "been eaten by the giant & evil Boss Poo!", and we have to help him escape, platforming, boosting and hammering his away through the poo's innards. You start in a sort of Kirby's Adventure-style hub world, flooded with coins, enemies (more poos), and several doorways. Behind each door is a miniboss (mostly poos). In a move perhaps inspired by Breath of the Wild, you can head straight to the finish at any point, but the more minibosses you defeat, the easier the final battle with Boss Poo will be.
At the top-left corner of the screen is a number. This acts as a time counter, health bar and power meter. The more coins you collect and enemies you attack, the higher it rises. Get over a 100 and you'll be able to launch a special attack that can defeat any enemy in an instant. It's actually quite an elegant system.
The central gimmick of LUNLUN SUPERHEROBABYS DX is "Anyone can play!", which the ESRB might have something to say about, as they determine the extensive display of feces makes the game unsuitable for children under the age of 10.
There isn't a lot to rave about in LUNLUN SUPERHEROBABYS DX. While there's an undeniable scruffiness to it, the art and music are surprisingly competent, and the core gameplay is fun enough. The tone is amusingly odd, and that carries through to the writing. Unlike a lot of very cheap, weird eShop games, there's a good degree of game design literacy at display here, with ideas seemingly rooted in Zelda, Gradius, Sonic and Kirby. It's game snob friendly, which is admirable for a game that's only really intended to be an amusing diversion for young children. The game's description suggests that "while the game was made with care for players of all ages, there might be some areas still challenging for some children. Please be a dear and help them out!"
I can't say this is a strong recommendation, but I admire LUNLUN SUPERHEROBABYS DX. Its intentions are very modest, and I appreciate that. I don't expect a mother of six to be able to create a top-tier videogame on her own, but this is a charming little release. I just hope I'm not the only baby amused by it.
LUNLUN SUPERHEROBABYS DX is a very unusual game, and there's not a lot of documentation on it online (particularly not in English), but when I mentioned I was playing the game on Twitter, I was retweeted by the legend, LunLun Games herself, giving me a little more insight into this curious home project.
£4-ish on the eShop, the description tells us that Baby Lunlun has "been eaten by the giant & evil Boss Poo!", and we have to help him escape, platforming, boosting and hammering his away through the poo's innards. You start in a sort of Kirby's Adventure-style hub world, flooded with coins, enemies (more poos), and several doorways. Behind each door is a miniboss (mostly poos). In a move perhaps inspired by Breath of the Wild, you can head straight to the finish at any point, but the more minibosses you defeat, the easier the final battle with Boss Poo will be.
At the top-left corner of the screen is a number. This acts as a time counter, health bar and power meter. The more coins you collect and enemies you attack, the higher it rises. Get over a 100 and you'll be able to launch a special attack that can defeat any enemy in an instant. It's actually quite an elegant system.
The central gimmick of LUNLUN SUPERHEROBABYS DX is "Anyone can play!", which the ESRB might have something to say about, as they determine the extensive display of feces makes the game unsuitable for children under the age of 10.
There isn't a lot to rave about in LUNLUN SUPERHEROBABYS DX. While there's an undeniable scruffiness to it, the art and music are surprisingly competent, and the core gameplay is fun enough. The tone is amusingly odd, and that carries through to the writing. Unlike a lot of very cheap, weird eShop games, there's a good degree of game design literacy at display here, with ideas seemingly rooted in Zelda, Gradius, Sonic and Kirby. It's game snob friendly, which is admirable for a game that's only really intended to be an amusing diversion for young children. The game's description suggests that "while the game was made with care for players of all ages, there might be some areas still challenging for some children. Please be a dear and help them out!"
I can't say this is a strong recommendation, but I admire LUNLUN SUPERHEROBABYS DX. Its intentions are very modest, and I appreciate that. I don't expect a mother of six to be able to create a top-tier videogame on her own, but this is a charming little release. I just hope I'm not the only baby amused by it.
I don't feel fully qualified to discuss Gunfighter II's technical issues, given the fact that the copy I bought last week came with an enormous, deep scar on the disc. Who knows how much of my experience can be attributed to that. It mainly seemed to affect the "NOW SAVING - DO NOT TURN OFF" screen, which would take up to a full minute to bypass as the audio glitched out. I don't like to use that worn-out "cursed" patter, but it was clear that I was never going to come back to the misery of running this disc. I either had to do it tonight, or face the very real possibility that it would never play again.
Gunfighter II is a sequel to a Q4 2001 PS1 lightgun game. It doesn't appear to have been brought into production because of the prior game's success, but the idea that these games cost nothing to make and can be thrown together in a month. This is a game from UK developer, Rebellion, years before their cult success with the Sniper Elite series. Their recent history featured titles like The Mummy, Largo Winch and the GBA version of Snood.
Let's talk about the things I like. Both Gunfighter games take obvious inspiration from Time Crisis 1. You reload while ducking behind cover, run from spot to spot, and your gun can take down enemies in a single shot (unfortunately, there are a few too many exceptions to this in Gunfighter II). I've also come to accept I really enjoy wild west settings. Saloons, canyons, desert bandit encampments, singing sorrowful campfire songs to your horse... that stuff all sounds pretty good to me. I could subsist on a diet of bourbon and beans quite happily. Rebellion understand the potential of its theme, and levels explore a good number of those old tropes. The game even utilises the G-Con 2's more advanced tracking for a duel at high noon with the final boss. Cracking.
Let's get into it, then.
Gunfighter II makes one thing abundantly clear - Lightgun games really need strong art direction. Time Crisis was so lucky having mid-nineties Namco on its side. Everything in Gunfighter II is a shade of brown. Not in the way that people talk about PS3 FPS games. I really mean it. It's really difficult to pick out distant enemies, and the game is chock-full of them. And there's innocent victims to avoid too, looking much the same as the criminals. The game really could have used a few Roy Rogers-types. There isn't a single sequin behind all the dust.
Animation quality runs on a scale from charmingly amateurish to concerningly malfunctional. Shoot an enemy multiple times, and they'll shift instantly between poses like you're flicking through Smash Bros trophies. There's even a handful of in-engine cutscenes through the campaign, and it's very funny when they attempt to do a cool close-up on these WWF Smackdown background models.
Enemy hitboxes are some of the fussiest I've ever encountered in a lightgun game. You may argue that I'm not as good a shot as I might like to think, but each trigger pull comes with an on-screen bulletmark, and a ton of them landed right on these guys' cuntnuts. Take my advice and always aim for the torso. The game doesn't always recognise those shots either, but it's by far the most reliable strategy.
Oh, and the audio's pretty crap. The soundtrack's full of short loops that likely came from an archive of stock music. They cheaped out on this one, making a 2003 PS2 game on CD, and I don't think they were even pushing the limits of the 700mb that offers.
The menus are atrociously designed, and my trusty G-Con 2 even seemed to lose connection during one level, but given the state of the disc I bought, I'm giving the game the benefit of the doubt on those points.
You can do a decent lightgun game on a tight budget. Cunning Developments' Endgame was developed under remarkably similar conditions, with remarkably similar intentions, and it's fucking miles better than this. Nothing special, obviously, but I saw that game in Tesco's for a tenner, and if my memory serves me, this was at least double the price at launch. I guess that goes to show why those guys were brought on to do Metroid Prime Pinball, while Rebellion were still stuck in the dirt, doing PSP versions of Gun and From Russia with Love. (Mind you, their version of Miami Vice was shockingly decent.)
You're never going to play this, and I never would have either, but it was one of the last three PS2 lightgun games on my list, and I found a £7 copy on an otherwise fruitless trip into town. I do not have any immediate desire to play either Resident Evil Survivor 2: Code Veronica, or Cocoto Funfair, but I can see that hunger on the horizon, and my bounty list is getting mighty short.
I'm awarding this one an extra half-star because the horses don't take damage when you shoot them. I just hope the travelling surgeon doesn't get too cross with me when they discover how much careless lead I put into them.
Gunfighter II is a sequel to a Q4 2001 PS1 lightgun game. It doesn't appear to have been brought into production because of the prior game's success, but the idea that these games cost nothing to make and can be thrown together in a month. This is a game from UK developer, Rebellion, years before their cult success with the Sniper Elite series. Their recent history featured titles like The Mummy, Largo Winch and the GBA version of Snood.
Let's talk about the things I like. Both Gunfighter games take obvious inspiration from Time Crisis 1. You reload while ducking behind cover, run from spot to spot, and your gun can take down enemies in a single shot (unfortunately, there are a few too many exceptions to this in Gunfighter II). I've also come to accept I really enjoy wild west settings. Saloons, canyons, desert bandit encampments, singing sorrowful campfire songs to your horse... that stuff all sounds pretty good to me. I could subsist on a diet of bourbon and beans quite happily. Rebellion understand the potential of its theme, and levels explore a good number of those old tropes. The game even utilises the G-Con 2's more advanced tracking for a duel at high noon with the final boss. Cracking.
Let's get into it, then.
Gunfighter II makes one thing abundantly clear - Lightgun games really need strong art direction. Time Crisis was so lucky having mid-nineties Namco on its side. Everything in Gunfighter II is a shade of brown. Not in the way that people talk about PS3 FPS games. I really mean it. It's really difficult to pick out distant enemies, and the game is chock-full of them. And there's innocent victims to avoid too, looking much the same as the criminals. The game really could have used a few Roy Rogers-types. There isn't a single sequin behind all the dust.
Animation quality runs on a scale from charmingly amateurish to concerningly malfunctional. Shoot an enemy multiple times, and they'll shift instantly between poses like you're flicking through Smash Bros trophies. There's even a handful of in-engine cutscenes through the campaign, and it's very funny when they attempt to do a cool close-up on these WWF Smackdown background models.
Enemy hitboxes are some of the fussiest I've ever encountered in a lightgun game. You may argue that I'm not as good a shot as I might like to think, but each trigger pull comes with an on-screen bulletmark, and a ton of them landed right on these guys' cuntnuts. Take my advice and always aim for the torso. The game doesn't always recognise those shots either, but it's by far the most reliable strategy.
Oh, and the audio's pretty crap. The soundtrack's full of short loops that likely came from an archive of stock music. They cheaped out on this one, making a 2003 PS2 game on CD, and I don't think they were even pushing the limits of the 700mb that offers.
The menus are atrociously designed, and my trusty G-Con 2 even seemed to lose connection during one level, but given the state of the disc I bought, I'm giving the game the benefit of the doubt on those points.
You can do a decent lightgun game on a tight budget. Cunning Developments' Endgame was developed under remarkably similar conditions, with remarkably similar intentions, and it's fucking miles better than this. Nothing special, obviously, but I saw that game in Tesco's for a tenner, and if my memory serves me, this was at least double the price at launch. I guess that goes to show why those guys were brought on to do Metroid Prime Pinball, while Rebellion were still stuck in the dirt, doing PSP versions of Gun and From Russia with Love. (Mind you, their version of Miami Vice was shockingly decent.)
You're never going to play this, and I never would have either, but it was one of the last three PS2 lightgun games on my list, and I found a £7 copy on an otherwise fruitless trip into town. I do not have any immediate desire to play either Resident Evil Survivor 2: Code Veronica, or Cocoto Funfair, but I can see that hunger on the horizon, and my bounty list is getting mighty short.
I'm awarding this one an extra half-star because the horses don't take damage when you shoot them. I just hope the travelling surgeon doesn't get too cross with me when they discover how much careless lead I put into them.