ACTIONBUTTONNET
2007
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“DESTINED FOR THE BARGAIN BIN IN SIX MONTHS' TIME”
I really, really wanted to love this game. I wanted to champion it as my own, a game I could love and not have to compete with anyone for that love — a game like cavia’s Ghost in the Shell or Drag-on Dragoon 2. It has all the hallmarks I look for — forget playability or graphics or what have you, I want names, and this game had them: Yoshiki “Street Fighter II” Okamoto, Kozy “Shin Megami Tensei” Okada, and even Hirohiko “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” Araki.
Well, that last name is kind of a long story — Araki actually had nothing to do with the creation of the game. Why is his name on the box, then? I have no idea. It’s there, though. It’s even better than being on the box — it’s on a sticker stuck to the shrink-wrap. I have a friend who works in the Japanese videogame box art trade. My friend says a sticker on the box is never a last-minute idea — there are hour-long presentations about meetings about these sorts of things. Quoth Araki, on the sticker (fairy-like, limp-wristed, foppish grammatical lisp added by yours truly), “Might this game have been inspired by my manga’s ‘Stand’ attacks? Oh my, I do believe it might have been!” Araki’s signature is a beauty to behold, scripted like a master calligrapher who’s experimented with either drugs or rock and roll. The sticker shines dully, half gold, half purple, like two colors plucked off a vintage JoJo manga volume cover on which a man poses like a wall-painting in an Egyptian tomb, dodging intercontinental ballistic missiles. I see it, and recall my youth, dangling beneath weapons of mass destruction with a machinegun in my beefy arms — or maybe that was Contra. Et cetera.
Why was Araki’s name shoehorned onto this game? A hundred reasons, and all of them are bubble-like flashes on one hot pan. The key ingredient is that the developers had no names left. Who the hell knows Yoshiki Okamoto, in this age of Brain Training and games appealing to the casual market? There are those (like me) who revere the man as something of a demigod who enters boardrooms and bathrooms alike with the sound of a bitching, asbestos-shattering overdriven power chord. We recall his faux-hawked visage every time we scream “SHORYUKEN” as we ejaculate beneath our girlfriends. Likewise, every time I see a hopped-up family restaurant waitress with razor cuts running down her arms, I think of Kozy Okada’s games, and how they most certainly didn’t make her that way. Two men — one capable of bringing the action, the other capable of bringing the atmosphere. There’s no way a collaboration could go wrong. And it didn’t, kind of. It just didn’t go right.
Originally, this game was planned as Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms. This was to semantically link it to Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner, a beyond-sweet PSP monster-catching game with brooding teenagers as the main character (think Pokemon for pop-punk-rockers); though seeing as Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner was kind of a flop, they figured they could rename the pseudo-sequel whatever they wanted and not stuff off too many cosplayers. Besides, what better way to differentiate Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms from Monster Hunter, Monster Rancher, and Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom?
What had started as something of a friendly bet between Okada and Okamoto, two rivals with different dreams, two men whose names both begin with the name kanji, two men who had both fled the companies they had helped put on the map, has now graduated into a matter of life and death. This was supposed to be Okamoto’s game; well, now it’s both of theirs. Okamoto had his chance to regain his former splendor with Genji on the PlayStation 2; likewise, Okada had had Monster Kingdom on the PSP. These two runaway game designers must have figured that, by now, they’d be back on top, and ready to release hot, original creations. Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms was to be the first such creation for Okamoto.
I looked forward to it with turgid excitement. After all, Monster Kingdom on PSP had had an excellent soundtrack, filled with contributions from the almighty Yasunori Mitsuda, the saintly Hitoshi Sakimoto, the lordlike Kenji Eno, and the occasionally amusing Yoko Shimomura, among other people with Japanese names. The resulting soundtrack was amazing; the two or three tracks submitted by each composer highlighted all the best aspects of their respective composing styles. To hear Mr. Okada explain it, he’d selected multiple composers because that would be the best way to ensure maximum quality. He picked them all to do tracks that he personally felt they would excel at. Yasunori Mitsuda got the opening movie, for example. I liked the way Okada described it. It made me interested in his little Monster Kingdom project. It seemed like a series of gamers’ games. The PSP outing was, already, something like Pokemon to be played by kids who might have already started smoking.
Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms ended up retitled Folkssoul, which is probably the worst name a videogame has ever had (the English title will be Folklore, which is better, if super-bland), though all the fancy word combinations in the world can’t hide the fact that it’s just another action game.
There were hopes that it’d be something of the Romancing SaGa of action games. These hopes were mostly mine. I fantasized semi-sexually about the game for something like six months. I’d played it at Tokyo Game Show, where, at Sony’s booth, the demo stations were equipped with the same television that I have at home, and I thought, hey, this game isn’t bad . . . maybe! Well! It’s definitely not terrible! It had some smooth crunch to it. A quick glance at a brochure and I knew enough to make me want this game, hard: you play as Keats, a long-coat-wearing, bespectacled, long-haired, stubble-faced columnist for a “third-rate occult magazine” (yes!) called “Unknown Realms“. (Or as a mostly bland girl named Elena, a proverbial Pokemon trainer out to catch her own dead mother.) One day, as research for a story, you go to the town of Lemrick, Ireland, where it’s rumored that average people can be reunited with the souls of their dead loved ones. Following a few spooky events, you’re allowed entrance into the Netherworld, home of over a hundred collectible monsters.
As you fight and defeat monsters, you can choose to suck their soul out of their bodies. When you do this, you can then use the monster to fight other monsters. “Just like Pokemon!” you might say. And you’d be half-wrong. Because Folkssoul is an action game. Press the L2 button to open a quick menu that displays all your monsters. You can sort them by category (defensive, magical, blunt, slashing, smashing, et cetera) or by which region of the world you found them in. Highlight a monster and press one of the four face buttons to set that monster to that button. Now, press the L2 button again to resume the game. If you’ve set a little slashing goblin to the square button, pressing the square button will result in your main character slashing with his arm, while a lifelike (hologram-like?) shadow of the slashing goblin appears a few inches in front of his body. Different monsters have different attack speeds and ranges, and some monsters have attacks that lead directly into other monsters’ attacks, which means that, yes, you can build your own multi-tiered combos. FIght enough with a monster to level it the hell up, resulting in increased strength, more combo hits, et cetera.
So yeah, this game sounds like plenty of fun for the RPG crowd and the spastic, frame-counting Devil May Cry meatheads alike, yeah? Well, kind of “yes”, kind of “no”. Folkssoul‘s ultimate problem is that it doesn’t contain enough of either of its genres for any of its influences to feel worthwhile. As an RPG, the customization is thin and weird — the only way to level up your monsters is to continue sucking the soul of that monster type. This makes sense, I guess, as long as you don’t think of this game as wanting to be exactly like Pokemon and not succeeding. I suppose the game designers didn’t want the player thinking, “Oh, I already have this monster; I can just avoid them, then, and continue through the stage.” Besides, when you already have a Geodude, it’s awesome to use your Squirtle to take down Geodudes in one hit, right?
Except, as an action game, this kind of doesn’t work. Action game players don’t want to be able to equip one weapon that can kill a certain type of enemy in one hit. They don’t want to reconfigure all four of their attacks every time the fight music starts up. They don’t want to even have the option to decimate a certain type of enemy with a certain type of attack, because this will only make them, as super players with super skills, need to use the correct attacks, or else feel inefficient. Forcing the player to be correct or incorrect about what button he uses to kill the bad guys is to shed an eerie, existentially damning light on videogames as a medium: in videogames, you’re either killing an enemy with as few hits as possible, or as many hits as possible. In other words, you’re either getting the enemy out of your sight, or you’re keeping the enemy in your sight for long enough to be considered stylish. Isn’t it pointless, either way? Think about it in this way, and games that focus on enemies who take a “modest” number of hits to kill seem like they might be covering something up.
Oh, well.
And then there’s the blue-balling. If you’ve played Devil May Cry 3, you may remember the experience of entering the tower stage for the first time. After some bitching-awesome battles, you’re forced to wander around aimlessly looking for some key that’ll open a door. Man, what a blue-baller! I got pretty mad at that part, let me tell you. Well, Folkssoul, halfway frightened at a different half of its audience at any given time, has shoehorned a sometimes-infuriating blue-balling structure into each stage, to draw them out to the maximum length. I wouldn’t have a problem with this — I like fighting! I like pressing buttons! I don’t mind backtracking through a stage if it means I get to do more fighting and/or pressing buttons! — so long as the game has a good, quick explanation for why I’m doing what I’m doing.
The game’s explanation, then, is kind of &^#$#ed. In each stage, you’re given a picture book. You have to find the five pages of the picture book. They’re scattered across the stage, usually contained inside — of course — hovering magic stones. As you find the pages, you can read the picture book from your item menu. Each page shows a different monster from the area, as well as a semi-abstract representation of one of the attacks that the boss is going to use. Once all five pages are assembled, you’ll have a step-by-step representation of which monsters you’ll have to use to beat the boss.
If that sounds kind of cool to you, that’s probably only because I’m not done explaining it: you need the picture book, or you can’t fight the boss. Without the picture book, you are not allowed near the boss. And not even by some citizen of the fantasy world, who deems it too difficult — no, there’s no one standing there with arms akimbo, shaking his head, telling you its impossible. There’s usually some barrier. In the first stage, it’s glowing thorns, for example. You can run your character against the thorns, watch him sprinting in place a bit. No dialogue window pops up and says “Get the picture book pages”, probably because the level designers feared that would expose how stupid it is that possessing a book would make magic thorns cease to exist.
If it doesn’t sound terrible yet, that’s probably only because I’m not done explaining it: in order to get all of the pages for the picture book, you need to run back and forth through the stage, searching for the floating magic stones that you can’t destroy with your basic attacks. When you can’t destroy a magic stone with all your current attacks, that means you need a new attack, which means you have to defeat and capture a different kind of monster in order to destroy that stone. Sometimes you’ll poke yourself into an unexplored corner of the map, and see a monster you don’t have yet, only you won’t be able to get to him, because of — yep — a floating row of magic stones of a color you can’t destroy yet. So, being hypothetical, let’s say that you find a yellow magic stone you can’t destroy, and then you see a row of red indestructible magic stones, behind which you can see a monster you don’t own yet. Eventually, you find a monster you haven’t soul-sucked yet; you suck his soul, and try using it against the yellow magic stone. That doesn’t work, so you use it against the red stones blocking the other new monster — it works! You soul-suck the new monster, and use his power to successfully break the yellow stone, and score a picture book page that shows the monster you used to destroy the yellow stone, dodging, say, a flame attack.
It’s kind of ridiculous. Then again, what videogame isn’t? That’s not the question — for all its scattered, hackneyed moments, Devil May Cry 3 manages to remain tightly focused on action. That you’re able to pause the game and change your weapon in Devil May Cry 3 is a fact, not a strategy. At the end of the day, Devil May Cry 3‘s designers chose to make a hardcore action game with multi-layered boss fights and a twitch-tastic parry system. They did this because they had confidence in the essence of their game’s action. Folkssoul‘s producers were obviously just overcompensating, and repeatedly, for what they perceived as a deficit in either of the contributing genres. The story is pretty stuffty in Folkssoul, though they force you to play through these sometimes hour-long actionless segments because they’re convinced that someone out there has to be enjoying it. There you are, wandering around the town, talking to residents, finding photographs in people’s houses, chatting with the bartender, combing the sand on the beach. And for what? So that you can open the portal to the next stage, with more picture book pages, more collectible monsters, more floating magic stones.
Maybe it could have worked as a straight action game. It already has one of those early-1990s Japanese arcade-game plots, and an aesthetic stolen from all the best pop-culture — part Tim Burton (the battle music is very Danny Elfman-inspired), part vintage “Doctor Who” (why else is there an old blue phone box in town square?), part JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (an invisible dandy-man wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask serves as your guide through the Nether-realms) — it could have worked, if only the designers were able to come up with better excuses for why the characters are fighting so much. Or maybe if they’d added some Zelda-like ingenuity or flow to the stages. Or some bosses that you beat by learning their patterns and then improvising grandly, instead of bosses that you beat by tinkering around with your monster menu.
Perhaps the most telling trait of Folkssoul is that, if summarized, on paper, in the fewest of words, it doesn’t seem like a bad game at all. Even the motion sensor controls — yank the controller to pull the souls out of monsters; yank hard for stronger monsters; yank harder, with the correct rhythm, for even stronger monsters — sound like they deserve to exist. Yet there’s a weird, gloppy sheen all over this game’s design document. It screams of the Nintendo Gamecube era, where Nintendo was forcing developers to utilize Gameboy Advance connectivity in some way, any way, and we ended up with mostly-useless remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell or some stuff.
There are plenty of other things I could pick on — like how every time your character gets hit by an enemy, it cancels your camera lock-on with that enemy (very frustrating), or how moronic it is that every time you press the R1 button to begin sucking an enemy’s soul, a big, ugly dialogue pops up on the bottom of the screen: “PRESS THE R3 BUTTON NOW FOR A TUTORIAL!!” I mean, seriously, I think the casual gamers walked away when they saw “FROM YOSHIKI OKAMOTO AND KOZY OKADA” in huge font on the back of the box.
Instead, I’ll try to be nice about the game: I like the voices. They’re pretty bad, yeah, though they transcend typical videogame bad voices by being 1.) Entirely in English, 2.) Entirely in Irish-accented English. And we’re not just talking any Irish accent — it’s like, alien Irish. I’ve been waiting this whole review to put “Aliens from the planet Ireland” into a sentence where it would fit, and I just couldn’t quite get it.
Another plus is the way the screen freezes for the tiniest instant every time your score a hit. The effect is most awesome when you use a multiple-hit attack, like the one big rolling armadillo attack. The screen pauses so you can savor the sparks of impact, and it gets to feeling kind of groovy. I guess that’s the best developers can do, when the controller doesn’t vibrate.
And lastly, the colors: this game’s colors worked overtime to earn 1.79 of the two stars this game was finally awarded. Since the Super Famicom era we’ve been hearing about how many colors a game system can display. (The Super Famicom reported could display any of 32,768 colors, though never all at the same time.) It’s only now that the promises of our childhoods are coming true. This game shines, blooms, radiates, et cetera. This entire game is made up of that one scene in Dragon Quest VIII with the purple carpets, that scene you could show anyone and have them say “Wow, that looks great.” And it has a hell of an amazing box art, as well. If only such things sufficed for a solid game, for well-executed atmosphere.
I liked Game Republic’s first game, Genji, for PS2. I would have liked it more were it not for the abundance of health-recovery items, and the option to use those items at any time in the game. The presence of these items threw off the balance of boss battles, ruining what could have been a snappy, arcade-like experience. Furthermore, the existence of a twitch-fueled one-hit-kill system, while rewarding for pro-level players, was essentially useless for the casuals the game was catering to with all those healing items. Game Republic had chosen the story of Japanese folk hero Yostuffsune because they thought it would get them big recognition, fast, though they also seemingly went out of their way to bastardize the story as postmodernly as possible — the princess, for example, is kidnapped because of her ability to fuse priceless magical gems. I saw Genji as a confused effort, and generously thought that, in the future, Game Republic could go places, if only they kept all of their testicles in the right place, and made games for a specific audience. If they would just think, “What would Devil May Cry do?” they could make a game that earns the respect of the players. Their PSP RPG Brave Story is a focused, deliberate masterpiece. Their third game, Folkssoul (they did not “make” Every Party for Xbox 360, or Genji 2 for PlayStation 3 so much as they rented out their name), is their second effort on a home console, and in it, the stains of their first game seem to have seeped deeper. It’s trying to please everyone at the same time, and you know what they say about pleasing everyone at the same time: you can’t do it. It’s not possible.
Game Republic: get your act together. This game right here will be sitting in the bargain bins in three to six months’ time, and in ten years, I expect to see it on used shelves for five dollars, and I expect to shudder and remember those days early in the PS3’s life, when we would have bought anything. Whether or not I come to regard those days as having ended or not — I suppose that’s all in your hands. For now, though, consider yourselves on academic probation.
★★☆☆
“DESTINED FOR THE BARGAIN BIN IN SIX MONTHS' TIME”
I really, really wanted to love this game. I wanted to champion it as my own, a game I could love and not have to compete with anyone for that love — a game like cavia’s Ghost in the Shell or Drag-on Dragoon 2. It has all the hallmarks I look for — forget playability or graphics or what have you, I want names, and this game had them: Yoshiki “Street Fighter II” Okamoto, Kozy “Shin Megami Tensei” Okada, and even Hirohiko “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” Araki.
Well, that last name is kind of a long story — Araki actually had nothing to do with the creation of the game. Why is his name on the box, then? I have no idea. It’s there, though. It’s even better than being on the box — it’s on a sticker stuck to the shrink-wrap. I have a friend who works in the Japanese videogame box art trade. My friend says a sticker on the box is never a last-minute idea — there are hour-long presentations about meetings about these sorts of things. Quoth Araki, on the sticker (fairy-like, limp-wristed, foppish grammatical lisp added by yours truly), “Might this game have been inspired by my manga’s ‘Stand’ attacks? Oh my, I do believe it might have been!” Araki’s signature is a beauty to behold, scripted like a master calligrapher who’s experimented with either drugs or rock and roll. The sticker shines dully, half gold, half purple, like two colors plucked off a vintage JoJo manga volume cover on which a man poses like a wall-painting in an Egyptian tomb, dodging intercontinental ballistic missiles. I see it, and recall my youth, dangling beneath weapons of mass destruction with a machinegun in my beefy arms — or maybe that was Contra. Et cetera.
Why was Araki’s name shoehorned onto this game? A hundred reasons, and all of them are bubble-like flashes on one hot pan. The key ingredient is that the developers had no names left. Who the hell knows Yoshiki Okamoto, in this age of Brain Training and games appealing to the casual market? There are those (like me) who revere the man as something of a demigod who enters boardrooms and bathrooms alike with the sound of a bitching, asbestos-shattering overdriven power chord. We recall his faux-hawked visage every time we scream “SHORYUKEN” as we ejaculate beneath our girlfriends. Likewise, every time I see a hopped-up family restaurant waitress with razor cuts running down her arms, I think of Kozy Okada’s games, and how they most certainly didn’t make her that way. Two men — one capable of bringing the action, the other capable of bringing the atmosphere. There’s no way a collaboration could go wrong. And it didn’t, kind of. It just didn’t go right.
Originally, this game was planned as Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms. This was to semantically link it to Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner, a beyond-sweet PSP monster-catching game with brooding teenagers as the main character (think Pokemon for pop-punk-rockers); though seeing as Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner was kind of a flop, they figured they could rename the pseudo-sequel whatever they wanted and not stuff off too many cosplayers. Besides, what better way to differentiate Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms from Monster Hunter, Monster Rancher, and Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom?
What had started as something of a friendly bet between Okada and Okamoto, two rivals with different dreams, two men whose names both begin with the name kanji, two men who had both fled the companies they had helped put on the map, has now graduated into a matter of life and death. This was supposed to be Okamoto’s game; well, now it’s both of theirs. Okamoto had his chance to regain his former splendor with Genji on the PlayStation 2; likewise, Okada had had Monster Kingdom on the PSP. These two runaway game designers must have figured that, by now, they’d be back on top, and ready to release hot, original creations. Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms was to be the first such creation for Okamoto.
I looked forward to it with turgid excitement. After all, Monster Kingdom on PSP had had an excellent soundtrack, filled with contributions from the almighty Yasunori Mitsuda, the saintly Hitoshi Sakimoto, the lordlike Kenji Eno, and the occasionally amusing Yoko Shimomura, among other people with Japanese names. The resulting soundtrack was amazing; the two or three tracks submitted by each composer highlighted all the best aspects of their respective composing styles. To hear Mr. Okada explain it, he’d selected multiple composers because that would be the best way to ensure maximum quality. He picked them all to do tracks that he personally felt they would excel at. Yasunori Mitsuda got the opening movie, for example. I liked the way Okada described it. It made me interested in his little Monster Kingdom project. It seemed like a series of gamers’ games. The PSP outing was, already, something like Pokemon to be played by kids who might have already started smoking.
Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms ended up retitled Folkssoul, which is probably the worst name a videogame has ever had (the English title will be Folklore, which is better, if super-bland), though all the fancy word combinations in the world can’t hide the fact that it’s just another action game.
There were hopes that it’d be something of the Romancing SaGa of action games. These hopes were mostly mine. I fantasized semi-sexually about the game for something like six months. I’d played it at Tokyo Game Show, where, at Sony’s booth, the demo stations were equipped with the same television that I have at home, and I thought, hey, this game isn’t bad . . . maybe! Well! It’s definitely not terrible! It had some smooth crunch to it. A quick glance at a brochure and I knew enough to make me want this game, hard: you play as Keats, a long-coat-wearing, bespectacled, long-haired, stubble-faced columnist for a “third-rate occult magazine” (yes!) called “Unknown Realms“. (Or as a mostly bland girl named Elena, a proverbial Pokemon trainer out to catch her own dead mother.) One day, as research for a story, you go to the town of Lemrick, Ireland, where it’s rumored that average people can be reunited with the souls of their dead loved ones. Following a few spooky events, you’re allowed entrance into the Netherworld, home of over a hundred collectible monsters.
As you fight and defeat monsters, you can choose to suck their soul out of their bodies. When you do this, you can then use the monster to fight other monsters. “Just like Pokemon!” you might say. And you’d be half-wrong. Because Folkssoul is an action game. Press the L2 button to open a quick menu that displays all your monsters. You can sort them by category (defensive, magical, blunt, slashing, smashing, et cetera) or by which region of the world you found them in. Highlight a monster and press one of the four face buttons to set that monster to that button. Now, press the L2 button again to resume the game. If you’ve set a little slashing goblin to the square button, pressing the square button will result in your main character slashing with his arm, while a lifelike (hologram-like?) shadow of the slashing goblin appears a few inches in front of his body. Different monsters have different attack speeds and ranges, and some monsters have attacks that lead directly into other monsters’ attacks, which means that, yes, you can build your own multi-tiered combos. FIght enough with a monster to level it the hell up, resulting in increased strength, more combo hits, et cetera.
So yeah, this game sounds like plenty of fun for the RPG crowd and the spastic, frame-counting Devil May Cry meatheads alike, yeah? Well, kind of “yes”, kind of “no”. Folkssoul‘s ultimate problem is that it doesn’t contain enough of either of its genres for any of its influences to feel worthwhile. As an RPG, the customization is thin and weird — the only way to level up your monsters is to continue sucking the soul of that monster type. This makes sense, I guess, as long as you don’t think of this game as wanting to be exactly like Pokemon and not succeeding. I suppose the game designers didn’t want the player thinking, “Oh, I already have this monster; I can just avoid them, then, and continue through the stage.” Besides, when you already have a Geodude, it’s awesome to use your Squirtle to take down Geodudes in one hit, right?
Except, as an action game, this kind of doesn’t work. Action game players don’t want to be able to equip one weapon that can kill a certain type of enemy in one hit. They don’t want to reconfigure all four of their attacks every time the fight music starts up. They don’t want to even have the option to decimate a certain type of enemy with a certain type of attack, because this will only make them, as super players with super skills, need to use the correct attacks, or else feel inefficient. Forcing the player to be correct or incorrect about what button he uses to kill the bad guys is to shed an eerie, existentially damning light on videogames as a medium: in videogames, you’re either killing an enemy with as few hits as possible, or as many hits as possible. In other words, you’re either getting the enemy out of your sight, or you’re keeping the enemy in your sight for long enough to be considered stylish. Isn’t it pointless, either way? Think about it in this way, and games that focus on enemies who take a “modest” number of hits to kill seem like they might be covering something up.
Oh, well.
And then there’s the blue-balling. If you’ve played Devil May Cry 3, you may remember the experience of entering the tower stage for the first time. After some bitching-awesome battles, you’re forced to wander around aimlessly looking for some key that’ll open a door. Man, what a blue-baller! I got pretty mad at that part, let me tell you. Well, Folkssoul, halfway frightened at a different half of its audience at any given time, has shoehorned a sometimes-infuriating blue-balling structure into each stage, to draw them out to the maximum length. I wouldn’t have a problem with this — I like fighting! I like pressing buttons! I don’t mind backtracking through a stage if it means I get to do more fighting and/or pressing buttons! — so long as the game has a good, quick explanation for why I’m doing what I’m doing.
The game’s explanation, then, is kind of &^#$#ed. In each stage, you’re given a picture book. You have to find the five pages of the picture book. They’re scattered across the stage, usually contained inside — of course — hovering magic stones. As you find the pages, you can read the picture book from your item menu. Each page shows a different monster from the area, as well as a semi-abstract representation of one of the attacks that the boss is going to use. Once all five pages are assembled, you’ll have a step-by-step representation of which monsters you’ll have to use to beat the boss.
If that sounds kind of cool to you, that’s probably only because I’m not done explaining it: you need the picture book, or you can’t fight the boss. Without the picture book, you are not allowed near the boss. And not even by some citizen of the fantasy world, who deems it too difficult — no, there’s no one standing there with arms akimbo, shaking his head, telling you its impossible. There’s usually some barrier. In the first stage, it’s glowing thorns, for example. You can run your character against the thorns, watch him sprinting in place a bit. No dialogue window pops up and says “Get the picture book pages”, probably because the level designers feared that would expose how stupid it is that possessing a book would make magic thorns cease to exist.
If it doesn’t sound terrible yet, that’s probably only because I’m not done explaining it: in order to get all of the pages for the picture book, you need to run back and forth through the stage, searching for the floating magic stones that you can’t destroy with your basic attacks. When you can’t destroy a magic stone with all your current attacks, that means you need a new attack, which means you have to defeat and capture a different kind of monster in order to destroy that stone. Sometimes you’ll poke yourself into an unexplored corner of the map, and see a monster you don’t have yet, only you won’t be able to get to him, because of — yep — a floating row of magic stones of a color you can’t destroy yet. So, being hypothetical, let’s say that you find a yellow magic stone you can’t destroy, and then you see a row of red indestructible magic stones, behind which you can see a monster you don’t own yet. Eventually, you find a monster you haven’t soul-sucked yet; you suck his soul, and try using it against the yellow magic stone. That doesn’t work, so you use it against the red stones blocking the other new monster — it works! You soul-suck the new monster, and use his power to successfully break the yellow stone, and score a picture book page that shows the monster you used to destroy the yellow stone, dodging, say, a flame attack.
It’s kind of ridiculous. Then again, what videogame isn’t? That’s not the question — for all its scattered, hackneyed moments, Devil May Cry 3 manages to remain tightly focused on action. That you’re able to pause the game and change your weapon in Devil May Cry 3 is a fact, not a strategy. At the end of the day, Devil May Cry 3‘s designers chose to make a hardcore action game with multi-layered boss fights and a twitch-tastic parry system. They did this because they had confidence in the essence of their game’s action. Folkssoul‘s producers were obviously just overcompensating, and repeatedly, for what they perceived as a deficit in either of the contributing genres. The story is pretty stuffty in Folkssoul, though they force you to play through these sometimes hour-long actionless segments because they’re convinced that someone out there has to be enjoying it. There you are, wandering around the town, talking to residents, finding photographs in people’s houses, chatting with the bartender, combing the sand on the beach. And for what? So that you can open the portal to the next stage, with more picture book pages, more collectible monsters, more floating magic stones.
Maybe it could have worked as a straight action game. It already has one of those early-1990s Japanese arcade-game plots, and an aesthetic stolen from all the best pop-culture — part Tim Burton (the battle music is very Danny Elfman-inspired), part vintage “Doctor Who” (why else is there an old blue phone box in town square?), part JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (an invisible dandy-man wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask serves as your guide through the Nether-realms) — it could have worked, if only the designers were able to come up with better excuses for why the characters are fighting so much. Or maybe if they’d added some Zelda-like ingenuity or flow to the stages. Or some bosses that you beat by learning their patterns and then improvising grandly, instead of bosses that you beat by tinkering around with your monster menu.
Perhaps the most telling trait of Folkssoul is that, if summarized, on paper, in the fewest of words, it doesn’t seem like a bad game at all. Even the motion sensor controls — yank the controller to pull the souls out of monsters; yank hard for stronger monsters; yank harder, with the correct rhythm, for even stronger monsters — sound like they deserve to exist. Yet there’s a weird, gloppy sheen all over this game’s design document. It screams of the Nintendo Gamecube era, where Nintendo was forcing developers to utilize Gameboy Advance connectivity in some way, any way, and we ended up with mostly-useless remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell or some stuff.
There are plenty of other things I could pick on — like how every time your character gets hit by an enemy, it cancels your camera lock-on with that enemy (very frustrating), or how moronic it is that every time you press the R1 button to begin sucking an enemy’s soul, a big, ugly dialogue pops up on the bottom of the screen: “PRESS THE R3 BUTTON NOW FOR A TUTORIAL!!” I mean, seriously, I think the casual gamers walked away when they saw “FROM YOSHIKI OKAMOTO AND KOZY OKADA” in huge font on the back of the box.
Instead, I’ll try to be nice about the game: I like the voices. They’re pretty bad, yeah, though they transcend typical videogame bad voices by being 1.) Entirely in English, 2.) Entirely in Irish-accented English. And we’re not just talking any Irish accent — it’s like, alien Irish. I’ve been waiting this whole review to put “Aliens from the planet Ireland” into a sentence where it would fit, and I just couldn’t quite get it.
Another plus is the way the screen freezes for the tiniest instant every time your score a hit. The effect is most awesome when you use a multiple-hit attack, like the one big rolling armadillo attack. The screen pauses so you can savor the sparks of impact, and it gets to feeling kind of groovy. I guess that’s the best developers can do, when the controller doesn’t vibrate.
And lastly, the colors: this game’s colors worked overtime to earn 1.79 of the two stars this game was finally awarded. Since the Super Famicom era we’ve been hearing about how many colors a game system can display. (The Super Famicom reported could display any of 32,768 colors, though never all at the same time.) It’s only now that the promises of our childhoods are coming true. This game shines, blooms, radiates, et cetera. This entire game is made up of that one scene in Dragon Quest VIII with the purple carpets, that scene you could show anyone and have them say “Wow, that looks great.” And it has a hell of an amazing box art, as well. If only such things sufficed for a solid game, for well-executed atmosphere.
I liked Game Republic’s first game, Genji, for PS2. I would have liked it more were it not for the abundance of health-recovery items, and the option to use those items at any time in the game. The presence of these items threw off the balance of boss battles, ruining what could have been a snappy, arcade-like experience. Furthermore, the existence of a twitch-fueled one-hit-kill system, while rewarding for pro-level players, was essentially useless for the casuals the game was catering to with all those healing items. Game Republic had chosen the story of Japanese folk hero Yostuffsune because they thought it would get them big recognition, fast, though they also seemingly went out of their way to bastardize the story as postmodernly as possible — the princess, for example, is kidnapped because of her ability to fuse priceless magical gems. I saw Genji as a confused effort, and generously thought that, in the future, Game Republic could go places, if only they kept all of their testicles in the right place, and made games for a specific audience. If they would just think, “What would Devil May Cry do?” they could make a game that earns the respect of the players. Their PSP RPG Brave Story is a focused, deliberate masterpiece. Their third game, Folkssoul (they did not “make” Every Party for Xbox 360, or Genji 2 for PlayStation 3 so much as they rented out their name), is their second effort on a home console, and in it, the stains of their first game seem to have seeped deeper. It’s trying to please everyone at the same time, and you know what they say about pleasing everyone at the same time: you can’t do it. It’s not possible.
Game Republic: get your act together. This game right here will be sitting in the bargain bins in three to six months’ time, and in ten years, I expect to see it on used shelves for five dollars, and I expect to shudder and remember those days early in the PS3’s life, when we would have bought anything. Whether or not I come to regard those days as having ended or not — I suppose that’s all in your hands. For now, though, consider yourselves on academic probation.
2007
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“NOT ART.”
If you imagine for a moment that all of the emails I received between last November and today asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, that would leave an overwhelming majority of emails asking me why I haven’t reviewed BioShock yet, with runner-up email topics being when I’m going to review BioShock, or if there’s some reason I am blatantly ignoring BioShock. I imagine that a good percentage of those of you sending me such emails are genuinely confused, because you know deep in your bones that reviewing BioShock is something I need to do as a “critic” of videogames. The rest of you are probably sneering in anticipation of some belly-laugh worthy one-liner smackdowns. You probably have a bottle of brandy in your cupboard, and your best snifter polished and at the ready. I’d like to say that I will make sure your brandies do not go to waste. Though a small part of me (definitely not my brain!) is a little hesitant, because I just plain don’t like BioShock enough to tear it a new butt-hole, and I don’t hate it enough to pretend I love it. It’s just kind of . . . there.
Here we are, anyway, with today’s installment of the Action Button Fashionably Late Review:
Oh, the critics screamed themselves red-eyed, they did. Though we must be careful when we call the game-review-writing masses “critics” — a vast majority of them really just got into the habit of writing about the games “industry” so they could get free passes to E3, where they could get free, XXXL, radical, awesome black T-shirts with centered, capitalized company names in sans-serif font. This was before that sort of thing was even ironic. I saw a hip kid at a party the other night wearing a T-shirt that said “T-Shirt” in the middle of the chest, in Arial font, for example. I don’t want to name names (though by the end of this paragraph I might end up doing just that) — just believe me when I say that the majority of “game critics” have really poor taste regarding pretty much anything that qualifies as entertainment. The first time I met Chris Kohler, for example, I learned that he’s actually not pretending when he says his favorite band is Fleetwood Mac! For stuff’s sake, that guy gets paid a robust salary by WIRED, of all people, to blog about videogames!
And, according to Game Set Watch, “he’s the best mainstream commentator on digital download matters right now”. We are so screwed, my fellow gamer-kinds!
Here at Action Button Dot Net, we listen exclusively to music like this, or this, or sometimes this (when we’re having awesome 2P co-op sex). So you can bet your bottom dollar that we’re not going to be fooled by something just because it has Django Reinhardt in it.
For the record, Django Reinhardt is more of a father to me than Jesus ever was, and I grew up Catholic. I sat and listened to his recordings in dumbstruck silence for probably more hours of my young life than I spent trying to perfect a play-through of both quests of the original Zelda. I didn’t realize that the man was able to make such beautiful, complicated music with just two complete fingers until many years later, when I saw the Woody Allen film “Sweet and Lowdown”. There; I’ve just succeeded in mentioning Woody Allen in a videogame review. This will likely get me more emails asking me why I don’t have cancer, though hey, so be it. What I’m trying to prove here, perhaps a little snidely, is that I have interests outside videogames, interests in things like other forms of entertainment. I might even mention that I enjoy swimming and weightlifting. Might as well! Now I’ll step back, put my toes on the other side of the line, and say that I liked Japanese hardcore music before I played Jet Set Radio. What I’m trying to say is that videogames are not necessarily a poor introduction to culture as they are a weird one. There’s really no insight to be gained from this statement of opinion; I’m just throwing it out there. I find it weird that some people are suddenly pretending to have always been deeply interested in Art Deco, the literary works of Ayn Rand, and the expert guitarring of Django Reinhardt just because of a videogame. It’s like, at this point, with so much qualified culture in your videogame, it doesn’t even need to be “good“.
Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli’s “Beyond the Sea” is a timeless, objectively brilliant piece of music; its inclusion in the opening of BioShock is a no-brainer in almost every sense of the word: obviously, this is the kind of music that would play over the PA at the supermarkets of choice of elite artists and urban refugee philosophers in an alternate-reality 1950-something. On the other hand, it is also a “no-brainer” because this is a game about a community beneath the sea; hours into BioShock, which soon proves to be little more than a videogame, the possibility that the people in charge of music selection might have been confusing it with that song from “The Little Mermaid” becomes strikingly relevant.
What I’m saying is that BioShock is a pretty shell.
This game is not a masterpiece — it is the bare minimum. Its attention to detail with regard to its atmosphere and its narrative is not, in and of itself, a glorious feast: it is the very least we should expect from now on.
I have said before that “Each work of expression humankind creates will sit at the bottom of a gazed-down-upon canyon for centuries to come, as messages from the past.” BioShock will, I’m afraid, for the futuristic alien-robots that eventually come to earth to sift through the nuclear wreckage, most likely be virtually indistinguishable from those 1990s short-film monsterpieces about dudes driving a mine cart into a volcano full of dinosaurs, where the theater chairs tilted left and right and fans blew your hair back and eyes dry.
To explain it simply, without re-referencing the game’s core wallpaper themettes of Ayn Rand, Art Deco, and beautiful triumphant jazz music, here is a description of BioShock‘s story: a man is flying over the ocean in a plane. The plane crashes. He survives. He swims toward a monolithic structure. He goes inside. Without questioning why, he boards a deep-sea-diving vessel, and finds himself in an underwater “utopia” built years before by scholars, artists, and philosophers who found the then-modern society not suited to their ideals. Upon entering the city, he discovers it has been destroyed, and is currently teeming with drugged-out brain-thirsty genetic psycho-freaks. A man contacts the hero via short-wave radio, and offers guidance. He wants the hero to save his family, and himself, and help the last few sane survivors of this nightmare get to the surface and go back to the society that they had once seen fit to leave.
Of course, between point A and point B, there’s going to be a whole lot of psycho-freak smashing. “That sounds good”, says the entertainment connoisseur. “That sounds plausible”, says the literati. “That sounds hecking bad-butt“, says the gamer.
Unfortunately, the cracks in BioShock‘s facade start to show themselves sooner rather than later. Most pointedly, the hero is a boring, nameless, voiceless dunce. He speaks one line at the beginning of the story, and then undergoes a vow of word-silence (grunts only) for the duration of the tale. There are thousands of people, no doubt, capable of constructing arguments that seem convincing to themselves, who can defend the nameless silent protagonist in a videogame, though it just doesn’t cut it for me anymore: if you’re going to build a rich atmosphere, if you’re going to try to tell a story, you’re probably going to need more than just “a character” — you’ll need an interesting character. Even Grand Theft Auto started giving the hero a voice and a personality after Grand Theft Auto III, and that game’s main goal was presumably just to let the player mess around and live out stupid fantasies involving casino roofs, rocket launchers, city buses, and digital law enforcement.
Say what you will about the silent protagonist thing: we can all at least agree that the hero in this game is a bit weird. He will eat potato chips that might be a year old immediately upon finding pulling them out of a garbage can in a city full of genetic freak-out zompeople; where hypodermic needles are as “daily-routine” for the citizens as a cup of coffee, you’d think that the basic idea of “this place is a filthy bio-hazard” would at least be on the tip of one’s subconscious when one finds food in a waste receptacle.
He’s also the type of guy to have a tattoo of a chain on his left wrist (“Maybe he was in prison?” the thirteen-year-old gamers wonder, and feel like geniuses), and make a medium-pitched grunting sound once every twenty times he jumps. I’m no expert in Hard Dudes, though I imagine that a man crawling on his stomach through a knee-high sewer hole would probably stop repeatedly and nonchalantly smacking his wrench against the palm of his free hand every few seconds. Not so with our hero.
Also, judging by the various sounds he makes when eating food, I have to say he would never be allowed in my house. (Or within fifty feet of my house. (I have Dog Ears. (While we’re on the subject, please don’t ever, ever, ever call me on the phone if you’re chewing gum. I’m hecking serious as a heart attack. If I call you and you happen to be chewing, hey, I can accept that as my mistake. Just don’t do it the other way around. In addition to being disgusting, it’s also rude.)))
Not ten minutes into the monster-smashing portion of the game, the player comes across his first ever hypodermic needle — a “Plasmid”, the game calls them — and upon plucking it out of a busted vending machine, he immediately jams it into his arm, goes into wicked convulsions, crashes through a banister, and slams into the floor twenty feet below. The potato chips thing had made me laugh; this thing involving the instant hypodermic needle snapped me out of my trance; all at once, I was awake in the world of BioShock, watching the dream armed with rubber gloves and forceps. Our guiding spirit contacts us via the short-wave: “You’ve just used your first Plasmid! It’s a bit of a doozy! Your genetic code is being re-written!” Thanks for telling us that before we jammed it into our arm! I bet your starving family finds it hecking hilarious that you’re willing to let their only chance of salvation flail around on the floor while an entire troop of psycho-freaks walks by, stares at him, and laughs.
As it turns out, the first Plasmid our silent hero obtains gives him the power to shoot lightning bolts from his fingertips. Wonderful. In case you’ve forgotten what happened one paragraph ago, yes, this Plasmid came out of a vending machine. So here I am, awake in the dream of BioShock‘s cluttered study, thinking up reasons that artists and scholars and philosophers who saw fit to run away from modern society would want to be able to shoot lightning from their fingertips, much less be able to purchase this ability from a vending machine. What would honest, society-loathing, government-rejecting artists, scholars, and philosophers need the power of telepathic electricity for? To recharge batteries? The game has some cute little graphic designs explaining the power of each Plasmid as you obtain them, though they always make the powers look like little more than fuel for painful pranks. And here begins the slippery slope of my One Night With BioShock.
BioShock fails, and quite embarrassingly hard, as far as I’m concerned, when it comes time to tie all of its genuinely enthralling atmospheric concepts (underwater city, inspired art design, excellent music, political message, overt genetic enhancement as common and convenient as multivitamins) into an actual knife of entertainment. As-is, there’s just too much to do, too many choices to make. I like having to choose my weapon upgrades wisely, and I can honestly see the pure-hearted intent of the game designers in making me do so; it’s just that, in something like BioShock, the richer and more excellently executed the atmosphere, the more shocking and bubble-bursting are the whip-cracks of context.
Now, 95% of Bioshock‘s appeal for me, personally, is the mystery of this destroyed undersea utopia, and the pleasure of wondering what exactly went wrong. Early on, I felt like Sherlock Holmes as I pieced together the smaller clues: I saw the signboards discarded at the dock, displaying messages such as “WE DON’T BELONG TO YOU, RYAN”, and thought, “Aha! These people wanted to leave! Something was going wrong here — and someone named ‘Ryan’ was to blame!” It would have been really nice if these sort of hints had built gradually in momentum. Not so: eventually, quite early on, you get to the point where you can purchase the “Enrage” plasmid, which, according to its item description, “ENRAGES target, causing it to attack someone other than you”. In a game so steeped in lore and godly details, I can’t help wondering for a second what function such a genetic enhancement would serve in a society focused on self-betterment.
Ultimately, I come to the conclusion that this society failed and exploded because people are jerks: the people making these biological “enhancements” were jerks, and the people buying them were jerks. It really only takes one jerk to destroy a world.
I now stand a precarious step away from implying that the people who made this game are jerks as well, though I’ve seen that one photograph Kotaku always uses whenever BioShock director Ken Levine says something in an interview, and he doesn’t look like a bad guy at all (if you’re ever in Tokyo, Ken, we must do lunch, seriously; I know an excellent ethnic-mixture vegan curry place).
Still: they could have buried the mystery a little more deftly.
Or: I can sort of believe vending machines in the middle of the city, though why are there vending machines for Expensive Things in these god-forsaken maintenance tunnels under the city? It doesn’t make sense — how often did workers suddenly find themselves in need of psychic power upgrades in the middle of a walk up to the surface? Wouldn’t they have dealt with their psychic inventory management on the way to work in the morning, or waited to do it after their shift was over and they were headed back home?
The thing about giving all of the videogame-power-up dispensers in your immersive videogame concrete, in-world justifications, with tastefully tacky, interesting, exuberant neon graphic design, is that you’re begging for the player to supply real-world-logic to explain why they exist where they exist. At one point, your constant narrator informs you, of the ruin of the city: “Nobody knows exactly what happened . . . maybe he found he just didn’t like people.” Duh! What other kind of human being would take a look at a scientific research lab where a man had accidentally created a psychic-power-modifying injection that imbued the user with the ability to send any target into fits of violent rage and say “Yeah, sure, let’s put that in the hecking vending machines all over the city, see what happens.” And seriously, what kind of society-shunning undersea magical enclave of artists and scholars would literally need plentiful vending machines, complete with a stereotypical cigarollo-chomping Mexican mascot, to dispense weapons and ammunition for cash? You can say that they were having problems with smugglers, or that the genetic-splicing freak-bastards were overrunning the city and the people needed to defend themselves, though seriously, I’d imagine that, at a point like that, you’d just have government officials handing out guns in the street (err, “glass connecting tubes”). Maybe if they hadn’t taken time to convene the hecking Board of Artists and decide on what kind of rugged yet cute gun-belt-wearing mascot to stamp all over all of the gun-vending machines, they would have had time to fight back the threat before it ruined the whole damned place. In this, a game so reliant upon its immersing environmental qualities, In many ways — dare I say it — these context-ful vending machines are actually worse than the ammo crates of yesteryear. Nice job on that, guys! Try nuclear fusion, next!
Here I could ask the burning question: “Did no one in this society detect that maybe something about the psychic-enhancement thing was asking for trouble?” Though I’m pretty sure someone would link me to the Wikipedia page on Scientology, and then I’d have to pretend to feel ridiculous.
Around the time the game introduced the interestingly modeled neon-glowing vending machines that let me manage my psychic power slots — that is, let me un-equip one psychic power to make room for another — my Night-Vision was on, and I was seeing pink all over the place. I had a bunch of guns, and I was shooting lots of dudes, and I kind of wasn’t feeling it. Then there was this “boss” encounter where I had to put all of my weapons into a pneumatic tube before entering the room. I got to the end of the encounter and reclaimed my weapons from the other end of the pneumatic tube, at which time my characters hands flipped up and down, wielding each weapon for a split-second before snapping to another one. If only this had been Burnout Paradise on the PlayStation 3, where users with PlayStation(R)Eye(TM) cameras connected to their USB(C) ports will have a snapshot of their face taken at the precise moment of fatal impact with a rival racer in an online match; I would love to see what facial expression I was wearing when that thing happened with the pneumatic tube. I’d put it on every time I go to Starbucks; that way, when I saunter up and say “Shot of whiskey” to the gorgeous girl at the register, she might actually realize that I’m joking, instead of saying “We only have coffees and teas here, sir.” Seriously, I used to work at a Target store, for crying out loud, where three out of ten male customers over forty would spout such small-talky “jokes” as “Workin’ hard, or hardly workin’?” or “‘Tar-zhay’, huh? Fancy French establishment you got yourself here”. Walking into Starbucks and asking for a shot of whiskey in a perfect rendition of a Japanese Clint Eastwood is pretty hecking hilarious, compared to the stuff I had to put up with!
At any rate, I’m officially bored enough of writing about BioShock to begin thinking about what I’m going to actually order at Starbucks tonight, so I’m going to pause for ten minutes to do some deep knee bends, some crunches, and some push-ups.
TEN MINUTES LATER
I believe I was talking about my “Night Vision” being turned on, about my “seeing pink” all over BioShock. “Seeing pink” is a catch phrase I just copyrighted, meaning, well, that I am officially distanced enough from a work of media to see all of its logical inconsistencies as though they be made of neon. Even so, without my critical night vision, I’d be able to see BioShock‘s trespasses, because it’s just so eager to show them to me: Majestic vistas such as water cascading out of a cracked roof and onto a dilapidated dental chair are undermined by the glinting, glowing boxes of shotgun shells conveniently forgotten — and dry — atop nearby cabinets.
Seeing all drawers of said cabinet suddenly flip open when you press the A button is jarring. It makes you think, “A cabinet that well-rendered and normal-mapped shouldn’t pop open that quickly”, which is a strange sentence to put into cognition. (Then again, Physics are Weird, here in Rapture — sliding metal doors make creaking sounds, for example.) If you’re going to spend so many thousands of man-hours on rendering glossy torn upholstery, you could at least put in a drawer-opening animation. A fast drawer-opening animation.
And so many of the damned drawers are completely empty, as well. Why even show me three little empty bubbles with the word “Empty” by them, anyway? Can’t I see that the bubbles are empty? If it’s empty, why even show me the bubbles? Why not just show the cabinet as flipped-open and ransacked to begin with? Even if the item placement is random, it can’t be that hard to program, can it? Can it?
The weirdest of the little logic hiccups unfortunately involve the game’s strongest element — that would be “the mood”. All over the ruined city are these . . . tape-recorders, just lying on tables or desks, or hanging from hooks on walls. You pick them up, and you get to hear a private voice-diary from someone’s life. The first one you find is sitting on a table in a bar, overlooking a frankly spectacular view of the ocean. The voice of a woman echoes out of the tape, with microphone clarity, over the din of people enjoying themselves in a quietly lively place. She says she’s getting drunk, and alone, on New Year’s Eve. She laments what a “fool” she is, for “falling in love with Andrew Ryan!” It’s not impossible to believe that this woman would be drunk enough to tape-blog about her Deepest Personal Secrets in such a public place on New Years Eve; the very candor in her voice indicates immediately that she’s That Type of Woman. Her tape diary ends abruptly with an explosion sound and an “Oh my god!” So the story creeps up and seeps into our brains: something happened on New Year’s Eve, and this woman’s tape diary was forgotten here on the table.
As things progress, though, the tapes start to seem vaguely . . . rude. There’s a point where you see a frozen-solid pipe-tunnel leading to another hub of the undersea city; there’s a tape recorder lying on the ground, glinting ferociously, as you approach. You play the tape, and out comes a thick Cockney squawking: “These frozen pipes! I keep telling Mister Ryan, frozen pipes break easily! We have to fix the frozen pipes, or we’ll have some serious trouble.” I hear this and think, “Uhh, thanks for that?” The little monologue comes within millimeters of saying “We’ll need to use fire plasmids to melt this ice, if it gets too thick!” I imagine the original script must have called for such a line, though someone on the Quality Assurance assembly line must have realized how dumb that would sound. However, without such a connection to the flow of the game as a game, this disembodied flavor-monologue just seems wickedly out of place. It’s damned if it do, damned if it don’t. Around then, the Awakened gamer should begin wondering about the tapes; wondering why these supposed private diaries have been exhumed and strewn about in convenient locations. What with the weird satanic costume-ball masks being worn by the weird klepto-psychos gallavanting all over the place, it’s not hard to make some kind of synapse connection between “Crazy People” and “Crazy Behavior”; maybe one of these genetic blowouts made it a personal mission to arrange these tapes in convenient locations. If you’re like me, and you’re thinking this critically about BioShock, you start to notice, even, that someone was apparently being cremated in the mortuary at the exact moment this underwater apocalypse went down, and you begin to feel a deep dread — like you’re in the audience at your little brother’s school play, and he’s on stage, dressed up as an ostrich, and you know for a fact that he’s going to go stuff-ballistic, vomit blood all over someone, and storm through the audience biting people’s throats — you start to kind of pray, whether you Know God or Not, that at some point soon, this game is not going to try to explain this. Like you’ll get to the Final Boss, and he’ll be standing atop his Ziggurat Of Glory with his imperial cape billowing and his monocle glinting, and he’ll drop the megaton bombshell that he is both your father and he placed all those tapes so that you would find him — and then proceed to die by his hand.
Six hours or so into the experience, I’m kind of tired. The introduction of the oft-discussed Big-Daddy/Little Sister dynamic has come and gone, and the plot has at last let go its iron grip. The storyteller has succeeded in getting us drunk, and proceeds to stand us up and push us out the front door of the bar. We look back, and he’s dusting off his hands, turning around, and setting up the “CLOSED” sign. We are now free. Free to Move Forward in this Meticulous World. Free to Enjoy the “Game Play”.
Well.
I’m not going to lie to anyone, here. I know how “game development” goes. I know it involves a Lot of People with a Lot of Ideas, working a Lot of Hours in a big, fancy office. I know that some of the ideas some people work on end up being a whole lot better-executed than some of the other ideas other people work on (witness how great the driving is in Burnout 3, and how drop-dead terrible the menus and interface are). And though I do believe I originally said that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was not a perfect game, I believe it demonstrates a much “more perfect” way to appropriately use an epic amount of human resources: basically, you write down what the player can do in your game, then you figure out what’s going to happen in your game, then you build a story around that, then you tell everyone, “This is the plan, and we’re sticking to it”. BioShock has too many ideas; too many Little Things To Do. And it’s a shame, because, as I might have said a dozen times before in this very article, the game has some drop-dead genuinely brilliant concepts. It’s just that everything turns into a grind in the end.
It’s like, in an action movie, yeah, where there’s a montage depicting a character’s recovery and/or training in the martial arts. Can you imagine what it would be like if the first forty-five minutes of “Rocky” breezed by, only to pause for three real-time months of footage of Rocky Balboa punching a heavy bag, jogging, eating oatmeal, doing sit-ups, perusing Reader’s Digest while taking epic stuffs? That’s kind of what happens to BioShock: it’s top-heavy, and then it’s boring. A little rearranging of the Feng Shui is in order: a little, gasp, Zelda-ism.
Take the Big Daddy / Little Sister dynamic I touched on earlier. This has been a firecracker of media discussion; this was the darling pet feature of the game. Basically, there are little girls, turned into demon-children by genetic experimentation, who represent the physical embodiment of some Great Power. They are accompanied, at all times, by giant bio-behemoth men in modified deep-sea diving suits. The image of the “Big Daddy” is so striking that it adorns the game’s box, that a metal “Big Daddy” figurine was the Grand Prize awarded to all rabid pre-installed fans savvy enough to pay an extra twenty dollars for the Limited Edition. Basically, the situation is this: The Little Sister is a harmless Little Girl. She has Great Power. If you so choose, you can “harvest” her for that power, making your in-game avatar stronger. However, the only way to get close to the Little Sister is to kill the Big Daddy. Do so, and the Little Sister will cower sadly. Save her, and your character does a Jesus Hand Dance, and sucks the evil out of her with his fingertips. Harvest her, and she sinks off screen, and there’s a scream.
In this day and age where Mass Effect can feature two muppet-like human beings having purely consensual prime-time network-TV Clothed Sex preceded by Literally a Dozen Hours of Accountant-worthy Courtship and cause even mildly Christian people to accuse games of instilling Our Children with the Hunger To Rape Other Children, one has to wonder whether the underlying “problem” with the videogame “industry” is one of people pressing too many buttons or not enough buttons. BioShock‘s “kill little girls for profit” mechanic is a surefire conversation-starter, though in the game, it’s handled with such sterile laryngitis that it might as well just not let you kill them at all.
My “idea” for how to “fix” this element of BioShock‘s game design, I’m afraid, is easier said than done. I’m going to go ahead and give the dudes and babes at 2K Boston the benefit of the doubt, and say that they probably thought of it first:
My idea is that there should have only ever been one Big Daddy, and one Little Sister. The story of the game would branch depending on whether you kill the Little Sister, and at which opportunity you kill her. Maybe the Big Daddy has some kind of card-key and can open doors that your character can’t, so it’s to your advantage to slink around behind them. Every time your path converges with theirs, there’d be some kind of big cathartic showdown. Maybe enemies would attack the Big Daddy, and he would destroy them, and you’d have to avoid getting caught in the fray, or else join the fight to take the Big Daddy down. Maybe the Big Daddy, ultimately, would perish at the end of the game if you let him live long enough, forcing you to make a decision about what to do with the girl.
Of course, this is easier said than done; it would require construction of actual thoughtful set-pieces; it would require the Big Daddy to be an epic, impossibly, amazingly difficult and worthy adversary; furthermore, it would require the Little Sister to be an actual character in the plot, even though she might be presented as an incidental bystander in the context of the greater story. Allowing context to render bystanders as “characters” is one of the great organic traits of modern fiction. BioShock, unfortunately, fails as “fiction” — and as “entertainment” — because its characters are as sharp as lead pipes. Everything that could be emotional or poignant is constantly having its lungs punctured by a rusty spike named “This Is A Videogame”. I stuff you not: at one point, just as the plot is about to let you go and plop you into The World, armed with your Fantastic Weapons and Psychic Powers, your guardian angel on the other side of the short-wave radio exclaims, in tears: “We’ll find the bastard! We’ll find him — and we’ll tear his heart out!” and at this exact moment, I spontaneously picked up a “battery” from the floor, resulting in harsh letters jumping up on the screen and poking their fingers into my eyeballs: “You got a component! Use components to invent things at a U-Invent!”
Eventually, everything in BioShock becomes “Something To Do In A Videogame”. Harvesting Little Sisters or Setting Them Free becomes a decision you make every fifteen minutes. Instead of a punctuation mark, it becomes a verb — and not just any verb, it becomes like a conjugation of “to be”. Killing Big Daddies, even on the hardest difficulty (we here at ABDN wouldn’t have it any other way), is repetitive and hollow. Just lob a bunch of grenades at him, electro-shock him, blast him with a tommy gun. Blow the heckers right up. Who gives a stuff? Not you, that’s for sure.
There was some talk — I think on Gama Sutra — wherein a BioShock game designer or someone related to a BioShock game designer talked about how there was too much stuff to do in the game, and that ultimately detracted from what could have been a tasty, crunchy flowing, living experience. To this, I say: no stuff, Sherlock. I’d like to congratulate you guys for acknowledging your flaws, and I’d like to hold out hope that you might turn out a brilliant game in the future, though seeing as you only recognized BioShock‘s packrattism in hindsight, I can’t be too optimistic.
BioShock means well, at least — its thrilling, thoughtful presentation is a testament to that — as at first it shows you an oblivious enemy standing in a puddle of water, and your guide whispers over the radio (how he can see what I can see, I don’t know): use your electric bolt on the water! Fry him! You do this. Said bad guy fries. Now he’s dead. Nice.
Six hours later, when you’re spilled out into the Game Proper, you’re still seeing guys standing hip-deep in water, and you’re still shocking them. There’s no catharsis in it anymore.
There’s a “puzzle” slightly before the game pushes you out into the street, where a door is locked and you need to find the combination. Amazingly, the combination is written on a piece of paper on a shelf just five meters away from the door. This is precisely where BioShock‘s good intentions crumbled into dust, and made me feel kind of sad; the game’s MO had been, from the outset, to “relay information to the player through atmospheric elements”. The beginning of the game, with luggage stacked on the dock at the city entrance and declarations of protest written on discarded picket signs, had felt like a triumph; now here I am, looking at a number scrawled very legibly on a sheet of paper. It’s four digits. The combination lock on the other side of the room requires four numbers. This absolutely, positively has to be the correct combination. I feel like I’m Sherlock Holmes, and Watson just confessed to me that every mystery I’ve ever “solved” had just been elaborate dinner-party skits concocted by him and a bunch of friends I’ve never met. For one thing, the revelation that Watson has friends is a real downer; for another thing, I’m still a smart guy, though only in the context of some drunk people’s idea of “fun”.
Night-vision goggles on, in the back of my brain, I’m solving ancient riddles: I now know why modern Zelda games are so heavy-handed and sucky. It’s because they spend so much time on them. They’ve got dungeons, plotted out like works of architecture, with hallways of yea length and pits of yea depth. Nintendo’s quality assurance period is so deafeningly long that the level designers must sit around tinkering with the dungeons sixteen hours a day, hoping they’ll get an order from above to “announce the release date already”.
“We’ve got this hallway here, see? In dungeon number six. It’s about fifty meters long. Tanaka put a lantern here, and you light the lantern, and this iron grate opens. That still leaves us with, uhh, like, thirty more meters. So check out what I did. I made a pit of spikes here. And see that wall over there?”
“Awwwwwwww stuff, Yamamoto-kun, is that a hookshot panel?”
“Yes, sir. The player obtains the hookshot in dungeon number four, and it’s only used three times up to this point in dungeon number six, so–“
“You are getting a ray-zuh!”
Et cetera. Or I could mention Rare’s Star Fox Adventures, where you get this “flame” “attachment” that lets you shoot “balls of fire” out of your “magic staff”, and how rather than be used to actually light things on fire, it’s usually used to shoot a “ball of fire” at a “flame panel” on a wall somewhere so that a door opens. Some ten hours of your life after getting that flame attachment, you might be at the end of a cavernous dungeon room, all the enemies dead, all of the blocks pushed, wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do to open the sealed door. You go into first-person view mode and scan the walls. There, way, way up behind you, is a “flame panel”. Both because there’s nothing else you can do and because you know this is the solution to the “puzzle”, you shoot the flame panel with your flame rod, and the door opens.
Seriously, aren’t there more clever things to do with 3D cameras than make me look for a flame panel to shoot with my flame rod?
This applies to BioShock all over the place, into infinity. Except it’s never as clearly offensive as the Star Fox Adventures Flame Rod Example. In fact, in giving me a “choice” of which gizmo from my Santa-sack of Stuff to use to conquer each pseudo-situation, BioShock is actually kind of worse off.
To wit: It used to be that characters would do stuff like fall asleep and dream about ravioli if you didn’t touch the controller. In BioShock, if you don’t press any buttons for a few moments, the words “Hold the right directional button to get a hint if you are stuck” appear on the screen.
The little puzzle-like mini-game you “play” every time you attempt to hack a downed turret or hover-drone-bot is about as fun as those rare, bizarrely self-important moments during your day at the office in which you actually have to use your cellular phone’s calculator function. Really, though, with all the concessions this game offers inexperienced players, I have to wonder when someone is going to make a puzzle element in a game that lets you end the whole charade with a single button press when you see the solution and have far more than adequate time to implement it. Call it the “I Get It Button”. While we’re at it, someone call Sony and tell them to include a feature in the next PlayStation 3 firmware that allows me to navigate several backdoor selections and eventually find a huge-text menu allowing me to disable the mandatory warning in front of every hecking game that tells me not to unplug the console from the wall and/or throw it out the window and/or experience a sudden power outage while the hard drive access light is blinking?
Eventually, the game gets just plain sloppy. There are several copy-editing related errors I have stored in the back of my head for some reason, like this one on-screen message that read “Your maximum health has been increased, allowing you to take more hits before being sent to a Resurrection Station”. I thought they were called Vita-Chambers?
Vita-Chambers are explained, very, very early in the game, as capsules that can re-energize your tired (and even dead) body, using some kind of mystical cloning technology. I’ll admit that I winced when I first read the explanation of Vita-Chambers, first because the description tells me that there’s “no need to touch or otherwise interact with a Vita-Chamber in order to activate it”, which is really dumb and silly, and second of all because I knew in the pit of my stomach that the game — a game with a story about life and death (and politics) — would not be able to roll on until its conclusion without somehow using the Vita-Chamber as a Key Element in the Plot. And when it did, my groan could have shattered a gazelle, had a gazelle been lurking outside my window, nuzzling through my sweet, hot garbage.
Tons of objects — beer bottles, some crates — have physics, and can be burst and blasted apart to reveal Delicious Items. Other crates, the likes of which are used to impede your progress and force you to seek Some Other Route, simply won’t budge.
When your main character gets wet, his field of vision becomes blurry the way that a camera lens does.
If a videogame is to be rightly hailed as a “masterpiece” and/or a work of “genius”, things like these need to not happen in the game, at the very least.
What we have here, with BioShock, is a well-meaning game with some excellent concepts and an iron grip on its execution. It’s just a shame that “its execution” equals “execution of absolutely hecking everything written in every draft of the design document.”
There’s been talk lately of Gore Verbinski, director of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” flicks, signing on to helm a film based on BioShock. The inevitable fanboy knee-jerk reaction was that it’d be “impossible” to relate BioShock‘s deep atmosphere in a movie. Are you kidding me? The only parts of BioShock that wouldn’t “translate” to a movie are the heavy-handed bullstuff things. Are the fan-creatures afraid that the film would neglect to inform the audience that the thing the main character rides down to the undersea city of Rapture at the beginning of the story is called a “Bathysphere”? Come to think of it, maybe that was my first hint that I would neither love nor hate BioShock: when the big white help text floated into view, telling me to press the A button to “Use Bathysphere”. Mac OSX’s spell checker doesn’t even say “Bathysphere” isn’t a real word, though, so maybe all of the internet forum-dwellers who instantly regaled friends with tales of “OMG” re: “the part in the bathysphere at the beginning” were just really big undersea lore aficionados.
At any rate, I think a BioShock film is a tremendous idea, and that Gore Verbinski is the perfect director, not because he’s amazingly capable of sculpting, like, actual art so much as because he at least has the conscience to request that his screen-writers use Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word, you know, so that they can go to the bottom of the columns and see if there are any arithmetical errors before shipping it off to the storyboard artists: I swear, when I went to see the third film in a theater in Tokyo, they handed me a heckin’ flowchart explaining the relationships between the characters. Who hates who, who loves who, who’s being paid to backstab who, et cetera. I thought for a second that the flow-chart only covered the first two movies, though apparently it turned out pretty useful for piecing together the third. In the end, the story, though idiotic, was air-tight. What the hell more could you expect from a movie based on a theme park ride featuring animatronic cartoon pirates? That the film looked really good and was nominated for a record-breaking number of Academy Awards for “Best Johnny Depping” — that must have been Verbinski’s idea. It looks to me like it’s Verbinski 1, theme-park rides 0. And what is BioShock, in its present state, if not a theme-park ride with more Shit To Do? The presence of a pre-installed plot, the very idea of catharsis existing between the Big Daddy and the Little Sister is more than enough feeling to shape a compelling narrative. The game misses the opportunity to be Something That Is, because it is too busy concentrating on being Something To Do; a film could really capitalize, whether or not it offers the lead character the choice of lightning or fire rounds for his shotgun, whether or not the character recovers psychic power and loses health when he smokes a pack of cigarettes. Or at least it could bring Django Reinhardt back to the pop-culture pre-conscious.
Well.
I arrive at the end of this review, then, wanting to say something positive aside from my constant beating the dead horse of “lovingly crafted atmosphere”. Here’s all I can think of:
1. The water looks great!
2. It’s perfectly fine to set games in destroyed places because it gives level designers a perfect excuse for why there’s so much stuff unnaturally thrown around.
3. The arrow that guides you to objectives is smart, guiding you in the direction of the stairs and then in the direction of the door. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guiding arrow do something like that in a game before, though it’s possible that I played a game with such an arrow and just didn’t notice because I otherwise wasn’t lost.
We here at Action Button Dot Net are planning something. It’s to be called “The Action Button Dot Net Manifesto”. It can and will be a list of what I (uhh, “we”) consider the best twenty-five games of all-time, ranked in order and everything. Naturally, these will all be games that would score four stars on the Action Button zero-to-four review scale.
I mention this because the game we will crown as the number one best game of all-time shares many, many traits in common with BioShock. However, it absolutely nails everything it aspires to. It is a tremendously great videogame, the likes of which BioShock had every opportunity to be; yes, I am rating BioShock as harshly as I have because I genuinely recognize and respect its potential when held up alongside the Best Game Ever. I’ve offered plenty of hints to the identity of that throughout this review. Feel free to guess, in the comments thread, what you think the game is (and if you already know, please don’t spoil it T-T).
The game is not Gears of War, so I’m fully free to use Gears as an example for my conclusion. Yes, we’re still operating under the belief that, game-design-wise, Gears of War is As Good As It Gets For Now.
Gears of War‘s simple mechanics are like a survival knife stabbing into an invincible watermelon: a delicious crunch of impact every time; we delight in beholding each and every watermelon tumble down the stairs, or come flying out of a window. BioShock‘s unwieldy choices-laden limp-noodle of a “game system”, on the other hand, is like swishing a chopstick in a glass of water. Eventually, it lets you swish a chopstick in a bathtub. The point is, both of these actions produce sounds — it’s just that one of them is just magnitudes more satisfying than the other.
Ultimately, what we need is a game with BioShock‘s love of details and Gears of War‘s crunch and flow. Because God help us if all of our “intelligent” games are going to be boring to play, and all our exciting games are going to star oatmeal-skinned meatheads. Come on, people. Let’s show a little creativity, a little diligence.
★★☆☆
“NOT ART.”
If you imagine for a moment that all of the emails I received between last November and today asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, that would leave an overwhelming majority of emails asking me why I haven’t reviewed BioShock yet, with runner-up email topics being when I’m going to review BioShock, or if there’s some reason I am blatantly ignoring BioShock. I imagine that a good percentage of those of you sending me such emails are genuinely confused, because you know deep in your bones that reviewing BioShock is something I need to do as a “critic” of videogames. The rest of you are probably sneering in anticipation of some belly-laugh worthy one-liner smackdowns. You probably have a bottle of brandy in your cupboard, and your best snifter polished and at the ready. I’d like to say that I will make sure your brandies do not go to waste. Though a small part of me (definitely not my brain!) is a little hesitant, because I just plain don’t like BioShock enough to tear it a new butt-hole, and I don’t hate it enough to pretend I love it. It’s just kind of . . . there.
Here we are, anyway, with today’s installment of the Action Button Fashionably Late Review:
Oh, the critics screamed themselves red-eyed, they did. Though we must be careful when we call the game-review-writing masses “critics” — a vast majority of them really just got into the habit of writing about the games “industry” so they could get free passes to E3, where they could get free, XXXL, radical, awesome black T-shirts with centered, capitalized company names in sans-serif font. This was before that sort of thing was even ironic. I saw a hip kid at a party the other night wearing a T-shirt that said “T-Shirt” in the middle of the chest, in Arial font, for example. I don’t want to name names (though by the end of this paragraph I might end up doing just that) — just believe me when I say that the majority of “game critics” have really poor taste regarding pretty much anything that qualifies as entertainment. The first time I met Chris Kohler, for example, I learned that he’s actually not pretending when he says his favorite band is Fleetwood Mac! For stuff’s sake, that guy gets paid a robust salary by WIRED, of all people, to blog about videogames!
And, according to Game Set Watch, “he’s the best mainstream commentator on digital download matters right now”. We are so screwed, my fellow gamer-kinds!
Here at Action Button Dot Net, we listen exclusively to music like this, or this, or sometimes this (when we’re having awesome 2P co-op sex). So you can bet your bottom dollar that we’re not going to be fooled by something just because it has Django Reinhardt in it.
For the record, Django Reinhardt is more of a father to me than Jesus ever was, and I grew up Catholic. I sat and listened to his recordings in dumbstruck silence for probably more hours of my young life than I spent trying to perfect a play-through of both quests of the original Zelda. I didn’t realize that the man was able to make such beautiful, complicated music with just two complete fingers until many years later, when I saw the Woody Allen film “Sweet and Lowdown”. There; I’ve just succeeded in mentioning Woody Allen in a videogame review. This will likely get me more emails asking me why I don’t have cancer, though hey, so be it. What I’m trying to prove here, perhaps a little snidely, is that I have interests outside videogames, interests in things like other forms of entertainment. I might even mention that I enjoy swimming and weightlifting. Might as well! Now I’ll step back, put my toes on the other side of the line, and say that I liked Japanese hardcore music before I played Jet Set Radio. What I’m trying to say is that videogames are not necessarily a poor introduction to culture as they are a weird one. There’s really no insight to be gained from this statement of opinion; I’m just throwing it out there. I find it weird that some people are suddenly pretending to have always been deeply interested in Art Deco, the literary works of Ayn Rand, and the expert guitarring of Django Reinhardt just because of a videogame. It’s like, at this point, with so much qualified culture in your videogame, it doesn’t even need to be “good“.
Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli’s “Beyond the Sea” is a timeless, objectively brilliant piece of music; its inclusion in the opening of BioShock is a no-brainer in almost every sense of the word: obviously, this is the kind of music that would play over the PA at the supermarkets of choice of elite artists and urban refugee philosophers in an alternate-reality 1950-something. On the other hand, it is also a “no-brainer” because this is a game about a community beneath the sea; hours into BioShock, which soon proves to be little more than a videogame, the possibility that the people in charge of music selection might have been confusing it with that song from “The Little Mermaid” becomes strikingly relevant.
What I’m saying is that BioShock is a pretty shell.
This game is not a masterpiece — it is the bare minimum. Its attention to detail with regard to its atmosphere and its narrative is not, in and of itself, a glorious feast: it is the very least we should expect from now on.
I have said before that “Each work of expression humankind creates will sit at the bottom of a gazed-down-upon canyon for centuries to come, as messages from the past.” BioShock will, I’m afraid, for the futuristic alien-robots that eventually come to earth to sift through the nuclear wreckage, most likely be virtually indistinguishable from those 1990s short-film monsterpieces about dudes driving a mine cart into a volcano full of dinosaurs, where the theater chairs tilted left and right and fans blew your hair back and eyes dry.
To explain it simply, without re-referencing the game’s core wallpaper themettes of Ayn Rand, Art Deco, and beautiful triumphant jazz music, here is a description of BioShock‘s story: a man is flying over the ocean in a plane. The plane crashes. He survives. He swims toward a monolithic structure. He goes inside. Without questioning why, he boards a deep-sea-diving vessel, and finds himself in an underwater “utopia” built years before by scholars, artists, and philosophers who found the then-modern society not suited to their ideals. Upon entering the city, he discovers it has been destroyed, and is currently teeming with drugged-out brain-thirsty genetic psycho-freaks. A man contacts the hero via short-wave radio, and offers guidance. He wants the hero to save his family, and himself, and help the last few sane survivors of this nightmare get to the surface and go back to the society that they had once seen fit to leave.
Of course, between point A and point B, there’s going to be a whole lot of psycho-freak smashing. “That sounds good”, says the entertainment connoisseur. “That sounds plausible”, says the literati. “That sounds hecking bad-butt“, says the gamer.
Unfortunately, the cracks in BioShock‘s facade start to show themselves sooner rather than later. Most pointedly, the hero is a boring, nameless, voiceless dunce. He speaks one line at the beginning of the story, and then undergoes a vow of word-silence (grunts only) for the duration of the tale. There are thousands of people, no doubt, capable of constructing arguments that seem convincing to themselves, who can defend the nameless silent protagonist in a videogame, though it just doesn’t cut it for me anymore: if you’re going to build a rich atmosphere, if you’re going to try to tell a story, you’re probably going to need more than just “a character” — you’ll need an interesting character. Even Grand Theft Auto started giving the hero a voice and a personality after Grand Theft Auto III, and that game’s main goal was presumably just to let the player mess around and live out stupid fantasies involving casino roofs, rocket launchers, city buses, and digital law enforcement.
Say what you will about the silent protagonist thing: we can all at least agree that the hero in this game is a bit weird. He will eat potato chips that might be a year old immediately upon finding pulling them out of a garbage can in a city full of genetic freak-out zompeople; where hypodermic needles are as “daily-routine” for the citizens as a cup of coffee, you’d think that the basic idea of “this place is a filthy bio-hazard” would at least be on the tip of one’s subconscious when one finds food in a waste receptacle.
He’s also the type of guy to have a tattoo of a chain on his left wrist (“Maybe he was in prison?” the thirteen-year-old gamers wonder, and feel like geniuses), and make a medium-pitched grunting sound once every twenty times he jumps. I’m no expert in Hard Dudes, though I imagine that a man crawling on his stomach through a knee-high sewer hole would probably stop repeatedly and nonchalantly smacking his wrench against the palm of his free hand every few seconds. Not so with our hero.
Also, judging by the various sounds he makes when eating food, I have to say he would never be allowed in my house. (Or within fifty feet of my house. (I have Dog Ears. (While we’re on the subject, please don’t ever, ever, ever call me on the phone if you’re chewing gum. I’m hecking serious as a heart attack. If I call you and you happen to be chewing, hey, I can accept that as my mistake. Just don’t do it the other way around. In addition to being disgusting, it’s also rude.)))
Not ten minutes into the monster-smashing portion of the game, the player comes across his first ever hypodermic needle — a “Plasmid”, the game calls them — and upon plucking it out of a busted vending machine, he immediately jams it into his arm, goes into wicked convulsions, crashes through a banister, and slams into the floor twenty feet below. The potato chips thing had made me laugh; this thing involving the instant hypodermic needle snapped me out of my trance; all at once, I was awake in the world of BioShock, watching the dream armed with rubber gloves and forceps. Our guiding spirit contacts us via the short-wave: “You’ve just used your first Plasmid! It’s a bit of a doozy! Your genetic code is being re-written!” Thanks for telling us that before we jammed it into our arm! I bet your starving family finds it hecking hilarious that you’re willing to let their only chance of salvation flail around on the floor while an entire troop of psycho-freaks walks by, stares at him, and laughs.
As it turns out, the first Plasmid our silent hero obtains gives him the power to shoot lightning bolts from his fingertips. Wonderful. In case you’ve forgotten what happened one paragraph ago, yes, this Plasmid came out of a vending machine. So here I am, awake in the dream of BioShock‘s cluttered study, thinking up reasons that artists and scholars and philosophers who saw fit to run away from modern society would want to be able to shoot lightning from their fingertips, much less be able to purchase this ability from a vending machine. What would honest, society-loathing, government-rejecting artists, scholars, and philosophers need the power of telepathic electricity for? To recharge batteries? The game has some cute little graphic designs explaining the power of each Plasmid as you obtain them, though they always make the powers look like little more than fuel for painful pranks. And here begins the slippery slope of my One Night With BioShock.
BioShock fails, and quite embarrassingly hard, as far as I’m concerned, when it comes time to tie all of its genuinely enthralling atmospheric concepts (underwater city, inspired art design, excellent music, political message, overt genetic enhancement as common and convenient as multivitamins) into an actual knife of entertainment. As-is, there’s just too much to do, too many choices to make. I like having to choose my weapon upgrades wisely, and I can honestly see the pure-hearted intent of the game designers in making me do so; it’s just that, in something like BioShock, the richer and more excellently executed the atmosphere, the more shocking and bubble-bursting are the whip-cracks of context.
Now, 95% of Bioshock‘s appeal for me, personally, is the mystery of this destroyed undersea utopia, and the pleasure of wondering what exactly went wrong. Early on, I felt like Sherlock Holmes as I pieced together the smaller clues: I saw the signboards discarded at the dock, displaying messages such as “WE DON’T BELONG TO YOU, RYAN”, and thought, “Aha! These people wanted to leave! Something was going wrong here — and someone named ‘Ryan’ was to blame!” It would have been really nice if these sort of hints had built gradually in momentum. Not so: eventually, quite early on, you get to the point where you can purchase the “Enrage” plasmid, which, according to its item description, “ENRAGES target, causing it to attack someone other than you”. In a game so steeped in lore and godly details, I can’t help wondering for a second what function such a genetic enhancement would serve in a society focused on self-betterment.
Ultimately, I come to the conclusion that this society failed and exploded because people are jerks: the people making these biological “enhancements” were jerks, and the people buying them were jerks. It really only takes one jerk to destroy a world.
I now stand a precarious step away from implying that the people who made this game are jerks as well, though I’ve seen that one photograph Kotaku always uses whenever BioShock director Ken Levine says something in an interview, and he doesn’t look like a bad guy at all (if you’re ever in Tokyo, Ken, we must do lunch, seriously; I know an excellent ethnic-mixture vegan curry place).
Still: they could have buried the mystery a little more deftly.
Or: I can sort of believe vending machines in the middle of the city, though why are there vending machines for Expensive Things in these god-forsaken maintenance tunnels under the city? It doesn’t make sense — how often did workers suddenly find themselves in need of psychic power upgrades in the middle of a walk up to the surface? Wouldn’t they have dealt with their psychic inventory management on the way to work in the morning, or waited to do it after their shift was over and they were headed back home?
The thing about giving all of the videogame-power-up dispensers in your immersive videogame concrete, in-world justifications, with tastefully tacky, interesting, exuberant neon graphic design, is that you’re begging for the player to supply real-world-logic to explain why they exist where they exist. At one point, your constant narrator informs you, of the ruin of the city: “Nobody knows exactly what happened . . . maybe he found he just didn’t like people.” Duh! What other kind of human being would take a look at a scientific research lab where a man had accidentally created a psychic-power-modifying injection that imbued the user with the ability to send any target into fits of violent rage and say “Yeah, sure, let’s put that in the hecking vending machines all over the city, see what happens.” And seriously, what kind of society-shunning undersea magical enclave of artists and scholars would literally need plentiful vending machines, complete with a stereotypical cigarollo-chomping Mexican mascot, to dispense weapons and ammunition for cash? You can say that they were having problems with smugglers, or that the genetic-splicing freak-bastards were overrunning the city and the people needed to defend themselves, though seriously, I’d imagine that, at a point like that, you’d just have government officials handing out guns in the street (err, “glass connecting tubes”). Maybe if they hadn’t taken time to convene the hecking Board of Artists and decide on what kind of rugged yet cute gun-belt-wearing mascot to stamp all over all of the gun-vending machines, they would have had time to fight back the threat before it ruined the whole damned place. In this, a game so reliant upon its immersing environmental qualities, In many ways — dare I say it — these context-ful vending machines are actually worse than the ammo crates of yesteryear. Nice job on that, guys! Try nuclear fusion, next!
Here I could ask the burning question: “Did no one in this society detect that maybe something about the psychic-enhancement thing was asking for trouble?” Though I’m pretty sure someone would link me to the Wikipedia page on Scientology, and then I’d have to pretend to feel ridiculous.
Around the time the game introduced the interestingly modeled neon-glowing vending machines that let me manage my psychic power slots — that is, let me un-equip one psychic power to make room for another — my Night-Vision was on, and I was seeing pink all over the place. I had a bunch of guns, and I was shooting lots of dudes, and I kind of wasn’t feeling it. Then there was this “boss” encounter where I had to put all of my weapons into a pneumatic tube before entering the room. I got to the end of the encounter and reclaimed my weapons from the other end of the pneumatic tube, at which time my characters hands flipped up and down, wielding each weapon for a split-second before snapping to another one. If only this had been Burnout Paradise on the PlayStation 3, where users with PlayStation(R)Eye(TM) cameras connected to their USB(C) ports will have a snapshot of their face taken at the precise moment of fatal impact with a rival racer in an online match; I would love to see what facial expression I was wearing when that thing happened with the pneumatic tube. I’d put it on every time I go to Starbucks; that way, when I saunter up and say “Shot of whiskey” to the gorgeous girl at the register, she might actually realize that I’m joking, instead of saying “We only have coffees and teas here, sir.” Seriously, I used to work at a Target store, for crying out loud, where three out of ten male customers over forty would spout such small-talky “jokes” as “Workin’ hard, or hardly workin’?” or “‘Tar-zhay’, huh? Fancy French establishment you got yourself here”. Walking into Starbucks and asking for a shot of whiskey in a perfect rendition of a Japanese Clint Eastwood is pretty hecking hilarious, compared to the stuff I had to put up with!
At any rate, I’m officially bored enough of writing about BioShock to begin thinking about what I’m going to actually order at Starbucks tonight, so I’m going to pause for ten minutes to do some deep knee bends, some crunches, and some push-ups.
TEN MINUTES LATER
I believe I was talking about my “Night Vision” being turned on, about my “seeing pink” all over BioShock. “Seeing pink” is a catch phrase I just copyrighted, meaning, well, that I am officially distanced enough from a work of media to see all of its logical inconsistencies as though they be made of neon. Even so, without my critical night vision, I’d be able to see BioShock‘s trespasses, because it’s just so eager to show them to me: Majestic vistas such as water cascading out of a cracked roof and onto a dilapidated dental chair are undermined by the glinting, glowing boxes of shotgun shells conveniently forgotten — and dry — atop nearby cabinets.
Seeing all drawers of said cabinet suddenly flip open when you press the A button is jarring. It makes you think, “A cabinet that well-rendered and normal-mapped shouldn’t pop open that quickly”, which is a strange sentence to put into cognition. (Then again, Physics are Weird, here in Rapture — sliding metal doors make creaking sounds, for example.) If you’re going to spend so many thousands of man-hours on rendering glossy torn upholstery, you could at least put in a drawer-opening animation. A fast drawer-opening animation.
And so many of the damned drawers are completely empty, as well. Why even show me three little empty bubbles with the word “Empty” by them, anyway? Can’t I see that the bubbles are empty? If it’s empty, why even show me the bubbles? Why not just show the cabinet as flipped-open and ransacked to begin with? Even if the item placement is random, it can’t be that hard to program, can it? Can it?
The weirdest of the little logic hiccups unfortunately involve the game’s strongest element — that would be “the mood”. All over the ruined city are these . . . tape-recorders, just lying on tables or desks, or hanging from hooks on walls. You pick them up, and you get to hear a private voice-diary from someone’s life. The first one you find is sitting on a table in a bar, overlooking a frankly spectacular view of the ocean. The voice of a woman echoes out of the tape, with microphone clarity, over the din of people enjoying themselves in a quietly lively place. She says she’s getting drunk, and alone, on New Year’s Eve. She laments what a “fool” she is, for “falling in love with Andrew Ryan!” It’s not impossible to believe that this woman would be drunk enough to tape-blog about her Deepest Personal Secrets in such a public place on New Years Eve; the very candor in her voice indicates immediately that she’s That Type of Woman. Her tape diary ends abruptly with an explosion sound and an “Oh my god!” So the story creeps up and seeps into our brains: something happened on New Year’s Eve, and this woman’s tape diary was forgotten here on the table.
As things progress, though, the tapes start to seem vaguely . . . rude. There’s a point where you see a frozen-solid pipe-tunnel leading to another hub of the undersea city; there’s a tape recorder lying on the ground, glinting ferociously, as you approach. You play the tape, and out comes a thick Cockney squawking: “These frozen pipes! I keep telling Mister Ryan, frozen pipes break easily! We have to fix the frozen pipes, or we’ll have some serious trouble.” I hear this and think, “Uhh, thanks for that?” The little monologue comes within millimeters of saying “We’ll need to use fire plasmids to melt this ice, if it gets too thick!” I imagine the original script must have called for such a line, though someone on the Quality Assurance assembly line must have realized how dumb that would sound. However, without such a connection to the flow of the game as a game, this disembodied flavor-monologue just seems wickedly out of place. It’s damned if it do, damned if it don’t. Around then, the Awakened gamer should begin wondering about the tapes; wondering why these supposed private diaries have been exhumed and strewn about in convenient locations. What with the weird satanic costume-ball masks being worn by the weird klepto-psychos gallavanting all over the place, it’s not hard to make some kind of synapse connection between “Crazy People” and “Crazy Behavior”; maybe one of these genetic blowouts made it a personal mission to arrange these tapes in convenient locations. If you’re like me, and you’re thinking this critically about BioShock, you start to notice, even, that someone was apparently being cremated in the mortuary at the exact moment this underwater apocalypse went down, and you begin to feel a deep dread — like you’re in the audience at your little brother’s school play, and he’s on stage, dressed up as an ostrich, and you know for a fact that he’s going to go stuff-ballistic, vomit blood all over someone, and storm through the audience biting people’s throats — you start to kind of pray, whether you Know God or Not, that at some point soon, this game is not going to try to explain this. Like you’ll get to the Final Boss, and he’ll be standing atop his Ziggurat Of Glory with his imperial cape billowing and his monocle glinting, and he’ll drop the megaton bombshell that he is both your father and he placed all those tapes so that you would find him — and then proceed to die by his hand.
Six hours or so into the experience, I’m kind of tired. The introduction of the oft-discussed Big-Daddy/Little Sister dynamic has come and gone, and the plot has at last let go its iron grip. The storyteller has succeeded in getting us drunk, and proceeds to stand us up and push us out the front door of the bar. We look back, and he’s dusting off his hands, turning around, and setting up the “CLOSED” sign. We are now free. Free to Move Forward in this Meticulous World. Free to Enjoy the “Game Play”.
Well.
I’m not going to lie to anyone, here. I know how “game development” goes. I know it involves a Lot of People with a Lot of Ideas, working a Lot of Hours in a big, fancy office. I know that some of the ideas some people work on end up being a whole lot better-executed than some of the other ideas other people work on (witness how great the driving is in Burnout 3, and how drop-dead terrible the menus and interface are). And though I do believe I originally said that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was not a perfect game, I believe it demonstrates a much “more perfect” way to appropriately use an epic amount of human resources: basically, you write down what the player can do in your game, then you figure out what’s going to happen in your game, then you build a story around that, then you tell everyone, “This is the plan, and we’re sticking to it”. BioShock has too many ideas; too many Little Things To Do. And it’s a shame, because, as I might have said a dozen times before in this very article, the game has some drop-dead genuinely brilliant concepts. It’s just that everything turns into a grind in the end.
It’s like, in an action movie, yeah, where there’s a montage depicting a character’s recovery and/or training in the martial arts. Can you imagine what it would be like if the first forty-five minutes of “Rocky” breezed by, only to pause for three real-time months of footage of Rocky Balboa punching a heavy bag, jogging, eating oatmeal, doing sit-ups, perusing Reader’s Digest while taking epic stuffs? That’s kind of what happens to BioShock: it’s top-heavy, and then it’s boring. A little rearranging of the Feng Shui is in order: a little, gasp, Zelda-ism.
Take the Big Daddy / Little Sister dynamic I touched on earlier. This has been a firecracker of media discussion; this was the darling pet feature of the game. Basically, there are little girls, turned into demon-children by genetic experimentation, who represent the physical embodiment of some Great Power. They are accompanied, at all times, by giant bio-behemoth men in modified deep-sea diving suits. The image of the “Big Daddy” is so striking that it adorns the game’s box, that a metal “Big Daddy” figurine was the Grand Prize awarded to all rabid pre-installed fans savvy enough to pay an extra twenty dollars for the Limited Edition. Basically, the situation is this: The Little Sister is a harmless Little Girl. She has Great Power. If you so choose, you can “harvest” her for that power, making your in-game avatar stronger. However, the only way to get close to the Little Sister is to kill the Big Daddy. Do so, and the Little Sister will cower sadly. Save her, and your character does a Jesus Hand Dance, and sucks the evil out of her with his fingertips. Harvest her, and she sinks off screen, and there’s a scream.
In this day and age where Mass Effect can feature two muppet-like human beings having purely consensual prime-time network-TV Clothed Sex preceded by Literally a Dozen Hours of Accountant-worthy Courtship and cause even mildly Christian people to accuse games of instilling Our Children with the Hunger To Rape Other Children, one has to wonder whether the underlying “problem” with the videogame “industry” is one of people pressing too many buttons or not enough buttons. BioShock‘s “kill little girls for profit” mechanic is a surefire conversation-starter, though in the game, it’s handled with such sterile laryngitis that it might as well just not let you kill them at all.
My “idea” for how to “fix” this element of BioShock‘s game design, I’m afraid, is easier said than done. I’m going to go ahead and give the dudes and babes at 2K Boston the benefit of the doubt, and say that they probably thought of it first:
My idea is that there should have only ever been one Big Daddy, and one Little Sister. The story of the game would branch depending on whether you kill the Little Sister, and at which opportunity you kill her. Maybe the Big Daddy has some kind of card-key and can open doors that your character can’t, so it’s to your advantage to slink around behind them. Every time your path converges with theirs, there’d be some kind of big cathartic showdown. Maybe enemies would attack the Big Daddy, and he would destroy them, and you’d have to avoid getting caught in the fray, or else join the fight to take the Big Daddy down. Maybe the Big Daddy, ultimately, would perish at the end of the game if you let him live long enough, forcing you to make a decision about what to do with the girl.
Of course, this is easier said than done; it would require construction of actual thoughtful set-pieces; it would require the Big Daddy to be an epic, impossibly, amazingly difficult and worthy adversary; furthermore, it would require the Little Sister to be an actual character in the plot, even though she might be presented as an incidental bystander in the context of the greater story. Allowing context to render bystanders as “characters” is one of the great organic traits of modern fiction. BioShock, unfortunately, fails as “fiction” — and as “entertainment” — because its characters are as sharp as lead pipes. Everything that could be emotional or poignant is constantly having its lungs punctured by a rusty spike named “This Is A Videogame”. I stuff you not: at one point, just as the plot is about to let you go and plop you into The World, armed with your Fantastic Weapons and Psychic Powers, your guardian angel on the other side of the short-wave radio exclaims, in tears: “We’ll find the bastard! We’ll find him — and we’ll tear his heart out!” and at this exact moment, I spontaneously picked up a “battery” from the floor, resulting in harsh letters jumping up on the screen and poking their fingers into my eyeballs: “You got a component! Use components to invent things at a U-Invent!”
Eventually, everything in BioShock becomes “Something To Do In A Videogame”. Harvesting Little Sisters or Setting Them Free becomes a decision you make every fifteen minutes. Instead of a punctuation mark, it becomes a verb — and not just any verb, it becomes like a conjugation of “to be”. Killing Big Daddies, even on the hardest difficulty (we here at ABDN wouldn’t have it any other way), is repetitive and hollow. Just lob a bunch of grenades at him, electro-shock him, blast him with a tommy gun. Blow the heckers right up. Who gives a stuff? Not you, that’s for sure.
There was some talk — I think on Gama Sutra — wherein a BioShock game designer or someone related to a BioShock game designer talked about how there was too much stuff to do in the game, and that ultimately detracted from what could have been a tasty, crunchy flowing, living experience. To this, I say: no stuff, Sherlock. I’d like to congratulate you guys for acknowledging your flaws, and I’d like to hold out hope that you might turn out a brilliant game in the future, though seeing as you only recognized BioShock‘s packrattism in hindsight, I can’t be too optimistic.
BioShock means well, at least — its thrilling, thoughtful presentation is a testament to that — as at first it shows you an oblivious enemy standing in a puddle of water, and your guide whispers over the radio (how he can see what I can see, I don’t know): use your electric bolt on the water! Fry him! You do this. Said bad guy fries. Now he’s dead. Nice.
Six hours later, when you’re spilled out into the Game Proper, you’re still seeing guys standing hip-deep in water, and you’re still shocking them. There’s no catharsis in it anymore.
There’s a “puzzle” slightly before the game pushes you out into the street, where a door is locked and you need to find the combination. Amazingly, the combination is written on a piece of paper on a shelf just five meters away from the door. This is precisely where BioShock‘s good intentions crumbled into dust, and made me feel kind of sad; the game’s MO had been, from the outset, to “relay information to the player through atmospheric elements”. The beginning of the game, with luggage stacked on the dock at the city entrance and declarations of protest written on discarded picket signs, had felt like a triumph; now here I am, looking at a number scrawled very legibly on a sheet of paper. It’s four digits. The combination lock on the other side of the room requires four numbers. This absolutely, positively has to be the correct combination. I feel like I’m Sherlock Holmes, and Watson just confessed to me that every mystery I’ve ever “solved” had just been elaborate dinner-party skits concocted by him and a bunch of friends I’ve never met. For one thing, the revelation that Watson has friends is a real downer; for another thing, I’m still a smart guy, though only in the context of some drunk people’s idea of “fun”.
Night-vision goggles on, in the back of my brain, I’m solving ancient riddles: I now know why modern Zelda games are so heavy-handed and sucky. It’s because they spend so much time on them. They’ve got dungeons, plotted out like works of architecture, with hallways of yea length and pits of yea depth. Nintendo’s quality assurance period is so deafeningly long that the level designers must sit around tinkering with the dungeons sixteen hours a day, hoping they’ll get an order from above to “announce the release date already”.
“We’ve got this hallway here, see? In dungeon number six. It’s about fifty meters long. Tanaka put a lantern here, and you light the lantern, and this iron grate opens. That still leaves us with, uhh, like, thirty more meters. So check out what I did. I made a pit of spikes here. And see that wall over there?”
“Awwwwwwww stuff, Yamamoto-kun, is that a hookshot panel?”
“Yes, sir. The player obtains the hookshot in dungeon number four, and it’s only used three times up to this point in dungeon number six, so–“
“You are getting a ray-zuh!”
Et cetera. Or I could mention Rare’s Star Fox Adventures, where you get this “flame” “attachment” that lets you shoot “balls of fire” out of your “magic staff”, and how rather than be used to actually light things on fire, it’s usually used to shoot a “ball of fire” at a “flame panel” on a wall somewhere so that a door opens. Some ten hours of your life after getting that flame attachment, you might be at the end of a cavernous dungeon room, all the enemies dead, all of the blocks pushed, wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do to open the sealed door. You go into first-person view mode and scan the walls. There, way, way up behind you, is a “flame panel”. Both because there’s nothing else you can do and because you know this is the solution to the “puzzle”, you shoot the flame panel with your flame rod, and the door opens.
Seriously, aren’t there more clever things to do with 3D cameras than make me look for a flame panel to shoot with my flame rod?
This applies to BioShock all over the place, into infinity. Except it’s never as clearly offensive as the Star Fox Adventures Flame Rod Example. In fact, in giving me a “choice” of which gizmo from my Santa-sack of Stuff to use to conquer each pseudo-situation, BioShock is actually kind of worse off.
To wit: It used to be that characters would do stuff like fall asleep and dream about ravioli if you didn’t touch the controller. In BioShock, if you don’t press any buttons for a few moments, the words “Hold the right directional button to get a hint if you are stuck” appear on the screen.
The little puzzle-like mini-game you “play” every time you attempt to hack a downed turret or hover-drone-bot is about as fun as those rare, bizarrely self-important moments during your day at the office in which you actually have to use your cellular phone’s calculator function. Really, though, with all the concessions this game offers inexperienced players, I have to wonder when someone is going to make a puzzle element in a game that lets you end the whole charade with a single button press when you see the solution and have far more than adequate time to implement it. Call it the “I Get It Button”. While we’re at it, someone call Sony and tell them to include a feature in the next PlayStation 3 firmware that allows me to navigate several backdoor selections and eventually find a huge-text menu allowing me to disable the mandatory warning in front of every hecking game that tells me not to unplug the console from the wall and/or throw it out the window and/or experience a sudden power outage while the hard drive access light is blinking?
Eventually, the game gets just plain sloppy. There are several copy-editing related errors I have stored in the back of my head for some reason, like this one on-screen message that read “Your maximum health has been increased, allowing you to take more hits before being sent to a Resurrection Station”. I thought they were called Vita-Chambers?
Vita-Chambers are explained, very, very early in the game, as capsules that can re-energize your tired (and even dead) body, using some kind of mystical cloning technology. I’ll admit that I winced when I first read the explanation of Vita-Chambers, first because the description tells me that there’s “no need to touch or otherwise interact with a Vita-Chamber in order to activate it”, which is really dumb and silly, and second of all because I knew in the pit of my stomach that the game — a game with a story about life and death (and politics) — would not be able to roll on until its conclusion without somehow using the Vita-Chamber as a Key Element in the Plot. And when it did, my groan could have shattered a gazelle, had a gazelle been lurking outside my window, nuzzling through my sweet, hot garbage.
Tons of objects — beer bottles, some crates — have physics, and can be burst and blasted apart to reveal Delicious Items. Other crates, the likes of which are used to impede your progress and force you to seek Some Other Route, simply won’t budge.
When your main character gets wet, his field of vision becomes blurry the way that a camera lens does.
If a videogame is to be rightly hailed as a “masterpiece” and/or a work of “genius”, things like these need to not happen in the game, at the very least.
What we have here, with BioShock, is a well-meaning game with some excellent concepts and an iron grip on its execution. It’s just a shame that “its execution” equals “execution of absolutely hecking everything written in every draft of the design document.”
There’s been talk lately of Gore Verbinski, director of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” flicks, signing on to helm a film based on BioShock. The inevitable fanboy knee-jerk reaction was that it’d be “impossible” to relate BioShock‘s deep atmosphere in a movie. Are you kidding me? The only parts of BioShock that wouldn’t “translate” to a movie are the heavy-handed bullstuff things. Are the fan-creatures afraid that the film would neglect to inform the audience that the thing the main character rides down to the undersea city of Rapture at the beginning of the story is called a “Bathysphere”? Come to think of it, maybe that was my first hint that I would neither love nor hate BioShock: when the big white help text floated into view, telling me to press the A button to “Use Bathysphere”. Mac OSX’s spell checker doesn’t even say “Bathysphere” isn’t a real word, though, so maybe all of the internet forum-dwellers who instantly regaled friends with tales of “OMG” re: “the part in the bathysphere at the beginning” were just really big undersea lore aficionados.
At any rate, I think a BioShock film is a tremendous idea, and that Gore Verbinski is the perfect director, not because he’s amazingly capable of sculpting, like, actual art so much as because he at least has the conscience to request that his screen-writers use Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word, you know, so that they can go to the bottom of the columns and see if there are any arithmetical errors before shipping it off to the storyboard artists: I swear, when I went to see the third film in a theater in Tokyo, they handed me a heckin’ flowchart explaining the relationships between the characters. Who hates who, who loves who, who’s being paid to backstab who, et cetera. I thought for a second that the flow-chart only covered the first two movies, though apparently it turned out pretty useful for piecing together the third. In the end, the story, though idiotic, was air-tight. What the hell more could you expect from a movie based on a theme park ride featuring animatronic cartoon pirates? That the film looked really good and was nominated for a record-breaking number of Academy Awards for “Best Johnny Depping” — that must have been Verbinski’s idea. It looks to me like it’s Verbinski 1, theme-park rides 0. And what is BioShock, in its present state, if not a theme-park ride with more Shit To Do? The presence of a pre-installed plot, the very idea of catharsis existing between the Big Daddy and the Little Sister is more than enough feeling to shape a compelling narrative. The game misses the opportunity to be Something That Is, because it is too busy concentrating on being Something To Do; a film could really capitalize, whether or not it offers the lead character the choice of lightning or fire rounds for his shotgun, whether or not the character recovers psychic power and loses health when he smokes a pack of cigarettes. Or at least it could bring Django Reinhardt back to the pop-culture pre-conscious.
Well.
I arrive at the end of this review, then, wanting to say something positive aside from my constant beating the dead horse of “lovingly crafted atmosphere”. Here’s all I can think of:
1. The water looks great!
2. It’s perfectly fine to set games in destroyed places because it gives level designers a perfect excuse for why there’s so much stuff unnaturally thrown around.
3. The arrow that guides you to objectives is smart, guiding you in the direction of the stairs and then in the direction of the door. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guiding arrow do something like that in a game before, though it’s possible that I played a game with such an arrow and just didn’t notice because I otherwise wasn’t lost.
We here at Action Button Dot Net are planning something. It’s to be called “The Action Button Dot Net Manifesto”. It can and will be a list of what I (uhh, “we”) consider the best twenty-five games of all-time, ranked in order and everything. Naturally, these will all be games that would score four stars on the Action Button zero-to-four review scale.
I mention this because the game we will crown as the number one best game of all-time shares many, many traits in common with BioShock. However, it absolutely nails everything it aspires to. It is a tremendously great videogame, the likes of which BioShock had every opportunity to be; yes, I am rating BioShock as harshly as I have because I genuinely recognize and respect its potential when held up alongside the Best Game Ever. I’ve offered plenty of hints to the identity of that throughout this review. Feel free to guess, in the comments thread, what you think the game is (and if you already know, please don’t spoil it T-T).
The game is not Gears of War, so I’m fully free to use Gears as an example for my conclusion. Yes, we’re still operating under the belief that, game-design-wise, Gears of War is As Good As It Gets For Now.
Gears of War‘s simple mechanics are like a survival knife stabbing into an invincible watermelon: a delicious crunch of impact every time; we delight in beholding each and every watermelon tumble down the stairs, or come flying out of a window. BioShock‘s unwieldy choices-laden limp-noodle of a “game system”, on the other hand, is like swishing a chopstick in a glass of water. Eventually, it lets you swish a chopstick in a bathtub. The point is, both of these actions produce sounds — it’s just that one of them is just magnitudes more satisfying than the other.
Ultimately, what we need is a game with BioShock‘s love of details and Gears of War‘s crunch and flow. Because God help us if all of our “intelligent” games are going to be boring to play, and all our exciting games are going to star oatmeal-skinned meatheads. Come on, people. Let’s show a little creativity, a little diligence.
1994
★★★★
“HOW AND WHY I NEVER FINISHED BECOMING A DETECTIVE”
by tim rogers
11 october 2019
Final Fantasy VI arrived in North American retail stores 25 years ago today, on October 11th, 1994. Back then it called itself Final Fantasy III. I remember this exact date because I remember everything because of a rare neurological condition I have suffered my whole life. I also remember this date because exactly fifty-nine days later an arsonist who would never be caught burned down my high school’s brand-new six-million-dollar gymnasium.
At 3:14pm on Tuesday, October 11th, 1994 I entered the side door of my parents’ house on the north side of Indianapolis, Indiana. I was wearing my gray sweatpants and my green flannel shirt, buttoned up all the way to the chin over my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt because I was morbidly obese and I hated being morbidly obese and buttoning my shirt all the way up to my chin made me feel thinner. My mom had her car keys in her hand.
“I’m taking your little brother to Wendy’s, get in the car.”
My mother has always had such an incorrect relationship with commas. I point this out the once because I want you to see her as she is. For the remainder of this piece I’ll embellish her toward semicolons.
My mom didn’t go through the drive-thru because they always got the order wrong. Since his infancy family legends told of my little brother vomiting at the sight of a photograph of salad. I remember differently, though it’s never been any use arguing with people who can’t remember literally anything as well as you remember literally everything.
My mom never went through the drive-thru because if her little sweet boy got one whiff of pickle, that’d be her upholstery.
“Look at this; look at that drive-thru line. Look at this; three in the afternoon on a Tuesdy! We’re goin’ inside so they don’t get you’s’s orders wrong.”
My little brother always ate one order of chicken nuggets, one order of fries, and two hamburgers with no ketchup, no mustard, no onions, and no pickles, just plain, that’s two of them, that’s both of them with no ketchup, that’s with no mustard, that’s with no onions, and that’s with no pickles, please and thank you.
My Wendy’s order was then as it is today, though today it’s only ever on the odd road trip: the biggest fries you got and the biggest Frosty you got.
My little brother was seven; I was fifteen and mute. Being mute is easy as a teenager because aren’t you supposed to never tell your parents anything, anyway, at that age? I left the Wendy’s with my hands in my pockets and wandered into the Video Vault, which as of 2018 is now a liquor store which is no longer called Video Vault.
Video Vault introduced me to anime, direct-to-video sequels to Jean-Claude Van Damme films, and many bad video games. Prior to our relocating from Fort Meade, Maryland to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1993, my mother had been in charge of game rentals. She applied shotgun logic to her rental choices. My math books would have described her mindframe as “selection with replacement.” She’d rent the same thing three or four times if my big brother didn’t say something. Even then she’d sometimes forget, and suddenly Archon for the NES was gonna sit on our bedroom floor for the weekend.
When we moved to Indianapolis, however, we had Video Vault right across the street and a block down from our house, sharing a parking lot with the Wendy’s. Video Vault was not the Army post supermarket of my mom’s poor decisions. No, Video Vault possessed a curated selection of games. Someone at the Vault was a connoisseur. And being that Wendy’s after school had quickly become a Friday Thing, I had been in charge of my own game-renting destiny for the past year. Usually I rented Final Fantasy II—that’s what we called Final Fantasy IV, back then (look, we didn’t have Wikipedia; we didn’t know)—and started a new save file and just blasted through the whole game over the weekend. It’s still my favorite Final Fantasy.
It was Tuesday, and we didn’t rent videos on Tuesday, even though Wendy’s after school had transitioned from a Friday Thing to a Whenever Baby’s Hungry Thing. You’d have thought renting video games would have become a Tuesday thing as well. Well, wrong: if you want your mom to never rent video games for you on a weekday in 1994, just don’t smile at the bus driver one day in 1992. Your mom always says hello to the bus driver, and he always says a lot more than hello back, because he deals with children all day and likes talking to adults.
I drifted mutely toward the games. A lightning bolt shocked the wind out of me.
Final Fantasy III was sitting there on the shelf, right next to Final Fantasy II, which was sitting to the right of EVO: The Search for Eden.
Final Fantasy II and EVO sat against plastic cases containing their respective cartridges and well-worn instruction manuals. Final Fantasy III sat fresh and clean against the shelf. It was not available. Someone had rented it. I didn’t care. Final Fantasy III was real, and I was about to touch its box.
I had never seen its box before. Back then, games didn’t always have release dates, much less press-released box art unveilings. All I’d ever seen was a cheeky two-page advertisement on the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly. This advertisement insinuated that the little cartoon Moogle, Mog, could turn a bunch of monsters into turds. The copy on page two of the ad nonchalantly informed readers that the game was coming “October 1994.” Which day in October was anyone’s guess, including mine, and that’s why I’d been stepping into Video Vault after school as frequently as my little brother wanted chicky nuggets.
I picked up its box with trembling hands.
Touching Final Fantasy III‘s box with my real hands had never occurred to me as potentially ever happening. I stared at the cute little moogle juxtaposed with the brooding deep purple background for several seconds, my eyes as big as tea saucers, before I remembered braver curiosity: I flipped the box over.
Boldly, the back of Final Fantasy III‘s box displayed only one screenshot. That screenshot showed a dark, red sky behind a gritty rust-colored metal fortress atop which stood two soldiers riding robot suits. Curiously, the screenshot was warped and bent a visibility-obfuscating angle.
I wasn’t disappointed at the lack of additional screenshots. I’d already seen screenshots of Final Fantasy III in Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Players. I didn’t need to see more screenshots.
Besides, it struck me as grown-up and bold that the box only showed one screenshot.
What I most wanted was to read the copy on the back of the box. It didn’t disappoint me: three terse paragraphs of clean, fantasy prose, calling the box-holder toward the action of wondering what wonders waited in this game. No bullet points; no numbers; no boasts of cartridge size. It only showed prose: with delicate brush strokes, it set the stage for what might have been a bigger story than the Bible.
I scanned back through issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly in my head. I recalled the October 1994 issue of Game Players’ review by Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan, who gave the game a 98%. I recalled screenshots embedded in that review, of a town with blue brick roads and snowy hilltops and Dickensian wooden houses and piping steam billowing on the wind. A brown-brick castle in beige sand; a clown laughing while that castle burned. I remembered Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan’s words.
“Deep inside me, there was a huge, empty hole. For years I tried to fill it with alcohol, dangerous sports, faster and faster cars, loud music, and countless women. Nothing could help me, until Final Fantasy III. Sell the house, sell the kids. Play the game!”
I measured Lundrigan’s words against all the screenshots in my memory, and then against the prose on the back of the box. So it came to pass that before ever touching a d-pad to move a character a single square, much less slot its cartridge into the Super Nintendo I shared with two brothers, I had decided that I held in my hand an empty box representing the best video game I had ever encountered in my life.
“Heh, yeah, dude, we just got that today.”
I dropped the box like it was someone else’s. I slid it so its back touched the shelf.
The Video Vault Guy Who Was Always Friendly To Me was chubby, tall, and he had a sort of a Jon Snow beard. He wore polo shirts and he probably lifted weights just because he had friends who did. He was much younger than I am now, though much older than I was then. West of the Rockies I take it he’d have had tattoos. Where he was he probably listened to metal while driving his mom’s old minivan despite never having been to a show.
“Looks like somebody already rented it.”
I nodded at him like he was the bus driver.
“Where by somebody I mean me,” he said.
I smiled at him with my huge gap teeth. I turned around and left. I ran into my mom on the way in.
“I knew you’d be in here. Son, you’re creepin’ these people out.”
We got home at shortly after 3:45pm. I put my Wendy’s french fries—circa 1994, the best fast-food french fries, hands down—into the refrigerator. I put my Frosty into the freezer. I went into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth. I went into my room. I took off my shoes. I put on the heavy wool socks I always wore to bed. I got in bed. I wrapped a T-shirt around my face. I fell asleep.
I woke up seven hours later. I crossed through the dark living room and into the dark kitchen. I microwaved a mixing bowl full of water. I made myself a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese. I microwaved the Wendy’s french fries. I mixed them into the macaroni and cheese. I took my Frosty out of the refrigerator. I squeezed that paper cup until its contents thawed into spoon-edibility. I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark. The shiny metallic blinds in my bedroom window reflected a glint of the little amber nightlight plugged into an outlet in the flower-wallpapered wall behind me. My room was always the coldest room in the house. It was cold that night. I’m thinking it was in the upper fifties. The sky had been gray over the Video Vault parking lot. My toes were cold inside my hiking boot socks. Smartphones hadn’t been invented yet and I’d never used the internet. A mixing bowl of macaroni and cheese heated my lap and a Frosty chilled my hand. Devoid of even Instagram, my life was no upbeat coming of age comedy. I was a fifteen-year-old obese mute self-taught vegetarian living on the night shift; I’d never talked to a girl, though I had held the shrink-wrapped, empty box of Final Fantasy III for thirty seconds at the local video store seven hours ago.
I studied Chinese until 6am. Then I did my homework until 7am. My mom entered my room and flipped the light switch on.
“You’re like a vampire in here, son; it’s time to get ready for school.”
Seventeen hours later I made another bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese and a Hot Pocket.
Eight hours after that, my mom told me I was a vampire and reminded me to smile at the bus driver. Black clouds swirled like barbecue smoke over the off-white sky outside as silent wind ripped through and bent deep green trees.
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I ate lunch alone. Tuesdays and Thursdays my class schedule put me into another lunch period, so I sat with my big brother Roy. Roy’s named after our grandfather, by the way, who was named after his grandfather, so he technically predates the singing cowboy. Roy was seventeen years old and a senior. Roy was as tall and skinny then as I am now. He wasn’t old enough to have ever had sex, though he was old enough to talk about gross stuff constantly at lunch with the friends he had that I didn’t.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, Roy would wait for me at the southwest entrance of our school’s vast, bright cafeteria. He’d greet me with monosyllables. I feel now like his “Hey. Yeah. Let’s go in.” reflected the real seventeen-year-old Roy Rogers The Third, and all the hot air and wiener jokes at lunch was a performance. There I go again, giving everyone too much credit.
Thursday, October 13th, 1994, Roy and his friend Jared were as excited about Pulp Fiction as I was about Final Fantasy III.
“It’s gonna be so fuckin’ bad ass,” Jared was saying. He’d said it thrice.
“Dude, I’m goin’ tomorrow,” Roy said. “I’m just goin.’ I’m walkin’ to Clearwater if I have to.”
“You gotta get your license!”
“Dude that movie looks gay as hell,” one of the other guys said. This guy only liked republicans and Michael Jordan. My brother’s friends were all so tall. I was Hobbit-high, yet so uncool I had never even read Lord of the Rings. They all looked like they were 35. I was 15 and I looked like I was in second grade.
“It won the prize at Cannes,” Jared said over a mouthful of something his mom had made. He pronounced it “Cans.” Jared was the fattest kid in our school by a half-marathon’s worth of miles, though somehow I was The Fat Kid at the table.
“Shit you don’t even know what Cannes is.”
“Nuh-uh, it’s in France.”
When the bell rang, my brother walked with me to the cafeteria exit. He had his hands in his pockets.
“You all right?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Okay,” my brother said.
The next day, Friday, October 14th, 1994, Final Fantasy III was still rented out at Video Vault. My mom drove me to the Blockbuster two parking oceans over. They didn’t even have the game.
“He’s looking for a Final Fantasy Three,” my mom told the guy.
“That’s not out yet.”
“They’ve got it over at the Video Vault.”
“I’m tellin’ you it isn’t out yet.”
“That kid’s a damn liar,” my mom was saying in the car.
I sat on the living room sofa and ate my french fries and Frosty. My little brother, his burger and nuggets already vanished into him, was banging toys together in the middle of the living room floor.
I was re-reading Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan’s review of Final Fantasy III when my brother Roy entered the side door into the living room.
“Where were you?” my mom asked him. “I brought some Wendy’s.”
“Me and Jared are gonna go over to Subway.”
“Huh.”
“We’ll be back.”
I went to bed.
My mother slapped the light on at just after seven in the evening.
“Wake up. Don’t you wanna go to the movies with your brother and your dad?”
My brother rode in the passenger’s seat of my dad’s Dodge Ram conversion van.
“That John Travolta, I ain’t heard that name in forever. You know what he was in, don’t you?”
“Saturday Night Fever,” my brother said. His voice sounded like his arms were crossed.
“That’s right! How do you even know about that movie?”
“I’ve seen it. You made us watch it on TBS.”
“That came out—yeah, that came out the year you were born! You musta been maybe six months old. We were in Delaware. I went to see that by myself, yeah, you musta been maybe six months old because it must have been the week before Christmas. I left you home with your mom and your Aunt Cindy. Boy, he could dance. I tell you. That man could dance. It was so slick. I tell you, that man could dance.”
My brother didn’t say anything.
“You know they show him dancing on the commercial for this movie, yeah? I bet you—I bet you they got him to dance because they musta seen him in Saturday Night Fever.”
“Yeah, probably.”
We got out of the van at the General Cinema at Clearwater Crossing. It was cold. My face turned red. I was still wearing my gray sweatpants and green flannel shirt, buttoned all the way up to my chin.
My brother looked at me.
“Are you alright?”
I shrugged.
I lived two whole years of my life on the opposite of a normal schedule. Even on weekends I remained nocturnal. School always comprised the last half of my waking day. I suffered apocalyptic exhaustion from start to finish of our Friday night showing of Pulp Fiction.
That night, my dad apologized to my mom.
“There was some filthy, filthy language. Oh, boy, it was filthy. I think—I think Tim was a little spooked. Roy, he’s a grownass man now, I know he loved it, though Tim, boy, there was—there was a guy got shot in the face with a gun, oh man! It was disgusting, just disgusting, and, the movie just makes you—everyone in the theater I swear there were people standing in the theater, it was so full, everyone in there is just laughing and laughing and I’m gonna tell you: I don’t think I ever cracked up so hard in my life. It’s just awful, the movie makes you laugh at something like that. And your son Tim is just sitting there grinning like a criminal.”
My mom shook her head back, forth, back, and forth.
“That John Travolta in the commercials,” my mom said, “boy, he got fat.”
“I tell you what, though, that John Travolta, that man sure can dance. He’s still got it. Boy, that was slick.”
I sat on the edge of my bed, eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes. My stomach was full of a whole large bucket of popcorn, so I ate slowly. I’d just seen a movie consisting of three episodes, each of which focused on a different set of characters, telling one loose story out of chronological order. I’d seen so many rules broken. I’d listened to a vast room full of people cackle with disbelief at the realistic sight of a man decapitated by a pistol blast. My life was different. I re-read the first half of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and then slunk out to the kitchen. I made a bowl of Frosted Flakes and played Doom at about 12 frames per second on the old computer in the laundry room.
Even the guy among my brother’s lunch friends who’d doubted Pulp Fiction couldn’t stop talking about it. Once on Tuesday and twice on Thursday he wondered aloud, “I still don’t get what was supposed to be in the suitcase.”
“I’m goin’ again Friday night, you better believe it,” Jared said.
“You ain’t goin’ to homecoming?”
“Homecoming is gay,” someone said.
“Homecoming sucks,” my brother said.
I sat on the edge of my bed Friday afternoon with a mixing bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios on my lap and Final Fantasy III‘s instruction manual, already tattered and coverless after two weeks of maltreatment by ghostly renters, smoothed atop my right knee. I was wearing my brown flannel shirt, buttoned up to my chin over my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt. My wide eyes drank in the wispy watercolor portraits of the game’s twelve characters. (The game’s manual did not mention the two hidden characters.)
“Tell him we’re locked and loaded at 5!” my dad enthusiastically informed my mom.
“I told you, he’s got his little treasure in there; he ain’t gonna wanna go outside with yous.”
“These are supposed to be the best years of his life,” my dad said. I think his sliding scale was broken.
My dad knocked on my bedroom door. One-Mississippi, Two-Mississippi, Three-Mississippi, he opened it.
“Your brother Roy and I are gonna go to Hardees and then we’re gonna go to your high school homecoming football game. If you’re comin’ you better be in the van at 5. We’re locked and loaded at 5. I wanna get there early, get our seats. Or you can sit there and play your videogame.” He pronounced it as one word.
He closed the door. To this day, my dad still goes to all of my high school’s sporting events.
I didn’t put Final Fantasy III into my Super Nintendo until after my mom had left with my little brother to join my dad and big brother at the football game. Friday, October 21st, 1994, wearing my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt just after sundown, I clicked that big heavy button and turned on the finest video game I had yet played.
Ghostly, operatic organ music bellowed out of my 19-inch television’s single speaker as a camera descended down a gray, lightning-crackly abyss. With a crashing crescendo, the words “FINAL FANTASY III” yelled themselves into text. I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth.
I pressed the “A” button. Back then, games didn’t have loading times. The save file screen came up in the space between two teeth-heartbeats.
You could only save three files in Final Fantasy III for the Super Nintendo. When the save screen comes up, you immediately see the names of the lead character in each party. So it was that my first impression of the world beyond Final Fantasy III‘s title screen was three files, each with Terra, Locke, and Edgar in the party.
In the top file, the player had named Terra “BITCH.”
I chose to start a new game. I played until three in the morning. I’d met four main characters and learned of their troubles in the troubled world. An event transpired which split our heroes up onto three different paths toward the same objective.
Final Fantasy III graciously offered me the choice of which scenario to play first. I’d never played anything like it. I thought of Pulp Fiction.
By the time my mom told me it was time to sleep through church on Sunday, I’d played all three scenarios. Each of them had introduced new characters and new elements of the plot. I played Locke’s first, because I liked him the most. I played Terra’s second, because I was most curious about her story. Then I began Sabin’s scenario. Looking back on it now, I think Final Fantasy III wants you to choose Sabin’s scenario last. He’s the character least involved in the machinations of the plot. Everyone else—Terra, Locke, Edgar—has a horse in the race and skin in the game of the game world’s political climate. Sabin is just along for the ride. Yet in playing his increasingly complicated, wickedly long scenario, over the course of which he teams up with a full party of three characters, first-hand witnesses a war crime disaster, and meets actual ghosts on a train, we see Sabin earn his racehorse. We see him get involved.
When Sabin’s scenario ended I knew it: Final Fantasy III was as good, smart, and important as Pulp Fiction. My brother’s lunch friends would have a field day talking about it.
My brother stood in my bedroom doorway Sunday morning.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He looked at the television. He picked up the game case.
I was buttoning my flannel shirt up to my chin, over my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt.
“They made a Final Fantasy Three, huh? Didn’t you and what’s-his-name used to play that Final Fantasy Two? That game was gay, dude.”
My brother had played Final Fantasy II from start to finish with my friend Carl and I in Fort Meade, Maryland three times during sleepovers between 1991 and 1992.
“Hey, let’s play some Mortal Kombat II.”
We played some Mortal Kombat II on the Super Nintendo. My brother lost three matches in a row. I did the same fatality every time—the one where Kung Lao splits his opponent down the middle with his bladed hat.
“God, that fatality’s so gay, dude.”
Friday, October 28th, 1994, Final Fantasy III was unavailable for rental at Video Vault. The Blockbuster nearby had acquired a copy, which was also rented out.
At roughly four PM on Sunday, October 30th, 1994, I stood in Electronics Boutique in Castleton Square Mall, reading and re-reading the prose on the back of Final Fantasy III‘s box. It was $79.99.
“Dude, we do trade-ins,” the store employee said to me. “Just bring a buncha NES games, man, that’s what I’d do.”
Friday, November 4th, 1994, I started Final Fantasy III afresh on Video Vault’s copy after my brothers and parents left for my high school’s football game at a high school across town. I had to save over a one-hour-progressed file in which Locke was named “COCK.” I remember thinking, at the very least the guy coulda put an “E” on the end of it.
Sunday, November 6th, 1994, I put down my controller in the middle of Sabin’s scenario. I grabbed a shoebox full of NES games and did my seatbelt in the back of my dad’s van.
“What is that he has back there; is that a box of gametapes? What is that; why’s he got those gametapes on him?”
“Electronics Boutique does trade-ins,” my big brother said.
“Your father and I paid for those,” my mom said. “You’re just gonna throw ’em away?”
Actually, mom, I paid for them all myself, with my grandmother’s birthday and Christmas money.
She was right about the throwing them away part, though. The guy at Electronics Boutique told me—well, first he told me “You don’t have to bring the box up here, dude”—Battletoads, Solar Jetman, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll, Final Fantasy, Double Dragon, River City Ransom, and Double Dragon II would net me $22 in store credit. I only had $36 in cash. If you factored in Indiana’s 5% sales tax, I was light by an Andrew Jackson and a half.
I stood in front of Sears in my black sweatpants and Payless Velcro strap sneakers for ninety minutes with my shoebox of game tapes. I had never wanted to leave a place so badly in my life. Everyone was loud. I wanted a slice of food court pizza though I needed to save my money if I was going to ever purchase Final Fantasy III. I was hot with weird fear about the extra-large Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt clinging dearly to the bodyfat beneath my flannel shirt. I felt like the biggest trash monster in the city or the world, to have let my mom put ten dollars down on that game, and agree to buy it for me as an early Christmas present on its release day. Why did Donkey Kong Country even have a release day? Why couldn’t Final Fantasy III have had a release day? If I’d have known, I would have made it my Christmas present.
I was a fifteen-year-old five-foot-tall morbidly obese mute self-taught vegetarian who had never talked to a girl, though I’d seen Pulp Fiction and I had played the same ten hours of Final Fantasy III twice. Yet somehow, the prospect of having a job and earning an hourly wage felt sound years away.
I just wanted to go home and get farther into Final Fantasy III than I’d gotten the first time. My blood began to boil. Why did my dad always give everyone two hours in the mall? Why couldn’t it be one hour? Why couldn’t it be thirty minutes? What could you do in the mall for two hours? They never bought anything. None of us ever bought anything.
My brother arrived at the rendezvous first. He had a half-empty Orange Julius cup in his hand. He gave it to me. I drank it. My dad showed up. My mom showed up last. She’d bought my little brother a Power Rangers toy on clearance. Its cardboard box rested as though animal-mangled inside a plastic bag in my mother’s hand. My brother was coddling the ranger like a puppy. He’d shatter it within a week.
Black clouds swirled like barbecue smoke in the off-white sky over the cracked beige asphalt of the half-empty mall parking lot.
When we got home, I locked myself in my room. I didn’t sleep or eat until Sunday evening. I’d just gotten past the epic strategy battle in Narshe and gotten absolutely destroyed by enemies in the liar’s town of Zozo. I hadn’t tried grinding yet in the game. Zozo’s aggressive monsters were beating me senseless. The game was trying to move on to its next chapter, and I’d hit a wall. The rainy drear of Zozo perfectly suited my mood that overcast Sunday evening when my mom opened my bedroom door without knocking, called me a vampire, turned the light on, and said, “Give me your Nintendo game; I gotta take it back. Do you want Wendy’s?”
I ate my fries in the dark. I fell asleep at seven PM and I woke up at four AM.
The next Friday, Video Vault’s copy of Final Fantasy III was gone. I rented Blockbuster’s copy. Someone had played the game for thirteen hours. The character Setzer was in the lead. I saved over the third file, in which Gau was leading a party with Sabin and Cyan. On Saturday, my brother went to see Pulp Fiction again.
The Friday after that, I went to Video Vault, then Blockbuster, then back to Video Vault. I rented Video Vault’s copy of Final Fantasy II. I played the game in its entirety over the weekend. One of the files had contained a level-99 Cecil named “Marduk.” That was cool.
The next Wednesay, the 23rd, was a half day. My mom took me to the mall to pick up my copy of Donkey Kong Country.
“This is your Christmas present,” she said.
We went to Wendy’s on the way home. I stopped at Video Vault. Final Fantasy III was in. I didn’t rent it. It felt awfully sad not to rent it.
Outside, dark clouds swirled like barbecue smoke in the gray sky over the parking lot.
I played through half of Donkey Kong Country that night. The next day was Thanksgiving. I sat at the table half asleep. Everyone was eating turkey. My family consists entirely of people who would need Doctor Oz to fit it into a soundbite that you can close your mouth when you chew. I ate Kraft macaroni and cheese, a grilled cheese sandwich, pickles, and a lot of cranberry sauce. My nose was all blocked up. I kept sniffing real loud. It must have sounded like I was snorting baseballs.
“It’s all that dairy!” my dad said.
“It ain’t no dairy,” my mom said. “He’s just bein’ an ass hole.”
They were each half right.
I finished Donkey Kong Country minutes before church on Sunday. The next Friday, I rented Final Fantasy III from Video Vault again. All three save files featured a Locke named “Fuck.” The timestamps indicated they’d all been saved within one minute of each other. I distinctly remember thinking, “He shoulda at least put an ‘E’ on the end.” Even back then, even as a friendless mute, I couldn’t resist a good joke callback, even if only a ghost existed to witness it.
I battled my way to Zozo again.
Sunday morning my mom told me it was time for church. My dad was drinking coffee in the kitchen. This was a couple years before he started wearing suits to church. He was only a couple years older than I am now. He was looking at the Indianapolis Star, asking nobody if they could believe the sports. I performed my weekly ritual of flipping open every full-color advertisement for a glimpse of video games amid mainstream products such as sweaters and electric razors. On a whim I visited the weekly circular for Kohl’s, a store whose Indianapolis locations sold ugly clothes that my mom bought for me, though no video games.
Between a golf bag and a set of flatware, as inexplicable as an alien invasion, sat the box of one solitary video game.
Final Fantasy III.
Next to it was the most curious price tag I have ever seen in my life: the game was on sale for $52.94.
To this day, I do not understand why or how that price happened.
So it was that on Sunday, December 4th, 1994, I traded in a box full of NES games for $22, added $34 of my own money, and purchased Final Fantasy III from the Electronics Boutique in Castleton Square Mall in Indianapolis, Indiana while a rented copy of the same game sat inside the Super Nintendo in my bedroom at home. I remember this date perfectly because I remember everything because of a neurological condition I have suffered my entire life. Also, I remember this date because four days later, an arsonist who would never be caught burned down my high school’s brand-new six-million-dollar gymnasium.
I put the rented Final Fantasy III back into its plastic case. I lovingly returned its tattered manual, now smoothed to toilet-paper softness by the hands of countless profane phantom renters. I closed the case. I put it on the dinner table in the kitchen so that my mom could return it.
I sat on the edge of my bed holding my very own copy of Final Fantasy III for many minutes. I measured its heft. I squeezed its bulk. I could feel that French-toast-thick instruction manual inside. The package felt so important compared to that of Donkey Kong Country. This was a video game my brother would like. This is a video game my dad would like. He likes John Travolta dancing in Pulp Fiction! Why wouldn’t he like this?
I removed the plastic hang tab from the box. I used it to slit open the shrink wrap. I peeled the shrink wrap open just enough to open the box.
My big brother came in.
“You got it, huh?”
He sat down on the bed next to me.
I put the cartridge into the Nintendo on the floor. I booted it up. The ominous title music played. My brother sat on the bed, his arms crossed. He’d walked in and out on the game before. The presence of a purchased copy must have inspired him to deeper attention. His arms folded, his brow furrowed. He’d even put his glasses on. He almost never wore them, back then.
His glasses were so much cooler than my glasses. I had a huge brown pair of American Optical Z-87 safety goggles. My brother had a fancy pair of wire rims. My parents had let him pick his glasses. He’d been in little league before he wore glasses.
I pressed the “A” button on the title screen.
“Dude, what the heck?”
There was already a save file in the game.
“Oh, shoot! Hey, mom, look at this!”
My mom came into the room with her hands on her hips.
“What am I lookin’ at?”
“There’s already a save file in the game! Somebody already played it! And look, they named the character ‘RETARD’!”
In hindsight, I can tell that the boy at Electronics Boutique to whom my mom gave a piece of her mind had, in fact, been the one to name Terra “RETARD.” Years later, I’d work in a Software, Etc at College Mall in Bloomington, Indiana. We checked games out all the time. We had a shrink-wrapper in the back room. We could make anything look like nobody’d played it before.
Castleton Mall closed at 5pm on Sundays. We left the mall just as someone started yelling over the loudspeaker for us to get out. Black clouds swirled like barbecue smoke in the charcoal sky. Indiana, back then, didn’t do Daylight Savings Time.
So it was that I returned a rented copy of Final Fantasy III to the dropbox slot of Video Vault in Indianapolis, Indiana while a brand-new, all-for-me copy sat in a bag in my mom’s 1984 Plymouth Horizon.
We went home. I went to bed. I woke up after midnight. With some microwaved Wendy’s french fries spilled on a paper plate in my lap, I played Final Fantasy III for two hours before turning it off and doing my homework.
At about two-forty PM on Thursday, December 8th, 1994, as the final bell loomed twenty too-long minutes in the distance past Mr. Gulde’s “Global Awareness” class, the fire alarm went off.
Mr. Gulde looked at his watch. “Everyone just take your bags with you.”
We all went outside. We stood on the lawn in front of the school. I looked at my big Casio watch. It was almost two-fifty. I thought about crossing the street and going home. Our house wasn’t even a block away. I wasn’t used to being outside at this time of day. Under those dark clouds and that dead sky I felt more tired than I did at church. I could barely keep my eyes open.
“Pranksters all, prankin’ and shit,” one of the students in Mr. Gulde’s tenth-period Global Awareness class said, milliseconds before the explosion. Everyone shut up. We looked toward the sound. Sheets of siding fell off the brand-new, six-million-dollar gymnasium—the best in the city; home of the North Central Panthers basketball team. Red and yellow flames burst out.
We stood in silence for several minutes.
A black pillar of smoke rose high, high up into the clouds.
I turned around and walked home.
My mom came into my room without knocking. I was putting my hiking boot socks on.
“You’re home early.”
Roy came in.
“Mom, turn on the news! Someone blew up the gym.”
The reporters said school was canceled the next day. My mom and brother sat and listened to the news in silence. Helicopter cameras showed the black pillar stomping down on the school like a finger from heaven.
I went outside. I stood in our lawn. The column of smoke would still be faintly visible on Sunday.
I played Final Fantasy III until 6am on Monday. I got through the Opera House. It was the greatest game I had ever played.
On Monday, the Indianapolis Police had set up checkpoints at every entrance of the school. Students were only allowed to use one entrance, which was equipped with a single metal detector. All three thousand students filed through that one metal detector.
At a special assembly that morning, the principal told us things had changed, effective immediately. Indianapolis Police offices would remain in the school indefinitely. We’d have more metal detectors in the coming days, to speed up student entry. Any students attempting to enter the school later than the pre-homeroom warning bell would be expelled.
Any students showing up late to class would be expelled.
Tuesday, there were cops in the lunchroom. Like, real cops, with guns. Roy and his friends weren’t as loud as usual. Nobody even said “nipple,” much less any of the worse stuff they usually talked about.
“I bet you it was the same kid from last year.”
In 1993, there had been a fire in the same area of the brand-new, six-million-dollar gymnasium, which had at that time just been unveiled. The fire barely covered a few square feet of floor. Investigators ruled it an arson.
The police arrested a student. They never revealed the student’s name. All anyone ever knew was that the student was allowed to return to the school.
“It wasn’t the kid they arrested last year because he didn’t even do it last year; that’s why they let him go!”
“We don’t even fuckin’ . . . know who he was.”
“It was Mr. Quandt’s son, you retard,” someone said. “He graduated.”
“It was not Mr. Quandt’s son,” Jared said.
“How do you know, Jared? Because it was you?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Then how do you know it wasn’t him?”
“Mr. Quandt’s son graduated and they said this kid they arrested last year is back in school.”
“That’s what I’m saying; I’m saying it wasn’t Mr. Quandt’s son who got arrested last year, it was Mr. Quandt’s son who actually did it.”
“Well even if it was Mr. Quandt’s son last year it wasn’t Mr. Quandt’s son this year,” Roy said. “He graduated.”
“Unless he came back,” someone said.
“That’s retarded; you sayin’ he’d sneak in to the school just to start another fire?”
“He’s got unfinished business!”
“You fuckin’ moron.”
“The news said the kid who did it last year wasn’t even in the gym when the fire started this year.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it last year!”
“I think it was Jared last year, and it was Jared this year.”
“Why’d it be me?”
“Yeah, tell me how it’s gonna be Jared,” my brother said, “when they’re talkin’ about how you get expelled if you’re late to class. You know Round Boy here ain’t exactly on the cross-country team!”
“Haw, haw.”
They all laughed. None of them knew that Jared would later lose over 200 pounds by eating Subway sandwiches, become a millionaire, and then be arrested for child sex trafficking charges.
“Maybe it was your brother,” one of the guys said. “Didn’t he have Coach Mitchell for gym last year? That bastard’d make anybody wanna torch the gym.”
My brother looked at me.
“Nah, he’s alright.”
“You always gotta watch out for the quiet ones,” one of the guys said. I believe he owned a skateboard.
“It coulda been anybody,” my brother said. He was half right.
“Fuckin’ punk, burning down the gym.”
“They said it’s like a million dollars of damage.”
“Who said?”
“They said it in the paper.”
“You read the paper?”
“What kinda bitch move, burnin’ down the gym. You don’t go around hatin’ basketball here in Hoosier country, that’s for damn sure.”
“It probably didn’t have nothin’ to do with basketball.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I don’t know. It just probably didn’t.”
“God damn . . . bitch move either way.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
1993: ONE YEAR EARLIER
“Classic loser move,” My Only Friend had said, a year prior, of the first North Central High School gymnasium arson. “Shoulda torched the fuckin’ lunch room, am I right? Shoulda done it like a month earlier, too, am I right?”
The arsonist had waited until the end of the school year to attempt to burn down the gym.
“Should just fuckin’ . . . put a fuckin’ pipe bomb in the mother . . . fuckin’ . . . . . . lunch room while all those fuckin’ . . . chodes were eatin’ their fuckin’ lunches, dude. Just fuckin’ blow ’em all to shit! There’d’a been hair on them walls!”
It occurred to me several years later that My Only Friend had gotten the phrase “hair on them walls” from the novel In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, about which he’d once proudly given me an impromptu book report, once: “Some fag wrote it, though it’s got some good shit about shotguns in it.”
It was July 1993. The fire had been a month ago. This was not the first time My Only Friend had discussed what he perceived as a wasted opportunity to wallpaper the lunchroom with hair while his mother purchased lottery tickets at a gas station.
“I think we’re gonna fuckin’ go to Taco Bell. Fuckin’ . . . psyched? I am gonna fill my go kart up with diarrhea dude.”
My Only Friend’s mom, who was someone my mom knew, which is how I found myself turned in to a little friendship with My Only Friend, emerged from inside the gas station with a couple of lottery tickets, a bottle of Barq’s root beer for My Only Friend, and a bottle of Sprite for me. I drank Sprite because I didn’t drink caffeine. My Only Friend drank Barq’s root beer because A&W root beer was “for queers.”
As she approached the car, My Only Friend said, “Don’t snitch to mom about any of this shit, [his little brother’s first name].”
“I won’t!” his little brother said, invisibly, from inside the passenger’s seat.
“You boys ready to go?” My Only Friend’s Mom was from Texas by way of Minnesota.
“Yeah, mom.”
On the way to the Taco Bell nearest the Putt-Putt on the south side Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” came on the radio. My Only Friend’s Mom was listening to 97.1. That was the Best of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and Today. (Today was the first two and a half years of the 1990s.)
“Hey, mom, turn it up.”
“You got it, kid,” she said.
My Only Friend bobbed his head along to the song. I had been fourteen for just one month, though I had considered the song inane since I was eleven. At age thirty-two people would call me a poser for saying that I don’t like songs that have lyrics I can understand as much as I like songs with lyrics I don’t understand. I swear, at age forty I’ve got playlists of, like, traditional Inuit throat singing and I don’t share any of it with anyone. At age fourteen I never shared my music opinions with anyone, so I never had to argue with anyone about them. My Only Friend looked over at me and said, “This song is awesome. There’s this part. Ah, heck. Where is it?” I, mutely, possessed neither the wherewithal nor the means to tell my friend the song was hacky and inane and that I would not stoop to define cleverness as stringing together rhyming words that evoked memories of pop culture or historical tragedies to anybody who’d ever looked at the cover of any given book. It wasn’t a song: it was a list of stuff. I hated about that song everything a cynic today might hate about remakes and reboots and sequels to movies.
“Yeah, yeah, here it is!”
In tandem with Billy Joel, My Only Friend shouted, “J! F! K! Blown Away! What Else Do! I! Have! To! Say!”
He clapped his hands once.
“Just, awesome, man. JFK got so blown away, dude.”
He headbanged a bit as the song stepped into its final chorus.
“We didn’t start the fire! We didn’t start the, start the fire!” He tonelessly talk-sang.
He didn’t realize that, actually, it had always been burning since the world had been turning–an ancient machine deep dark in an inscrutable jungle switched on by hands divine in a time before time which we may never find though if any among us does and if we can reckon its power switch from all that mess of whatever meat composes it it is our human duty to smash it
At Putt-Putt, before go karts, we spectated Mortal Kombat II. Taller teenagers than ourselves crowded the machine.
My Only Friend had social skills. He talked up these kids who might as well have been an alien species to me.
“He says there’s a couple new fatalities,” My Only Friend told me. “Maybe we’ll get to see some. Ah, hell, Kung Lao’s gonna win this one. Oh, sh, look at that—cut him from crotch to cranium, dude!” Yes, he did speak like he was always writing MAD Magazine blurbs.
I wanted to play some Street Fighter II, so I did. I played as Ken against the CPU. I lost at Vega. I rejoined My Only Friend.
“I heard some jackass saying there’s ‘Friendships’ in Mortal Kombat II, like Johnny Cage can sign an autograph and hand it to a dude instead of finishing them. Fuckin’ liar. Let’s go ride those go karts.”
In addiiton to $5 for arcade games (NBA Jam), my mom had given me money specifically to ride the go karts. I was not allowed to use it on anything else. My mom didn’t want me not riding the go karts because My Only Friend was going to be riding the go karts, and My Only Friend’s parents were richer than my parents. We rode the go karts. It was too hot for a kid as fat as me. I filled my little go kart with my own gravy. My Only Friend crashed into other drivers so many times and too obviously on purpose that he got yelled at twice by a big teenager who had a whistle and knew how to blow it.
“I’ll shove that whistle so far up his ass he . . . pisses it out his DICK!” My Only Friend was saying as we walked back toward Mortal Kombat II. I had a dollar left over from the go karts and Street Fighter.
“Come on, play Mortal Kombat II against me. I wanna try a fatality.”
Inside, a teenager from earlier told My Only Friend, “Dude, you missed it, dude, that dude did Johnny Cage’s friendship.”
“You’re a fuckin’ liar.”
“Ah, fuck you I’m not.”
“Fuckin’ fuck you.”
We watched Mortal Kombat II for a half an hour. Neither of us got to play. My Only Friend’s mom and little brother came around with some tickets they’d won at skee ball.
“Maybe you boys wanna play minigolf next time?”
“Minigolf is for homos, mom.”
“Son! Watch your language.”
We went home. It was hot in the backseat of that car.
Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” came on the radio.
“Hey mom! Turn it up!”
“There’s this part in this song where this guy says people are puttin’ bread in a jar.”
One month later, it was My Only Friend’s birthday. He wanted to go to the Lone Star Steakhouse and then to the Block Party Arcade.
“This place rules,” he told me, of Lone Star Steakhouse. “They bring you a bucket of peanuts, and you just throw the shells on the floor!”
At the Block Party arcade, he wanted to play Dactyl Nightmare. I stood maybe thirty feet back and watched him flail as though underwater beneath the weight of ancient virtual reality paraphernalia.
“Dude, that was so awesome.”
We stopped at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the way out of the Clearwater Crossing mall.
“Let me show you something,” he was saying. He slid up a little stepladder. He grabbed an imported British video game magazine off the top shelf of the magazine rack. “See how big this fucker is?” he whispered. He shook it. It was inside a huge crinkly plastic bag, and maybe three inches taller than other magazines.
He looked left. He looked right. “Spot me.” He pulled on the plastic bag, yanking it open along the seam. “Seriously, spot me, dude.”
He slid the stepladder over to the left one rack. He stepped up, and then gingerly stepped down a moment later.
He led me around the corner. He indicated the plastic bag. I peered in. He fanned open the pages of the big, tall, British video game magazine.
Inside, he had deposited an issue of Hustler. I’d never seen pornography before. I mean, technically, it was just the cover, though I was in the AP classes, so trust me: I pretty easily intuited it was pornography.
“We got fuckin’ both feet in the jackpot, now.”
He purchased the magazine, deploying two timid, theatrical utterances of the word “sir.”
His mom’s car rolled up in front of the Barnes & Noble.
“You find what you want?”
“Yeah, mom.”
“You boys wanna go anywhere else?”
“Let’s go home and play some Sega CD.”
His house was bigger than mine. It was wider and darker. The kitchen had one of those countertops you could see over into a dining room and living room. Outside of that they had what I figured was a second, smaller living room, with windows behind a sofa, and no television. Down the hall from that was his room, with a 25-inch television and every game console.
“Dude, let’s play some Sega CD.”
He’d owned a Sega CD and all the games released so far, so somebody had to watch him play it. He put on Sewer Shark.
“Sewer Shark is so awesome, dude.”
The loading times were longer than anything I think the game was trying to do.
“I’m gonna take a piss,” he said. “Don’t fuckin’ touch anything, okay?”
I sat on the edge of one of the two large chairs in the middle of his bedroom floor. In the dark, I watched the Sega CD try to load Sewer Shark. It was like watching a turtle try to stand on its hind legs. It was still more entertaining than watching him actually play Sewer Shark.
My Only Friend reemerged into his dark bedroom.
“The fu is going on with this stupid bastard?”
The Sega CD still had not loaded the disc.
“Fuck. You didn’t fuckin’ touch it, did you?”
I shrugged.
“I fuckin’ swear if you fuckin’ touched this thing and it’s fuckin’ broken my fuckin’ mom is gonna fuckin’ kill you.”
He reset the machine.
“I swear Sewer Shark is so awesome, dude. Do you wanna play Streets of Rage 2?”
I watched him play Streets of Rage 2. He hadn’t offered me the other controller.
The last weekend of the summer, we went to the Putt Putt again.
“Why don’t you boys play the miniature golf?”
“I wanna ride the go karts, mom.”
After the go karts, we spectated Mortal Kombat II. Some big kid in a Thrasher shirt pulled off Johnny Cage’s Friendship: Johnny Cage signed an autograph and threw it at Scorpion.
The crowd hooted, hollered, and bellowed.
“Ohhhhhh shiiiittttt”
My Only Friend’s face twisted.
“Dude, that’s so fucking gay.”
He never looked at Mortal Kombat II again.
He did, however, look at Mortal Kombat One, when it released for the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo on September 13th, 1993. He cornered me at school and told me he was going to tell his mom to call my mom and invite me over to his house on Saturday. I complied. He handed me a controller. He told me to pick Sonya, the only female character in the game. We chose the stage “The Courtyard,” where, in front of a large audience of background dwellers, he practiced every character’s Fatalities on Sonya. If I won, he’d snatch the controller out of my hand and practice Sonya’s Fatalities. Maybe sixteen times during this funereally joyless multi-hour exercise he sat back at the conclusion of one fatality or another and proudly said, “Dude, the Super Nintendo version is so gay.” The Super Nintendo version had replaced blood with sweat and censored the Fatalities. Instead of ripping out an opponent’s heart, the character Kano reached forward and removed something gray from behind their silhouette. A scrap of clothing? What is this gray pseudosphere? I’m looking at it on YouTube. The boggledness of my mind yet today suffices for an equal shock to my age-fourteen eye-witnessing the heart-rip. Most nightmares in my experience, outside those by-Halloween-cartoon-educated children think of when they hear the word “nightmare,” concern more often amorphous gray masses produced from fourth-dimensional elsewhere than they star horror movie monsters.
The week after Christmas, 1993, he and his mom came to my house. Our school was on winter break. My little brother was sitting at the kitchen table, playing with Silly Putty. Silly Putty was my little brother’s favorite toy. He was six. He liked to put the Silly Putty onto the table and dagger-pound it with his fist-bottom. He also treated non-Silly-Putty toys like he treated Silly Putty.
My Only Friend sat at the dinner table while my mom talked to My Only Friend’s mom about something on the news.
“FU—I mean, heck,” he whispered. “Is that heckin’ . . . . . . red Silly Putty?” He got up. He hunched forward, hands on his thighs, and spoke to my little brother like my little brother was a cat or a baby. “Hey, buddy, can I see this here?”
My Only Friend picked up a Wolverine action figure. He laid Wolverine flat on his back on my family dinner table. He broke off tiny pieces of red Silly Putty. Between his fingers, he smeared them into little thin shrapnel-scraps.
“Do you have any toothpicks?”
I got him a toothpick from the kitchen.
In ten minutes, he’d made two dozen little skinny tendrils of red Silly Putty, and shaped them so they geysered up out of supine Wolverine’s abdomen. He took an egg of original-color Silly Putty and crafted fat, caucasian-flesh-colored snakey ropes. He balled them into a bundle. He gingerly set the bundle atop Wolverine’s abdomen.
“Hell yes. Bad ass. He’s disemboweled.”
One year earlier, the first time I ever went to his house, he asked me sweetly if I’d ever played Mario Paint.
“It’s got this mouse—don’t touch it. It’s got this mouse. Check this out.”
He loaded up his custom animation. He had painstakingly inserted a Sonic the Hedgehog sprite art into the game. He played a crude animation in which Sonic rolled into a ball and spin-dashed at a provided, authentic Mario sprite, which then exploded into an air-brushed puff of primary red.
“That’s how it would be. That’s what would happen if Mario and Sonic were in a fight, dude.”
Then he asked me if I’d ever seen the movie Akira. I shook my head. He put on a VHS tape and fast-forwarded it to the part where you can see a girl’s boobs if you pause it fast enough. Some punks were assaulting the girl in an alley. They ripped her shirt off.
“Dudes are fuckin’ like, ‘Show me those chesticles, bitch!'” I hear the phrase again today. Where did he learn to talk like this? Had someone snuck him in to witness an alcoholic divorced stand-up New England comedian’s final pre-suicide set?
The week after Christmas, 1993, we went to his house. I hoped he would show me Doom. He showed me Sonic CD.
“It’s got music by Tommy Tallarico, dude. It’s so good. Listen to it. Listen.”
He continued to exhibit the aftermath of his richboy Christmas. He loaded up Hook, based on the Steven Spielberg film in which Robin Williams plays Old Sad Peter Pan.
“Listen to this, dude.”
Maybe ten months later, the game had loaded. He ham-fisted and sausage-fingered his way around the first level, which I had already cleared a couple boredly times on the Super Nintendo version.
“The music sounds exactly like the movie.”
I wanted to tell him, “No, it doesn’t sound exactly like the movie. It sorta does, though it also sorta doesn’t. At any rate, I don’t want to be listening to this at all, much less right now.” I didn’t tell him this because I was mute, which didn’t matter to him, because he probably wouldn’t have listened anyway.
“Nintendo is pissin’ their pants listening to this.”
He then plugged in the 3DO he’d gotten for Christmas. He played Gex. While he played Gex, he told me three things: firstly, that Dana Gould could suck a shotgun barrel for all he cared, secondly, that they should have totally gotten Dennis Leary to voice Gex, and third, that—and I quote, “Doom is so gay, dude.” He’d also gotten DOOM, before Christmas, for the PC he also had in his bedroom alongside his 3DO, his Sega Genesis with Sega CD, and his Super Nintendo.
I hated him. I think his brother hated him.
1993 became 1994. Cold months happened. I missed Fort Meade, Maryland. I missed marathoning Final Fantasy II with Carl. I missed playing in the woods and talking about what kind of Zelda game Nintendo should make. I cruised through ninth grade. Teachers go easy on you when you’re a little bit weirder than the other kids. I started staying up later and later at night so I could watch David Letterman. He was from Indianapolis, Indiana. His mom lived right down the street from us. My dad reminded me of that every night. Eventually I was watching Conan O’Brien after David Letterman. I started writing essays and short stories on the electric typewriter my dad had found for me two years back. I listened to X103 on my old Walkman with headphones late at night. I listened to Nirvana. I laid on the blue shag carpet in my bedroom, staring at the flower wallpaper lit by that amber-colored nightlight that never went out, waiting for “All Apologies” to come on. I had received a cheap stereo with a CD player for Christmas 1993. I had In Utero and Nevermind and Bleach. I think that’s pretty good taste for a thirteen-year-old, okay? I looked over Electronic Gaming Monthly and my Chinese dictionary while listening to Nirvana with one headphone and David Letterman on the television. I ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and macaroni and cheese. Ever since My Only Friend’s birthday at Lone Star Steakhouse, I’d become a fan of Tabasco sauce. I kept a bottle in my bedroom. I was the only member of my family who enjoyed anything spicy. Lots of the other things they say about white people are this true as well. My mom found the bottle one day, and was worried about me for years. Well, once you start keeping food in your bedroom, normalcy doesn’t like you so much anymore. I slowly became more nocturnal than not. I was a fourteen-year-old mute, obese, self-taught vegetarian, and I had never talked to a girl, though one day I was going to touch a guitar, if I’d let myself give myself a chance. Kurt Cobain killed himself with a shotgun at age twenty-seven, which seemed old to me, on a day when I ate one more peanut butter and jelly sandwich than usual.
Saturday, April 9th, 1994, My Only Friend’s mom picked me up and took me to their house. She and her husband went to the movies. She left us alone in the house. Me, My Only Friend, and his little brother sat atop stools at the minibar-countertop thing in the house’s secondary living room. Video game magazines were splashed about the countertop. My Only Friend set down a third empty Barq’s root beer can. All outside that very grown-up furniture fixture was an ocean of blackness.
Copying from an image of Super Metroid‘s box art in an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, My Only Friend and his brother were drawing pictures of Samus Aran in their respective sketchpads. My Only Friend was fourteen years old; his twelve-year-old brother’s drawing was better. I had my hands on my knees. I stared at the wood paneled wall. I wasn’t in a mood to draw.
“Hey, [his little brother’s name], did you tell Tim about Cam’s Masturbation?”
He said it like his little brother was in charge of telling me things, and like Cam’s Masturbation was a thing everyone desperately needed to know about.
He gave the pair of words “Cam’s Masturbation” so much gravity I presumed for a moment it alluded to a philosophical corollary.
His brother shrugged and rolled his eyes.
“Fine, I’ll tell him. So.”
So.
“There’s this speddo who was in [my little brother]’s kindergarten class. They put him in special ed later. His name was Cameron. They called him Cam. He was a real sped! Tell him about what Cam did, [brother]?”
My Only Friend’s Brother shrugged. My Only Friend rolled his eyes. He continued.
“The teacher was asking all the kids, hey, what do you like to do when you’re at home? And kids were like I like painting or I like playing with blocks and they got to Cam. The teacher was like, Cam, what do you like doing when you’re at home? And Cam just reached right for his junk and started beating it, like this.”
Here my friend stood up and beat the dull side of his fist into the top of his jeans’ pubic region.
“Except he went under the pants, like, he actually grabbed onto his wiener. Can you believe that!”
I could believe anything.
An hour passed there, in the dark, a grandfather clock ticking in the other living room, somewhere around the bend of a hallway.
“Check this out.”
My Only Friend’s little brother looked up from coloring his Metroid drawing. He’s a professional comic book artist now, by the way. He scoffed at his brother’s drawing.
Crudely, in the style like a comic pamphlet about Jesus you’d find on a city bus and your mom would warn you about germs if you touched it, My Only Friend had drawn Kurt Cobain, a shotgun in his mouth, gore exploding outward in a shockwave halo around his head. On the wall behind him My Only Friend had scrawled “I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE.”
“You’re so sick,” his brother said.
“No! I’m not fuckin’ sick, you’re just a fuckin’retard!”
He spun the drawing around, though I’d already absorbed it upside down.
“What do you think? Faggot took the easy way out, huh? Went down like a shitbitch. fuckin’ trashcan pissdiaper”
I snatched the drawing up off the table, balled it up, and shoved it in my mouth.
“You fuckin’ mongoloid sped!”
I chewed it four times; I spit it onto the floor.
“Fuckin’ . . . . . . pick that up and flush it down the toilet before my mom gets home, you reebo.”
I picked it up and flushed it down the toilet before his mom got home.
“Do you guys wanna fuckin’ . . . play Doom?”
I watched him play Doom on his homework computer.
“Doom is so gay,” he said, a near-silent hour later.
His family moved. I never saw him again.
1995: EIGHT MONTHS LATER
We were reading The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy in our English literature class, like that was a normal, relatable work of written material for fifteen-year-olds to care about while the OJ Simpson trial was on television all day every day and I was still two years away from having my first long conversation with a black person my age (and her mom) about who The Cops actually are.
Simon raised his hand, because that’s what he did. I bet he’s on Facebook. I’m going to look him up on Facebook immediately after I finish typing this. I hope he’s a lawyer. I mean that in the nicest possible way.
“Yes, Simon?”
“You said we could talk about some real issues.”
“This isn’t about OJ again, is it?”
“N-no.”
“What is it?”
“I feel that some of the students—and myself—still have questions about the fire.”
Our teacher, who was, objectively remembering, not a good teacher, sat on the edge of her desk.
“Of course you do.”
“I just think a lot of us feel violated. We feel scared.” He stood up. He rotated in place. “We feel like there’s something they’re not telling us.”
“Well, I don’t know who’s not telling who what,” our teacher said.
A silence fell off the ceiling and evaporated on the floor.
“I just think we could use some answers.”
“Do you have questions?”
“How long are we going to keep having cops in the halls? Am I gonna have to go through a metal detector every day until I graduate? And who’s the student who got arrested last year? At least can’t we know if he did it or not?”
Our teacher stepped forward off the edge of her desk. She threw her hands up.
“I don’t know. You know what? I’d tell you if I could.”
When I say that she was not, objectively remembering, a good teacher, I mean, for example, that I feel like a good teacher would have left it at “I don’t know.”
After class Simon was talking in the halls with the girl who sat next to me in every class because our last names were adjacent in alphabetical order, and the new disciplinary rules required teachers to seat students in alphabetical order.
“We should organize a group to investigate,” he was saying. “I think if enough of us put our heads together, we can find out who did it.” The boy who would be the captain of the swim team next year stood nearby, nodding.
I lingered and listened. The eventual swim team captain looked at me. He made eye contact. He looked away. I walked away.
At home, late that night, by the light of a string of Christmas bulbs in the dining room, I scrounged through the basket of newspapers under the piano my dad never let any of us play. I clipped every article pertaining to the fire at my school. I put them all in a medium-sized Ziploc baggie. I put the baggie in my shoebox of video games. I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the box on the floor between my feet.
Over the next week I composed a letter to Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan at Game Players, for his game tips column. The letter went through five drafts. I told him I was a big fan. I said that I had a hole inside me, too, though I was only fifteen years old so I could only legally fill it with macaroni and cheese and Sprite. I thought it was a good joke. It might have been. I told him I loved Final Fantasy III. I told him if you cast “Vanish” on an enemy it works 100% of the time, and then if you cast “X-Zone,” that enemy will die 100% of the time. I told him a couple other tips that weren’t in Nintendo Power‘s strategy guide. I closed the letter out by saying, “Hey, do you think Kefka is actually Shadow’s friend—the one you see in Shadow’s flashback dream scenes? His friend was captured by the Empire, and Kefka is the result of experiments, right? Shadow seems to have some personal business with Kefka.”
I never heard a response. They never printed my letter. I didn’t expect them to.
The Wednesday after I sent the letter, a kid spilled his own chocolate milk into my hair as he walked past my table.
I took my time in the bathroom. I wet my hands and ran them through the wig-like hair pile atop my huge head. For not the first and not the last time, I beheld the mess of myself in that window.
The halls were empty when I exited the bathroom. Students were afraid of being expelled for tardiness.
The future swim team captain was walking down the hall in my direction. His girlfriend was with him.
“Watch this,” he said.
He sprinted toward me.
“Bon appetit, faggot!” he yelled. He kicked me so hard in the testicles I threw up all over my sweatpants. His facial expression melted away.
“Oh my god honey what did you do that for?” his girlfriend asked him. The exact emphasis of her “what” still reverberates in my ears today when I think on it.
He didn’t answer. I feel like a decent person would have at least said “I don’t know.”
I drenched my sweatpants in bathroom sink water. I showed up at my next class stinking like evil orange juice. Teachers don’t give you a hard time when you’re slightly weirder than everyone else. I went home and threw my pants in the washer. I sat on the edge of my bed and didn’t cry.
Time flowed without speed or mercy. In June of 1995 I turned 16. That very day I got a job at Target. By August of 1995 I’d grown two inches taller and lost 40 pounds. On Friday, August 11th, 1995, ten months to the day after the release of Final Fantasy III, Chrono Trigger came out in North America. I had my own money. I bought it full-price on day one. I sat on the edge of my bed in my cargo shorts and hiking boots after my shift mutely pushing carts, measuring the heft of Chrono Trigger‘s turgid box. I’d bought it on faith alone. I tried to guess at how many pages its manual had. A confusion found me. It didn’t leave for a while. I think now that at last, with nonchalance, my hole had finally found me.
Six years later, I’d have all the ingredients of a normal adult life, which I continue to have in some form today. Though for a period of dark vampiring months in my fifteenth year of life normalcy felt colder than impossible. Deep within the jungle of the unknown unknown my normal life slept, coiled and exhausted. The possibility of being a person never occurred to me once. These days, surrounded by information and noise as I am and we are, occasionally that possibility blinks into invisibility for a moment or an hour, and for god’s sake I am terrified, and for all your sakes I am humiliated. For a while in my youth outside of calculating the trade-in value of a couple Nintendo games, I lost my concept of considering the future.
“I know an invisible machine,” Rosa Peel, also known as The Tennis Monster, says, in my novel Chronicle of a Tennis Monster.
“This ancient machine of garbage and meat, active before we ever breathe, yelling after my bones are gone.”
In other words, we didn’t start the fire.
“Cut me up and sell my bones to the trashcan factory when I die,” Rosa Peel also says, earlier in the story, though I’m not sure what that means.
“Promise me you’ll make sure I’m dead before you sell my bones to the trashcan factory,” Rosa says, later. Now I’m thinking of trashcan factories. I’m sorry that I don’t know why I person I built is trying to say whatever they’re trying to say. I tried to build someone worse than myself and I tried to dig for humanity there. Instead she just wants to keep talking about trashcan factories. Eventually she says something beautiful about rotten fruit which almost always still almost makes me cry even for example in airports, though much of the time I hate myself for hating her.
I will die possessing many frivolous yet beautiful memories of people and weather. For as long as I remember to remember, my mind makes no difference between darkness, medicine, and entertainment. Our lives are the longest trivia games in the world.
Two years after Chrono Trigger came out in North America, a game called Moon: Remix RPG Adventure released in Japan. One summer night in 2003 I played this game at the house of a friend who’d purchased it because a noise cellist she liked, Hiromichi Sakamoto, had contributed a song to its soundtrack. I played the game with my friend all night in the wooden darkness of a Tokyo living room. We played it again the next week, and the next week, until finally we’d finished it. We’d lost a mutual friend to suicide earlier that year. I haven’t ever cried with another person like that.
I sought out the director of the game, Yoshiro Kimura, in 2004. We became acquaintances, and then friends. For fourteen years I asked him to let me translate his game into English. He always gave the same reply: the game is too hard, and it’s not very good, so nobody would like it.
In 2018, he decided to release it again. He said he’d let me translate it.
A couple weeks ago, unspeakable treadmill lightyears removed from the macaroni silence of my adolescence, I went to Tokyo to see Yoshiro Kimura. We talked for many hours. We videotaped the conversation, so that I can edit it into a documentary at some point in the future. The documentary provided me a perfect excuse to ask him broader questions about Moon than casual circumstances had ever encouraged me to ask. He told me about his time working at Squaresoft, on Romancing SaGa 3 and Super Mario RPG. We talked about Final Fantasy III, IV, V, and VI. I told him I was very antisocial when I played Final Fantasy VI. He nodded.
I went on.
I told him, one day, halfway between sixteen and seventeen, I looked at myself in a mirror. I hated myself more than I felt anything about anything else. And I’ll never know why, though that day I realized it was terrible and useless to hate myself. I’d keep doing it, and I still do it every day of my adult life, though at least I know I’m doing it. I told him, I knew that day that I had wasted days. I had wasted thousands of opportunities to pay the world acts of goodness. Until maybe 2008 I went on living wastefully and terribly. Since then I’ve done good things whenever I can, even when it hurts me and ruins me. I keep them to myself. And one day—just the other day, in fact—I looked at myself in a mirror in Narita Airport in Tokyo, Japan, and I knew that I know something no one else knows; I knew that I knew something beautiful and wordless, and if I ever figure out how to say it, I’ll say it immediately. I promise I won’t keep it. If I die having never said it, that’s all right, because it wasn’t worth saying if I didn’t say it right. And if I figure out how to say it right, I’ll say it without hesitation, and someone will hear it, and they’ll someday fix a part of the world I don’t know how to see, and so on, until I’m far away and sorry.
I told him about the kid who made Sonic kill Mario in Mario Paint. I told him about my gymnasium fire. I told him that last Christmas, my mother had told me that that kid, now grown up and married with children, called my parents’ house in the middle of a November evening the week before Thanksgiving 2018 and asked if he could take them out to dinner. My mom said she told him she was already cooking dinner; he could come over, if he wanted. He said he’d come over. She said he was a perfect gentleman and didn’t ask about me once. I told my friend I stood in the bathroom and stared at my face and my eyebrows for five minutes after hearing that. I remember everything because I can’t forget anything, though every fresher cell of me differs many times over from those of those gone days. For several minutes I looked for someone else at myself.
He nodded. “I think I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I don’t know how I got here,” I said.
I got here the only way anyone gets anywhere.
I finished translating Moon immediately before beginning to write this. It was released on the Nintendo Switch eShop on 27 August 2020. If you play it, please try not to think of me.
“HOW AND WHY I NEVER FINISHED BECOMING A DETECTIVE”
by tim rogers
11 october 2019
Final Fantasy VI arrived in North American retail stores 25 years ago today, on October 11th, 1994. Back then it called itself Final Fantasy III. I remember this exact date because I remember everything because of a rare neurological condition I have suffered my whole life. I also remember this date because exactly fifty-nine days later an arsonist who would never be caught burned down my high school’s brand-new six-million-dollar gymnasium.
At 3:14pm on Tuesday, October 11th, 1994 I entered the side door of my parents’ house on the north side of Indianapolis, Indiana. I was wearing my gray sweatpants and my green flannel shirt, buttoned up all the way to the chin over my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt because I was morbidly obese and I hated being morbidly obese and buttoning my shirt all the way up to my chin made me feel thinner. My mom had her car keys in her hand.
“I’m taking your little brother to Wendy’s, get in the car.”
My mother has always had such an incorrect relationship with commas. I point this out the once because I want you to see her as she is. For the remainder of this piece I’ll embellish her toward semicolons.
My mom didn’t go through the drive-thru because they always got the order wrong. Since his infancy family legends told of my little brother vomiting at the sight of a photograph of salad. I remember differently, though it’s never been any use arguing with people who can’t remember literally anything as well as you remember literally everything.
My mom never went through the drive-thru because if her little sweet boy got one whiff of pickle, that’d be her upholstery.
“Look at this; look at that drive-thru line. Look at this; three in the afternoon on a Tuesdy! We’re goin’ inside so they don’t get you’s’s orders wrong.”
My little brother always ate one order of chicken nuggets, one order of fries, and two hamburgers with no ketchup, no mustard, no onions, and no pickles, just plain, that’s two of them, that’s both of them with no ketchup, that’s with no mustard, that’s with no onions, and that’s with no pickles, please and thank you.
My Wendy’s order was then as it is today, though today it’s only ever on the odd road trip: the biggest fries you got and the biggest Frosty you got.
My little brother was seven; I was fifteen and mute. Being mute is easy as a teenager because aren’t you supposed to never tell your parents anything, anyway, at that age? I left the Wendy’s with my hands in my pockets and wandered into the Video Vault, which as of 2018 is now a liquor store which is no longer called Video Vault.
Video Vault introduced me to anime, direct-to-video sequels to Jean-Claude Van Damme films, and many bad video games. Prior to our relocating from Fort Meade, Maryland to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1993, my mother had been in charge of game rentals. She applied shotgun logic to her rental choices. My math books would have described her mindframe as “selection with replacement.” She’d rent the same thing three or four times if my big brother didn’t say something. Even then she’d sometimes forget, and suddenly Archon for the NES was gonna sit on our bedroom floor for the weekend.
When we moved to Indianapolis, however, we had Video Vault right across the street and a block down from our house, sharing a parking lot with the Wendy’s. Video Vault was not the Army post supermarket of my mom’s poor decisions. No, Video Vault possessed a curated selection of games. Someone at the Vault was a connoisseur. And being that Wendy’s after school had quickly become a Friday Thing, I had been in charge of my own game-renting destiny for the past year. Usually I rented Final Fantasy II—that’s what we called Final Fantasy IV, back then (look, we didn’t have Wikipedia; we didn’t know)—and started a new save file and just blasted through the whole game over the weekend. It’s still my favorite Final Fantasy.
It was Tuesday, and we didn’t rent videos on Tuesday, even though Wendy’s after school had transitioned from a Friday Thing to a Whenever Baby’s Hungry Thing. You’d have thought renting video games would have become a Tuesday thing as well. Well, wrong: if you want your mom to never rent video games for you on a weekday in 1994, just don’t smile at the bus driver one day in 1992. Your mom always says hello to the bus driver, and he always says a lot more than hello back, because he deals with children all day and likes talking to adults.
I drifted mutely toward the games. A lightning bolt shocked the wind out of me.
Final Fantasy III was sitting there on the shelf, right next to Final Fantasy II, which was sitting to the right of EVO: The Search for Eden.
Final Fantasy II and EVO sat against plastic cases containing their respective cartridges and well-worn instruction manuals. Final Fantasy III sat fresh and clean against the shelf. It was not available. Someone had rented it. I didn’t care. Final Fantasy III was real, and I was about to touch its box.
I had never seen its box before. Back then, games didn’t always have release dates, much less press-released box art unveilings. All I’d ever seen was a cheeky two-page advertisement on the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly. This advertisement insinuated that the little cartoon Moogle, Mog, could turn a bunch of monsters into turds. The copy on page two of the ad nonchalantly informed readers that the game was coming “October 1994.” Which day in October was anyone’s guess, including mine, and that’s why I’d been stepping into Video Vault after school as frequently as my little brother wanted chicky nuggets.
I picked up its box with trembling hands.
Touching Final Fantasy III‘s box with my real hands had never occurred to me as potentially ever happening. I stared at the cute little moogle juxtaposed with the brooding deep purple background for several seconds, my eyes as big as tea saucers, before I remembered braver curiosity: I flipped the box over.
Boldly, the back of Final Fantasy III‘s box displayed only one screenshot. That screenshot showed a dark, red sky behind a gritty rust-colored metal fortress atop which stood two soldiers riding robot suits. Curiously, the screenshot was warped and bent a visibility-obfuscating angle.
I wasn’t disappointed at the lack of additional screenshots. I’d already seen screenshots of Final Fantasy III in Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Players. I didn’t need to see more screenshots.
Besides, it struck me as grown-up and bold that the box only showed one screenshot.
What I most wanted was to read the copy on the back of the box. It didn’t disappoint me: three terse paragraphs of clean, fantasy prose, calling the box-holder toward the action of wondering what wonders waited in this game. No bullet points; no numbers; no boasts of cartridge size. It only showed prose: with delicate brush strokes, it set the stage for what might have been a bigger story than the Bible.
I scanned back through issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly in my head. I recalled the October 1994 issue of Game Players’ review by Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan, who gave the game a 98%. I recalled screenshots embedded in that review, of a town with blue brick roads and snowy hilltops and Dickensian wooden houses and piping steam billowing on the wind. A brown-brick castle in beige sand; a clown laughing while that castle burned. I remembered Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan’s words.
“Deep inside me, there was a huge, empty hole. For years I tried to fill it with alcohol, dangerous sports, faster and faster cars, loud music, and countless women. Nothing could help me, until Final Fantasy III. Sell the house, sell the kids. Play the game!”
I measured Lundrigan’s words against all the screenshots in my memory, and then against the prose on the back of the box. So it came to pass that before ever touching a d-pad to move a character a single square, much less slot its cartridge into the Super Nintendo I shared with two brothers, I had decided that I held in my hand an empty box representing the best video game I had ever encountered in my life.
“Heh, yeah, dude, we just got that today.”
I dropped the box like it was someone else’s. I slid it so its back touched the shelf.
The Video Vault Guy Who Was Always Friendly To Me was chubby, tall, and he had a sort of a Jon Snow beard. He wore polo shirts and he probably lifted weights just because he had friends who did. He was much younger than I am now, though much older than I was then. West of the Rockies I take it he’d have had tattoos. Where he was he probably listened to metal while driving his mom’s old minivan despite never having been to a show.
“Looks like somebody already rented it.”
I nodded at him like he was the bus driver.
“Where by somebody I mean me,” he said.
I smiled at him with my huge gap teeth. I turned around and left. I ran into my mom on the way in.
“I knew you’d be in here. Son, you’re creepin’ these people out.”
We got home at shortly after 3:45pm. I put my Wendy’s french fries—circa 1994, the best fast-food french fries, hands down—into the refrigerator. I put my Frosty into the freezer. I went into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth. I went into my room. I took off my shoes. I put on the heavy wool socks I always wore to bed. I got in bed. I wrapped a T-shirt around my face. I fell asleep.
I woke up seven hours later. I crossed through the dark living room and into the dark kitchen. I microwaved a mixing bowl full of water. I made myself a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese. I microwaved the Wendy’s french fries. I mixed them into the macaroni and cheese. I took my Frosty out of the refrigerator. I squeezed that paper cup until its contents thawed into spoon-edibility. I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark. The shiny metallic blinds in my bedroom window reflected a glint of the little amber nightlight plugged into an outlet in the flower-wallpapered wall behind me. My room was always the coldest room in the house. It was cold that night. I’m thinking it was in the upper fifties. The sky had been gray over the Video Vault parking lot. My toes were cold inside my hiking boot socks. Smartphones hadn’t been invented yet and I’d never used the internet. A mixing bowl of macaroni and cheese heated my lap and a Frosty chilled my hand. Devoid of even Instagram, my life was no upbeat coming of age comedy. I was a fifteen-year-old obese mute self-taught vegetarian living on the night shift; I’d never talked to a girl, though I had held the shrink-wrapped, empty box of Final Fantasy III for thirty seconds at the local video store seven hours ago.
I studied Chinese until 6am. Then I did my homework until 7am. My mom entered my room and flipped the light switch on.
“You’re like a vampire in here, son; it’s time to get ready for school.”
Seventeen hours later I made another bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese and a Hot Pocket.
Eight hours after that, my mom told me I was a vampire and reminded me to smile at the bus driver. Black clouds swirled like barbecue smoke over the off-white sky outside as silent wind ripped through and bent deep green trees.
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I ate lunch alone. Tuesdays and Thursdays my class schedule put me into another lunch period, so I sat with my big brother Roy. Roy’s named after our grandfather, by the way, who was named after his grandfather, so he technically predates the singing cowboy. Roy was seventeen years old and a senior. Roy was as tall and skinny then as I am now. He wasn’t old enough to have ever had sex, though he was old enough to talk about gross stuff constantly at lunch with the friends he had that I didn’t.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, Roy would wait for me at the southwest entrance of our school’s vast, bright cafeteria. He’d greet me with monosyllables. I feel now like his “Hey. Yeah. Let’s go in.” reflected the real seventeen-year-old Roy Rogers The Third, and all the hot air and wiener jokes at lunch was a performance. There I go again, giving everyone too much credit.
Thursday, October 13th, 1994, Roy and his friend Jared were as excited about Pulp Fiction as I was about Final Fantasy III.
“It’s gonna be so fuckin’ bad ass,” Jared was saying. He’d said it thrice.
“Dude, I’m goin’ tomorrow,” Roy said. “I’m just goin.’ I’m walkin’ to Clearwater if I have to.”
“You gotta get your license!”
“Dude that movie looks gay as hell,” one of the other guys said. This guy only liked republicans and Michael Jordan. My brother’s friends were all so tall. I was Hobbit-high, yet so uncool I had never even read Lord of the Rings. They all looked like they were 35. I was 15 and I looked like I was in second grade.
“It won the prize at Cannes,” Jared said over a mouthful of something his mom had made. He pronounced it “Cans.” Jared was the fattest kid in our school by a half-marathon’s worth of miles, though somehow I was The Fat Kid at the table.
“Shit you don’t even know what Cannes is.”
“Nuh-uh, it’s in France.”
When the bell rang, my brother walked with me to the cafeteria exit. He had his hands in his pockets.
“You all right?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Okay,” my brother said.
The next day, Friday, October 14th, 1994, Final Fantasy III was still rented out at Video Vault. My mom drove me to the Blockbuster two parking oceans over. They didn’t even have the game.
“He’s looking for a Final Fantasy Three,” my mom told the guy.
“That’s not out yet.”
“They’ve got it over at the Video Vault.”
“I’m tellin’ you it isn’t out yet.”
“That kid’s a damn liar,” my mom was saying in the car.
I sat on the living room sofa and ate my french fries and Frosty. My little brother, his burger and nuggets already vanished into him, was banging toys together in the middle of the living room floor.
I was re-reading Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan’s review of Final Fantasy III when my brother Roy entered the side door into the living room.
“Where were you?” my mom asked him. “I brought some Wendy’s.”
“Me and Jared are gonna go over to Subway.”
“Huh.”
“We’ll be back.”
I went to bed.
My mother slapped the light on at just after seven in the evening.
“Wake up. Don’t you wanna go to the movies with your brother and your dad?”
My brother rode in the passenger’s seat of my dad’s Dodge Ram conversion van.
“That John Travolta, I ain’t heard that name in forever. You know what he was in, don’t you?”
“Saturday Night Fever,” my brother said. His voice sounded like his arms were crossed.
“That’s right! How do you even know about that movie?”
“I’ve seen it. You made us watch it on TBS.”
“That came out—yeah, that came out the year you were born! You musta been maybe six months old. We were in Delaware. I went to see that by myself, yeah, you musta been maybe six months old because it must have been the week before Christmas. I left you home with your mom and your Aunt Cindy. Boy, he could dance. I tell you. That man could dance. It was so slick. I tell you, that man could dance.”
My brother didn’t say anything.
“You know they show him dancing on the commercial for this movie, yeah? I bet you—I bet you they got him to dance because they musta seen him in Saturday Night Fever.”
“Yeah, probably.”
We got out of the van at the General Cinema at Clearwater Crossing. It was cold. My face turned red. I was still wearing my gray sweatpants and green flannel shirt, buttoned all the way up to my chin.
My brother looked at me.
“Are you alright?”
I shrugged.
I lived two whole years of my life on the opposite of a normal schedule. Even on weekends I remained nocturnal. School always comprised the last half of my waking day. I suffered apocalyptic exhaustion from start to finish of our Friday night showing of Pulp Fiction.
That night, my dad apologized to my mom.
“There was some filthy, filthy language. Oh, boy, it was filthy. I think—I think Tim was a little spooked. Roy, he’s a grownass man now, I know he loved it, though Tim, boy, there was—there was a guy got shot in the face with a gun, oh man! It was disgusting, just disgusting, and, the movie just makes you—everyone in the theater I swear there were people standing in the theater, it was so full, everyone in there is just laughing and laughing and I’m gonna tell you: I don’t think I ever cracked up so hard in my life. It’s just awful, the movie makes you laugh at something like that. And your son Tim is just sitting there grinning like a criminal.”
My mom shook her head back, forth, back, and forth.
“That John Travolta in the commercials,” my mom said, “boy, he got fat.”
“I tell you what, though, that John Travolta, that man sure can dance. He’s still got it. Boy, that was slick.”
I sat on the edge of my bed, eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes. My stomach was full of a whole large bucket of popcorn, so I ate slowly. I’d just seen a movie consisting of three episodes, each of which focused on a different set of characters, telling one loose story out of chronological order. I’d seen so many rules broken. I’d listened to a vast room full of people cackle with disbelief at the realistic sight of a man decapitated by a pistol blast. My life was different. I re-read the first half of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and then slunk out to the kitchen. I made a bowl of Frosted Flakes and played Doom at about 12 frames per second on the old computer in the laundry room.
Even the guy among my brother’s lunch friends who’d doubted Pulp Fiction couldn’t stop talking about it. Once on Tuesday and twice on Thursday he wondered aloud, “I still don’t get what was supposed to be in the suitcase.”
“I’m goin’ again Friday night, you better believe it,” Jared said.
“You ain’t goin’ to homecoming?”
“Homecoming is gay,” someone said.
“Homecoming sucks,” my brother said.
I sat on the edge of my bed Friday afternoon with a mixing bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios on my lap and Final Fantasy III‘s instruction manual, already tattered and coverless after two weeks of maltreatment by ghostly renters, smoothed atop my right knee. I was wearing my brown flannel shirt, buttoned up to my chin over my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt. My wide eyes drank in the wispy watercolor portraits of the game’s twelve characters. (The game’s manual did not mention the two hidden characters.)
“Tell him we’re locked and loaded at 5!” my dad enthusiastically informed my mom.
“I told you, he’s got his little treasure in there; he ain’t gonna wanna go outside with yous.”
“These are supposed to be the best years of his life,” my dad said. I think his sliding scale was broken.
My dad knocked on my bedroom door. One-Mississippi, Two-Mississippi, Three-Mississippi, he opened it.
“Your brother Roy and I are gonna go to Hardees and then we’re gonna go to your high school homecoming football game. If you’re comin’ you better be in the van at 5. We’re locked and loaded at 5. I wanna get there early, get our seats. Or you can sit there and play your videogame.” He pronounced it as one word.
He closed the door. To this day, my dad still goes to all of my high school’s sporting events.
I didn’t put Final Fantasy III into my Super Nintendo until after my mom had left with my little brother to join my dad and big brother at the football game. Friday, October 21st, 1994, wearing my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt just after sundown, I clicked that big heavy button and turned on the finest video game I had yet played.
Ghostly, operatic organ music bellowed out of my 19-inch television’s single speaker as a camera descended down a gray, lightning-crackly abyss. With a crashing crescendo, the words “FINAL FANTASY III” yelled themselves into text. I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth.
I pressed the “A” button. Back then, games didn’t have loading times. The save file screen came up in the space between two teeth-heartbeats.
You could only save three files in Final Fantasy III for the Super Nintendo. When the save screen comes up, you immediately see the names of the lead character in each party. So it was that my first impression of the world beyond Final Fantasy III‘s title screen was three files, each with Terra, Locke, and Edgar in the party.
In the top file, the player had named Terra “BITCH.”
I chose to start a new game. I played until three in the morning. I’d met four main characters and learned of their troubles in the troubled world. An event transpired which split our heroes up onto three different paths toward the same objective.
Final Fantasy III graciously offered me the choice of which scenario to play first. I’d never played anything like it. I thought of Pulp Fiction.
By the time my mom told me it was time to sleep through church on Sunday, I’d played all three scenarios. Each of them had introduced new characters and new elements of the plot. I played Locke’s first, because I liked him the most. I played Terra’s second, because I was most curious about her story. Then I began Sabin’s scenario. Looking back on it now, I think Final Fantasy III wants you to choose Sabin’s scenario last. He’s the character least involved in the machinations of the plot. Everyone else—Terra, Locke, Edgar—has a horse in the race and skin in the game of the game world’s political climate. Sabin is just along for the ride. Yet in playing his increasingly complicated, wickedly long scenario, over the course of which he teams up with a full party of three characters, first-hand witnesses a war crime disaster, and meets actual ghosts on a train, we see Sabin earn his racehorse. We see him get involved.
When Sabin’s scenario ended I knew it: Final Fantasy III was as good, smart, and important as Pulp Fiction. My brother’s lunch friends would have a field day talking about it.
My brother stood in my bedroom doorway Sunday morning.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He looked at the television. He picked up the game case.
I was buttoning my flannel shirt up to my chin, over my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt.
“They made a Final Fantasy Three, huh? Didn’t you and what’s-his-name used to play that Final Fantasy Two? That game was gay, dude.”
My brother had played Final Fantasy II from start to finish with my friend Carl and I in Fort Meade, Maryland three times during sleepovers between 1991 and 1992.
“Hey, let’s play some Mortal Kombat II.”
We played some Mortal Kombat II on the Super Nintendo. My brother lost three matches in a row. I did the same fatality every time—the one where Kung Lao splits his opponent down the middle with his bladed hat.
“God, that fatality’s so gay, dude.”
Friday, October 28th, 1994, Final Fantasy III was unavailable for rental at Video Vault. The Blockbuster nearby had acquired a copy, which was also rented out.
At roughly four PM on Sunday, October 30th, 1994, I stood in Electronics Boutique in Castleton Square Mall, reading and re-reading the prose on the back of Final Fantasy III‘s box. It was $79.99.
“Dude, we do trade-ins,” the store employee said to me. “Just bring a buncha NES games, man, that’s what I’d do.”
Friday, November 4th, 1994, I started Final Fantasy III afresh on Video Vault’s copy after my brothers and parents left for my high school’s football game at a high school across town. I had to save over a one-hour-progressed file in which Locke was named “COCK.” I remember thinking, at the very least the guy coulda put an “E” on the end of it.
Sunday, November 6th, 1994, I put down my controller in the middle of Sabin’s scenario. I grabbed a shoebox full of NES games and did my seatbelt in the back of my dad’s van.
“What is that he has back there; is that a box of gametapes? What is that; why’s he got those gametapes on him?”
“Electronics Boutique does trade-ins,” my big brother said.
“Your father and I paid for those,” my mom said. “You’re just gonna throw ’em away?”
Actually, mom, I paid for them all myself, with my grandmother’s birthday and Christmas money.
She was right about the throwing them away part, though. The guy at Electronics Boutique told me—well, first he told me “You don’t have to bring the box up here, dude”—Battletoads, Solar Jetman, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll, Final Fantasy, Double Dragon, River City Ransom, and Double Dragon II would net me $22 in store credit. I only had $36 in cash. If you factored in Indiana’s 5% sales tax, I was light by an Andrew Jackson and a half.
I stood in front of Sears in my black sweatpants and Payless Velcro strap sneakers for ninety minutes with my shoebox of game tapes. I had never wanted to leave a place so badly in my life. Everyone was loud. I wanted a slice of food court pizza though I needed to save my money if I was going to ever purchase Final Fantasy III. I was hot with weird fear about the extra-large Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt clinging dearly to the bodyfat beneath my flannel shirt. I felt like the biggest trash monster in the city or the world, to have let my mom put ten dollars down on that game, and agree to buy it for me as an early Christmas present on its release day. Why did Donkey Kong Country even have a release day? Why couldn’t Final Fantasy III have had a release day? If I’d have known, I would have made it my Christmas present.
I was a fifteen-year-old five-foot-tall morbidly obese mute self-taught vegetarian who had never talked to a girl, though I’d seen Pulp Fiction and I had played the same ten hours of Final Fantasy III twice. Yet somehow, the prospect of having a job and earning an hourly wage felt sound years away.
I just wanted to go home and get farther into Final Fantasy III than I’d gotten the first time. My blood began to boil. Why did my dad always give everyone two hours in the mall? Why couldn’t it be one hour? Why couldn’t it be thirty minutes? What could you do in the mall for two hours? They never bought anything. None of us ever bought anything.
My brother arrived at the rendezvous first. He had a half-empty Orange Julius cup in his hand. He gave it to me. I drank it. My dad showed up. My mom showed up last. She’d bought my little brother a Power Rangers toy on clearance. Its cardboard box rested as though animal-mangled inside a plastic bag in my mother’s hand. My brother was coddling the ranger like a puppy. He’d shatter it within a week.
Black clouds swirled like barbecue smoke in the off-white sky over the cracked beige asphalt of the half-empty mall parking lot.
When we got home, I locked myself in my room. I didn’t sleep or eat until Sunday evening. I’d just gotten past the epic strategy battle in Narshe and gotten absolutely destroyed by enemies in the liar’s town of Zozo. I hadn’t tried grinding yet in the game. Zozo’s aggressive monsters were beating me senseless. The game was trying to move on to its next chapter, and I’d hit a wall. The rainy drear of Zozo perfectly suited my mood that overcast Sunday evening when my mom opened my bedroom door without knocking, called me a vampire, turned the light on, and said, “Give me your Nintendo game; I gotta take it back. Do you want Wendy’s?”
I ate my fries in the dark. I fell asleep at seven PM and I woke up at four AM.
The next Friday, Video Vault’s copy of Final Fantasy III was gone. I rented Blockbuster’s copy. Someone had played the game for thirteen hours. The character Setzer was in the lead. I saved over the third file, in which Gau was leading a party with Sabin and Cyan. On Saturday, my brother went to see Pulp Fiction again.
The Friday after that, I went to Video Vault, then Blockbuster, then back to Video Vault. I rented Video Vault’s copy of Final Fantasy II. I played the game in its entirety over the weekend. One of the files had contained a level-99 Cecil named “Marduk.” That was cool.
The next Wednesay, the 23rd, was a half day. My mom took me to the mall to pick up my copy of Donkey Kong Country.
“This is your Christmas present,” she said.
We went to Wendy’s on the way home. I stopped at Video Vault. Final Fantasy III was in. I didn’t rent it. It felt awfully sad not to rent it.
Outside, dark clouds swirled like barbecue smoke in the gray sky over the parking lot.
I played through half of Donkey Kong Country that night. The next day was Thanksgiving. I sat at the table half asleep. Everyone was eating turkey. My family consists entirely of people who would need Doctor Oz to fit it into a soundbite that you can close your mouth when you chew. I ate Kraft macaroni and cheese, a grilled cheese sandwich, pickles, and a lot of cranberry sauce. My nose was all blocked up. I kept sniffing real loud. It must have sounded like I was snorting baseballs.
“It’s all that dairy!” my dad said.
“It ain’t no dairy,” my mom said. “He’s just bein’ an ass hole.”
They were each half right.
I finished Donkey Kong Country minutes before church on Sunday. The next Friday, I rented Final Fantasy III from Video Vault again. All three save files featured a Locke named “Fuck.” The timestamps indicated they’d all been saved within one minute of each other. I distinctly remember thinking, “He shoulda at least put an ‘E’ on the end.” Even back then, even as a friendless mute, I couldn’t resist a good joke callback, even if only a ghost existed to witness it.
I battled my way to Zozo again.
Sunday morning my mom told me it was time for church. My dad was drinking coffee in the kitchen. This was a couple years before he started wearing suits to church. He was only a couple years older than I am now. He was looking at the Indianapolis Star, asking nobody if they could believe the sports. I performed my weekly ritual of flipping open every full-color advertisement for a glimpse of video games amid mainstream products such as sweaters and electric razors. On a whim I visited the weekly circular for Kohl’s, a store whose Indianapolis locations sold ugly clothes that my mom bought for me, though no video games.
Between a golf bag and a set of flatware, as inexplicable as an alien invasion, sat the box of one solitary video game.
Final Fantasy III.
Next to it was the most curious price tag I have ever seen in my life: the game was on sale for $52.94.
To this day, I do not understand why or how that price happened.
So it was that on Sunday, December 4th, 1994, I traded in a box full of NES games for $22, added $34 of my own money, and purchased Final Fantasy III from the Electronics Boutique in Castleton Square Mall in Indianapolis, Indiana while a rented copy of the same game sat inside the Super Nintendo in my bedroom at home. I remember this date perfectly because I remember everything because of a neurological condition I have suffered my entire life. Also, I remember this date because four days later, an arsonist who would never be caught burned down my high school’s brand-new six-million-dollar gymnasium.
I put the rented Final Fantasy III back into its plastic case. I lovingly returned its tattered manual, now smoothed to toilet-paper softness by the hands of countless profane phantom renters. I closed the case. I put it on the dinner table in the kitchen so that my mom could return it.
I sat on the edge of my bed holding my very own copy of Final Fantasy III for many minutes. I measured its heft. I squeezed its bulk. I could feel that French-toast-thick instruction manual inside. The package felt so important compared to that of Donkey Kong Country. This was a video game my brother would like. This is a video game my dad would like. He likes John Travolta dancing in Pulp Fiction! Why wouldn’t he like this?
I removed the plastic hang tab from the box. I used it to slit open the shrink wrap. I peeled the shrink wrap open just enough to open the box.
My big brother came in.
“You got it, huh?”
He sat down on the bed next to me.
I put the cartridge into the Nintendo on the floor. I booted it up. The ominous title music played. My brother sat on the bed, his arms crossed. He’d walked in and out on the game before. The presence of a purchased copy must have inspired him to deeper attention. His arms folded, his brow furrowed. He’d even put his glasses on. He almost never wore them, back then.
His glasses were so much cooler than my glasses. I had a huge brown pair of American Optical Z-87 safety goggles. My brother had a fancy pair of wire rims. My parents had let him pick his glasses. He’d been in little league before he wore glasses.
I pressed the “A” button on the title screen.
“Dude, what the heck?”
There was already a save file in the game.
“Oh, shoot! Hey, mom, look at this!”
My mom came into the room with her hands on her hips.
“What am I lookin’ at?”
“There’s already a save file in the game! Somebody already played it! And look, they named the character ‘RETARD’!”
In hindsight, I can tell that the boy at Electronics Boutique to whom my mom gave a piece of her mind had, in fact, been the one to name Terra “RETARD.” Years later, I’d work in a Software, Etc at College Mall in Bloomington, Indiana. We checked games out all the time. We had a shrink-wrapper in the back room. We could make anything look like nobody’d played it before.
Castleton Mall closed at 5pm on Sundays. We left the mall just as someone started yelling over the loudspeaker for us to get out. Black clouds swirled like barbecue smoke in the charcoal sky. Indiana, back then, didn’t do Daylight Savings Time.
So it was that I returned a rented copy of Final Fantasy III to the dropbox slot of Video Vault in Indianapolis, Indiana while a brand-new, all-for-me copy sat in a bag in my mom’s 1984 Plymouth Horizon.
We went home. I went to bed. I woke up after midnight. With some microwaved Wendy’s french fries spilled on a paper plate in my lap, I played Final Fantasy III for two hours before turning it off and doing my homework.
At about two-forty PM on Thursday, December 8th, 1994, as the final bell loomed twenty too-long minutes in the distance past Mr. Gulde’s “Global Awareness” class, the fire alarm went off.
Mr. Gulde looked at his watch. “Everyone just take your bags with you.”
We all went outside. We stood on the lawn in front of the school. I looked at my big Casio watch. It was almost two-fifty. I thought about crossing the street and going home. Our house wasn’t even a block away. I wasn’t used to being outside at this time of day. Under those dark clouds and that dead sky I felt more tired than I did at church. I could barely keep my eyes open.
“Pranksters all, prankin’ and shit,” one of the students in Mr. Gulde’s tenth-period Global Awareness class said, milliseconds before the explosion. Everyone shut up. We looked toward the sound. Sheets of siding fell off the brand-new, six-million-dollar gymnasium—the best in the city; home of the North Central Panthers basketball team. Red and yellow flames burst out.
We stood in silence for several minutes.
A black pillar of smoke rose high, high up into the clouds.
I turned around and walked home.
My mom came into my room without knocking. I was putting my hiking boot socks on.
“You’re home early.”
Roy came in.
“Mom, turn on the news! Someone blew up the gym.”
The reporters said school was canceled the next day. My mom and brother sat and listened to the news in silence. Helicopter cameras showed the black pillar stomping down on the school like a finger from heaven.
I went outside. I stood in our lawn. The column of smoke would still be faintly visible on Sunday.
I played Final Fantasy III until 6am on Monday. I got through the Opera House. It was the greatest game I had ever played.
On Monday, the Indianapolis Police had set up checkpoints at every entrance of the school. Students were only allowed to use one entrance, which was equipped with a single metal detector. All three thousand students filed through that one metal detector.
At a special assembly that morning, the principal told us things had changed, effective immediately. Indianapolis Police offices would remain in the school indefinitely. We’d have more metal detectors in the coming days, to speed up student entry. Any students attempting to enter the school later than the pre-homeroom warning bell would be expelled.
Any students showing up late to class would be expelled.
Tuesday, there were cops in the lunchroom. Like, real cops, with guns. Roy and his friends weren’t as loud as usual. Nobody even said “nipple,” much less any of the worse stuff they usually talked about.
“I bet you it was the same kid from last year.”
In 1993, there had been a fire in the same area of the brand-new, six-million-dollar gymnasium, which had at that time just been unveiled. The fire barely covered a few square feet of floor. Investigators ruled it an arson.
The police arrested a student. They never revealed the student’s name. All anyone ever knew was that the student was allowed to return to the school.
“It wasn’t the kid they arrested last year because he didn’t even do it last year; that’s why they let him go!”
“We don’t even fuckin’ . . . know who he was.”
“It was Mr. Quandt’s son, you retard,” someone said. “He graduated.”
“It was not Mr. Quandt’s son,” Jared said.
“How do you know, Jared? Because it was you?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Then how do you know it wasn’t him?”
“Mr. Quandt’s son graduated and they said this kid they arrested last year is back in school.”
“That’s what I’m saying; I’m saying it wasn’t Mr. Quandt’s son who got arrested last year, it was Mr. Quandt’s son who actually did it.”
“Well even if it was Mr. Quandt’s son last year it wasn’t Mr. Quandt’s son this year,” Roy said. “He graduated.”
“Unless he came back,” someone said.
“That’s retarded; you sayin’ he’d sneak in to the school just to start another fire?”
“He’s got unfinished business!”
“You fuckin’ moron.”
“The news said the kid who did it last year wasn’t even in the gym when the fire started this year.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it last year!”
“I think it was Jared last year, and it was Jared this year.”
“Why’d it be me?”
“Yeah, tell me how it’s gonna be Jared,” my brother said, “when they’re talkin’ about how you get expelled if you’re late to class. You know Round Boy here ain’t exactly on the cross-country team!”
“Haw, haw.”
They all laughed. None of them knew that Jared would later lose over 200 pounds by eating Subway sandwiches, become a millionaire, and then be arrested for child sex trafficking charges.
“Maybe it was your brother,” one of the guys said. “Didn’t he have Coach Mitchell for gym last year? That bastard’d make anybody wanna torch the gym.”
My brother looked at me.
“Nah, he’s alright.”
“You always gotta watch out for the quiet ones,” one of the guys said. I believe he owned a skateboard.
“It coulda been anybody,” my brother said. He was half right.
“Fuckin’ punk, burning down the gym.”
“They said it’s like a million dollars of damage.”
“Who said?”
“They said it in the paper.”
“You read the paper?”
“What kinda bitch move, burnin’ down the gym. You don’t go around hatin’ basketball here in Hoosier country, that’s for damn sure.”
“It probably didn’t have nothin’ to do with basketball.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I don’t know. It just probably didn’t.”
“God damn . . . bitch move either way.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
1993: ONE YEAR EARLIER
“Classic loser move,” My Only Friend had said, a year prior, of the first North Central High School gymnasium arson. “Shoulda torched the fuckin’ lunch room, am I right? Shoulda done it like a month earlier, too, am I right?”
The arsonist had waited until the end of the school year to attempt to burn down the gym.
“Should just fuckin’ . . . put a fuckin’ pipe bomb in the mother . . . fuckin’ . . . . . . lunch room while all those fuckin’ . . . chodes were eatin’ their fuckin’ lunches, dude. Just fuckin’ blow ’em all to shit! There’d’a been hair on them walls!”
It occurred to me several years later that My Only Friend had gotten the phrase “hair on them walls” from the novel In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, about which he’d once proudly given me an impromptu book report, once: “Some fag wrote it, though it’s got some good shit about shotguns in it.”
It was July 1993. The fire had been a month ago. This was not the first time My Only Friend had discussed what he perceived as a wasted opportunity to wallpaper the lunchroom with hair while his mother purchased lottery tickets at a gas station.
“I think we’re gonna fuckin’ go to Taco Bell. Fuckin’ . . . psyched? I am gonna fill my go kart up with diarrhea dude.”
My Only Friend’s mom, who was someone my mom knew, which is how I found myself turned in to a little friendship with My Only Friend, emerged from inside the gas station with a couple of lottery tickets, a bottle of Barq’s root beer for My Only Friend, and a bottle of Sprite for me. I drank Sprite because I didn’t drink caffeine. My Only Friend drank Barq’s root beer because A&W root beer was “for queers.”
As she approached the car, My Only Friend said, “Don’t snitch to mom about any of this shit, [his little brother’s first name].”
“I won’t!” his little brother said, invisibly, from inside the passenger’s seat.
“You boys ready to go?” My Only Friend’s Mom was from Texas by way of Minnesota.
“Yeah, mom.”
On the way to the Taco Bell nearest the Putt-Putt on the south side Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” came on the radio. My Only Friend’s Mom was listening to 97.1. That was the Best of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and Today. (Today was the first two and a half years of the 1990s.)
“Hey, mom, turn it up.”
“You got it, kid,” she said.
My Only Friend bobbed his head along to the song. I had been fourteen for just one month, though I had considered the song inane since I was eleven. At age thirty-two people would call me a poser for saying that I don’t like songs that have lyrics I can understand as much as I like songs with lyrics I don’t understand. I swear, at age forty I’ve got playlists of, like, traditional Inuit throat singing and I don’t share any of it with anyone. At age fourteen I never shared my music opinions with anyone, so I never had to argue with anyone about them. My Only Friend looked over at me and said, “This song is awesome. There’s this part. Ah, heck. Where is it?” I, mutely, possessed neither the wherewithal nor the means to tell my friend the song was hacky and inane and that I would not stoop to define cleverness as stringing together rhyming words that evoked memories of pop culture or historical tragedies to anybody who’d ever looked at the cover of any given book. It wasn’t a song: it was a list of stuff. I hated about that song everything a cynic today might hate about remakes and reboots and sequels to movies.
“Yeah, yeah, here it is!”
In tandem with Billy Joel, My Only Friend shouted, “J! F! K! Blown Away! What Else Do! I! Have! To! Say!”
He clapped his hands once.
“Just, awesome, man. JFK got so blown away, dude.”
He headbanged a bit as the song stepped into its final chorus.
“We didn’t start the fire! We didn’t start the, start the fire!” He tonelessly talk-sang.
He didn’t realize that, actually, it had always been burning since the world had been turning–an ancient machine deep dark in an inscrutable jungle switched on by hands divine in a time before time which we may never find though if any among us does and if we can reckon its power switch from all that mess of whatever meat composes it it is our human duty to smash it
At Putt-Putt, before go karts, we spectated Mortal Kombat II. Taller teenagers than ourselves crowded the machine.
My Only Friend had social skills. He talked up these kids who might as well have been an alien species to me.
“He says there’s a couple new fatalities,” My Only Friend told me. “Maybe we’ll get to see some. Ah, hell, Kung Lao’s gonna win this one. Oh, sh, look at that—cut him from crotch to cranium, dude!” Yes, he did speak like he was always writing MAD Magazine blurbs.
I wanted to play some Street Fighter II, so I did. I played as Ken against the CPU. I lost at Vega. I rejoined My Only Friend.
“I heard some jackass saying there’s ‘Friendships’ in Mortal Kombat II, like Johnny Cage can sign an autograph and hand it to a dude instead of finishing them. Fuckin’ liar. Let’s go ride those go karts.”
In addiiton to $5 for arcade games (NBA Jam), my mom had given me money specifically to ride the go karts. I was not allowed to use it on anything else. My mom didn’t want me not riding the go karts because My Only Friend was going to be riding the go karts, and My Only Friend’s parents were richer than my parents. We rode the go karts. It was too hot for a kid as fat as me. I filled my little go kart with my own gravy. My Only Friend crashed into other drivers so many times and too obviously on purpose that he got yelled at twice by a big teenager who had a whistle and knew how to blow it.
“I’ll shove that whistle so far up his ass he . . . pisses it out his DICK!” My Only Friend was saying as we walked back toward Mortal Kombat II. I had a dollar left over from the go karts and Street Fighter.
“Come on, play Mortal Kombat II against me. I wanna try a fatality.”
Inside, a teenager from earlier told My Only Friend, “Dude, you missed it, dude, that dude did Johnny Cage’s friendship.”
“You’re a fuckin’ liar.”
“Ah, fuck you I’m not.”
“Fuckin’ fuck you.”
We watched Mortal Kombat II for a half an hour. Neither of us got to play. My Only Friend’s mom and little brother came around with some tickets they’d won at skee ball.
“Maybe you boys wanna play minigolf next time?”
“Minigolf is for homos, mom.”
“Son! Watch your language.”
We went home. It was hot in the backseat of that car.
Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” came on the radio.
“Hey mom! Turn it up!”
“There’s this part in this song where this guy says people are puttin’ bread in a jar.”
One month later, it was My Only Friend’s birthday. He wanted to go to the Lone Star Steakhouse and then to the Block Party Arcade.
“This place rules,” he told me, of Lone Star Steakhouse. “They bring you a bucket of peanuts, and you just throw the shells on the floor!”
At the Block Party arcade, he wanted to play Dactyl Nightmare. I stood maybe thirty feet back and watched him flail as though underwater beneath the weight of ancient virtual reality paraphernalia.
“Dude, that was so awesome.”
We stopped at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the way out of the Clearwater Crossing mall.
“Let me show you something,” he was saying. He slid up a little stepladder. He grabbed an imported British video game magazine off the top shelf of the magazine rack. “See how big this fucker is?” he whispered. He shook it. It was inside a huge crinkly plastic bag, and maybe three inches taller than other magazines.
He looked left. He looked right. “Spot me.” He pulled on the plastic bag, yanking it open along the seam. “Seriously, spot me, dude.”
He slid the stepladder over to the left one rack. He stepped up, and then gingerly stepped down a moment later.
He led me around the corner. He indicated the plastic bag. I peered in. He fanned open the pages of the big, tall, British video game magazine.
Inside, he had deposited an issue of Hustler. I’d never seen pornography before. I mean, technically, it was just the cover, though I was in the AP classes, so trust me: I pretty easily intuited it was pornography.
“We got fuckin’ both feet in the jackpot, now.”
He purchased the magazine, deploying two timid, theatrical utterances of the word “sir.”
His mom’s car rolled up in front of the Barnes & Noble.
“You find what you want?”
“Yeah, mom.”
“You boys wanna go anywhere else?”
“Let’s go home and play some Sega CD.”
His house was bigger than mine. It was wider and darker. The kitchen had one of those countertops you could see over into a dining room and living room. Outside of that they had what I figured was a second, smaller living room, with windows behind a sofa, and no television. Down the hall from that was his room, with a 25-inch television and every game console.
“Dude, let’s play some Sega CD.”
He’d owned a Sega CD and all the games released so far, so somebody had to watch him play it. He put on Sewer Shark.
“Sewer Shark is so awesome, dude.”
The loading times were longer than anything I think the game was trying to do.
“I’m gonna take a piss,” he said. “Don’t fuckin’ touch anything, okay?”
I sat on the edge of one of the two large chairs in the middle of his bedroom floor. In the dark, I watched the Sega CD try to load Sewer Shark. It was like watching a turtle try to stand on its hind legs. It was still more entertaining than watching him actually play Sewer Shark.
My Only Friend reemerged into his dark bedroom.
“The fu is going on with this stupid bastard?”
The Sega CD still had not loaded the disc.
“Fuck. You didn’t fuckin’ touch it, did you?”
I shrugged.
“I fuckin’ swear if you fuckin’ touched this thing and it’s fuckin’ broken my fuckin’ mom is gonna fuckin’ kill you.”
He reset the machine.
“I swear Sewer Shark is so awesome, dude. Do you wanna play Streets of Rage 2?”
I watched him play Streets of Rage 2. He hadn’t offered me the other controller.
The last weekend of the summer, we went to the Putt Putt again.
“Why don’t you boys play the miniature golf?”
“I wanna ride the go karts, mom.”
After the go karts, we spectated Mortal Kombat II. Some big kid in a Thrasher shirt pulled off Johnny Cage’s Friendship: Johnny Cage signed an autograph and threw it at Scorpion.
The crowd hooted, hollered, and bellowed.
“Ohhhhhh shiiiittttt”
My Only Friend’s face twisted.
“Dude, that’s so fucking gay.”
He never looked at Mortal Kombat II again.
He did, however, look at Mortal Kombat One, when it released for the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo on September 13th, 1993. He cornered me at school and told me he was going to tell his mom to call my mom and invite me over to his house on Saturday. I complied. He handed me a controller. He told me to pick Sonya, the only female character in the game. We chose the stage “The Courtyard,” where, in front of a large audience of background dwellers, he practiced every character’s Fatalities on Sonya. If I won, he’d snatch the controller out of my hand and practice Sonya’s Fatalities. Maybe sixteen times during this funereally joyless multi-hour exercise he sat back at the conclusion of one fatality or another and proudly said, “Dude, the Super Nintendo version is so gay.” The Super Nintendo version had replaced blood with sweat and censored the Fatalities. Instead of ripping out an opponent’s heart, the character Kano reached forward and removed something gray from behind their silhouette. A scrap of clothing? What is this gray pseudosphere? I’m looking at it on YouTube. The boggledness of my mind yet today suffices for an equal shock to my age-fourteen eye-witnessing the heart-rip. Most nightmares in my experience, outside those by-Halloween-cartoon-educated children think of when they hear the word “nightmare,” concern more often amorphous gray masses produced from fourth-dimensional elsewhere than they star horror movie monsters.
The week after Christmas, 1993, he and his mom came to my house. Our school was on winter break. My little brother was sitting at the kitchen table, playing with Silly Putty. Silly Putty was my little brother’s favorite toy. He was six. He liked to put the Silly Putty onto the table and dagger-pound it with his fist-bottom. He also treated non-Silly-Putty toys like he treated Silly Putty.
My Only Friend sat at the dinner table while my mom talked to My Only Friend’s mom about something on the news.
“FU—I mean, heck,” he whispered. “Is that heckin’ . . . . . . red Silly Putty?” He got up. He hunched forward, hands on his thighs, and spoke to my little brother like my little brother was a cat or a baby. “Hey, buddy, can I see this here?”
My Only Friend picked up a Wolverine action figure. He laid Wolverine flat on his back on my family dinner table. He broke off tiny pieces of red Silly Putty. Between his fingers, he smeared them into little thin shrapnel-scraps.
“Do you have any toothpicks?”
I got him a toothpick from the kitchen.
In ten minutes, he’d made two dozen little skinny tendrils of red Silly Putty, and shaped them so they geysered up out of supine Wolverine’s abdomen. He took an egg of original-color Silly Putty and crafted fat, caucasian-flesh-colored snakey ropes. He balled them into a bundle. He gingerly set the bundle atop Wolverine’s abdomen.
“Hell yes. Bad ass. He’s disemboweled.”
One year earlier, the first time I ever went to his house, he asked me sweetly if I’d ever played Mario Paint.
“It’s got this mouse—don’t touch it. It’s got this mouse. Check this out.”
He loaded up his custom animation. He had painstakingly inserted a Sonic the Hedgehog sprite art into the game. He played a crude animation in which Sonic rolled into a ball and spin-dashed at a provided, authentic Mario sprite, which then exploded into an air-brushed puff of primary red.
“That’s how it would be. That’s what would happen if Mario and Sonic were in a fight, dude.”
Then he asked me if I’d ever seen the movie Akira. I shook my head. He put on a VHS tape and fast-forwarded it to the part where you can see a girl’s boobs if you pause it fast enough. Some punks were assaulting the girl in an alley. They ripped her shirt off.
“Dudes are fuckin’ like, ‘Show me those chesticles, bitch!'” I hear the phrase again today. Where did he learn to talk like this? Had someone snuck him in to witness an alcoholic divorced stand-up New England comedian’s final pre-suicide set?
The week after Christmas, 1993, we went to his house. I hoped he would show me Doom. He showed me Sonic CD.
“It’s got music by Tommy Tallarico, dude. It’s so good. Listen to it. Listen.”
He continued to exhibit the aftermath of his richboy Christmas. He loaded up Hook, based on the Steven Spielberg film in which Robin Williams plays Old Sad Peter Pan.
“Listen to this, dude.”
Maybe ten months later, the game had loaded. He ham-fisted and sausage-fingered his way around the first level, which I had already cleared a couple boredly times on the Super Nintendo version.
“The music sounds exactly like the movie.”
I wanted to tell him, “No, it doesn’t sound exactly like the movie. It sorta does, though it also sorta doesn’t. At any rate, I don’t want to be listening to this at all, much less right now.” I didn’t tell him this because I was mute, which didn’t matter to him, because he probably wouldn’t have listened anyway.
“Nintendo is pissin’ their pants listening to this.”
He then plugged in the 3DO he’d gotten for Christmas. He played Gex. While he played Gex, he told me three things: firstly, that Dana Gould could suck a shotgun barrel for all he cared, secondly, that they should have totally gotten Dennis Leary to voice Gex, and third, that—and I quote, “Doom is so gay, dude.” He’d also gotten DOOM, before Christmas, for the PC he also had in his bedroom alongside his 3DO, his Sega Genesis with Sega CD, and his Super Nintendo.
I hated him. I think his brother hated him.
1993 became 1994. Cold months happened. I missed Fort Meade, Maryland. I missed marathoning Final Fantasy II with Carl. I missed playing in the woods and talking about what kind of Zelda game Nintendo should make. I cruised through ninth grade. Teachers go easy on you when you’re a little bit weirder than the other kids. I started staying up later and later at night so I could watch David Letterman. He was from Indianapolis, Indiana. His mom lived right down the street from us. My dad reminded me of that every night. Eventually I was watching Conan O’Brien after David Letterman. I started writing essays and short stories on the electric typewriter my dad had found for me two years back. I listened to X103 on my old Walkman with headphones late at night. I listened to Nirvana. I laid on the blue shag carpet in my bedroom, staring at the flower wallpaper lit by that amber-colored nightlight that never went out, waiting for “All Apologies” to come on. I had received a cheap stereo with a CD player for Christmas 1993. I had In Utero and Nevermind and Bleach. I think that’s pretty good taste for a thirteen-year-old, okay? I looked over Electronic Gaming Monthly and my Chinese dictionary while listening to Nirvana with one headphone and David Letterman on the television. I ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and macaroni and cheese. Ever since My Only Friend’s birthday at Lone Star Steakhouse, I’d become a fan of Tabasco sauce. I kept a bottle in my bedroom. I was the only member of my family who enjoyed anything spicy. Lots of the other things they say about white people are this true as well. My mom found the bottle one day, and was worried about me for years. Well, once you start keeping food in your bedroom, normalcy doesn’t like you so much anymore. I slowly became more nocturnal than not. I was a fourteen-year-old mute, obese, self-taught vegetarian, and I had never talked to a girl, though one day I was going to touch a guitar, if I’d let myself give myself a chance. Kurt Cobain killed himself with a shotgun at age twenty-seven, which seemed old to me, on a day when I ate one more peanut butter and jelly sandwich than usual.
Saturday, April 9th, 1994, My Only Friend’s mom picked me up and took me to their house. She and her husband went to the movies. She left us alone in the house. Me, My Only Friend, and his little brother sat atop stools at the minibar-countertop thing in the house’s secondary living room. Video game magazines were splashed about the countertop. My Only Friend set down a third empty Barq’s root beer can. All outside that very grown-up furniture fixture was an ocean of blackness.
Copying from an image of Super Metroid‘s box art in an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, My Only Friend and his brother were drawing pictures of Samus Aran in their respective sketchpads. My Only Friend was fourteen years old; his twelve-year-old brother’s drawing was better. I had my hands on my knees. I stared at the wood paneled wall. I wasn’t in a mood to draw.
“Hey, [his little brother’s name], did you tell Tim about Cam’s Masturbation?”
He said it like his little brother was in charge of telling me things, and like Cam’s Masturbation was a thing everyone desperately needed to know about.
He gave the pair of words “Cam’s Masturbation” so much gravity I presumed for a moment it alluded to a philosophical corollary.
His brother shrugged and rolled his eyes.
“Fine, I’ll tell him. So.”
So.
“There’s this speddo who was in [my little brother]’s kindergarten class. They put him in special ed later. His name was Cameron. They called him Cam. He was a real sped! Tell him about what Cam did, [brother]?”
My Only Friend’s Brother shrugged. My Only Friend rolled his eyes. He continued.
“The teacher was asking all the kids, hey, what do you like to do when you’re at home? And kids were like I like painting or I like playing with blocks and they got to Cam. The teacher was like, Cam, what do you like doing when you’re at home? And Cam just reached right for his junk and started beating it, like this.”
Here my friend stood up and beat the dull side of his fist into the top of his jeans’ pubic region.
“Except he went under the pants, like, he actually grabbed onto his wiener. Can you believe that!”
I could believe anything.
An hour passed there, in the dark, a grandfather clock ticking in the other living room, somewhere around the bend of a hallway.
“Check this out.”
My Only Friend’s little brother looked up from coloring his Metroid drawing. He’s a professional comic book artist now, by the way. He scoffed at his brother’s drawing.
Crudely, in the style like a comic pamphlet about Jesus you’d find on a city bus and your mom would warn you about germs if you touched it, My Only Friend had drawn Kurt Cobain, a shotgun in his mouth, gore exploding outward in a shockwave halo around his head. On the wall behind him My Only Friend had scrawled “I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE.”
“You’re so sick,” his brother said.
“No! I’m not fuckin’ sick, you’re just a fuckin’retard!”
He spun the drawing around, though I’d already absorbed it upside down.
“What do you think? Faggot took the easy way out, huh? Went down like a shitbitch. fuckin’ trashcan pissdiaper”
I snatched the drawing up off the table, balled it up, and shoved it in my mouth.
“You fuckin’ mongoloid sped!”
I chewed it four times; I spit it onto the floor.
“Fuckin’ . . . . . . pick that up and flush it down the toilet before my mom gets home, you reebo.”
I picked it up and flushed it down the toilet before his mom got home.
“Do you guys wanna fuckin’ . . . play Doom?”
I watched him play Doom on his homework computer.
“Doom is so gay,” he said, a near-silent hour later.
His family moved. I never saw him again.
1995: EIGHT MONTHS LATER
We were reading The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy in our English literature class, like that was a normal, relatable work of written material for fifteen-year-olds to care about while the OJ Simpson trial was on television all day every day and I was still two years away from having my first long conversation with a black person my age (and her mom) about who The Cops actually are.
Simon raised his hand, because that’s what he did. I bet he’s on Facebook. I’m going to look him up on Facebook immediately after I finish typing this. I hope he’s a lawyer. I mean that in the nicest possible way.
“Yes, Simon?”
“You said we could talk about some real issues.”
“This isn’t about OJ again, is it?”
“N-no.”
“What is it?”
“I feel that some of the students—and myself—still have questions about the fire.”
Our teacher, who was, objectively remembering, not a good teacher, sat on the edge of her desk.
“Of course you do.”
“I just think a lot of us feel violated. We feel scared.” He stood up. He rotated in place. “We feel like there’s something they’re not telling us.”
“Well, I don’t know who’s not telling who what,” our teacher said.
A silence fell off the ceiling and evaporated on the floor.
“I just think we could use some answers.”
“Do you have questions?”
“How long are we going to keep having cops in the halls? Am I gonna have to go through a metal detector every day until I graduate? And who’s the student who got arrested last year? At least can’t we know if he did it or not?”
Our teacher stepped forward off the edge of her desk. She threw her hands up.
“I don’t know. You know what? I’d tell you if I could.”
When I say that she was not, objectively remembering, a good teacher, I mean, for example, that I feel like a good teacher would have left it at “I don’t know.”
After class Simon was talking in the halls with the girl who sat next to me in every class because our last names were adjacent in alphabetical order, and the new disciplinary rules required teachers to seat students in alphabetical order.
“We should organize a group to investigate,” he was saying. “I think if enough of us put our heads together, we can find out who did it.” The boy who would be the captain of the swim team next year stood nearby, nodding.
I lingered and listened. The eventual swim team captain looked at me. He made eye contact. He looked away. I walked away.
At home, late that night, by the light of a string of Christmas bulbs in the dining room, I scrounged through the basket of newspapers under the piano my dad never let any of us play. I clipped every article pertaining to the fire at my school. I put them all in a medium-sized Ziploc baggie. I put the baggie in my shoebox of video games. I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the box on the floor between my feet.
Over the next week I composed a letter to Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan at Game Players, for his game tips column. The letter went through five drafts. I told him I was a big fan. I said that I had a hole inside me, too, though I was only fifteen years old so I could only legally fill it with macaroni and cheese and Sprite. I thought it was a good joke. It might have been. I told him I loved Final Fantasy III. I told him if you cast “Vanish” on an enemy it works 100% of the time, and then if you cast “X-Zone,” that enemy will die 100% of the time. I told him a couple other tips that weren’t in Nintendo Power‘s strategy guide. I closed the letter out by saying, “Hey, do you think Kefka is actually Shadow’s friend—the one you see in Shadow’s flashback dream scenes? His friend was captured by the Empire, and Kefka is the result of experiments, right? Shadow seems to have some personal business with Kefka.”
I never heard a response. They never printed my letter. I didn’t expect them to.
The Wednesday after I sent the letter, a kid spilled his own chocolate milk into my hair as he walked past my table.
I took my time in the bathroom. I wet my hands and ran them through the wig-like hair pile atop my huge head. For not the first and not the last time, I beheld the mess of myself in that window.
The halls were empty when I exited the bathroom. Students were afraid of being expelled for tardiness.
The future swim team captain was walking down the hall in my direction. His girlfriend was with him.
“Watch this,” he said.
He sprinted toward me.
“Bon appetit, faggot!” he yelled. He kicked me so hard in the testicles I threw up all over my sweatpants. His facial expression melted away.
“Oh my god honey what did you do that for?” his girlfriend asked him. The exact emphasis of her “what” still reverberates in my ears today when I think on it.
He didn’t answer. I feel like a decent person would have at least said “I don’t know.”
I drenched my sweatpants in bathroom sink water. I showed up at my next class stinking like evil orange juice. Teachers don’t give you a hard time when you’re slightly weirder than everyone else. I went home and threw my pants in the washer. I sat on the edge of my bed and didn’t cry.
Time flowed without speed or mercy. In June of 1995 I turned 16. That very day I got a job at Target. By August of 1995 I’d grown two inches taller and lost 40 pounds. On Friday, August 11th, 1995, ten months to the day after the release of Final Fantasy III, Chrono Trigger came out in North America. I had my own money. I bought it full-price on day one. I sat on the edge of my bed in my cargo shorts and hiking boots after my shift mutely pushing carts, measuring the heft of Chrono Trigger‘s turgid box. I’d bought it on faith alone. I tried to guess at how many pages its manual had. A confusion found me. It didn’t leave for a while. I think now that at last, with nonchalance, my hole had finally found me.
Six years later, I’d have all the ingredients of a normal adult life, which I continue to have in some form today. Though for a period of dark vampiring months in my fifteenth year of life normalcy felt colder than impossible. Deep within the jungle of the unknown unknown my normal life slept, coiled and exhausted. The possibility of being a person never occurred to me once. These days, surrounded by information and noise as I am and we are, occasionally that possibility blinks into invisibility for a moment or an hour, and for god’s sake I am terrified, and for all your sakes I am humiliated. For a while in my youth outside of calculating the trade-in value of a couple Nintendo games, I lost my concept of considering the future.
“I know an invisible machine,” Rosa Peel, also known as The Tennis Monster, says, in my novel Chronicle of a Tennis Monster.
“This ancient machine of garbage and meat, active before we ever breathe, yelling after my bones are gone.”
In other words, we didn’t start the fire.
“Cut me up and sell my bones to the trashcan factory when I die,” Rosa Peel also says, earlier in the story, though I’m not sure what that means.
“Promise me you’ll make sure I’m dead before you sell my bones to the trashcan factory,” Rosa says, later. Now I’m thinking of trashcan factories. I’m sorry that I don’t know why I person I built is trying to say whatever they’re trying to say. I tried to build someone worse than myself and I tried to dig for humanity there. Instead she just wants to keep talking about trashcan factories. Eventually she says something beautiful about rotten fruit which almost always still almost makes me cry even for example in airports, though much of the time I hate myself for hating her.
I will die possessing many frivolous yet beautiful memories of people and weather. For as long as I remember to remember, my mind makes no difference between darkness, medicine, and entertainment. Our lives are the longest trivia games in the world.
Two years after Chrono Trigger came out in North America, a game called Moon: Remix RPG Adventure released in Japan. One summer night in 2003 I played this game at the house of a friend who’d purchased it because a noise cellist she liked, Hiromichi Sakamoto, had contributed a song to its soundtrack. I played the game with my friend all night in the wooden darkness of a Tokyo living room. We played it again the next week, and the next week, until finally we’d finished it. We’d lost a mutual friend to suicide earlier that year. I haven’t ever cried with another person like that.
I sought out the director of the game, Yoshiro Kimura, in 2004. We became acquaintances, and then friends. For fourteen years I asked him to let me translate his game into English. He always gave the same reply: the game is too hard, and it’s not very good, so nobody would like it.
In 2018, he decided to release it again. He said he’d let me translate it.
A couple weeks ago, unspeakable treadmill lightyears removed from the macaroni silence of my adolescence, I went to Tokyo to see Yoshiro Kimura. We talked for many hours. We videotaped the conversation, so that I can edit it into a documentary at some point in the future. The documentary provided me a perfect excuse to ask him broader questions about Moon than casual circumstances had ever encouraged me to ask. He told me about his time working at Squaresoft, on Romancing SaGa 3 and Super Mario RPG. We talked about Final Fantasy III, IV, V, and VI. I told him I was very antisocial when I played Final Fantasy VI. He nodded.
I went on.
I told him, one day, halfway between sixteen and seventeen, I looked at myself in a mirror. I hated myself more than I felt anything about anything else. And I’ll never know why, though that day I realized it was terrible and useless to hate myself. I’d keep doing it, and I still do it every day of my adult life, though at least I know I’m doing it. I told him, I knew that day that I had wasted days. I had wasted thousands of opportunities to pay the world acts of goodness. Until maybe 2008 I went on living wastefully and terribly. Since then I’ve done good things whenever I can, even when it hurts me and ruins me. I keep them to myself. And one day—just the other day, in fact—I looked at myself in a mirror in Narita Airport in Tokyo, Japan, and I knew that I know something no one else knows; I knew that I knew something beautiful and wordless, and if I ever figure out how to say it, I’ll say it immediately. I promise I won’t keep it. If I die having never said it, that’s all right, because it wasn’t worth saying if I didn’t say it right. And if I figure out how to say it right, I’ll say it without hesitation, and someone will hear it, and they’ll someday fix a part of the world I don’t know how to see, and so on, until I’m far away and sorry.
I told him about the kid who made Sonic kill Mario in Mario Paint. I told him about my gymnasium fire. I told him that last Christmas, my mother had told me that that kid, now grown up and married with children, called my parents’ house in the middle of a November evening the week before Thanksgiving 2018 and asked if he could take them out to dinner. My mom said she told him she was already cooking dinner; he could come over, if he wanted. He said he’d come over. She said he was a perfect gentleman and didn’t ask about me once. I told my friend I stood in the bathroom and stared at my face and my eyebrows for five minutes after hearing that. I remember everything because I can’t forget anything, though every fresher cell of me differs many times over from those of those gone days. For several minutes I looked for someone else at myself.
He nodded. “I think I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I don’t know how I got here,” I said.
I got here the only way anyone gets anywhere.
I finished translating Moon immediately before beginning to write this. It was released on the Nintendo Switch eShop on 27 August 2020. If you play it, please try not to think of me.
2007
text by tim rogers
★★⋆☆
“NOT A CULTURAL EVENT -- IT'S JUST A VIDEOGAME.”
There comes a point in every high-profile game-reviewer’s life when he has to put down that can of Red Bull (which has likely been empty for minutes now) and start banging out the words. Here at Action Button Dot Net, we don’t have the rigorous deadlines and tight schedules of videogame magazines, who employ what must be the hardest-working souls on earth; without them, we wouldn’t exist, for better or for worse, though forget about that. This paragraph is meant to indicate that it is only after great consideration and much stewing in my own juices that I finally decide to talk about Super Mario Galaxy, a month after tearing all the way through it from start to finish, a year and a day after the Wii’s launch in Japan, a year and two days after deciding that it couldn’t be released any sooner, and nearly twelve years of praying that, some day, it would come, and that it would be great.
Though I was yet a teenager at a time, Super Mario 64 did not excite me precisely in the way it excited Chris Slate of Ultra Game Players, who said (and this is off the top of my head) “Right now, today, Super Mario 64 is the best game I’ve ever played”. I appreciated his use of the commas around the word “today” — very literesque — though I didn’t quite share his enthusiasm. I was a boy gifted with the experience of having played Super Mario Bros. for only a few short months before God brought us Super Mario Bros. 3. I hadn’t had years of habitual Super Mario Bros. under my belt, and if anything, this made the refinements of Super Mario Bros. 3 all the more crisp.
In other words, upon playing Super Mario 64 for ten minutes, I was already anticipating the game that would play Super Mario Bros. 3 to its Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Sunshine, released for the Gamecube, was more or less a one-off. Around the time of its release, Nintendo had already been parading Super Mario left and right, in party games, puzzle games, golf games, tennis games. Sunshine seemingly existed to prove that Nintendo could put Super Mario into another action-platform game, if they wanted. It was like they were saying, see, we’re not scared to make another Super Mario game. I’ll admit that I was rather crushed with how just-decent it was, though now that I look back, I wish that people like me had just let it slide. What Mario — the person — needed was a bloodletting. He needed to cool his jets. He needed to star in one action-platform game a year for, I don’t know, five years. Sunshine had the tropical island theme. Maybe they could have set the next one at a ski resort, had Mario sliding down lots of hills.
Instead, a million slighted fanboy hearts beat in unison; the drumming on the horizon scared Nintendo’s creative geniuses back into their shells. When, eventually, Super Mario Galaxy was announced, Nintendo’s American face kept no secrets: lovable buffoon president Reggie Fils-Aime was proud to say that Galaxy would be the “true successor to Super Mario 64“. We — the proverbial “kids at home” — filled in the blanks: “Just like Super Mario Bros. 3 was the true successor to Super Mario Bros.“
And now here it is, and I don’t like it. I mean, I really, really, really, really don’t like it. It just about makes me nauseous how little I like it. What went wrong? Really? Oh no — I’m not asking these questions about the game’s development process. I’m asking them about myself. Why does disliking this game depress me so much? When I at first emerged on the other side of Super Mario Galaxy, feeling deflated, I thought, if I write a review of this on Action Button Dot Net, people are going to accuse us of being controversial, of hit-baiting, of attention-cravery. People are going to accuse us of trying to heck up the Metacritic score (even though we don’t submit scores to Metacritic) or trying to drum up ad revenue (even though we don’t have ads). More importantly, I’m going to get literally thousands of greasy-fingered hate mails from people telling me that I’m not human, that I have soul cancer, that I’ve forgotten how to have fun.
And maybe these things are true. Maybe I have forgotten how to have fun, though I’ll be darned if I can’t still see some flickering shadow of fun on my bedroom wall late at night, just before I fall asleep. It is the Rosebud of my every barely-waking moment. When I close my eyes, I can see the shape of how, exactly, I selfishly wanted Super Mario Galaxy to be. It would have been miraculous. At least, for me, it would have been.
Instead, we get a weird, cloying, conflicted jumble of good concepts, amazing concepts, genius concepts, brilliant concepts, and junk. When I try to focus on the game, I end up distracted by all the floating debris.
This is not “schtick”. This is not this website’s “thing”. This is just how I feel.
I had envisioned this game as a joyful rope — a straight shot from planetoid to planetoid, with multiple ways to “solve” each planetoid, resulting in varied, multiple paths through the game. I blame this impression on the ten-minute demo I was able to play at a Nintendo Wii showcase event in Tokyo just before the console’s launch in Japan. In that demo, well-placed Mushroom Retainers give you simple control instructions (jump, triple jump, squat-jump, wall-jump) as you make your way up a mountainside. Eventually, you reach a mountaintop that’s well into the stratosphere, where you choose to go left or right. Either path leads to a star that blasts you off toward a series of planetoid challenges.
This left a strong impression on me; I was instantly fascinated with the game’s subtlety. Maybe this could have been the “difficulty selection” — maybe the only place to learn that the left path was “hard” and the right path was “easy” would be to look it up in the instruction manual? In this day and age of non-gamers welcoming Nintendo back with opened wallets, who knows what craziness is in the air? Maybe people can actually be trusted to read instruction manuals again?
In an interview some nine months after my initial, overjoyed impressions of the game, Shigeru Miyamoto told Weekly Famitsu‘s editor-in-chief Hirokazu Hamamura that his team’s “main goal” in Super Mario Galaxy was to make a game that was easy enough for anyone to pick up and play — a game that could be embraced and played to completion by non-gamers, all while never once making the hardcore gamers feel like they’re being “patronized”. He actually used the Japanese verb “being licked” (like a mommy kitty licks a baby kitty, to help the image along) — he was well into meaning-business mode. Maybe he’d played the latest Zelda games, where a blasted text box will scream at you about the function of a key every single god damned time you pick up a key: “You got a magic key! . . . This is a magic key! . . . It can be used to unlock one door! After unlocking one door, this magic key will vanish!”
I took Miyamoto’s “No Licking” stance to mean that he was against the source of the licking as well as the act of licking itself. Maybe he’d stopped and asked himself two questions, regarding the keys in Zelda: number one, why can’t the game show you what a key does? When you use a key to unlock a door, maybe we could just see the key hover up above the hero’s head, fly into the lock, click, turn, and vanish into a puff of smoke as the door rumbles open? Then we’d know, deep down, “Hey, that key’s gone now.” Number two: why does the key have to disappear after we use it? The answer to the second question has something to do with how the key isn’t a “key” so much as it’s just “something to do” in order to progress deeper into a dungeon. On a deeper, weirder psychological level, the key is imprinting our children with obsessive urges to always look for the solution to the problem before their eyes in the most far-flung place. In this way, it can be construed that games aren’t running parallel to real-world logic so much as they’re scribbling poisonous crayon circles anywhere they please.
Yet Super Mario Galaxy licked me plenty of times, up and down, all over. At a certain point about three-quarters of the way through the game — this almost scarred me for life — I was swimming in a giant liquid sphere toward a floating tower, when a penguin sidled up to me out of nowhere and with a hateful snippet of a sound effect, his text box took up the greater part of the center of the screen: “PRESS THE A BUTTON TO SWIM”.
It occurs to me once again that no one in any Japanese office anywhere, precisely, has yet been able to construct a Powerpoint presentation that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that though the people who forget to use the one button on the controller to do almost everything, or else forget that keys unlock doors are forgetful enough to also have lost the instruction manual (and possibly box) of every game they own, they are probably also forgetful enough to misplace the game disc and/or the console.
Someone should really get on that proof. This could be the Pythagorean Theorem of the 21st Century.
The cloying and the down-talking penetrates to only the most bizarre strata of Super Mario Galaxy. The hub world is the most visible offender. In Super Mario 64, we had a castle, where everything was laid-out in an easily understandable fashion: the first mission you complete nets you a Power Star; you remember a door with a star logo and a numeral “1” on it, you stand near the door, Mario yields a star in his hand, and the door opens. Many doors with stars and numerals exist; each stage has seven stars for you to earn; from so very close to the beginning, you’re on your own.
Super Mario 64, though purchased at a one-to-one attach rate with the Nintendo 64 hardware, was not considered a success in Japan, because the Nintendo 64 hardware was not considered a success. A Nintendo fanboy could tell you that this is because the World Was Wrong, that They didn’t know what was Good for Them. Nintendo took a bath on the Gamecube as well; some would say that they decided to change their policies after that, though I would argue that they didn’t. I would argue that the success of the DS, of the Wii, and of new president Satoru Iwata is grounded firmly in Iwata’s bold decision to stick with the company’s guns, to emphasize rather than mute the little conceptual quirks (like connecting your Gameboy Advance to your Gamecube so each player has his own little handheld screen) that had possibly turned off the gaming populace. The Wii remote is very much a direct continuation of the DS stylus, et cetera. And if Wii Sports has proven anything, it’s that Nintendo’s games are successful with non-gamers because they’re presented and packaged well, not because they’re more simple than other games or because they’re similar to real-life actions — or even because they’re actually fun.
In other words, I find it vaguely unsettling that one of Nintendo’s ideas for making the game “simple” enough for the “wider audience” to “understand” involved gutting the hands-on “exploration” element out of the hub world; instead of a living, breathing (yet empty — for a reason) castle, we’ve got a floating fortress / spaceship thing with loud creatures buzzing all around and these ugly rooms with fixed camera angles, where all of the levels are contained. Clear a mission, and you’ll see a load-masking cut-scene of Mario flying back to the hub; he’ll land, and the Burnoutitis will commence: a big menu pops up, telling you “NEW HIGH SCORE”; it counts down how many coins you earned, then it switches to another menu, and tells you how many star bits you picked up, then it switches to another menu to tell you you’ve opened a new stage, then a map pops up, and a star logo in one of the various rooms of the ship blinks loudly. Go inside a room — say, the kitchen — and arbitrarily point the remote at a blue star and press the A button, which will pull Mario toward it; the screen switches to a planetarium view; select the galaxy you want to fly to — galaxies you can’t enter are marked by a star icon and a numeral (the number of stars needed to unlock it) — click on it, and you’ll see a little cut-scene of Mario flying out in space. Now a screen pops up with a list of star goals for the selected galaxy. Choose the one you want, and there’s another triumphant “WAHOO”. With a “YES!”, Mario lands in the galaxy, and there you have it: you’re finally playing a videogame.
Why put all this bullstuff between the action set-pieces? I mean, at the very least, could we not have the “YAY! Look at this numeric representation of how YOU’RE SUCH A GOOD BOY“? All the original Super Mario Bros. had was the timer countdown and the fireworks; that seemed to do pretty nicely for most people. That game sold, like, literally 20 million copies! Here we are in the twenty-first century, and here we are with all this stopping and starting. I wanted to play a rope. I wanted the game to just keep going, keep evolving, keep crunching. I wanted it to be a delicious buffet dinner, not a room full of bottles of multi-vitamins.
To be both more concrete and more abstract, I wanted the game to get more difficult as it went along. Instead, the game’s difficulty level stays numbingly even from beginning to end. The bosses are all little puzzles with obvious solutions. (It usually involves using the spin attack to knock back a projectile.)
The thing is, if you want Super Mario Galaxy to be challenging, you have to want it to be challenging. You only need sixty stars to complete the “main” game, though if you’re an acquitted kleptomaniac, you can get sixty more, and then a nifty little reward.
And this isn’t the most of it. I’ll tell you what’s the worst. The game, as a series of challenges, isn’t even about anything so much as it’s about itself. Literally halfway through the game, you arrive in a “galaxy” that you need thirty stars to unlock (you can complete the game with as few as sixty stars). The first mission in the galaxy is called “The Rabbits Are Looking For Something”. You land in the galaxy, where a big, fuzzy bee immediately gets all up in your face. “The rabbits are looking for something!” he says. Walk down the only path before you, and you’ll come up to a rabbit who is, maybe, looking for something. Get too close to the rabbit, and he automatically talks to you. “Where could that [STAR CHIP] be?” In place of the “[STAR CHIP]” is a Star Chip icon. Star Chips are these blue fragment things; if you collect five of them, they join together to make a star-thing that teleports you somewhere else, so you can once again feel the orgasm of progress. The camera floats up softly. We see a Star Chip floating high above the ground. The rabbit remains oblivious. (Compelling side-question: is Mario, too, oblivious?) We now notice that the rabbit is standing in the middle of a peculiar arrangement of three wooden posts. We may remember, from earlier missions or worlds or galaxies, that Mario can perform a hip-drop if we press the Z button while jumping. Do a hip drop on a wooden post, and you can hammer it into the ground. We see these three posts, and we hammer them all in. Out of nowhere, a rotating star-gate-thing appears. We stand in it, remember that we have to shake the remote to use it, shake the remote, and Mario flies up just high enough to grab the Star Chip. He doesn’t not inform the rabbit that he found the Star Chip. (This is crucial.) The next rabbit we find is standing near a large wooden box. “I can almost smell a [STAR CHIP ICON]”. The camera pans slyly right, highlighting the wooden box. We might remember from earlier missions that we can shake the remote to make Mario do a spin attack move. Spin attacks can break boxes. We break the box. We collect the Star Chip that had been inside. Again, Mario does not inform the rabbit that he has found the Star Chip (double crucial). The other challenges in this mission require you to remember how to jump on enemies or remember that Mario has to ability to perform a wall jump. None of these challenges are laid-out as set pieces. They just wobble there, hunks of pineapple in lime Jell-O. When at last you assemble the Star Gate Thing and blast off to the final portion of the stage, there’s Mario on a planetoid with a rabbit. The rabbit has the star. He says he’ll give it to you, if you can beat him in a race.
. . . Like, what the heck? Are these rabbits not all on the same side? If this rabbit had the star from the beginning, why were the other rabbits looking for star chips? Is he a rogue rabbit? This is why Shigeru Miyamoto says they shouldn’t put stories in these things.
The important analysis to make of the above example is that Super Mario Galaxy is a game that, as far as halfway into its duration, continually rewards the player with something the game has contrived the player to need after the player remembers a thing that he can do, and then does it.
You might remember the first time you walked into a room in a Zelda game to see a locked door and four unlit torches. In your inventory you had a lantern that was capable of lighting torches. Somewhere deep down, you knew the truth, only you would never be able to put it into words: “If I light those four torches, that door is going to open”. Sometimes, the door would just open by magic; sometimes, a key would fall from the sky. Sometimes, you’d light the four torches, and enemies would fall into the room: kill them, and the door opened magically. This is sick, people. This is a mind-killer. Grand Theft Auto doesn’t turn kids into prostitute-killing car-jackers, because it looks real enough to be ridiculous. Super Mario Galaxy, however, with its slick, abstract, kid-friendly cartoon exterior, stands a pretty good chance of turning all of our children into kleptomaniacs (or, at the very least, obsessive-compulsives).
Most reviews of this game cite this as a sign of its generosity, of its deep bounty. I’ll admit that some of the harder missions are indeed What I Crave when it comes to platform games — time attacks, speed collection, more enemies — though they really are just rehashes of the same levels you’ve already played. And some of those levels are terrorism; replaying those levels for time is about as much fun as organizing data into a spreadsheet while riding the fastest train in the world. I’m not saying that reusing / rehashing is the devil, necessarily, just that I kind of miss the days when the difficult parts of a game were, you know, actually included in the game. For example, in Super Mario Bros. 3, if you wanted to finish the game, you had no choice: you’re going to have to go through that amazingly tough castle. You’re going to have to platform-hop across that ridiculous fleet of jet-plane airships.
Now, though, when we’ve invited grandma into the living room, games have to act civilized. Everyone has the right to witness the full curve of a game’s content, these days. To be fair, Nintendo’s been moving this way ever since Super Mario World, where the best part of the game, the Special World, is very difficult, quite hidden, extremely optional, and rewards you, when you complete it, only by making the game graphically hideous. Sunshine only turned the gain up (that’s a guitar term) on certain missions within each level, though with the way the game was structured, you didn’t always have to play them. If you did, though, it’d put you in a better position for progressing through the main game. Nonetheless, the hard parts of Sunshine were immediately visible as such: Mario was stripped of the water-blasting backpack that served as the game’s main gimmick, and the background music switched to an a cappella riff on the original Super Mario Bros. theme. And there you were, alone with floating platforms, tricky jumps, and a relentlessly all-encompassing deathvoid.
The high-difficulty segments of Sunshine were amazingly brilliant, most of the time, and Shigeru Miyamoto, himself, was quoted shortly after the game’s release as saying he’d love to make a whole game in that style. (I really wish he would.) What’s most important here is that they were all new and unique parts of the game. It seems, now, that Nintendo’s design philosophy has shifted: to deny anyone, even grandpa, a chance to romp around without fear of death in any unique part of the game is a serious crime. (Or, perhaps, judging by the fact that you can’t skip the “How to Fasten the Wii Remote Strap” screen until it’s been displayed for ten whole seconds, maybe the legal team advised them of the danger of a class-action lawsuit from widows of old men with overloaded pacemakers.)
(At any rate, at least Super Mario Galaxy‘s optional difficult segments are better presented than the “hidden” worlds of New Super Mario Bros. You know, how you have to take it upon yourself to defeat a boss The Hard Way just so you can be slotted down a path to a slightly different, maybe-more-difficult world. Like, why should World 6 be harder than World 7, really?)
The phantom lurking behind all this is called “Story”. Galaxy‘s developers knew that they couldn’t make a Mario game without a story, even though the story would have to be the same old thing it always is. Any deviation would result in tired groans all around the internet: Bowser has kidnapped the princess. Go get her back. The ending is no secret from the very beginning: Mario’s going to beat Bowser, get the princess back, and save the day. (And he’s so obviously not going to get laid.)
People of all ages loved Super Mario Bros., way back in the day, regardless of their grasp of the story. All they had to know was that this little guy had a quest, a quest that lurked somewhere to the right of where he is when we first meet him. Maybe they read the full story in the instruction manual, or maybe the neighbor kid explained it to them: “This dragon kidnapped a princess, and you’ve got to save her.” Whether you know the story or not, the enigmatic “Our Princess is in Another Castle” at the end of every four stages has never not been something pop-cultural enough to put on a T-shirt. There’s nothing similarly pop-culture-event-like about Super Mario Galaxy; just a fetishistic puppet show of squealing CG and mishmashed production values. Like, why have CG cut-scenes, if the characters aren’t going to talk? The first three seconds of Bowser’s “speech” in the opening scene are cute: he’s making this huge robo-dragon grumbling sound, while subtitles indicate that he’s speaking actual words. Then, once the grumble has looped for maybe the sixth time, it starts to get disturbing. Your ear becomes accustomed to the peaks and valleys in the individual sound waves, and maybe it all starts to seem a little off. Princess Peach, who is offered the courtesy of the only full sentence of dialogue in the game (in her letter at the very beginning), is revealed as typically speaking a language consisting of high-pitched pouts; Bowser’s right-hand magician speaks entirely in hyecking cackles.
Why not put voice-acting in? It’s a tiny, trite issue, I’ll admit, though really, why not go the extra step? It seems to me that Nintendo knew the story to Super Mario Galaxy was so totally not the point, and didn’t want to bother putting too much effort into the cut-scenes. Why have them in the first place, then? My dad taught me long ago: even if he knows the right fielder is going to catch that pop fly, Pete Rose keeps running for first base, and he doesn’t stop there. That’s why they called him “Charlie Hustle” — because he hustled (ironically, his name wasn’t Charlie) no matter what the circumstances. In other words, yes, maybe Nintendo should have just gone ahead and put voice-acting into Super Mario Galaxy, even if they were convinced that the story was filler nonsense; or maybe they should have just not put any story into it at all. Or at least no dialogue — do we really need subtitles to know that Bowser is threatening Peach, or that his assistant is threatening Mario? Pictures speak a thousand words, and CG — especially when it’s as colorful and sweet as in Super Mario Galaxy — speaks a million. Right?
One thing we don’t need, for sure, is the mysterious Princess Rosalina, who has absolutely no function in the story other than to stand around and explain the mechanics of the game — over and over and over again. I don’t get it — I kept thinking that maybe she had some sinister motive, though by the end of the game, when it’s revealed that there’s nothing to reveal, I was scratching my head. It was something like the end of Dragon Quest VII, during the course of which you can build a huge casino-centric metropolis on a tropical island as a side-quest, though no matter how awesome the city is, the main character goes back to being his fisherman father’s assistant at the end of the game. Princess Rosalina is a lot like that — too much time was spent designing her character, with no payoff. And all she does, for the most part, is recite lines from the instruction manual, or else describe things that the cut-scenes have already pretty much succeeded at getting across: every single time we earn a “Grand Star” from beating a boss, the Grand Star flies into the core of the hub, thus increasing the size and color of the core; a quick look-around scene shows energy flowing through the veins on the floor, demonstrating that power is being restored to another part of the hub. Why, then, must Princess Rosalina tell us, “The Grand Star has powered up the core, restoring energy to The Kitchen!” Why tell us that the room we’re about to go check out is a kitchen? For god’s sake, let us figure it out for ourselves; Grandpa’s Pacemaker isn’t going to explode because “Holy stuff no one told me it was gonna be a kitchen!!” Princess Rosalina feels simultaneously underused and tacked-on — which I guess isn’t all that amazing. Someone at Nintendo designed her, and they figured, hey, let’s put her into this game. What you end up with, though, is a symptom of the weird non-terminal illness infecting every Nintendo universe these days: hundreds of man-hours spilled into the task of painting a sign. Assigning a police officer to every STOP sign in town, so he can remind every motorist personally that “STOP” means “Stop”. Et cetera. Princess Rosalina is Nintendo using their assets because their assets are their assets. It’s the same thing they were doing back with Super Mario Stadium baseball, when they let Goomba be a selectable player even though Goombas have no hands and therefore can’t hold a baseball bat. It’s a spliter of the weird fever that gave birth to The Lightning Bolt in Super Mario Kart — a power-up that the person in last place, who is in last place for a reason (the reason being that he sucks at playing the game), has a much higher probability of receiving than anyone else. The Lightning Bolt will shrink and severely handicap every other racer, so that the person in last place might catch up. What happens when the Lightning Bolt wears off? We can say that, most of the time, the sucky player is surpassed once again. Why offer them that hope, then? Isn’t that kind of, you know, sick? Why not teach people to live with their mistakes, and regain their footing thanks to actual skill? Someone at Nintendo must have recently made a similarly pointed hypothesis, resulting in muted difficulty curves and more screen-filling help messages. Princess Rosalina is a lingering figment of Nintendo’s “let everyone play” mentality, only she’s not a real human being, and she’s not serving any purpose.
She certainly is, however, a lot hotter than Princess Peach. Why bother rescuing Peach, if you’ve got a hotter Princess right here? Go ahead and accuse me of being shallow, if you want, though really, how much do we know about Princess Peach and Mario’s relationship? Under the best circumstances, the earliest players of Super Mario Bros. didn’t know what the princess looked like until they got to the very, very end of the game. It would have surprised them if there hadn’t been a princess, though only because they’d been expecting one, even if the promise had never had any visual confirmation. If Super Mario Galaxy were made perfectly — and it’s not perfect — we would need no dialogue, no hub world, no Princess Rosalina: just a look at Princess Peach, a visual confirmation of the tyranny of the dragon, an unassuming launch into outer space, and it’d be hard not to hit the ground running from there. Instead, when the game opens, we’re chasing rabbits on a little planetoid, rabbits who, though they don’t want to be caught, are also telling us to “Press the A button to jump!” Whatever happened to teaching the player how to play through context? In Super Mario Bros., there’s a Goomba right there in front of us. There are blocks with question marks, which produce shiny things when hit, there’s a mushroom we can eat to grow large, there’s a pipe we can’t progress over without jumping. There you have it: crushing enemies, breaking blocks, earning coins, surpassing obstacles, all taught to us right at the beginning. Mario’s been likened to Charlie Chaplin before; why not make his games play like silent films? If there absolutely must be a tutorial involving a hecking rabbit, why not make the rabbit show us how to jump instead of tell us? Again, when the controller has only one button, it’s kind of unforgivable. Let’s watch the rabbit jump, once, twice, three times. He can teach us how to wall-jump, all on the way up a mountain, like in that demo I played last year. And then the game can commence, the beautiful rope I yearn for even now, the beautiful rope I cannot have.
Instead, Nintendo’s way of supposedly making the game more friendly to the mainstream is to give Mario as many complicated moves as possible. Shake the Wii remote to initiate Mario’s ridiculous spin attack, because
1. Mario needs an attack
2. it’s not a real Wii game if you don’t have to shake the remote.
For God’s sake, that the current most-anticipated Wii game is Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which will not use the Wii’s motion-sensing functionality, should probably say something, though I’m not totally sure what.
Mario’s spin attack is a real limp noodle stuck to the center of your TV screen. I could never shake (no pun intended) the tackiness of it. After Mario spins, there’s a lull, during which he can’t spin again. This is clearly to limit the player’s ability to shake the controller like crazy, so that Mario is always attacking, wherever he goes, which would make any “advanced” playing session of the game look even less like art. You’ll know Mario is able to attack again when the little star pops out from under Mario’s hat and makes a little doggie chew-toy noise. The little star exists mainly so that the player can feel some tiny intangible debt to Princess Rosalina, thus validating her existence as a character: see, it’s Rosalina that gives us the little magic star, which grants us the spin attack and the ability to fly through space. Personally, I would rather none of this be explained at all, though clearly Nintendo continuity fetishists would fall apart at the seams if there weren’t plenty of slow-moving dialogue windows to seal all the holes, to keep it all air-tight — never mind that the explanation is a flaming load of bullstuff, if a guy with a mushroom for a head says it, it must be true.
I would rather Mario just punch and kick the enemies in the face, the way he did in Super Mario 64. Maybe that was considered Way Too Violent for Grandpa’s Pacemaker, I don’t know. Either way, I hereby declare my strict stance against normal attack actions that require the player to shake the Wii remote.
Besides, there’s the cute little star-bit-collecting/shooting thing to fill the waggle quota.
Before playing the game, I remember thinking that man, it looks like it’d be a lot of fun with a Dual Shock. Now that I’ve played it and experienced the star-bit collection firsthand, I have to say it’s kind of nice — in concept. I’ve always fantasized about a game where you control two characters at once — part of the reason I love the right-analog-stick controlled RC car in Ape Escape — so the extra-peripheral weirdness of collecting star-bits with the pointer while running Mario around is really welcome for me. All throughout Twilight Princess, I was wishing there was something to do with the fairy pointer as Link was running around. (Speaking of Twilight Princess — I suppose enough people complained about the ear-grating tinkling sound of the pointer moving for Nintendo to make Super Mario Galaxy‘s pointer gracefully silent.) Then we have the star-bit-shooting function: aim the pointer and press the B button to launch a star-bit at an enemy to stun — or possibly kill — it. There’s a precious little disconnect between pressing the fire button and the launching of the star-bit; the angle at which the star-bit enters the screen is ever-so-quaintly off; this functions a lot like the momentum of old-school Mario’s run: it’s a quirk that for some reason makes perfect sense, and getting used to it is ninety-something-percent part of the fun. It’s more than clever enough to fill the waggle quota, though I guess the design document template for a flagship title demands both Wiimote shaking and precision pointing.
Either way, there’s not enough execution of the star-bit-shooting. If used effectively, it could make the game like a Gyromite where you control the professor and the platforms at the same time. As-is, it’s too optional. It’s something you can do if you feel like it, or forget about if it’s too hard for you. It’s also the sole duty of the second player — Japanese Housewife Mode — and probably the feature Weekly Famitsu had in mind when they said “It’s even fun just to watch!” I’m all for Active Watching as a trend in future videogames; its infancy, as seen in Super Mario Galaxy, is intriguing, though ultimately kind of empty. Then again, I guess, if you’re, like, actually mentally handicapped, shooting stars as player two could be the most fun you ever have in your life. For me — I wrote off the validity of the mode the second I saw that player two’s pointer — which is a very different color from player one’s (play the game to find out which color!) — has a very large “2P” attached to it. The presence of 2P also means that player one’s pointer now gets a “1P” by it. Obviously, this hasn’t been thought through very well. Seriously, people.
Though there are just-about-breathtaking moments in almost every other stage of Super Mario Galaxy, the overall amount of standing around and waiting (or otherwise dinking around) involved ultimately crushed my fun factor. Before the game’s release, I saw an amazing screenshot of Mario walking on a floating stone corkscrew, with giant Thwomp blocks grimacing down at him; when actually playing this part of the game, I was dumbfounded by how slowly the giant blocks move up and down, by how the only “solution” to the “puzzle” of the moment is to stand there and wait for the block to stand there in the down position for several seconds before slowwwwwwwwly going back up. Huge safe zones in the obstacle courses make a majority of the platform segments feel weirdly jerky and redundant.
And then there are the floaty parts.
Early on, there’s a “Wind Garden” galaxy, where the very first thing you’re expected to do is perform a spin attack to knock these dandelion spore things into the air. Then you jump up and grab one, and now Mario is floating on wind currents. Line yourself up with the right wind current, and be prepared to switch to another one within ten seconds. The thing is, if you’re going to fail, you’ll know it maybe ten seconds ahead of time. There’s no split-second action that can be employed to avoid it. It’s all just a matter of waiting. (Spur-of-the-moment game idea: survival horror story where the main character is locked in a solid granite room just before what would be the final boss; the room very slowly begins to fill with water. The character screams at the top of his or her lungs while the player tries in vain to escape. An hour later, the main character is dead.) In the pyramid world, there’s a similar part where you have to keep jumping into tornadoes, sending Mario spinning through the air very, very, very, very, very slowly. Line him up with the platform and do a hip drop to land — or else, if you miss the mark, just float helplessly until you’re dead, or else do a hip drop to give up already. I don’t like any game — especially Mario — having “just give up already” situations.
The game shines brightest in retro-style 2D segments, which is kind of ironic, and kind of sad, though ultimately the retro-2D segments made the hemispheres of my brain figuratively rotate in place, grinding against one another loudly, because for some reason, though the perspective switches to 2D, the controls are still 3D, meaning that if you’re tilting the stick a tiny bit upward, Mario will get stuck to walls, though only just as he’s about to jump. This level of imprecision — in addition to Mario’s overall amazingly slow movement speed — is kind of just not allowed in a platform game if you expect me to take it seriously.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was just . . . so sharp. It had perfected Mario’s nuanced momentum, in addition to birthing a handful of power-ups with their own nuances. The awkward hopping of the frog suit made it horribly difficult to play on land, though swimming was a breeze. Raccoon Mario had the series’ first head-to-head melee attack (the tail attack). Tanooki Mario could turn to stone, avoiding damage from enemies. Hammer Mario’s deadly hammers flew at a curious, difficult-to-master angle, and his shell (when ducking) was impervious to fire.
In Super Mario Galaxy, a game conceived on the notion of Mario having no power-ups at all, all we get is hecking Bee Mario and hecking Boo Mario. Bee Mario can fly. You just hold down the A button and YIPPEE, that abstract representation of you, on the television screen, is flying. Boo Mario — oh my god, he can fly too, and also pass through walls, because he’s a ghost, a hideous ghost.
Ice Mario can walk on water, and his ice-skating (which makes Mario move at double his top speed) is actually the most finely nuanced movement in the game, by far. However, that the power-up is only usable for a limited time — and that each time you use it, the goal is merely get somewhere you couldn’t get otherwise, in a short amount of time (which is usually way too long) — makes it kind of useless in the long run. And unlike Super Mario Bros. 3, power-ups don’t carry over between levels, which is a real let-down, because it’d be really awesome to try to play other levels as Ice Mario. Everything has to be time-based now, and of course, if you run out of time, you just go back to the respawn point for the power-up.
Fire Mario — another time-limited powerup — is so nuanced he’s a mess. The only goal you’ll ever have as Fire Mario is the ridiculously Zelda-esque and touchy task of lighting two torches with his fireballs, which bounce like ping-pong balls on a bed of mousetraps. The only way to truly ensure you’re going to hit the target is to stand as close to it as you can before shaking the controller. Trying to hit the torches from a distance of more than two scale feet is like giving your last hundred dollars to a puppy and telling him to go play blackjack. You never know — the little bastard might make you a millionaire.
The best parts of Super Mario Galaxy are the wholly optional segments where you’re tilting the controller to steer a manta ray down a fast-paced waterslide, or where you’re rolling on top of a ball, down a huge playing field littered with holes. These games are so pure, and so technical, that I really wish these, Nintendo’s highest-paid game designers, would just make me a full game out of the slide segments from Super Mario 64, or the deathvoid stages from Super Mario Sunshine, already.
Instead, we get a game where large segments of the action involve pointing the remote at a little blue star, holding down the A button, and watching Mario get sucked in. Keep pointing at the next star and clicking — sometimes quickly — to keep moving. (It’s also very similar to Donkey Kong: King of Swing, which was made by the same developers.)
There you are, floating in space. How do you feel? Do you feel like you’re in space?
Eventually, my ability to enjoy Super Mario Galaxy withered away under the iron fist of the maybes. The first time I saw one of those blazing black-hole cores, my eyes popped open — so that’s how you do a bottomless pit in zero-gravity. The first time I saw a rubber ball at the core of a planetoid, half of my brain exploded. So, so many times, I kept thinking: “This would be so awesome if it were in a videogame”. And by the end of the experience, I had a flickering reflection in the back of my brain of the game I had wanted to play:
Call it Super Mario Acid. Here’s Mario, on a sphere made of acid, floating in space. He’s standing on a block. The block is being eaten by the acid. Where’s he going to go after the block completely sinks into the acid? you wonder, just as another block, sucked in by gravity, slams into the acid planetoid. This repeats for eternity — sometimes the blocks have flagpoles on them, sometimes it’s ladders, sometimes they’re long enough to get a running start so you can do a long jump or a triple jump, sometimes they have little overhangs to get caught under if you’re not careful. As you play, the speed of the blocks’ appearance gently increases, though the goal never changes: get to the high ground, whatever the high ground is.
Or maybe it’s just Super Mario standing on a block, floating in space around a black hole. Yeah, maybe that’s better — that way, you’d be able to see all of the orbiting platforms at once. Platforms keep entering the orbit of the black hole, and you have to keep jumping on them. You know a block is about to get sucked into the black hole because it starts shaking, faster and faster.
There’d be no way to win; like in Tetris, the only way to “win” is to be still playing the game. The existential dread and lack of a story didn’t stop Tetris from becoming the most popular videogame of all-time, you know, even among housewives. (Maybe it had something to do with the lack of a human protagonist. (Though in a way, we can say that the player is the protagonist, and GAME OVER represents their failure to live forever, which is kind of a lot more creepy than merely witnessing third-person the torment of a cartoon character. (Especially one with a mustache and overalls.))
The game would, ultimately, be a celebration of Mario Physics: the only true goal would be to enjoy existing in the world.
Instead, with Super Mario Galaxy, we get a load of filler leading up to a too-late climax; we get penguins teaching humans how to ride manta rays — animals teaching humans how to ride other animals — and all the half-assed production value that entails — no voice acting, a story that fully understands its own insignificance, lavish orchestral recordings of banal one-note compositions, and a “new” Mario voice from Charles Martinet, which I suppose is meant to represent Mario’s thrill upon finding himself in outer space. It ends up sounding more like cocaine hitting a ceiling fan. Then the terrible aspects: the music ranges from evocative of the image of ritualistically defecating Teletubbies to post-Jock-Jam, pre-apocalyptic trash that plays when you pick up the Ice or Fire Mario power-ups (it sounds like the song that’s playing on the radio the night you drive home from an overtime shift and find your refrigerator full of cockroaches), and the absolute terror of the washing-machine-buzzer-like sound that indicates MARIO IS ABOUT TO DIE. I’ve always despised such sound effects. Whatever happened to Super Mario? The only power-up mushroom in Super Mario Galaxy that makes Mario stronger just increases his ethereal “life” meter from a “3” numeral to a “6”. Maybe that says everything, right there.
Now that I think about it — really, what did happen to Super Mario? In this age of Katamari and Shadow of the Colossus, why not make a 3D Super Mario game where you can eat a mushroom that makes you bigger? Eat one to grow twice as big, eat two to grow four times as big, et cetera. Each one you eat makes you bigger, makes more areas of each stage accessible to you. Every time you get hit, you drop one size. Where’s this kind of thinking, in Super Mario Galaxy? Sure, planetoids represent a significant challenge for programmers and designers, and I respect that, though I’d appreciate either some actual originality or (not “and”) some really tight focus. This right here is a big jumble of yammering parts, and it could have been absolutely perfect if only someone knew how to apply a god damned scientific calculator. It could have been a rope, it could have had flow. It could have been gorgeous.
It could have been a cultural event, like the original Super Mario Bros. As what it is, though, it’s just another videogame.
Not that I have anything against videogames.
Just recently, though, I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles. No guard rails, no lights, no reflectors, a brilliant ocean pounding on rocks 2,000 feet below, stars filling the sky late at night. It was terrifying and visceral. A sign at one point in the road showed a squiggly arrow — used to indicate bendy roads — and a sign beneath it read: “NEXT 74 MILES”. Nine hours later, we were on Hollywood Boulevard, looking for a parking space for a half an hour. What I’m saying is, we need more games that are about driving down the Pacific Coast Highway with a hot blonde, and less games that are about looking for parking spaces. Super Mario Galaxy is ultimately a blue-baller; I will never play it again. I’ve parked that car two hundred and forty times, and eaten the keys.
And that’s it, people. We’re done. And more importantly, we’re also adults. Go home, tape some glow-in-the-dark plastic dolphins to the walls, and make heroic love to your wives, for God’s sake.
★★⋆☆
“NOT A CULTURAL EVENT -- IT'S JUST A VIDEOGAME.”
There comes a point in every high-profile game-reviewer’s life when he has to put down that can of Red Bull (which has likely been empty for minutes now) and start banging out the words. Here at Action Button Dot Net, we don’t have the rigorous deadlines and tight schedules of videogame magazines, who employ what must be the hardest-working souls on earth; without them, we wouldn’t exist, for better or for worse, though forget about that. This paragraph is meant to indicate that it is only after great consideration and much stewing in my own juices that I finally decide to talk about Super Mario Galaxy, a month after tearing all the way through it from start to finish, a year and a day after the Wii’s launch in Japan, a year and two days after deciding that it couldn’t be released any sooner, and nearly twelve years of praying that, some day, it would come, and that it would be great.
Though I was yet a teenager at a time, Super Mario 64 did not excite me precisely in the way it excited Chris Slate of Ultra Game Players, who said (and this is off the top of my head) “Right now, today, Super Mario 64 is the best game I’ve ever played”. I appreciated his use of the commas around the word “today” — very literesque — though I didn’t quite share his enthusiasm. I was a boy gifted with the experience of having played Super Mario Bros. for only a few short months before God brought us Super Mario Bros. 3. I hadn’t had years of habitual Super Mario Bros. under my belt, and if anything, this made the refinements of Super Mario Bros. 3 all the more crisp.
In other words, upon playing Super Mario 64 for ten minutes, I was already anticipating the game that would play Super Mario Bros. 3 to its Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Sunshine, released for the Gamecube, was more or less a one-off. Around the time of its release, Nintendo had already been parading Super Mario left and right, in party games, puzzle games, golf games, tennis games. Sunshine seemingly existed to prove that Nintendo could put Super Mario into another action-platform game, if they wanted. It was like they were saying, see, we’re not scared to make another Super Mario game. I’ll admit that I was rather crushed with how just-decent it was, though now that I look back, I wish that people like me had just let it slide. What Mario — the person — needed was a bloodletting. He needed to cool his jets. He needed to star in one action-platform game a year for, I don’t know, five years. Sunshine had the tropical island theme. Maybe they could have set the next one at a ski resort, had Mario sliding down lots of hills.
Instead, a million slighted fanboy hearts beat in unison; the drumming on the horizon scared Nintendo’s creative geniuses back into their shells. When, eventually, Super Mario Galaxy was announced, Nintendo’s American face kept no secrets: lovable buffoon president Reggie Fils-Aime was proud to say that Galaxy would be the “true successor to Super Mario 64“. We — the proverbial “kids at home” — filled in the blanks: “Just like Super Mario Bros. 3 was the true successor to Super Mario Bros.“
And now here it is, and I don’t like it. I mean, I really, really, really, really don’t like it. It just about makes me nauseous how little I like it. What went wrong? Really? Oh no — I’m not asking these questions about the game’s development process. I’m asking them about myself. Why does disliking this game depress me so much? When I at first emerged on the other side of Super Mario Galaxy, feeling deflated, I thought, if I write a review of this on Action Button Dot Net, people are going to accuse us of being controversial, of hit-baiting, of attention-cravery. People are going to accuse us of trying to heck up the Metacritic score (even though we don’t submit scores to Metacritic) or trying to drum up ad revenue (even though we don’t have ads). More importantly, I’m going to get literally thousands of greasy-fingered hate mails from people telling me that I’m not human, that I have soul cancer, that I’ve forgotten how to have fun.
And maybe these things are true. Maybe I have forgotten how to have fun, though I’ll be darned if I can’t still see some flickering shadow of fun on my bedroom wall late at night, just before I fall asleep. It is the Rosebud of my every barely-waking moment. When I close my eyes, I can see the shape of how, exactly, I selfishly wanted Super Mario Galaxy to be. It would have been miraculous. At least, for me, it would have been.
Instead, we get a weird, cloying, conflicted jumble of good concepts, amazing concepts, genius concepts, brilliant concepts, and junk. When I try to focus on the game, I end up distracted by all the floating debris.
This is not “schtick”. This is not this website’s “thing”. This is just how I feel.
I had envisioned this game as a joyful rope — a straight shot from planetoid to planetoid, with multiple ways to “solve” each planetoid, resulting in varied, multiple paths through the game. I blame this impression on the ten-minute demo I was able to play at a Nintendo Wii showcase event in Tokyo just before the console’s launch in Japan. In that demo, well-placed Mushroom Retainers give you simple control instructions (jump, triple jump, squat-jump, wall-jump) as you make your way up a mountainside. Eventually, you reach a mountaintop that’s well into the stratosphere, where you choose to go left or right. Either path leads to a star that blasts you off toward a series of planetoid challenges.
This left a strong impression on me; I was instantly fascinated with the game’s subtlety. Maybe this could have been the “difficulty selection” — maybe the only place to learn that the left path was “hard” and the right path was “easy” would be to look it up in the instruction manual? In this day and age of non-gamers welcoming Nintendo back with opened wallets, who knows what craziness is in the air? Maybe people can actually be trusted to read instruction manuals again?
In an interview some nine months after my initial, overjoyed impressions of the game, Shigeru Miyamoto told Weekly Famitsu‘s editor-in-chief Hirokazu Hamamura that his team’s “main goal” in Super Mario Galaxy was to make a game that was easy enough for anyone to pick up and play — a game that could be embraced and played to completion by non-gamers, all while never once making the hardcore gamers feel like they’re being “patronized”. He actually used the Japanese verb “being licked” (like a mommy kitty licks a baby kitty, to help the image along) — he was well into meaning-business mode. Maybe he’d played the latest Zelda games, where a blasted text box will scream at you about the function of a key every single god damned time you pick up a key: “You got a magic key! . . . This is a magic key! . . . It can be used to unlock one door! After unlocking one door, this magic key will vanish!”
I took Miyamoto’s “No Licking” stance to mean that he was against the source of the licking as well as the act of licking itself. Maybe he’d stopped and asked himself two questions, regarding the keys in Zelda: number one, why can’t the game show you what a key does? When you use a key to unlock a door, maybe we could just see the key hover up above the hero’s head, fly into the lock, click, turn, and vanish into a puff of smoke as the door rumbles open? Then we’d know, deep down, “Hey, that key’s gone now.” Number two: why does the key have to disappear after we use it? The answer to the second question has something to do with how the key isn’t a “key” so much as it’s just “something to do” in order to progress deeper into a dungeon. On a deeper, weirder psychological level, the key is imprinting our children with obsessive urges to always look for the solution to the problem before their eyes in the most far-flung place. In this way, it can be construed that games aren’t running parallel to real-world logic so much as they’re scribbling poisonous crayon circles anywhere they please.
Yet Super Mario Galaxy licked me plenty of times, up and down, all over. At a certain point about three-quarters of the way through the game — this almost scarred me for life — I was swimming in a giant liquid sphere toward a floating tower, when a penguin sidled up to me out of nowhere and with a hateful snippet of a sound effect, his text box took up the greater part of the center of the screen: “PRESS THE A BUTTON TO SWIM”.
It occurs to me once again that no one in any Japanese office anywhere, precisely, has yet been able to construct a Powerpoint presentation that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that though the people who forget to use the one button on the controller to do almost everything, or else forget that keys unlock doors are forgetful enough to also have lost the instruction manual (and possibly box) of every game they own, they are probably also forgetful enough to misplace the game disc and/or the console.
Someone should really get on that proof. This could be the Pythagorean Theorem of the 21st Century.
The cloying and the down-talking penetrates to only the most bizarre strata of Super Mario Galaxy. The hub world is the most visible offender. In Super Mario 64, we had a castle, where everything was laid-out in an easily understandable fashion: the first mission you complete nets you a Power Star; you remember a door with a star logo and a numeral “1” on it, you stand near the door, Mario yields a star in his hand, and the door opens. Many doors with stars and numerals exist; each stage has seven stars for you to earn; from so very close to the beginning, you’re on your own.
Super Mario 64, though purchased at a one-to-one attach rate with the Nintendo 64 hardware, was not considered a success in Japan, because the Nintendo 64 hardware was not considered a success. A Nintendo fanboy could tell you that this is because the World Was Wrong, that They didn’t know what was Good for Them. Nintendo took a bath on the Gamecube as well; some would say that they decided to change their policies after that, though I would argue that they didn’t. I would argue that the success of the DS, of the Wii, and of new president Satoru Iwata is grounded firmly in Iwata’s bold decision to stick with the company’s guns, to emphasize rather than mute the little conceptual quirks (like connecting your Gameboy Advance to your Gamecube so each player has his own little handheld screen) that had possibly turned off the gaming populace. The Wii remote is very much a direct continuation of the DS stylus, et cetera. And if Wii Sports has proven anything, it’s that Nintendo’s games are successful with non-gamers because they’re presented and packaged well, not because they’re more simple than other games or because they’re similar to real-life actions — or even because they’re actually fun.
In other words, I find it vaguely unsettling that one of Nintendo’s ideas for making the game “simple” enough for the “wider audience” to “understand” involved gutting the hands-on “exploration” element out of the hub world; instead of a living, breathing (yet empty — for a reason) castle, we’ve got a floating fortress / spaceship thing with loud creatures buzzing all around and these ugly rooms with fixed camera angles, where all of the levels are contained. Clear a mission, and you’ll see a load-masking cut-scene of Mario flying back to the hub; he’ll land, and the Burnoutitis will commence: a big menu pops up, telling you “NEW HIGH SCORE”; it counts down how many coins you earned, then it switches to another menu, and tells you how many star bits you picked up, then it switches to another menu to tell you you’ve opened a new stage, then a map pops up, and a star logo in one of the various rooms of the ship blinks loudly. Go inside a room — say, the kitchen — and arbitrarily point the remote at a blue star and press the A button, which will pull Mario toward it; the screen switches to a planetarium view; select the galaxy you want to fly to — galaxies you can’t enter are marked by a star icon and a numeral (the number of stars needed to unlock it) — click on it, and you’ll see a little cut-scene of Mario flying out in space. Now a screen pops up with a list of star goals for the selected galaxy. Choose the one you want, and there’s another triumphant “WAHOO”. With a “YES!”, Mario lands in the galaxy, and there you have it: you’re finally playing a videogame.
Why put all this bullstuff between the action set-pieces? I mean, at the very least, could we not have the “YAY! Look at this numeric representation of how YOU’RE SUCH A GOOD BOY“? All the original Super Mario Bros. had was the timer countdown and the fireworks; that seemed to do pretty nicely for most people. That game sold, like, literally 20 million copies! Here we are in the twenty-first century, and here we are with all this stopping and starting. I wanted to play a rope. I wanted the game to just keep going, keep evolving, keep crunching. I wanted it to be a delicious buffet dinner, not a room full of bottles of multi-vitamins.
To be both more concrete and more abstract, I wanted the game to get more difficult as it went along. Instead, the game’s difficulty level stays numbingly even from beginning to end. The bosses are all little puzzles with obvious solutions. (It usually involves using the spin attack to knock back a projectile.)
The thing is, if you want Super Mario Galaxy to be challenging, you have to want it to be challenging. You only need sixty stars to complete the “main” game, though if you’re an acquitted kleptomaniac, you can get sixty more, and then a nifty little reward.
And this isn’t the most of it. I’ll tell you what’s the worst. The game, as a series of challenges, isn’t even about anything so much as it’s about itself. Literally halfway through the game, you arrive in a “galaxy” that you need thirty stars to unlock (you can complete the game with as few as sixty stars). The first mission in the galaxy is called “The Rabbits Are Looking For Something”. You land in the galaxy, where a big, fuzzy bee immediately gets all up in your face. “The rabbits are looking for something!” he says. Walk down the only path before you, and you’ll come up to a rabbit who is, maybe, looking for something. Get too close to the rabbit, and he automatically talks to you. “Where could that [STAR CHIP] be?” In place of the “[STAR CHIP]” is a Star Chip icon. Star Chips are these blue fragment things; if you collect five of them, they join together to make a star-thing that teleports you somewhere else, so you can once again feel the orgasm of progress. The camera floats up softly. We see a Star Chip floating high above the ground. The rabbit remains oblivious. (Compelling side-question: is Mario, too, oblivious?) We now notice that the rabbit is standing in the middle of a peculiar arrangement of three wooden posts. We may remember, from earlier missions or worlds or galaxies, that Mario can perform a hip-drop if we press the Z button while jumping. Do a hip drop on a wooden post, and you can hammer it into the ground. We see these three posts, and we hammer them all in. Out of nowhere, a rotating star-gate-thing appears. We stand in it, remember that we have to shake the remote to use it, shake the remote, and Mario flies up just high enough to grab the Star Chip. He doesn’t not inform the rabbit that he found the Star Chip. (This is crucial.) The next rabbit we find is standing near a large wooden box. “I can almost smell a [STAR CHIP ICON]”. The camera pans slyly right, highlighting the wooden box. We might remember from earlier missions that we can shake the remote to make Mario do a spin attack move. Spin attacks can break boxes. We break the box. We collect the Star Chip that had been inside. Again, Mario does not inform the rabbit that he has found the Star Chip (double crucial). The other challenges in this mission require you to remember how to jump on enemies or remember that Mario has to ability to perform a wall jump. None of these challenges are laid-out as set pieces. They just wobble there, hunks of pineapple in lime Jell-O. When at last you assemble the Star Gate Thing and blast off to the final portion of the stage, there’s Mario on a planetoid with a rabbit. The rabbit has the star. He says he’ll give it to you, if you can beat him in a race.
. . . Like, what the heck? Are these rabbits not all on the same side? If this rabbit had the star from the beginning, why were the other rabbits looking for star chips? Is he a rogue rabbit? This is why Shigeru Miyamoto says they shouldn’t put stories in these things.
The important analysis to make of the above example is that Super Mario Galaxy is a game that, as far as halfway into its duration, continually rewards the player with something the game has contrived the player to need after the player remembers a thing that he can do, and then does it.
You might remember the first time you walked into a room in a Zelda game to see a locked door and four unlit torches. In your inventory you had a lantern that was capable of lighting torches. Somewhere deep down, you knew the truth, only you would never be able to put it into words: “If I light those four torches, that door is going to open”. Sometimes, the door would just open by magic; sometimes, a key would fall from the sky. Sometimes, you’d light the four torches, and enemies would fall into the room: kill them, and the door opened magically. This is sick, people. This is a mind-killer. Grand Theft Auto doesn’t turn kids into prostitute-killing car-jackers, because it looks real enough to be ridiculous. Super Mario Galaxy, however, with its slick, abstract, kid-friendly cartoon exterior, stands a pretty good chance of turning all of our children into kleptomaniacs (or, at the very least, obsessive-compulsives).
Most reviews of this game cite this as a sign of its generosity, of its deep bounty. I’ll admit that some of the harder missions are indeed What I Crave when it comes to platform games — time attacks, speed collection, more enemies — though they really are just rehashes of the same levels you’ve already played. And some of those levels are terrorism; replaying those levels for time is about as much fun as organizing data into a spreadsheet while riding the fastest train in the world. I’m not saying that reusing / rehashing is the devil, necessarily, just that I kind of miss the days when the difficult parts of a game were, you know, actually included in the game. For example, in Super Mario Bros. 3, if you wanted to finish the game, you had no choice: you’re going to have to go through that amazingly tough castle. You’re going to have to platform-hop across that ridiculous fleet of jet-plane airships.
Now, though, when we’ve invited grandma into the living room, games have to act civilized. Everyone has the right to witness the full curve of a game’s content, these days. To be fair, Nintendo’s been moving this way ever since Super Mario World, where the best part of the game, the Special World, is very difficult, quite hidden, extremely optional, and rewards you, when you complete it, only by making the game graphically hideous. Sunshine only turned the gain up (that’s a guitar term) on certain missions within each level, though with the way the game was structured, you didn’t always have to play them. If you did, though, it’d put you in a better position for progressing through the main game. Nonetheless, the hard parts of Sunshine were immediately visible as such: Mario was stripped of the water-blasting backpack that served as the game’s main gimmick, and the background music switched to an a cappella riff on the original Super Mario Bros. theme. And there you were, alone with floating platforms, tricky jumps, and a relentlessly all-encompassing deathvoid.
The high-difficulty segments of Sunshine were amazingly brilliant, most of the time, and Shigeru Miyamoto, himself, was quoted shortly after the game’s release as saying he’d love to make a whole game in that style. (I really wish he would.) What’s most important here is that they were all new and unique parts of the game. It seems, now, that Nintendo’s design philosophy has shifted: to deny anyone, even grandpa, a chance to romp around without fear of death in any unique part of the game is a serious crime. (Or, perhaps, judging by the fact that you can’t skip the “How to Fasten the Wii Remote Strap” screen until it’s been displayed for ten whole seconds, maybe the legal team advised them of the danger of a class-action lawsuit from widows of old men with overloaded pacemakers.)
(At any rate, at least Super Mario Galaxy‘s optional difficult segments are better presented than the “hidden” worlds of New Super Mario Bros. You know, how you have to take it upon yourself to defeat a boss The Hard Way just so you can be slotted down a path to a slightly different, maybe-more-difficult world. Like, why should World 6 be harder than World 7, really?)
The phantom lurking behind all this is called “Story”. Galaxy‘s developers knew that they couldn’t make a Mario game without a story, even though the story would have to be the same old thing it always is. Any deviation would result in tired groans all around the internet: Bowser has kidnapped the princess. Go get her back. The ending is no secret from the very beginning: Mario’s going to beat Bowser, get the princess back, and save the day. (And he’s so obviously not going to get laid.)
People of all ages loved Super Mario Bros., way back in the day, regardless of their grasp of the story. All they had to know was that this little guy had a quest, a quest that lurked somewhere to the right of where he is when we first meet him. Maybe they read the full story in the instruction manual, or maybe the neighbor kid explained it to them: “This dragon kidnapped a princess, and you’ve got to save her.” Whether you know the story or not, the enigmatic “Our Princess is in Another Castle” at the end of every four stages has never not been something pop-cultural enough to put on a T-shirt. There’s nothing similarly pop-culture-event-like about Super Mario Galaxy; just a fetishistic puppet show of squealing CG and mishmashed production values. Like, why have CG cut-scenes, if the characters aren’t going to talk? The first three seconds of Bowser’s “speech” in the opening scene are cute: he’s making this huge robo-dragon grumbling sound, while subtitles indicate that he’s speaking actual words. Then, once the grumble has looped for maybe the sixth time, it starts to get disturbing. Your ear becomes accustomed to the peaks and valleys in the individual sound waves, and maybe it all starts to seem a little off. Princess Peach, who is offered the courtesy of the only full sentence of dialogue in the game (in her letter at the very beginning), is revealed as typically speaking a language consisting of high-pitched pouts; Bowser’s right-hand magician speaks entirely in hyecking cackles.
Why not put voice-acting in? It’s a tiny, trite issue, I’ll admit, though really, why not go the extra step? It seems to me that Nintendo knew the story to Super Mario Galaxy was so totally not the point, and didn’t want to bother putting too much effort into the cut-scenes. Why have them in the first place, then? My dad taught me long ago: even if he knows the right fielder is going to catch that pop fly, Pete Rose keeps running for first base, and he doesn’t stop there. That’s why they called him “Charlie Hustle” — because he hustled (ironically, his name wasn’t Charlie) no matter what the circumstances. In other words, yes, maybe Nintendo should have just gone ahead and put voice-acting into Super Mario Galaxy, even if they were convinced that the story was filler nonsense; or maybe they should have just not put any story into it at all. Or at least no dialogue — do we really need subtitles to know that Bowser is threatening Peach, or that his assistant is threatening Mario? Pictures speak a thousand words, and CG — especially when it’s as colorful and sweet as in Super Mario Galaxy — speaks a million. Right?
One thing we don’t need, for sure, is the mysterious Princess Rosalina, who has absolutely no function in the story other than to stand around and explain the mechanics of the game — over and over and over again. I don’t get it — I kept thinking that maybe she had some sinister motive, though by the end of the game, when it’s revealed that there’s nothing to reveal, I was scratching my head. It was something like the end of Dragon Quest VII, during the course of which you can build a huge casino-centric metropolis on a tropical island as a side-quest, though no matter how awesome the city is, the main character goes back to being his fisherman father’s assistant at the end of the game. Princess Rosalina is a lot like that — too much time was spent designing her character, with no payoff. And all she does, for the most part, is recite lines from the instruction manual, or else describe things that the cut-scenes have already pretty much succeeded at getting across: every single time we earn a “Grand Star” from beating a boss, the Grand Star flies into the core of the hub, thus increasing the size and color of the core; a quick look-around scene shows energy flowing through the veins on the floor, demonstrating that power is being restored to another part of the hub. Why, then, must Princess Rosalina tell us, “The Grand Star has powered up the core, restoring energy to The Kitchen!” Why tell us that the room we’re about to go check out is a kitchen? For god’s sake, let us figure it out for ourselves; Grandpa’s Pacemaker isn’t going to explode because “Holy stuff no one told me it was gonna be a kitchen!!” Princess Rosalina feels simultaneously underused and tacked-on — which I guess isn’t all that amazing. Someone at Nintendo designed her, and they figured, hey, let’s put her into this game. What you end up with, though, is a symptom of the weird non-terminal illness infecting every Nintendo universe these days: hundreds of man-hours spilled into the task of painting a sign. Assigning a police officer to every STOP sign in town, so he can remind every motorist personally that “STOP” means “Stop”. Et cetera. Princess Rosalina is Nintendo using their assets because their assets are their assets. It’s the same thing they were doing back with Super Mario Stadium baseball, when they let Goomba be a selectable player even though Goombas have no hands and therefore can’t hold a baseball bat. It’s a spliter of the weird fever that gave birth to The Lightning Bolt in Super Mario Kart — a power-up that the person in last place, who is in last place for a reason (the reason being that he sucks at playing the game), has a much higher probability of receiving than anyone else. The Lightning Bolt will shrink and severely handicap every other racer, so that the person in last place might catch up. What happens when the Lightning Bolt wears off? We can say that, most of the time, the sucky player is surpassed once again. Why offer them that hope, then? Isn’t that kind of, you know, sick? Why not teach people to live with their mistakes, and regain their footing thanks to actual skill? Someone at Nintendo must have recently made a similarly pointed hypothesis, resulting in muted difficulty curves and more screen-filling help messages. Princess Rosalina is a lingering figment of Nintendo’s “let everyone play” mentality, only she’s not a real human being, and she’s not serving any purpose.
She certainly is, however, a lot hotter than Princess Peach. Why bother rescuing Peach, if you’ve got a hotter Princess right here? Go ahead and accuse me of being shallow, if you want, though really, how much do we know about Princess Peach and Mario’s relationship? Under the best circumstances, the earliest players of Super Mario Bros. didn’t know what the princess looked like until they got to the very, very end of the game. It would have surprised them if there hadn’t been a princess, though only because they’d been expecting one, even if the promise had never had any visual confirmation. If Super Mario Galaxy were made perfectly — and it’s not perfect — we would need no dialogue, no hub world, no Princess Rosalina: just a look at Princess Peach, a visual confirmation of the tyranny of the dragon, an unassuming launch into outer space, and it’d be hard not to hit the ground running from there. Instead, when the game opens, we’re chasing rabbits on a little planetoid, rabbits who, though they don’t want to be caught, are also telling us to “Press the A button to jump!” Whatever happened to teaching the player how to play through context? In Super Mario Bros., there’s a Goomba right there in front of us. There are blocks with question marks, which produce shiny things when hit, there’s a mushroom we can eat to grow large, there’s a pipe we can’t progress over without jumping. There you have it: crushing enemies, breaking blocks, earning coins, surpassing obstacles, all taught to us right at the beginning. Mario’s been likened to Charlie Chaplin before; why not make his games play like silent films? If there absolutely must be a tutorial involving a hecking rabbit, why not make the rabbit show us how to jump instead of tell us? Again, when the controller has only one button, it’s kind of unforgivable. Let’s watch the rabbit jump, once, twice, three times. He can teach us how to wall-jump, all on the way up a mountain, like in that demo I played last year. And then the game can commence, the beautiful rope I yearn for even now, the beautiful rope I cannot have.
Instead, Nintendo’s way of supposedly making the game more friendly to the mainstream is to give Mario as many complicated moves as possible. Shake the Wii remote to initiate Mario’s ridiculous spin attack, because
1. Mario needs an attack
2. it’s not a real Wii game if you don’t have to shake the remote.
For God’s sake, that the current most-anticipated Wii game is Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which will not use the Wii’s motion-sensing functionality, should probably say something, though I’m not totally sure what.
Mario’s spin attack is a real limp noodle stuck to the center of your TV screen. I could never shake (no pun intended) the tackiness of it. After Mario spins, there’s a lull, during which he can’t spin again. This is clearly to limit the player’s ability to shake the controller like crazy, so that Mario is always attacking, wherever he goes, which would make any “advanced” playing session of the game look even less like art. You’ll know Mario is able to attack again when the little star pops out from under Mario’s hat and makes a little doggie chew-toy noise. The little star exists mainly so that the player can feel some tiny intangible debt to Princess Rosalina, thus validating her existence as a character: see, it’s Rosalina that gives us the little magic star, which grants us the spin attack and the ability to fly through space. Personally, I would rather none of this be explained at all, though clearly Nintendo continuity fetishists would fall apart at the seams if there weren’t plenty of slow-moving dialogue windows to seal all the holes, to keep it all air-tight — never mind that the explanation is a flaming load of bullstuff, if a guy with a mushroom for a head says it, it must be true.
I would rather Mario just punch and kick the enemies in the face, the way he did in Super Mario 64. Maybe that was considered Way Too Violent for Grandpa’s Pacemaker, I don’t know. Either way, I hereby declare my strict stance against normal attack actions that require the player to shake the Wii remote.
Besides, there’s the cute little star-bit-collecting/shooting thing to fill the waggle quota.
Before playing the game, I remember thinking that man, it looks like it’d be a lot of fun with a Dual Shock. Now that I’ve played it and experienced the star-bit collection firsthand, I have to say it’s kind of nice — in concept. I’ve always fantasized about a game where you control two characters at once — part of the reason I love the right-analog-stick controlled RC car in Ape Escape — so the extra-peripheral weirdness of collecting star-bits with the pointer while running Mario around is really welcome for me. All throughout Twilight Princess, I was wishing there was something to do with the fairy pointer as Link was running around. (Speaking of Twilight Princess — I suppose enough people complained about the ear-grating tinkling sound of the pointer moving for Nintendo to make Super Mario Galaxy‘s pointer gracefully silent.) Then we have the star-bit-shooting function: aim the pointer and press the B button to launch a star-bit at an enemy to stun — or possibly kill — it. There’s a precious little disconnect between pressing the fire button and the launching of the star-bit; the angle at which the star-bit enters the screen is ever-so-quaintly off; this functions a lot like the momentum of old-school Mario’s run: it’s a quirk that for some reason makes perfect sense, and getting used to it is ninety-something-percent part of the fun. It’s more than clever enough to fill the waggle quota, though I guess the design document template for a flagship title demands both Wiimote shaking and precision pointing.
Either way, there’s not enough execution of the star-bit-shooting. If used effectively, it could make the game like a Gyromite where you control the professor and the platforms at the same time. As-is, it’s too optional. It’s something you can do if you feel like it, or forget about if it’s too hard for you. It’s also the sole duty of the second player — Japanese Housewife Mode — and probably the feature Weekly Famitsu had in mind when they said “It’s even fun just to watch!” I’m all for Active Watching as a trend in future videogames; its infancy, as seen in Super Mario Galaxy, is intriguing, though ultimately kind of empty. Then again, I guess, if you’re, like, actually mentally handicapped, shooting stars as player two could be the most fun you ever have in your life. For me — I wrote off the validity of the mode the second I saw that player two’s pointer — which is a very different color from player one’s (play the game to find out which color!) — has a very large “2P” attached to it. The presence of 2P also means that player one’s pointer now gets a “1P” by it. Obviously, this hasn’t been thought through very well. Seriously, people.
Though there are just-about-breathtaking moments in almost every other stage of Super Mario Galaxy, the overall amount of standing around and waiting (or otherwise dinking around) involved ultimately crushed my fun factor. Before the game’s release, I saw an amazing screenshot of Mario walking on a floating stone corkscrew, with giant Thwomp blocks grimacing down at him; when actually playing this part of the game, I was dumbfounded by how slowly the giant blocks move up and down, by how the only “solution” to the “puzzle” of the moment is to stand there and wait for the block to stand there in the down position for several seconds before slowwwwwwwwly going back up. Huge safe zones in the obstacle courses make a majority of the platform segments feel weirdly jerky and redundant.
And then there are the floaty parts.
Early on, there’s a “Wind Garden” galaxy, where the very first thing you’re expected to do is perform a spin attack to knock these dandelion spore things into the air. Then you jump up and grab one, and now Mario is floating on wind currents. Line yourself up with the right wind current, and be prepared to switch to another one within ten seconds. The thing is, if you’re going to fail, you’ll know it maybe ten seconds ahead of time. There’s no split-second action that can be employed to avoid it. It’s all just a matter of waiting. (Spur-of-the-moment game idea: survival horror story where the main character is locked in a solid granite room just before what would be the final boss; the room very slowly begins to fill with water. The character screams at the top of his or her lungs while the player tries in vain to escape. An hour later, the main character is dead.) In the pyramid world, there’s a similar part where you have to keep jumping into tornadoes, sending Mario spinning through the air very, very, very, very, very slowly. Line him up with the platform and do a hip drop to land — or else, if you miss the mark, just float helplessly until you’re dead, or else do a hip drop to give up already. I don’t like any game — especially Mario — having “just give up already” situations.
The game shines brightest in retro-style 2D segments, which is kind of ironic, and kind of sad, though ultimately the retro-2D segments made the hemispheres of my brain figuratively rotate in place, grinding against one another loudly, because for some reason, though the perspective switches to 2D, the controls are still 3D, meaning that if you’re tilting the stick a tiny bit upward, Mario will get stuck to walls, though only just as he’s about to jump. This level of imprecision — in addition to Mario’s overall amazingly slow movement speed — is kind of just not allowed in a platform game if you expect me to take it seriously.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was just . . . so sharp. It had perfected Mario’s nuanced momentum, in addition to birthing a handful of power-ups with their own nuances. The awkward hopping of the frog suit made it horribly difficult to play on land, though swimming was a breeze. Raccoon Mario had the series’ first head-to-head melee attack (the tail attack). Tanooki Mario could turn to stone, avoiding damage from enemies. Hammer Mario’s deadly hammers flew at a curious, difficult-to-master angle, and his shell (when ducking) was impervious to fire.
In Super Mario Galaxy, a game conceived on the notion of Mario having no power-ups at all, all we get is hecking Bee Mario and hecking Boo Mario. Bee Mario can fly. You just hold down the A button and YIPPEE, that abstract representation of you, on the television screen, is flying. Boo Mario — oh my god, he can fly too, and also pass through walls, because he’s a ghost, a hideous ghost.
Ice Mario can walk on water, and his ice-skating (which makes Mario move at double his top speed) is actually the most finely nuanced movement in the game, by far. However, that the power-up is only usable for a limited time — and that each time you use it, the goal is merely get somewhere you couldn’t get otherwise, in a short amount of time (which is usually way too long) — makes it kind of useless in the long run. And unlike Super Mario Bros. 3, power-ups don’t carry over between levels, which is a real let-down, because it’d be really awesome to try to play other levels as Ice Mario. Everything has to be time-based now, and of course, if you run out of time, you just go back to the respawn point for the power-up.
Fire Mario — another time-limited powerup — is so nuanced he’s a mess. The only goal you’ll ever have as Fire Mario is the ridiculously Zelda-esque and touchy task of lighting two torches with his fireballs, which bounce like ping-pong balls on a bed of mousetraps. The only way to truly ensure you’re going to hit the target is to stand as close to it as you can before shaking the controller. Trying to hit the torches from a distance of more than two scale feet is like giving your last hundred dollars to a puppy and telling him to go play blackjack. You never know — the little bastard might make you a millionaire.
The best parts of Super Mario Galaxy are the wholly optional segments where you’re tilting the controller to steer a manta ray down a fast-paced waterslide, or where you’re rolling on top of a ball, down a huge playing field littered with holes. These games are so pure, and so technical, that I really wish these, Nintendo’s highest-paid game designers, would just make me a full game out of the slide segments from Super Mario 64, or the deathvoid stages from Super Mario Sunshine, already.
Instead, we get a game where large segments of the action involve pointing the remote at a little blue star, holding down the A button, and watching Mario get sucked in. Keep pointing at the next star and clicking — sometimes quickly — to keep moving. (It’s also very similar to Donkey Kong: King of Swing, which was made by the same developers.)
There you are, floating in space. How do you feel? Do you feel like you’re in space?
Eventually, my ability to enjoy Super Mario Galaxy withered away under the iron fist of the maybes. The first time I saw one of those blazing black-hole cores, my eyes popped open — so that’s how you do a bottomless pit in zero-gravity. The first time I saw a rubber ball at the core of a planetoid, half of my brain exploded. So, so many times, I kept thinking: “This would be so awesome if it were in a videogame”. And by the end of the experience, I had a flickering reflection in the back of my brain of the game I had wanted to play:
Call it Super Mario Acid. Here’s Mario, on a sphere made of acid, floating in space. He’s standing on a block. The block is being eaten by the acid. Where’s he going to go after the block completely sinks into the acid? you wonder, just as another block, sucked in by gravity, slams into the acid planetoid. This repeats for eternity — sometimes the blocks have flagpoles on them, sometimes it’s ladders, sometimes they’re long enough to get a running start so you can do a long jump or a triple jump, sometimes they have little overhangs to get caught under if you’re not careful. As you play, the speed of the blocks’ appearance gently increases, though the goal never changes: get to the high ground, whatever the high ground is.
Or maybe it’s just Super Mario standing on a block, floating in space around a black hole. Yeah, maybe that’s better — that way, you’d be able to see all of the orbiting platforms at once. Platforms keep entering the orbit of the black hole, and you have to keep jumping on them. You know a block is about to get sucked into the black hole because it starts shaking, faster and faster.
There’d be no way to win; like in Tetris, the only way to “win” is to be still playing the game. The existential dread and lack of a story didn’t stop Tetris from becoming the most popular videogame of all-time, you know, even among housewives. (Maybe it had something to do with the lack of a human protagonist. (Though in a way, we can say that the player is the protagonist, and GAME OVER represents their failure to live forever, which is kind of a lot more creepy than merely witnessing third-person the torment of a cartoon character. (Especially one with a mustache and overalls.))
The game would, ultimately, be a celebration of Mario Physics: the only true goal would be to enjoy existing in the world.
Instead, with Super Mario Galaxy, we get a load of filler leading up to a too-late climax; we get penguins teaching humans how to ride manta rays — animals teaching humans how to ride other animals — and all the half-assed production value that entails — no voice acting, a story that fully understands its own insignificance, lavish orchestral recordings of banal one-note compositions, and a “new” Mario voice from Charles Martinet, which I suppose is meant to represent Mario’s thrill upon finding himself in outer space. It ends up sounding more like cocaine hitting a ceiling fan. Then the terrible aspects: the music ranges from evocative of the image of ritualistically defecating Teletubbies to post-Jock-Jam, pre-apocalyptic trash that plays when you pick up the Ice or Fire Mario power-ups (it sounds like the song that’s playing on the radio the night you drive home from an overtime shift and find your refrigerator full of cockroaches), and the absolute terror of the washing-machine-buzzer-like sound that indicates MARIO IS ABOUT TO DIE. I’ve always despised such sound effects. Whatever happened to Super Mario? The only power-up mushroom in Super Mario Galaxy that makes Mario stronger just increases his ethereal “life” meter from a “3” numeral to a “6”. Maybe that says everything, right there.
Now that I think about it — really, what did happen to Super Mario? In this age of Katamari and Shadow of the Colossus, why not make a 3D Super Mario game where you can eat a mushroom that makes you bigger? Eat one to grow twice as big, eat two to grow four times as big, et cetera. Each one you eat makes you bigger, makes more areas of each stage accessible to you. Every time you get hit, you drop one size. Where’s this kind of thinking, in Super Mario Galaxy? Sure, planetoids represent a significant challenge for programmers and designers, and I respect that, though I’d appreciate either some actual originality or (not “and”) some really tight focus. This right here is a big jumble of yammering parts, and it could have been absolutely perfect if only someone knew how to apply a god damned scientific calculator. It could have been a rope, it could have had flow. It could have been gorgeous.
It could have been a cultural event, like the original Super Mario Bros. As what it is, though, it’s just another videogame.
Not that I have anything against videogames.
Just recently, though, I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles. No guard rails, no lights, no reflectors, a brilliant ocean pounding on rocks 2,000 feet below, stars filling the sky late at night. It was terrifying and visceral. A sign at one point in the road showed a squiggly arrow — used to indicate bendy roads — and a sign beneath it read: “NEXT 74 MILES”. Nine hours later, we were on Hollywood Boulevard, looking for a parking space for a half an hour. What I’m saying is, we need more games that are about driving down the Pacific Coast Highway with a hot blonde, and less games that are about looking for parking spaces. Super Mario Galaxy is ultimately a blue-baller; I will never play it again. I’ve parked that car two hundred and forty times, and eaten the keys.
And that’s it, people. We’re done. And more importantly, we’re also adults. Go home, tape some glow-in-the-dark plastic dolphins to the walls, and make heroic love to your wives, for God’s sake.
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“ACTUALLY A VIDEOGAME.”
I’ve honestly never liked Pac-Man. At all. Here I will take a page from all of the middle-aged mohawkers submitting guitar effects pedals reviews on Harmony Central, and say that I’ve been playing guitar for 35 years, have owned Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, and SGs, used Bigsby tremolos and Gibson Vibrolas, have covered everything from AC/DC to Rage Against the Machine, and I’ve never found a better fuzz pedal than the traditional Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, so trust me when I say that the Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff is a pansy-ass piece of stuff.
Take all the guitar terms in the previous sentence, and replace them with the names of game consoles and software franchises.
Why don’t I like Pac-Man? In the past, when I had to stand on a milk carton, I played it in pizza joints because my dad figured I loved it; I played it on Atari 2600 because it existed, and eventually, I played Ms. Pac-Man on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I can’t say I hated Ms. Pac-Man — I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t have any balls, machismo, guts, or what have you. In later years — leading right up until Pac-Man CE was released for Xbox Live Arcade, in fact — I’d identify that I just didn’t like the way Pac-Man controlled. It felt too loose and weird, which just didn’t totally mesh with how tight the game was conceptually.
If you’d have asked me how to make a better Pac-Manning experience, I probably would have told you I’d think about it and then get back to you later. That night, when you weren’t watching, I would have cut you off of my LiveJournal friends list, and then set my own journal to “friends-only”.
It’s a hell of an IQ-test question: how do you make Pac-Man better? It’s like asking me to list, off the top of my head, as many verbs that start with “V” as possible (validate, verify, vindicate, et cetera). I couldn’t think of any possible solutions, probably because I’m not a genius game designer. Maybe I could be, I don’t know, though like my mother always told me, I guess I’m kind of lazy. Either way, it’s evokes ambiguously positive emotions that original Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was reportedly responsible for the virtuosic Pac-Man CE — it makes me feel good to know that it took him nearly 30 years to come up with all these ideas.
Was Namco ever trying, though, to make Pac-Man anything more than an icon? Judging by the quality of every game starring Pac-Man, it would seem that none of them were made for any more generous reason than to keep bumping his name to the top of the gamer subconscious, to keep telling people who play games that, hey, this company called Namco has an archetypically deep heritage, and they’re not afraid of it!
They’ve been plopping remakes and reissues of Pac-Man out on the lunchroom tray of humanity for the better part of this most recent decade. They never hesitate to flop the original game onto one of their six-game “Museum” volumes, you know, which generously use up about 1/3000th of their storage medium. As of this writing, in addition to Pac-Man CE, there are two other Pac-Mans on Xbox Live Arcade — the original, and Ms. Pac-Man, both with six-dollar price tags, ugly borders and awesome online ranking leaderboards, which can only be accessed if you unlock the full version of the game.
(Really, for heck’s sake, Microsoft, let’s stop using the word “unlock”. It’s not like we’re using keys to play these games — nor even, in the gaming sense, are we using points or in-game currency. Using the word “Unlock” makes it seem like we can purchase the games using the “Gamer Points” we get from unlocking “Achievements”. Just use the word “Purchase”, please. It’s bad enough that you’ve made your own currency with “Microsoft Points”, and it’s precisely because you’ve made your own currency with which to buy things that it’s ridiculous that you award another kind of “Points” to people who do &^#$#ed stuff in games, which in turn makes it more ridiculous that you use the same word (“Unlock”) to indicate the option to purchase an Xbox Live Arcade game as you use to indicate a player being awarded an “Achievement”.)
Anyway, yeah, who wants to pay 400 “Microsoft Points” to play the original Pac-Man, when you can just pick up Ridge Racer 6 from a bargain bin and play Pac-Man to your heart’s content on the loading screen? When (not if) you get bored, you can just play Ridge Racer 6, which has nitro in it, which is awesome. However, it doesn’t have slipstreaming in it, even though Ridge Racer 5 did, because they wanted to save slipstreaming for Ridge Racer 7, which is as marginal an upgrade as you’re ever to see in videogames, though once you’ve played 7, 6 — and its Pac-Man loading screen — should seem utterly and horribly broken. After years of not upgrading the number in the series title, Namco sprung Ridge Racer 6, a statement of their staunch support of the Xbox 360, only to announce Ridge Racer 7 for the PlayStation 3 literally months later.
There’s a point to be made of this slipstream-talk, however muddy it might be: this is the sort of bullstuff Namco does. More to the point: the Pac-Man loading screen of Ridge Racer 6 isn’t even a loading screen. It’s just there. From the second it pops up, it says at the bottom of the screen: “Press the A button to begin Ridge Racer 6.” Why do they even put Pac-Man there in the first place? One slightly morbid reason is that it’s a throwback to Ridge Racer on the PlayStation, which let you play Galaxian at the pre-game loading scene. Many Namco games since then have let you play a game at the loading screen, so maybe Ridge Racer 6 was slyly trying to stir up nostalgia in the kinds of people who give a stuff. I wonder what happened to the guy who suggested the idea of putting a game in the loading screen. He’s probably 65 years old right now, with teeth the color of wooden stuff, and just finished paying off the loan for his mid-size condominium in a boring neighborhood in Tokyo. I’ve probably walked past his home a hundred times and never realized it. Probably some younger guy came up with the idea, and passed it on to the older guy out of “respect” so that the older guy could get a promotion, after which he would remember the younger guy and promote him some day. The younger guy probably never smoked a single cigarette until he was twenty-four years old.
Pac-Man is not just for loading screens — no, he’s also all over scoreboards in the Ridge Racer series, as well. Every time you hit a checkpoint, he pops up on your time display, chasing ghosts. This retro-gamer appeal is sprinkled into Namco games quite viciously, aiming to be the sort of thing some surreal-Dig-Dug-painting-owning poser on a UK games forum hears about and then says “SOLD”, maybe with some exclamation marks.
Also, a little Pac-Man badge appeared on Klonoa’s hat. Klonoa was Namco’s would-be mascot, star of a bland 2.5D game released for the PlayStation; some people still think that game was Jesus, and it kind of sucks to be those people. Klonoa had potential, anyway, though Namco didn’t care, and immediately resumed exhuming Pac-Man’s iconic profile and propping his corpse up in the weirdest places.
At the same time, developers all over the place claimed to love the original Pac-Man and tightened-up Ms. Pac-Man. Shigeru Miyamoto said, in an interview, that without Pac-Man, there would have been no Donkey Kong, and I guess he’s probably right. Donkey Kong is, subtly, about as inspired by Pac-Man as a game can get without also playing a lot like Pac-Man. The one game publisher in the world to understand the core of Pac-Man the least, ironically, has been Namco: since the success of the two “canon” games in the series, Namco has used and abused the “character” on numerous numbing occasions, such as the dull platformer Pac-Land, which no one likes unless they realize first that no one else likes it, or Pac-Man World, a 3D take on Pac-Land, where Pac-Man is now a sphere instead of a circle, which makes the fact that he has legs all the more freakish, and the fact that he has a speaking voice actually quite terrifying, and the fact that the stages lack actual design unforgivable. Recently, there’s been Pac-Pix on the DS, a game less tangentially related to the original Pac-Man than Pac-Man World, though jarring all the same: you have to keep drawing pictures of Pac-Man, his mouth facing in the correct direction, so that he munches the perpetually spawning ghosts. Pac-Pix, while a tiny bit interesting, misses the core of Pac-Man — the game is no longer about the “hunted becomes the hunter” dynamic, it’s just about drawing pictures big enough and quickly enough.
Arguably the most inspired of all the Pac-Man rehashes was Pac-Man VS, designed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. This was back when Nintendo was pushing the feature to connect a Gameboy Advance to a Gamecube, and use the Gameboy Advance as a controller. This era also brought us the dismal Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (it’s as much a challenge to try to enjoy it alone as it is to find three people willing to play it at the same time) and the friendship-wrecking The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords.
It might be most accurate to say that, back in those days, Nintendo was forcing all developers to include some level of GBA-Gamecube connectivity in all games. Player two could use a GBA to control remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell, for example. Games like Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles were big-scale brainstorms. Pac-Man VS was a lot smaller-scale, and as such, Nintendo and Namco had no clue what to do with it. Ultimately, they just slopped it onto some discs that included other games. I guess that was about the best place for it.
Pac-Man VS isn’t so much a game as a reason to scream. Essentially, it’s Pac-Man, where one player plays as Pac-Man and the other players play as the ghosts. Only the ghosts can’t see the entire playing field. Pac-Man, however, can see the ghosts. The Pac-Man player plays with the Gameboy Advance. The other players control their ghosts on the television. If it doesn’t immediately sound brilliant, it’s because it’s subtle. You really have to play it to “get” it, and playing it is, as you might imagine, kind of a hard thing to arrange: there is no one-player mode.
Yet none of these games cut to the heart of Pac-Man, where the ghosts hunt you until you eat a Power Pellet, at which point the tables turn and the ghosts flee in terror, because now you can eat them. This is a really good dynamic, and it’s just been sitting there locked up in a clunky shell for decades, reissued time and time again as-is by its shrugging, money-hungry parents, or else being shot in the feet and told to dance in monsterpieces like Pac-Man World 2, with its elbow jabbing, LOLing bullstuff cut-scenes wherein Pac-Man talks about constantly being hungry, and Ms. Pac-Man gives Pac-Man a birthday cake with a Power Pellet on top of it.
When Microsoft announced at their press conference at Tokyo Game Show 2006 that they would be holding the world’s first “Pac-Man World Championship”, I had to groan. First of all, hasn’t some guy played a perfect game of Pac-Man? How can you have a world championship of something that someone out there is perfect at? Aren’t you just asking him — and hundreds like him — to show up and dominate? Sitting there at the press conference, I couldn’t even begin to conceive of Pac-Man Championship Edition. Maybe it was because of how bullstuffty the whole presentation of it was. Peter Moore stood up there with a little headset microphone on his cranium, looking like he was either Madonna singing “Vogue” live or a high-rolling coach of a Halo team on Xbox Live. When he said that they were planning this Pac-Man world championship with the help of original creator Toru Iwatani, he repeatedly mispronounced Mr. Iwatani’s last name with such ferocity that I found it exceedingly hard to believe he’d ever met the guy. He kept calling him “Mistah Iwatawwy”. Seriously, Mr. Moore, I see only one “W” in the man’s last name, not sixteen of them.
EE-WAH-TAH-NEE.
For God’s sake.
Iwatani came out and gave a little speech. He talked about his plans to leave Namco in 2007 to become a lecturer on the subject of game design at Tokyo Polytechnic University. Listening to Iwatani’s speech, I figured this Pac-Man World Championship thing was just a big corporate flog, and Iwatani was only called in, thanks to a modest-sized envelope of money, to temporarily increase the number of Japanese people on the stage, making for a friendlier “photo op” (or, “shutter chance” as they call it in katakana) with which to infiltrate the Japanese juvenile consciousness via many games news services. Seriously, I’ve seen the notes on the PowerPoints they use to set these things up.
When Pac-Man: Championship Edition was announced and subsequently released, six whole days went by before I noticed and then downloaded the demo. Three days later, I played the demo, and purchased the full version after three play-throughs, making it the first thing I ever purchased with Microsoft Points.
Holy stuff, this is a hell of a videogame. Toru Iwatani, before walking out of Namco, put his balls on the table, and holy stuff, that’s a lot of balls. It’s like him flipping off decades of idiocy, and telling Namco to, seriously, heck Pac-Man as a “character”.
It’s basically Pac-Man with the aesthetic completed, and the dynamics mastered. Simply put: you can’t ever completely clear the board. It constantly re-seeds. The whole thing starts with just a few dots and a power pellet on each side. Eat all the dots on the right side and a fruit will appear on the left side. Eat the fruit on the left side to re-seed fresh dots and power pellets on the right side. Eat all the dots on the left side to reveal a fruit on the right side. Eat the fruit on the right side to re-seed the dots and power pellets on the left side. Et cetera, to infinity. As you repeatedly refresh the board, the layout changes, subtly. This gives the game a flow that no Pac-Man had ever possessed — the original is too stop-start to be nearly this much fun: eat all the dots to clear the stage, then start back at the middle of the maze with a completely fresh board of dots. Pac-Man CE nails the flow: the action never stops, and by staying alive, you start to feel like a hero. Every successful outwitting of ghosts, every eight-ghost combo scored, every time sparks shoot from Pac-Man’s body as he grinds around a corner, you want to pump your fist.
The longer you stay alive, the faster Pac-Man moves, and the more points the dots are worth. Being hunted by ghosts and escaping would-be run-downs is such a glimmering, pure experience that no car-chase in any 3D videogame can touch its primal thrills of success. Power pellets let you eat ghosts, as always; when you eat a ghost, the game pauses for a second, as the controller thumps, letting you savor your big point score. Eat several ghosts in a row to score increasing points — eat another power pellet before all four ghosts escape from the middle of the board, and you can find yourself lining up eight-ghost combos. If Pac-Man is fast enough and you’re a bad enough dude, you can eat twelve, sixteen, twenty ghosts in a row.
At first, scoring big in this game feels like luck. Eventually, the skill involved is undeniable. Look up some replays on YouTube after your first shot at the game, and feel the doors unlocking in your brain. I force everyone who sits on my sofa to play this game at least once, and every time I watch intently, always picking up little idiosyncrasies that I myself either possess or don’t possess. Every time, I learn a little something about my friend, the game, or — ideally — both.
So — final answer: Pac-Man CE has essentially made Pac-Man into a videogame I’m likely to enjoy for the rest of my life, and it gives Toru Iwatani good enough reason to lecture about videogame design. Maybe he has a whole lecture based around how and why it took him thirty years to wonder, “If the ghosts refresh constantly, why do the stages reset to zero every time?” Cheers, Mr. Iwatani, for having the guts to go back and complete what your company and your public had never doubted was a masterpiece.
There are a couple of other modes apart from “Championship Mode” in Pac-Man CE, including one where the power pellets don’t refresh, and ones with longer wraparound escape tunnels — where you can seriously get screwed by clever ghosts. Some people have complained about a lack of variety in the modes, or moaned about the lack of an endless mode, and I guess the latter complaint is kind of valid. It would be hella cool to see how long people could last, though I think the designers probably feared that the game might devolve into extreme, Tetris-Grand-Master-esque freakish speed, or else because they were getting conscientious, and didn’t want people losing their whole lives to this game. At any rate, the “Championship Mode” is pretty finely tuned as-is: get as high a score as you can in five minutes. I think that’s good enough. It’s good enough, even, for Japanese arcades: I could totally see this game working in Japanese arcades. Twitch masters would eat it up — figuratively. If they managed to hook it up to the internet, said twitch masters could even participate in the international leaderboards.
Then again, why pay 100 yen per play if you can just play the demo of this game for free? You don’t even need to pay for the game. All you really get out of paying for it is the ability to put your score up on the international leaderboards, which is kind of boring. I mean, I don’t suspect I’ll ever be not tied for 10,000th place, if you know what I mean. As willing as I am to admit that this game is a masterpiece by default, I’m not exactly jumping at the chance to spend my life playing it. I’d much rather continue cycling guitar scales (this week it’s the Spanish Gypsy Scale) in the dark when I should be sleeping, if you know what I mean.
When I do play this game, though, I find the Xbox 360 controller sorely lacking — either the D-pad or the analog stick is too wishy-washy about rounding corners. I wish I could play it with a joystick, though I never bought a joystick for the 360. I wish I could just get a Sanwa ball-type stick and one button (the Start button), and hack my own exclusive controller for this game, though the Xbox 360 is too complicated to work with. Damn it. There’s always the Hori Dead of Alive 4 stick, still clogging select Japanese retailers ever since that game tanked, hard. I could get one of those, I guess, though the prospect of another monolithic Hori joystick in my house — and of the tacky plastic-like boobs engraved into said special-edition stick — kind of turns me off. As it stands, the Xbox 360 controller is Pac-Man CE‘s biggest fault, though I really can’t dock its score for that.
The second-biggest flaw would have to do with the cheesy American glazed-over aesthetic. The glimmering rainbow colors of the playing field are a bit much. I mean, it’s high-definition enough, though I personally would probably prefer it more if the cute neon texture of the borders just stayed one solid color, and maybe changed just once every time both sides of the board re-seed. As it is now, it gives me a bit of a headache. There’s too much jumpy flashing going on, like the producers were trying to overcompensate for something. Leave it the hell alone, man! It’s Pac-Man. Next thing you know, they’ll release a patch that gives Pac-Man legs and eyes and a hecking snifter of brandy.
Also, the music is pretty terrible. It sounds something like what’s playing in any given club in Berlin the moment a hip German teenager first contemplates acting on the insecurity that his penis is smaller than that of other guys. It’s cute how it builds to a swell in the five minutes allotted for play-time, though really, it’s not even good techno. It’s like the record the DJ puts on when the club manager tells him they need to sell some drinks right now.
I know, I can use the Xbox 360’s excellent custom soundtracks feature, though isn’t that kind of cheating? It sounds almost like game companies are giving up, refusing to budget good music, and hoping that the player has good enough taste in music to make up for their games’ faults. As I’ll no doubt say again, ideally, a game should have music good enough to make me not want to use a custom soundtrack.
Even so, it’s convenient that a game of Pac-Man CE lasts only five minutes. There are many songs that are exactly five minutes in length, like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (off the “Scary Monsters” album). The Stone Roses’ “This is The One” is also precisely five minutes. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is 5:01, though that last second doesn’t really have too much going on.
After dipping deep into my memory banks, I recall that “Big Bikes” by Kyuss is 5:01, and would probably be really awesome to listen to while playing this game. It even has an awesome little false stop with twenty-two seconds to go, and then with nineteen seconds left it comes back, at double-time. That would be pretty badass for the closing seconds, rushing to kill just a couple more ghosts, to push the score up over your record.
I can think of a couple more songs off the top of my head, though I keep getting tempted to just check iTunes and sort all songs by length. In the face of this strong temptation to cheat, I’m just going to go ahead and quit writing this.
EXTRA BONUS PARAGRAPH. Hello and welcome to an extra bonus paragraph, written in celebration of Pac-Man: Championship Edition‘s induction to the Action Button Dot Net Manifesto Hall of Fame. Anyway, here’s Pac-Man. Since beginning this list, we have received literally dozens of emails from readers who promise terrible things if we don’t acknowledge some “Actual Great Games” on our pissy little contrarian list of videogames we possess the gall and nerve to pretend we like. Pac-Man is our way of throwing you lovable scamps a bone and flipping you off at the same time. On the one hand, it’s a Classic Japanese Videogame made by an Indisputably Wise “Genius”! On the other hand, it’s a remake! On the one hand, it’s Pac-Man! On the other hand, it’s Microsoft! On the one hand, it’s got retro-cool geek-chic in spades! On the other hand, it’s got Horrifying, Terrible Electronic Music!
All kidding aside, though, really, this is a brain-blastingly perfect videogame. There’s this cliche, about how music was great on the NES “because” of the limitations of the hardware, or how retro remakes are a key to the future of game design because they force us to examine what game designers used to do when they didn’t have normal maps, when they didn’t have the ability to drench any character’s skin in oatmeal and add six pounds of simulated fat into their chest with the click of a mouse. To this, we say “Duh”. Freedom will always breed laziness: compare yourself to a convicted bank robber Doing Hard Time. You have the freedom to leave your house; you also have the freedom to do this in your living room. However, it goes without (and sometimes with) saying that the guy Doing Hard Time is probably better at doing that than you are. Grand Theft Auto III is you — Pac-Man: Championship Edition is the convicted felon. We like the convicted felon more than we like you.
Anyway, Pac-Man: Championship Edition is a classic arcade game revisited with an attention to detail, money, and a newfound kernel of wisdom re: the very concept of games and their rules. It’s sharp, punctual, and entertaining. You can enjoy it as much as you want. For example, though the game was promoted well before its release as a proving ground for a Pac-Man world championship, and though we find that marvelous and precious, we have never bothered to check Wikipedia to see if the anybody won, or if the championship is still going on, or what. We don’t care! Pac-Man: CE is a brilliantly polished little product; it is the computer programming of 1977 graduated from Tetris university. It is an actual videogame. It is the Return of Awesome. Recently, Taito released Space Invaders Extreme, which is also pretty astounding, and kind of has better music, and Capcom released Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which has amazing music though now looks so good that the idea of being unable to jump is actually vaguely creepy (when a single chest-high stone brick blocks your progress in one direction, it feels funny to have all that HDR lighting); meanwhile, a man named Jonathon Blow makes a game called Braid, as serious a meditation on the core of classic game design as it is an exercise in making something absolutely new, which coincidentally might have actually existed twenty years ago. Then there’s Megaman 9: rather than simply remake an old Megaman game with slick graphics for a quick yen, Capcom have decided that they are Not Afraid of Death, that they are going to make a new installment in an old series, complete with old-like graphics: only now, the level design has the benefit of decades of wisdom. It could be glorious.
Thus it is abundantly clear that someone, somewhere, has sounded a giant gong, proclaiming that Games Today Kind of Suck. Cautious backward-tiptoe-steps (tipheels?) are being taken in the direction of Maybe It’s Not Just Nostalgia After All, and people are looking long and hard at the very essence of “fun”. We’d really love to see Takashi Tezuka take one for the team with New Super Mario Bros. 2, remove the “world map” segments, get rid of the “Whoa Crazy Huge” mushroom, shoehorn harder Mario Physics in, and actually make the triple-jumping and wall-jumping work in the context of the level design. That would make for something really excellent. For the meantime, Pac-Man CE is the best example yet of how to look backward and forward at the same time. Since making it, Toru Iwatani has bowed out of the games industry, though it won’t surprise us to see his former slavemasters at Namco exhuming Pac-Man and splattering him all over menus, loading screens, and car hood ornaments in Ridge Racer — nor will it surprise us to see level design and game design (Tenuous Namedrop: Gears of War (2), Uncharted (2?)) re-awakened to the awesome simplicity of Pac-Man. It’s kind of funny, and kind of sad — all these years, Namco has been looking for ways to make Pac-Man marketable, and all they could ever think of was to give him arms, legs, and a family. Really, what they should have been doing, is applying the delicacy, grace, and utter shocking nobility of the original Pac-Man‘s game design into other games starring new characters. In short, to use the phrase we hope you’ve caught on to by now: Artistic Conscience.
In closing, it has come to our attention that not everyone owning an Xbox 360 has purchased Pac-Man: Championship Edition or even downloaded the free demo. If one of you is reading this, please, stop being a jackass. Don’t let the fact that Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are also available for download fool you. It’s not a cop-out of a cash-in: it’s something real. Download it and make everyone you know play it. If anyone doesn’t enjoy it, tell them to hit the bricks.
★★★★
“ACTUALLY A VIDEOGAME.”
I’ve honestly never liked Pac-Man. At all. Here I will take a page from all of the middle-aged mohawkers submitting guitar effects pedals reviews on Harmony Central, and say that I’ve been playing guitar for 35 years, have owned Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, and SGs, used Bigsby tremolos and Gibson Vibrolas, have covered everything from AC/DC to Rage Against the Machine, and I’ve never found a better fuzz pedal than the traditional Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, so trust me when I say that the Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff is a pansy-ass piece of stuff.
Take all the guitar terms in the previous sentence, and replace them with the names of game consoles and software franchises.
Why don’t I like Pac-Man? In the past, when I had to stand on a milk carton, I played it in pizza joints because my dad figured I loved it; I played it on Atari 2600 because it existed, and eventually, I played Ms. Pac-Man on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I can’t say I hated Ms. Pac-Man — I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t have any balls, machismo, guts, or what have you. In later years — leading right up until Pac-Man CE was released for Xbox Live Arcade, in fact — I’d identify that I just didn’t like the way Pac-Man controlled. It felt too loose and weird, which just didn’t totally mesh with how tight the game was conceptually.
If you’d have asked me how to make a better Pac-Manning experience, I probably would have told you I’d think about it and then get back to you later. That night, when you weren’t watching, I would have cut you off of my LiveJournal friends list, and then set my own journal to “friends-only”.
It’s a hell of an IQ-test question: how do you make Pac-Man better? It’s like asking me to list, off the top of my head, as many verbs that start with “V” as possible (validate, verify, vindicate, et cetera). I couldn’t think of any possible solutions, probably because I’m not a genius game designer. Maybe I could be, I don’t know, though like my mother always told me, I guess I’m kind of lazy. Either way, it’s evokes ambiguously positive emotions that original Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was reportedly responsible for the virtuosic Pac-Man CE — it makes me feel good to know that it took him nearly 30 years to come up with all these ideas.
Was Namco ever trying, though, to make Pac-Man anything more than an icon? Judging by the quality of every game starring Pac-Man, it would seem that none of them were made for any more generous reason than to keep bumping his name to the top of the gamer subconscious, to keep telling people who play games that, hey, this company called Namco has an archetypically deep heritage, and they’re not afraid of it!
They’ve been plopping remakes and reissues of Pac-Man out on the lunchroom tray of humanity for the better part of this most recent decade. They never hesitate to flop the original game onto one of their six-game “Museum” volumes, you know, which generously use up about 1/3000th of their storage medium. As of this writing, in addition to Pac-Man CE, there are two other Pac-Mans on Xbox Live Arcade — the original, and Ms. Pac-Man, both with six-dollar price tags, ugly borders and awesome online ranking leaderboards, which can only be accessed if you unlock the full version of the game.
(Really, for heck’s sake, Microsoft, let’s stop using the word “unlock”. It’s not like we’re using keys to play these games — nor even, in the gaming sense, are we using points or in-game currency. Using the word “Unlock” makes it seem like we can purchase the games using the “Gamer Points” we get from unlocking “Achievements”. Just use the word “Purchase”, please. It’s bad enough that you’ve made your own currency with “Microsoft Points”, and it’s precisely because you’ve made your own currency with which to buy things that it’s ridiculous that you award another kind of “Points” to people who do &^#$#ed stuff in games, which in turn makes it more ridiculous that you use the same word (“Unlock”) to indicate the option to purchase an Xbox Live Arcade game as you use to indicate a player being awarded an “Achievement”.)
Anyway, yeah, who wants to pay 400 “Microsoft Points” to play the original Pac-Man, when you can just pick up Ridge Racer 6 from a bargain bin and play Pac-Man to your heart’s content on the loading screen? When (not if) you get bored, you can just play Ridge Racer 6, which has nitro in it, which is awesome. However, it doesn’t have slipstreaming in it, even though Ridge Racer 5 did, because they wanted to save slipstreaming for Ridge Racer 7, which is as marginal an upgrade as you’re ever to see in videogames, though once you’ve played 7, 6 — and its Pac-Man loading screen — should seem utterly and horribly broken. After years of not upgrading the number in the series title, Namco sprung Ridge Racer 6, a statement of their staunch support of the Xbox 360, only to announce Ridge Racer 7 for the PlayStation 3 literally months later.
There’s a point to be made of this slipstream-talk, however muddy it might be: this is the sort of bullstuff Namco does. More to the point: the Pac-Man loading screen of Ridge Racer 6 isn’t even a loading screen. It’s just there. From the second it pops up, it says at the bottom of the screen: “Press the A button to begin Ridge Racer 6.” Why do they even put Pac-Man there in the first place? One slightly morbid reason is that it’s a throwback to Ridge Racer on the PlayStation, which let you play Galaxian at the pre-game loading scene. Many Namco games since then have let you play a game at the loading screen, so maybe Ridge Racer 6 was slyly trying to stir up nostalgia in the kinds of people who give a stuff. I wonder what happened to the guy who suggested the idea of putting a game in the loading screen. He’s probably 65 years old right now, with teeth the color of wooden stuff, and just finished paying off the loan for his mid-size condominium in a boring neighborhood in Tokyo. I’ve probably walked past his home a hundred times and never realized it. Probably some younger guy came up with the idea, and passed it on to the older guy out of “respect” so that the older guy could get a promotion, after which he would remember the younger guy and promote him some day. The younger guy probably never smoked a single cigarette until he was twenty-four years old.
Pac-Man is not just for loading screens — no, he’s also all over scoreboards in the Ridge Racer series, as well. Every time you hit a checkpoint, he pops up on your time display, chasing ghosts. This retro-gamer appeal is sprinkled into Namco games quite viciously, aiming to be the sort of thing some surreal-Dig-Dug-painting-owning poser on a UK games forum hears about and then says “SOLD”, maybe with some exclamation marks.
Also, a little Pac-Man badge appeared on Klonoa’s hat. Klonoa was Namco’s would-be mascot, star of a bland 2.5D game released for the PlayStation; some people still think that game was Jesus, and it kind of sucks to be those people. Klonoa had potential, anyway, though Namco didn’t care, and immediately resumed exhuming Pac-Man’s iconic profile and propping his corpse up in the weirdest places.
At the same time, developers all over the place claimed to love the original Pac-Man and tightened-up Ms. Pac-Man. Shigeru Miyamoto said, in an interview, that without Pac-Man, there would have been no Donkey Kong, and I guess he’s probably right. Donkey Kong is, subtly, about as inspired by Pac-Man as a game can get without also playing a lot like Pac-Man. The one game publisher in the world to understand the core of Pac-Man the least, ironically, has been Namco: since the success of the two “canon” games in the series, Namco has used and abused the “character” on numerous numbing occasions, such as the dull platformer Pac-Land, which no one likes unless they realize first that no one else likes it, or Pac-Man World, a 3D take on Pac-Land, where Pac-Man is now a sphere instead of a circle, which makes the fact that he has legs all the more freakish, and the fact that he has a speaking voice actually quite terrifying, and the fact that the stages lack actual design unforgivable. Recently, there’s been Pac-Pix on the DS, a game less tangentially related to the original Pac-Man than Pac-Man World, though jarring all the same: you have to keep drawing pictures of Pac-Man, his mouth facing in the correct direction, so that he munches the perpetually spawning ghosts. Pac-Pix, while a tiny bit interesting, misses the core of Pac-Man — the game is no longer about the “hunted becomes the hunter” dynamic, it’s just about drawing pictures big enough and quickly enough.
Arguably the most inspired of all the Pac-Man rehashes was Pac-Man VS, designed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. This was back when Nintendo was pushing the feature to connect a Gameboy Advance to a Gamecube, and use the Gameboy Advance as a controller. This era also brought us the dismal Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (it’s as much a challenge to try to enjoy it alone as it is to find three people willing to play it at the same time) and the friendship-wrecking The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords.
It might be most accurate to say that, back in those days, Nintendo was forcing all developers to include some level of GBA-Gamecube connectivity in all games. Player two could use a GBA to control remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell, for example. Games like Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles were big-scale brainstorms. Pac-Man VS was a lot smaller-scale, and as such, Nintendo and Namco had no clue what to do with it. Ultimately, they just slopped it onto some discs that included other games. I guess that was about the best place for it.
Pac-Man VS isn’t so much a game as a reason to scream. Essentially, it’s Pac-Man, where one player plays as Pac-Man and the other players play as the ghosts. Only the ghosts can’t see the entire playing field. Pac-Man, however, can see the ghosts. The Pac-Man player plays with the Gameboy Advance. The other players control their ghosts on the television. If it doesn’t immediately sound brilliant, it’s because it’s subtle. You really have to play it to “get” it, and playing it is, as you might imagine, kind of a hard thing to arrange: there is no one-player mode.
Yet none of these games cut to the heart of Pac-Man, where the ghosts hunt you until you eat a Power Pellet, at which point the tables turn and the ghosts flee in terror, because now you can eat them. This is a really good dynamic, and it’s just been sitting there locked up in a clunky shell for decades, reissued time and time again as-is by its shrugging, money-hungry parents, or else being shot in the feet and told to dance in monsterpieces like Pac-Man World 2, with its elbow jabbing, LOLing bullstuff cut-scenes wherein Pac-Man talks about constantly being hungry, and Ms. Pac-Man gives Pac-Man a birthday cake with a Power Pellet on top of it.
When Microsoft announced at their press conference at Tokyo Game Show 2006 that they would be holding the world’s first “Pac-Man World Championship”, I had to groan. First of all, hasn’t some guy played a perfect game of Pac-Man? How can you have a world championship of something that someone out there is perfect at? Aren’t you just asking him — and hundreds like him — to show up and dominate? Sitting there at the press conference, I couldn’t even begin to conceive of Pac-Man Championship Edition. Maybe it was because of how bullstuffty the whole presentation of it was. Peter Moore stood up there with a little headset microphone on his cranium, looking like he was either Madonna singing “Vogue” live or a high-rolling coach of a Halo team on Xbox Live. When he said that they were planning this Pac-Man world championship with the help of original creator Toru Iwatani, he repeatedly mispronounced Mr. Iwatani’s last name with such ferocity that I found it exceedingly hard to believe he’d ever met the guy. He kept calling him “Mistah Iwatawwy”. Seriously, Mr. Moore, I see only one “W” in the man’s last name, not sixteen of them.
EE-WAH-TAH-NEE.
For God’s sake.
Iwatani came out and gave a little speech. He talked about his plans to leave Namco in 2007 to become a lecturer on the subject of game design at Tokyo Polytechnic University. Listening to Iwatani’s speech, I figured this Pac-Man World Championship thing was just a big corporate flog, and Iwatani was only called in, thanks to a modest-sized envelope of money, to temporarily increase the number of Japanese people on the stage, making for a friendlier “photo op” (or, “shutter chance” as they call it in katakana) with which to infiltrate the Japanese juvenile consciousness via many games news services. Seriously, I’ve seen the notes on the PowerPoints they use to set these things up.
When Pac-Man: Championship Edition was announced and subsequently released, six whole days went by before I noticed and then downloaded the demo. Three days later, I played the demo, and purchased the full version after three play-throughs, making it the first thing I ever purchased with Microsoft Points.
Holy stuff, this is a hell of a videogame. Toru Iwatani, before walking out of Namco, put his balls on the table, and holy stuff, that’s a lot of balls. It’s like him flipping off decades of idiocy, and telling Namco to, seriously, heck Pac-Man as a “character”.
It’s basically Pac-Man with the aesthetic completed, and the dynamics mastered. Simply put: you can’t ever completely clear the board. It constantly re-seeds. The whole thing starts with just a few dots and a power pellet on each side. Eat all the dots on the right side and a fruit will appear on the left side. Eat the fruit on the left side to re-seed fresh dots and power pellets on the right side. Eat all the dots on the left side to reveal a fruit on the right side. Eat the fruit on the right side to re-seed the dots and power pellets on the left side. Et cetera, to infinity. As you repeatedly refresh the board, the layout changes, subtly. This gives the game a flow that no Pac-Man had ever possessed — the original is too stop-start to be nearly this much fun: eat all the dots to clear the stage, then start back at the middle of the maze with a completely fresh board of dots. Pac-Man CE nails the flow: the action never stops, and by staying alive, you start to feel like a hero. Every successful outwitting of ghosts, every eight-ghost combo scored, every time sparks shoot from Pac-Man’s body as he grinds around a corner, you want to pump your fist.
The longer you stay alive, the faster Pac-Man moves, and the more points the dots are worth. Being hunted by ghosts and escaping would-be run-downs is such a glimmering, pure experience that no car-chase in any 3D videogame can touch its primal thrills of success. Power pellets let you eat ghosts, as always; when you eat a ghost, the game pauses for a second, as the controller thumps, letting you savor your big point score. Eat several ghosts in a row to score increasing points — eat another power pellet before all four ghosts escape from the middle of the board, and you can find yourself lining up eight-ghost combos. If Pac-Man is fast enough and you’re a bad enough dude, you can eat twelve, sixteen, twenty ghosts in a row.
At first, scoring big in this game feels like luck. Eventually, the skill involved is undeniable. Look up some replays on YouTube after your first shot at the game, and feel the doors unlocking in your brain. I force everyone who sits on my sofa to play this game at least once, and every time I watch intently, always picking up little idiosyncrasies that I myself either possess or don’t possess. Every time, I learn a little something about my friend, the game, or — ideally — both.
So — final answer: Pac-Man CE has essentially made Pac-Man into a videogame I’m likely to enjoy for the rest of my life, and it gives Toru Iwatani good enough reason to lecture about videogame design. Maybe he has a whole lecture based around how and why it took him thirty years to wonder, “If the ghosts refresh constantly, why do the stages reset to zero every time?” Cheers, Mr. Iwatani, for having the guts to go back and complete what your company and your public had never doubted was a masterpiece.
There are a couple of other modes apart from “Championship Mode” in Pac-Man CE, including one where the power pellets don’t refresh, and ones with longer wraparound escape tunnels — where you can seriously get screwed by clever ghosts. Some people have complained about a lack of variety in the modes, or moaned about the lack of an endless mode, and I guess the latter complaint is kind of valid. It would be hella cool to see how long people could last, though I think the designers probably feared that the game might devolve into extreme, Tetris-Grand-Master-esque freakish speed, or else because they were getting conscientious, and didn’t want people losing their whole lives to this game. At any rate, the “Championship Mode” is pretty finely tuned as-is: get as high a score as you can in five minutes. I think that’s good enough. It’s good enough, even, for Japanese arcades: I could totally see this game working in Japanese arcades. Twitch masters would eat it up — figuratively. If they managed to hook it up to the internet, said twitch masters could even participate in the international leaderboards.
Then again, why pay 100 yen per play if you can just play the demo of this game for free? You don’t even need to pay for the game. All you really get out of paying for it is the ability to put your score up on the international leaderboards, which is kind of boring. I mean, I don’t suspect I’ll ever be not tied for 10,000th place, if you know what I mean. As willing as I am to admit that this game is a masterpiece by default, I’m not exactly jumping at the chance to spend my life playing it. I’d much rather continue cycling guitar scales (this week it’s the Spanish Gypsy Scale) in the dark when I should be sleeping, if you know what I mean.
When I do play this game, though, I find the Xbox 360 controller sorely lacking — either the D-pad or the analog stick is too wishy-washy about rounding corners. I wish I could play it with a joystick, though I never bought a joystick for the 360. I wish I could just get a Sanwa ball-type stick and one button (the Start button), and hack my own exclusive controller for this game, though the Xbox 360 is too complicated to work with. Damn it. There’s always the Hori Dead of Alive 4 stick, still clogging select Japanese retailers ever since that game tanked, hard. I could get one of those, I guess, though the prospect of another monolithic Hori joystick in my house — and of the tacky plastic-like boobs engraved into said special-edition stick — kind of turns me off. As it stands, the Xbox 360 controller is Pac-Man CE‘s biggest fault, though I really can’t dock its score for that.
The second-biggest flaw would have to do with the cheesy American glazed-over aesthetic. The glimmering rainbow colors of the playing field are a bit much. I mean, it’s high-definition enough, though I personally would probably prefer it more if the cute neon texture of the borders just stayed one solid color, and maybe changed just once every time both sides of the board re-seed. As it is now, it gives me a bit of a headache. There’s too much jumpy flashing going on, like the producers were trying to overcompensate for something. Leave it the hell alone, man! It’s Pac-Man. Next thing you know, they’ll release a patch that gives Pac-Man legs and eyes and a hecking snifter of brandy.
Also, the music is pretty terrible. It sounds something like what’s playing in any given club in Berlin the moment a hip German teenager first contemplates acting on the insecurity that his penis is smaller than that of other guys. It’s cute how it builds to a swell in the five minutes allotted for play-time, though really, it’s not even good techno. It’s like the record the DJ puts on when the club manager tells him they need to sell some drinks right now.
I know, I can use the Xbox 360’s excellent custom soundtracks feature, though isn’t that kind of cheating? It sounds almost like game companies are giving up, refusing to budget good music, and hoping that the player has good enough taste in music to make up for their games’ faults. As I’ll no doubt say again, ideally, a game should have music good enough to make me not want to use a custom soundtrack.
Even so, it’s convenient that a game of Pac-Man CE lasts only five minutes. There are many songs that are exactly five minutes in length, like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (off the “Scary Monsters” album). The Stone Roses’ “This is The One” is also precisely five minutes. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is 5:01, though that last second doesn’t really have too much going on.
After dipping deep into my memory banks, I recall that “Big Bikes” by Kyuss is 5:01, and would probably be really awesome to listen to while playing this game. It even has an awesome little false stop with twenty-two seconds to go, and then with nineteen seconds left it comes back, at double-time. That would be pretty badass for the closing seconds, rushing to kill just a couple more ghosts, to push the score up over your record.
I can think of a couple more songs off the top of my head, though I keep getting tempted to just check iTunes and sort all songs by length. In the face of this strong temptation to cheat, I’m just going to go ahead and quit writing this.
EXTRA BONUS PARAGRAPH. Hello and welcome to an extra bonus paragraph, written in celebration of Pac-Man: Championship Edition‘s induction to the Action Button Dot Net Manifesto Hall of Fame. Anyway, here’s Pac-Man. Since beginning this list, we have received literally dozens of emails from readers who promise terrible things if we don’t acknowledge some “Actual Great Games” on our pissy little contrarian list of videogames we possess the gall and nerve to pretend we like. Pac-Man is our way of throwing you lovable scamps a bone and flipping you off at the same time. On the one hand, it’s a Classic Japanese Videogame made by an Indisputably Wise “Genius”! On the other hand, it’s a remake! On the one hand, it’s Pac-Man! On the other hand, it’s Microsoft! On the one hand, it’s got retro-cool geek-chic in spades! On the other hand, it’s got Horrifying, Terrible Electronic Music!
All kidding aside, though, really, this is a brain-blastingly perfect videogame. There’s this cliche, about how music was great on the NES “because” of the limitations of the hardware, or how retro remakes are a key to the future of game design because they force us to examine what game designers used to do when they didn’t have normal maps, when they didn’t have the ability to drench any character’s skin in oatmeal and add six pounds of simulated fat into their chest with the click of a mouse. To this, we say “Duh”. Freedom will always breed laziness: compare yourself to a convicted bank robber Doing Hard Time. You have the freedom to leave your house; you also have the freedom to do this in your living room. However, it goes without (and sometimes with) saying that the guy Doing Hard Time is probably better at doing that than you are. Grand Theft Auto III is you — Pac-Man: Championship Edition is the convicted felon. We like the convicted felon more than we like you.
Anyway, Pac-Man: Championship Edition is a classic arcade game revisited with an attention to detail, money, and a newfound kernel of wisdom re: the very concept of games and their rules. It’s sharp, punctual, and entertaining. You can enjoy it as much as you want. For example, though the game was promoted well before its release as a proving ground for a Pac-Man world championship, and though we find that marvelous and precious, we have never bothered to check Wikipedia to see if the anybody won, or if the championship is still going on, or what. We don’t care! Pac-Man: CE is a brilliantly polished little product; it is the computer programming of 1977 graduated from Tetris university. It is an actual videogame. It is the Return of Awesome. Recently, Taito released Space Invaders Extreme, which is also pretty astounding, and kind of has better music, and Capcom released Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which has amazing music though now looks so good that the idea of being unable to jump is actually vaguely creepy (when a single chest-high stone brick blocks your progress in one direction, it feels funny to have all that HDR lighting); meanwhile, a man named Jonathon Blow makes a game called Braid, as serious a meditation on the core of classic game design as it is an exercise in making something absolutely new, which coincidentally might have actually existed twenty years ago. Then there’s Megaman 9: rather than simply remake an old Megaman game with slick graphics for a quick yen, Capcom have decided that they are Not Afraid of Death, that they are going to make a new installment in an old series, complete with old-like graphics: only now, the level design has the benefit of decades of wisdom. It could be glorious.
Thus it is abundantly clear that someone, somewhere, has sounded a giant gong, proclaiming that Games Today Kind of Suck. Cautious backward-tiptoe-steps (tipheels?) are being taken in the direction of Maybe It’s Not Just Nostalgia After All, and people are looking long and hard at the very essence of “fun”. We’d really love to see Takashi Tezuka take one for the team with New Super Mario Bros. 2, remove the “world map” segments, get rid of the “Whoa Crazy Huge” mushroom, shoehorn harder Mario Physics in, and actually make the triple-jumping and wall-jumping work in the context of the level design. That would make for something really excellent. For the meantime, Pac-Man CE is the best example yet of how to look backward and forward at the same time. Since making it, Toru Iwatani has bowed out of the games industry, though it won’t surprise us to see his former slavemasters at Namco exhuming Pac-Man and splattering him all over menus, loading screens, and car hood ornaments in Ridge Racer — nor will it surprise us to see level design and game design (Tenuous Namedrop: Gears of War (2), Uncharted (2?)) re-awakened to the awesome simplicity of Pac-Man. It’s kind of funny, and kind of sad — all these years, Namco has been looking for ways to make Pac-Man marketable, and all they could ever think of was to give him arms, legs, and a family. Really, what they should have been doing, is applying the delicacy, grace, and utter shocking nobility of the original Pac-Man‘s game design into other games starring new characters. In short, to use the phrase we hope you’ve caught on to by now: Artistic Conscience.
In closing, it has come to our attention that not everyone owning an Xbox 360 has purchased Pac-Man: Championship Edition or even downloaded the free demo. If one of you is reading this, please, stop being a jackass. Don’t let the fact that Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are also available for download fool you. It’s not a cop-out of a cash-in: it’s something real. Download it and make everyone you know play it. If anyone doesn’t enjoy it, tell them to hit the bricks.
1991
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE BEST VIDEOGAME OF ALL-TIME.”
Another World (released as “Out of This World” in the US and “Outer World” in Japan) is, perhaps by default, the best game of all-time by our criteria: it was designed and programmed by virtually one man, it is not long, it features no heads-up display to clutter the screen, it features precisely one weapon which can be used for three purposes (regular attack, charge attack, shield) using only one button (we love games that let us hold down a button and then let go), it possesses unshakable confidence in the sharpness of its mechanic (conveyed in level design that prompts the player to use his multi-faceted gun in many creative ways), it features puzzles whose solutions require no more than common sense, it has amazing music, it is gorgeous to look at, and it tells a story while it moves, relentlessly, never stopping, never preaching, never speaking, from the frightening beginning right up to the heartbreaking conclusion.
Out of This World was ahead of its time in 1991, and it is still ahead of not-its time in 2008. One might call it an art film of a videogame. This wouldn’t be a wrong description so much as a lazy one. It’s more of a silent film of a videogame. Or, better than that, it is a videogame of a videogame.
Out of This World shows (not tells) us the story of Lester Knight Chaykin, a red-haired physicist working in some kind of laboratory. The introduction scene impresses us immediately with visions of the familiar: a car (headlights), a building, a thunderstorm. Lester — whose name we will only know if we’ve read it out of the instruction manual — descends into his laboratory and boots up a large computer. He leans back in his chair. He sips a can of what might be beer. It’ll be the last can of what might be beer that he’ll ever have. A lightning bolt strikes the building outside. We see Lester’s car again, for a split second. Something explodes and implodes simultaneously deep inside the lab. A spherical hole replaces Lester’s chair. The screen hangs there for a moment, perfect, weighty cinematography befitting . . . cinema. Then there’s a crash, and a splash. Lester materializes in a pool of water. Vine-like tentacles begin to reach toward the sunlight on the surface of the pool.
The game begins.
Out of This World, from this moment until its fascinating conclusion, represents an Actual Genius’s osmosed omniscience regarding game design: we can say that it is Super Mario Bros. turned on its ear. In Super Mario Bros., the player knows he has to go to the right because his recognizable-as-human avatar is facing to the right, and standing just left of the center of the screen. The reason for going to the right is explained only in the instruction manual: a dragon has kidnapped a princess, and Mario must get her back (our imaginations fill in the perhaps-promise of getting laid). Out of This World doesn’t need an instruction manual: here we have a hero who was in one place, and is now in another. Sinking in a pool of water is objectively worse (humans can’t breathe underwater) a situation than sitting in a desk chair drinking beer (what’s a few dead brain cells?). We must get out of here. To further impress the situation upon us, we have those growing, evil tentacles.
It is possible to die a grisly, uniquely animated death not one second into Out of This World. It’s likely that the designer, one Eric Chahi, intended for the player to die the first time the game began. This is how you die in the beginning of the game: you don’t press any buttons. You just stare at the beautiful and serene pool of water. This is, in fact, what most people would do, if they found themselves suddenly transported from a desk chair in a laboratory to a pool of water beneath a vaguely alien sun. That one second is long enough for Lester to sink just far enough for the evil tentacles to grab him. Now you’re being dragged underwater. The next thing you know, you’re dead.
All great art tends to originate from a somewhat shy little need. Most of the time, the “need” is only a placebo. The artist eventually realizes he didn’t need anything. Like The Stone Roses said, “You don’t have to wait to die / the kingdom’s all inside”. Or something. Eric Chahi’s production of Another World began when he saw the game Dragon’s Lair, found the animation fascinating, and dreamt up — probably in a split second, while standing dead still in the middle of an intersection with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand — a method to make similarly fluid animation using much less data storage space. He set to work immediately, having no clue what he was going to make — only a basic idea of how he was going to do it. It’s said he planned at first only to make a game like Karateka and Prince of Persia, only in a science-fiction setting. He spent half a year developing his excessively complicated though ultimately amazingly efficient animation technique. He developed it the only sane way: while using it to make a cinematic introduction for his game.
Now it was time to make a game. Eric Chahi presumably did not bother to jot his game design idea onto a bar napkin. The “game design” pre-production phase of Another World did not exist. Chahi had presumably had a simple idea brewing. When it came time to make a game, he figuratively snapped his fingers, and a genie exploded out of his ears.
Every third man who owns an electric guitar will claim to have met and hung out with the person who only they consider “the best unknown singer / songwriter alive today”. These singer / songwriter-warriors often impart the same advice regarding songwriting to every friend cool enough to drink a beer with them: if you want to write a song, man, just heckin’ write a song. Anything can be a song. A song can be anything. And If you have a song, sing it. This is not just the method for writing songs — you can replace these verbs and adjectives at random, and you’ll end up with a pretty fool-proof philosophy.
Another World is a song of a videogame. The dumbfounding simplicity of its core mechanics are such that they must have been set in stone from the very moment Chahi began level design. Chahi says, nowadays, that the level design was done completely at random, in a spur-of-the-moment sort of way, and this sticks: only when the game design is so thoroughly complete is the level design allowed to be spur-of-the-moment.
The basic gist of Another World is that you must not die. You play the part of a man in a world completely different from the home of cars and laboratories glimpsed in the introduction, and then never again. You escape from the tentacles in the pool to find yourself on a barren, rocky planet. You may walk either to the right or to the left. To the left is a cliff, and a vine. To the right are some slugs. If a slug bites your leg, you will see a pan-flash close-up animation of a silver stinger cutting through khaki. Then it’s back to the main screen. Lester falls over, dead. Your next attempt, you might try pressing a button. Press the Action Button, and Lester kicks. Kick the slugs to kill them. Press the Jump Button to hop over the slugs. Keep moving right, and you will come face-to-face with a beast. The beast is huge, and black. It is, in fact, the first thing you see upon exiting the pool at the beginning of the game: the beast is standing on a cliff in the distance. When you emerge from the water, he turns and gallops off-screen. You cannot kill the beast, and you will immediately know this because you know how Lester is hardly a match for a slug. Whether you walked left at the beginning of the game or not, whether you saw that vine and that cliff or not, you will be compelled to run back the way you came by virtue of the fact that the beast literally takes up most of the right side of the screen. You will run left, jumping over the slugs. The beast chases you. You run all the way off the edge of the cliff, grab the vine, and swing around as the beast rears up to avoid falling. Now you have to run again to the right, jumping over the slugs again. Make your way all the way back to the screen where you met the beast; when you run off the right side of the screen, the game suddenly betrays your just-founded expectations (that running off the edge of one screen takes you to a new screen) by having your character fall backward onto the rocky ground. Robe-shrouded, large humanoid forms walk into the frame. The beast comes gallopping into the screen. One of the robed men immediately shoots the beast with a concealed weapon. The beast crumples into a pile. Lester stands up, thanking his saviors. He is punched in the gut with a laserbeam, and the screen fades to black.
You wake up in a cage. It’s a brief cut-scene. You see an alien sitting across from you. This is very important: at the lower-right corner of the screen is one of the robed aliens. He immediately removes his robe. Underneath is a large, albino-gorilla-like muscular being wearing a skin-tight black shirt and briefs. This alien being is precisely identical to the alien beings mining in the background — and the alien sitting next to us in our cage. Why are we in the cage? As with most of the questions presented in Another World, this is a question we don’t need to ask. We can ask it — and then answer it — anyway: these aliens all look precisely the same. Lester doesn’t look anything like them. Lester is in the cage, perhaps, because he is an obviously intelligent being who looks nothing like the resident intelligent beings of this world. The narrative plays our brain on subconscious levels: if Lester is arrested for looking different, then these people might have some kind of racism in their hearts. That would make them inherently bad. We don’t hesitate to assume that the reason they locked up one of their own kind is because he is not bad. If the game’s first puzzle is getting out of the pool, and the second puzzle is escaping from the beast, the third is wondering why these terrible things keep happening to us. The solution to the puzzle involves a leap of conscience: escape from the cage. Escaping from the cage requires as much common sense as swimming out of the water. In the water, you pressed up. In the cage, you press right and left to make it swing. Make it swing once, and the guard in the lower-right shouts some unintelligible alien words at you. He fires his gun into the air. Guards appear in the background. Now you know you’re on the right track. Swing harder. The cage falls off its chain and crushes the guard dead. A quick cut-scene shows Lester’s hand approaching the floor, picking up a gun. The guards in the background panic.
The rest of the game begins.
The immediate, short-term, and long-term goals will, for the duration of the experience, be “move”, and “survive”. Moving will involve running and jumping; surviving will involve shooting and dodging.
Another World is a game centered on death. As we’ve established, Eric Chahi’s inspiration for creating it came from looking at Dragon’s Lair and wondering if he could create a similar graphical effect using much less storage space. There had to be a little more to the Dragon’s Lair inspiration than Eric Chahi has perhaps let on. Dragon’s Lair‘s initial appeal was its full-motion-video graphics. It was better than something that looked “like” a cartoon — it was a cartoon. That was enough, in Dragon’s Lair‘s day and age. People wouldn’t care about the control or depth of a game if it looked like absolutely nothing they’d ever seen before within the same medium. You play Dragon’s Lair by pressing the correct button as dictated by a glint on the screen. Press that button, and the hero will move, initiating a “successful” video segment. Don’t press that button, and the current segment of video will flow directly into the “failure” animation. Dragon’s Lair‘s conscience is a weird one to peg, however, because nearly as much attention is paid to “failure” as to “success”. Some would even argue that watching your hero die is more interesting than watching him succeed. If you have only successfully completed Dragon’s Lair without making any mistakes, then you haven’t seen the whole game. Another World is the same way, only — thanks to the beautiful animations taking up much less data storage space than full-motion video — there’s an actual game shoehorned into it.
Dragon’s Lair had been joyfully free of then-modern videogame genre restrictions: the action was shown from many bizarre, quasi-cinematic angles. Another World was intended from the outset to be an experiment in streamlining an artistic game experience. So it ended up as a side-scroller in the vein of Super Mario Bros. Chahi probably never had a doubt in his mind that many of the set-pieces in the game would rely on use of a context-sensitive Action Button. It’s the button you will immediately think to press when an alien grabs you buy the shoulders; press it in time and you kick him in the groin, and he drops you. No game has done Action Buttoning as well as Another World, try as games might. The simplicity of the situations — always one man, expressively and silently facing a faceless opponent in a unique struggle — and the honest, terse dread of every moment-to-moment conflict lend themselves well to a just-barely-subconscious instinct that knows to Press That One Button. The variety of set pieces exploits the Action Button’s function and timing in enough entertaining ways to qualify this game as a masterpiece, as the undisputed king of the “adventure” genre, far better than all those point-and-clickers with their byzantine puzzles with arcane solutions and tacked-on tacky humor. Then the game goes and takes one step closer to the edge of the Grand Canyon, when Lester picks up a gun; minutes later, we are playing The Greatest Videogame Ever.
Pick up the gun and proceed one screen to the right. You will see guards in the halls. The gun is the king in Another World: no living thing survives more than one shot. Landing that one shot is the trick. In your second fight, you will see a guard hold his gun out, and a ball of energy grow at the tip. Eventually, the ball of energy will become a shield roughlythe height of his body. He will then poke his arm out of the shield and fire at you. You can duck his shots. The game is telling you to hold your own Action Button down. Hold it down long enough, and you produce your own shield. Poke your arm out and shoot at his shield. Shoot his shield enough to break it. Or you can hold your trigger until the glowing ball appears, and then let go to fire a massive, shield-destroying shot. With the shield destroyed, fire another quick zap to disintegrate your enemy.
If Another World were made today, or one day later, or one day earlier, you maybe would have just had a gun that fired when you pressed the fire button. Maybe you would have gotten another gun, later, which fired really fast, and a third gun, which fired really big bullets. Another World‘s game design, however, was gracefully decided in what we’ve determined was the length of a snap of the creator’s fingers. A gorgeous one-off informed by all that was ever fun in videogames, and all that would ever come to be.
To recap, your gun can:
1. Fire enemy-killing lasers
2. Create a force shield capable of absorbing several shots
3. Fire a charged shot capable of destroying an enemy force shield in one burst
The level design escalates smoothly, then sharply. We learn how to shoot. We learn how to shield. We learn how to break shields. Then the game pushes us down an elevator shaft, the sink-or-swim approach. Soon, we’re making shields on staircases, or making two shields, or three. Soon, we have enemies attacking from two fronts. Eventually, we’re attacking enemies with craft. Each screen, each skirmish, becomes a little puzzle. Another World owes its elegance in no small part to its screen-by-screen nature. Like Pac-Man, like Donkey Kong, all action in the game takes place within one screen. What we can see right now is what matters. Maybe some literary theme is hiding behind the scenes of this, or maybe not. Either way, it works, because the creator only needed to think of every gunfight in the context of one screen.
Some will say that Another World‘s controls are hokey, or ropey. We say that they are exactly as they’re supposed to be. We’re not even going to cop-out and say that life is hokey and ropey, nor are we going to say that the characters in Gears of War move really slowly. We’re just going to say that everything bows to the game design. We believe that the highest compliment one can pay a single-player adventure game is that a two-player deathmatch mode, with each player controlling a clone of the main character, would be amazing. This is certainly the case in Another World: we can imagine a single-screen arena where players are free to set up shields, blast shields down, and take shots at one another. In that context, the controls would feel just right. It’d be at least as engaging as Pac-Man Vs., or as entertaining as four-player “Don’t Touch The Floor” in Bionic Commando: Rearmed.
The game flows along, through Action Button scenes, platform segments, environmental puzzles, split-second-long yet mesmerizing cut-scenes, and increasingly elaborate gunfights. Lester will eventually have to swim, solve a dastardly puzzle requiring him to flood a large cave, and pilot a tank in a death arena. All the while, you keep running, terrified. The story shows itself deliberately, with elaborate foreground and background animations. Eventually, there’s a “main bad guy”, who looks exactly like every other alien — including your buddy. The “final battle”, which you fight on your stomach, crawling at one-sixteenth your previous walking speed, involves a hysterically brilliant play on the physical appearance of the aliens, eliminating all doubt: no, Eric Chahi most definitely did not make all the aliens look the same because he was lazy. (Then again, to say he intended this conclusion all along would negate what he’d said about doing the level design randomly. In other words, Eric Chahi is even more of a genius for deciding to stage the final battle the way he did. Wow.)
The ending is beautiful, and you’ll never forget it.
Certain questions regarding Another World‘s continuity will only ever be asked by fourteen-year-old kids: at the beginning of the game, we see these aliens shooting a beast with a gun. If the only purpose of having a gun is to hunt for safety or for food, why is there a shield function? The answer to the question is, of course, another question: why are the aliens imprisoning one of their own, who happens to look exactly like they look? Eventually, if you want it, Another World becomes about more than survival. Eventually, a quite frankly spooky theme settles down gently over the experience: we are a man sprinting for freedom in an absolutely, mind-crushingly foreign universe. There it is: no matter how sharply the rules of life might suddenly change, any man will know from instinct alone what freedom is.
Right after the first gunfight, Lester and his Alien Buddy get on an elevator. You can go down — the right way — or you can go up. If you go up, you will find yourself in a small, dome-shaped room with a window. Walk over and look out the window. We see through Lester’s eyes. The first time you see it, you don’t know what to think.
It’s a view of the expanse of this terrifyingly foreign world. Immediately, you look at that, and you know you’re going to die. You know Lester is going to die, some day, even if — especially if — he survives this. All at once, the Looney Tunes nature of grisly death and oblivious rebirth subconsciously becomes an essential artistic element of Another World‘s design.
Playing Another World before age sixteen can, probably, make one a better human being in the end. It’s certainly more qualifiable as “art” than any Disney animation.
Aw, we shouldn’t have said that. That was kind of rude.
Another World is a lean game, designed through a series of what must have been excruciatingly difficult choices. Chahi chose not to incorporate every possible gun/shield-dynamic permutation into the game, because this isn’t a game “about” shooting. Overstaying his welcome was never Chahi’s intent. Chahi’s intent, presumably, was to make a game that begins, middles, and ends. He composed event sequences on the fly, maybe fiddled with the arrangement, and then set about removing what didn’t work perfectly well. This is something modern game designers don’t do, more often than not. Just ask the crew behind the Final Fantasy games: past a certain point in the development, if an idea is still sitting on the table, it will be in the game. It’s a terrifying staring contest. Luckily, one man can’t have a staring contest with himself, so Another World, with regard to flow, is absolutely perfect.
Modern game designers also toil over the question of how to balance story and action segments: if the game is too hard, the player won’t be able to witness the full extent of the story, which means we might as well not have a story. Attention, game developers: if you’re thinking this, maybe your game is, at its core, too long, too complicated, or just plain boring. Another World keeps the context front and center, and the most complicated it gets is offering us the opportunity to easily kill a near-invincible guard by climbing into the tunnel above his chamber and shooting a hanging green orb the instant we see his reflection pass under it. We’ve previously said that Lost Vikings and Portal are amazing games because the level designers stop at nothing to exploit every facet of their brilliant mechanics; now, we’re going to say that Another World is more brilliant because it possesses sparkling self-confidence, and uses its mechanics as a tool. It stays cool-headed, elegant, and noble until the end. It isn’t a “game” with an “engine”; it’s an experience, one big, elaborate “puzzle”. It’s a story. It just happens to contain the bones and sinews of an excellent game. As a “piece of art” where the focal theme is the utter dread of being a stranger in a strange land, both the very concept of dying and being reborn (offered the chance to try again) in a videogame and the Looney-Tunes-like snap-to presentation of the post-death rebirth lends itself perfectly to the theme. From the moment this man’s life is upset (again: transported from a laboratory to a bizarre alien world), we know deep down, instinctually, that he will die some day, and so will we. His multiple deaths in our effort to learn the ins and outs of the experience perfectly — and, (crucially,) accidentally — present us with a plausible “ending” at any and every deadly turn. No one can ever pronounce Another World‘s thoughtfulness “pretentious”, because it’s not. It’s unassuming, nonchalant, confident, and cool. In short: yes, it’s French.
Another World is just simply not a game in which to stand still. This is crucial: casual players the world over can aesthetically break any game in three to four seconds by standing still. During its conflict phases, Another World will not let you stand still. It works a miraculous magic on the player, compelling him to always be acting out his role.
The second fight we find ourselves in involves several guards coming from the left side of the screen. Our New Alien Friend pounds away at a computer panel. We immediately recognize our role, without some FPS-like commanding officer barking orders at us: keep the enemies back while our man opens the door. This is as fist-sized and logistical as the fights will get, or will ever need to get, for Another World to prove its point.
Other games saw fit to expand on Another World‘s spear-like, joyfully geometric mechanics in rudimentary, fundamental, or elaborate ways. Interplay’s Blackthorne is perhaps best described as Another World: The Videogame: the level designers picked up the slack and put Another World‘s crisp conflict model into a non-stop, overwhelmingly thorough puzzle-solving blast-a-thon. Years later, Oddworld Inhabitants, perhaps thinking they were being clever, unleashed Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, which they paraded as a brilliant, brand-new thing. Going by the way the developer hyped it to the media, they seriously believed it would be the Next Huge Thing, the next Super Mario. The game was essentially Another World, turned into a “videogame”, expanded, multiplied by eleven, and starring hideous character designs that not even a mother’s mother could love. (Thus we actually happen to like the game a lot.)
Modern games have inherited Another World‘s showmanship and close to none of its subtlety. BioShock pays fetishistic, loving attention to its own world, which it realizes with an awe-inspiring level of beauty: despite being very obviously a videogame, a “simulation”, its visual and sonic confidence exudes subconscious-like understanding of the greatness of Another World. Too bad the “game” part is convoluted and bogged down by a design document that no doubt contained an entire ream-long section labeled “Bullstuff”.
Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami has gone on record as considering Another World the absolute best game of all-time, and the primary influence on Resident Evil. Using Another World as a yardstick, we can say that Resident Evil is hilariously unsuccessful — it is laden with red keys, red doors, blue keys, blue doors, and an inventory management system that smacks of the developers being scared that the game wouldn’t have “enough stuff” in it. It goes without saying that Resident Evil possessed the opportunity to be as sophisticated and perfect as Another World; however, through the process of think-tanking and regularly scheduled Monday-morning hung-over brainstorms, through the absolute lack of “common sense” as a job requirement for the level designers (or: the absolute lack of the “level designer” in post-Famicom-era Japanese game development), the game became unnecessarily dirty. When it came time to “improve” the game in sequels, we ended up with only more bullstuff. Resident Evil 4, an amazing and beautiful game in its own right, saw Mikami getting conscientious, and leaning closer to the dream of Another World. The “horror movie” genre of videogame had perhaps been too ambitious, Mikami must have noticed. So they went about making an “action movie”. It worked tremendously well, and had it featured only one truly awesome gun and no speaking cut-scenes (seriously: heck that radio stuff), we’d probably love it a whole lot more than we already do.
Goichi Suda, CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture and director of games such as Killer 7, Flower, Sun, and Rain, The Silver Case, and No More Heroes, all titles so close to being masterpieces that they suck royally, is also a repeat professor of his love of Another World. Suda’s love of Another World stems from its absolute unwavering execution of atmospheric mood. You can see plenty of influence in Suda’s titles, if you squint hard enough. The confidence evident in the sound design and visual sense alone earn his games hall-of-fame status. However, the issue of game design has a problem — namely, that there isn’t any. We can certainly see what Suda is driving at with games like No More Heroes: he is imagining a concept and a world, and is keeping the game elements to a minimum so as to allow each boss encounter to be a game in and of itself. The problem is that he hasn’t hit on the right minimum yet.
Fumito Ueda would have to be the only Japanese game designer who “truly” “gets” the Another World aesthetic. He, too, praises Another World above all games. When we interviewed him on the subject of Shadow of the Colossus in 2004, we asked him some questions about Another World, and he replied by very frankly saying that it depresses him when he reads gushing reviews of ICO, which fail to note the copious Another World homages. Ueda is a game designer’s game designer, and he may or may not surpass Another World in the future. For now, however, his parents allow him the keys to the Ferrari, though not the Lamborghini: Ueda had apparently wanted Shadow of the Colossus to not feature any kind of HUD display at all, like Another World, only his higher-ups literally told him that having no HUD would result in the game being “looked-down upon” as “unsophisticated” by critics and players. What kind of hecked-up world do we live in, where (#1) people who have worked at a company for 30 years, being promoted only because they’re not doing anything worthy of being promoted (and laws of societal niceness dictate that we not tell a man implicitly that he’s “not making anything better”) are trusted over people with genuine creativity (#2) someone with a university degree can possibly think that a little icon showing a sword is absolutely necessary in a videogame where the main character stands in the center of the screen and one can clearly see, at all times, that he is holding a sword? It’s like face portraits by dialogue boxes in RPGs: these days, when the characters are so big and expressive, having a face portrait by the dialogue box is freaky and depressing. Either way, Shadow of the Colossus can’t be a perfect game, because there’s no explanation for why the bow has unlimited arrows. What a pity! We will gladly, turgidly anticipate his next works, however, because it’s clear he both loves Another World‘s vibe and appreciates Zelda‘s aims. A bullstuff-free, flowing game possessing Zelda‘s attention to detail could be amazing.
Of all the Japanese game designers claiming to love Another World more than any other game, ever, Hideo Kojima would have to be the most hilarious and ironic. He makes the longest, ugliest, most logically convoluted orchestrated fatuosities yet produced by modern man in the name of attempted entertainment; if he actually loves Another World, we have to say that his love has not inspired him, or, rather, his love has inspired him to run like the wind in the opposite direction. Furthermore, we would like to express our condolences to his wife.
Okay, maybe we’re being mean. Maybe, just maybe, we can see some Another World in the original Metal Gear Solid; some cinematics can be described as “virtuoso” (these tend to be the silent ones), and the setups for small-scale grunt conflicts express an eerie tightness which insinuates that Kojima, like Chahi, had allowed “play situations” to come along naturally. Likewise, we recall Fumito Ueda describing the production of Ico as “design by subtraction” — they designed puzzle-challenges one at a time, and then arranged them in the best logical order, eliminating the ones that were too easy, too hard, or redundant. Many confrontations in the Metal Gear Solid series feel the same way; it’s just that Kojima seems to adore the raw concept of the videogame on far too many levels. The fans have grown up alongside him, and they find the idea of Shakespeare in Japanese: Starring US Army Special Forces, Giant Robots, and Cyborg Ninjas to be as captivating as he must find it hilarious.
If anything, we arrive at the core of this analysis believing in the cold center of our hearts that the “design by subtraction” that Fumito Ueda speaks of is the only way to make an excellent videogame. We arrive at the conclusion of our list of the Best Games Ever awakened to the fact that Level Design is the most important part of any game, be it an epic cluster of entertainment purposely fashioned to be impenetrable to non-gamers or a sleek and simple rope-like experience. Game designers: think of a single, sharp, spear-like mechanic, stick with it, set it in stone, and then make awesome levels. If there’s a mood you want to go for, keep it in mind. In short: be cool, and you too can make a masterpiece. Even if your single mechanic is amazing, it doesn’t mean anything without great levels. However, even a bare-bones mechanic (like, say, “running and jumping”) can make for spectacular entertainment if the levels are great (Super Mario Bros. 3).
No one loves on Another World enough, these days. Five furious minutes of internet research have yielded us the information that no major gaming news / review site has ever put Another World on its list of the best games ever — not even at #100. These are lists that have hecking Hogan’s Alley or Kingdom Hearts on them, for God’s sake.
It’s safe to say that some of the right people like this game, however. We can’t exactly prove it, though when we played Call of Duty 4, there were times where we felt like everyone involved in that game must have instinctively gotten the point of Another World: for every moment of commanding officers shouting orders, there is a balancing poetic moment of fine level design; when the game twists the “conventions” of its “genre”, it does so matter-of-factly, without pretention, a post-Kojima kind of anti-bravado.
Gears of War‘s cover mechanic still feels to us more like something out of a 2D platform-action game — and a specific one, at that — than an FPS, which is probably why it works so well in 3D.
Half-Life 2‘s gravity gun is a whole game in and of itself, and the greater part of the game simply radiates with confidence and direction.
And then there’s the issue of Portal: like Another World, it begins disorientingly, and it ends apocalyptically. It tells a story with feet; it lets the player absorb the atmosphere and make of it what he or she will. It’s talky, though never annoying, because it’s also funny (at least to us). No one (even us) can accuse it of being “too linear”, because, like Another World — and unlike Half-Life 2 — your character literally is a prisoner in a restricted world.
Like Another World, Portal has often been criticized as being “too short”.
A game cannot be too short if it’s memorable. Portal‘s sterile atmosphere implants itself in our brains precisely because there exist moments of visual clash; the dialogue implants itself in our brains because it rides a change in theme. And the main reason the game works is because it has a brilliant mechanic: the Portal Gun. Another World is a better game than Portal, mostly, because we say so. Because it’s not glib, and offers no reason for no one not to like it. It is honest, humble, noble, and at the same time hugely artistic and expressive. It tells a story, it presents awesome, unforgettable gunfights, and it lingers in the back of the mind for an eternity. It is the closest videogames have yet come to a great film, and we probably shouldn’t ignore it anymore. Every element that causes critics to jump up and down with joy in modern games existed in a perfect, pure form in Another World. Everyone making games — or writing about them, or playing them — should either play it, play it again, or at least think about it. Because, seriously, though we can’t say with a straight face that we “need” more games like this, once we have a whole bunch more of them, we’ll definitely start wondering what we did without them.
–tim rogers
* Footnote: no, there is no particular reason we didn’t mention Flashback in this review. We thought about going back and adding it to the part re: Abe’s Oddysee, though we hesitated and now can’t remember the exact intended wording. Anyway, Flashback is a very nice game as well. It just tries a tiny bit too hard. We also almost mentioned Beyond Good and Evil because it too was envisioned by a French man, though we figured maybe we shouldn’t bother. That’d be like telling a Japanese person that you like Haruki Murakami and having them reply immediately with “I don’t know, man, I prefer Ryu Murakami.” Seriously, a man’s peers aren’t decided by his last name.
★★★★
“THE BEST VIDEOGAME OF ALL-TIME.”
Another World (released as “Out of This World” in the US and “Outer World” in Japan) is, perhaps by default, the best game of all-time by our criteria: it was designed and programmed by virtually one man, it is not long, it features no heads-up display to clutter the screen, it features precisely one weapon which can be used for three purposes (regular attack, charge attack, shield) using only one button (we love games that let us hold down a button and then let go), it possesses unshakable confidence in the sharpness of its mechanic (conveyed in level design that prompts the player to use his multi-faceted gun in many creative ways), it features puzzles whose solutions require no more than common sense, it has amazing music, it is gorgeous to look at, and it tells a story while it moves, relentlessly, never stopping, never preaching, never speaking, from the frightening beginning right up to the heartbreaking conclusion.
Out of This World was ahead of its time in 1991, and it is still ahead of not-its time in 2008. One might call it an art film of a videogame. This wouldn’t be a wrong description so much as a lazy one. It’s more of a silent film of a videogame. Or, better than that, it is a videogame of a videogame.
Out of This World shows (not tells) us the story of Lester Knight Chaykin, a red-haired physicist working in some kind of laboratory. The introduction scene impresses us immediately with visions of the familiar: a car (headlights), a building, a thunderstorm. Lester — whose name we will only know if we’ve read it out of the instruction manual — descends into his laboratory and boots up a large computer. He leans back in his chair. He sips a can of what might be beer. It’ll be the last can of what might be beer that he’ll ever have. A lightning bolt strikes the building outside. We see Lester’s car again, for a split second. Something explodes and implodes simultaneously deep inside the lab. A spherical hole replaces Lester’s chair. The screen hangs there for a moment, perfect, weighty cinematography befitting . . . cinema. Then there’s a crash, and a splash. Lester materializes in a pool of water. Vine-like tentacles begin to reach toward the sunlight on the surface of the pool.
The game begins.
Out of This World, from this moment until its fascinating conclusion, represents an Actual Genius’s osmosed omniscience regarding game design: we can say that it is Super Mario Bros. turned on its ear. In Super Mario Bros., the player knows he has to go to the right because his recognizable-as-human avatar is facing to the right, and standing just left of the center of the screen. The reason for going to the right is explained only in the instruction manual: a dragon has kidnapped a princess, and Mario must get her back (our imaginations fill in the perhaps-promise of getting laid). Out of This World doesn’t need an instruction manual: here we have a hero who was in one place, and is now in another. Sinking in a pool of water is objectively worse (humans can’t breathe underwater) a situation than sitting in a desk chair drinking beer (what’s a few dead brain cells?). We must get out of here. To further impress the situation upon us, we have those growing, evil tentacles.
It is possible to die a grisly, uniquely animated death not one second into Out of This World. It’s likely that the designer, one Eric Chahi, intended for the player to die the first time the game began. This is how you die in the beginning of the game: you don’t press any buttons. You just stare at the beautiful and serene pool of water. This is, in fact, what most people would do, if they found themselves suddenly transported from a desk chair in a laboratory to a pool of water beneath a vaguely alien sun. That one second is long enough for Lester to sink just far enough for the evil tentacles to grab him. Now you’re being dragged underwater. The next thing you know, you’re dead.
All great art tends to originate from a somewhat shy little need. Most of the time, the “need” is only a placebo. The artist eventually realizes he didn’t need anything. Like The Stone Roses said, “You don’t have to wait to die / the kingdom’s all inside”. Or something. Eric Chahi’s production of Another World began when he saw the game Dragon’s Lair, found the animation fascinating, and dreamt up — probably in a split second, while standing dead still in the middle of an intersection with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand — a method to make similarly fluid animation using much less data storage space. He set to work immediately, having no clue what he was going to make — only a basic idea of how he was going to do it. It’s said he planned at first only to make a game like Karateka and Prince of Persia, only in a science-fiction setting. He spent half a year developing his excessively complicated though ultimately amazingly efficient animation technique. He developed it the only sane way: while using it to make a cinematic introduction for his game.
Now it was time to make a game. Eric Chahi presumably did not bother to jot his game design idea onto a bar napkin. The “game design” pre-production phase of Another World did not exist. Chahi had presumably had a simple idea brewing. When it came time to make a game, he figuratively snapped his fingers, and a genie exploded out of his ears.
Every third man who owns an electric guitar will claim to have met and hung out with the person who only they consider “the best unknown singer / songwriter alive today”. These singer / songwriter-warriors often impart the same advice regarding songwriting to every friend cool enough to drink a beer with them: if you want to write a song, man, just heckin’ write a song. Anything can be a song. A song can be anything. And If you have a song, sing it. This is not just the method for writing songs — you can replace these verbs and adjectives at random, and you’ll end up with a pretty fool-proof philosophy.
Another World is a song of a videogame. The dumbfounding simplicity of its core mechanics are such that they must have been set in stone from the very moment Chahi began level design. Chahi says, nowadays, that the level design was done completely at random, in a spur-of-the-moment sort of way, and this sticks: only when the game design is so thoroughly complete is the level design allowed to be spur-of-the-moment.
The basic gist of Another World is that you must not die. You play the part of a man in a world completely different from the home of cars and laboratories glimpsed in the introduction, and then never again. You escape from the tentacles in the pool to find yourself on a barren, rocky planet. You may walk either to the right or to the left. To the left is a cliff, and a vine. To the right are some slugs. If a slug bites your leg, you will see a pan-flash close-up animation of a silver stinger cutting through khaki. Then it’s back to the main screen. Lester falls over, dead. Your next attempt, you might try pressing a button. Press the Action Button, and Lester kicks. Kick the slugs to kill them. Press the Jump Button to hop over the slugs. Keep moving right, and you will come face-to-face with a beast. The beast is huge, and black. It is, in fact, the first thing you see upon exiting the pool at the beginning of the game: the beast is standing on a cliff in the distance. When you emerge from the water, he turns and gallops off-screen. You cannot kill the beast, and you will immediately know this because you know how Lester is hardly a match for a slug. Whether you walked left at the beginning of the game or not, whether you saw that vine and that cliff or not, you will be compelled to run back the way you came by virtue of the fact that the beast literally takes up most of the right side of the screen. You will run left, jumping over the slugs. The beast chases you. You run all the way off the edge of the cliff, grab the vine, and swing around as the beast rears up to avoid falling. Now you have to run again to the right, jumping over the slugs again. Make your way all the way back to the screen where you met the beast; when you run off the right side of the screen, the game suddenly betrays your just-founded expectations (that running off the edge of one screen takes you to a new screen) by having your character fall backward onto the rocky ground. Robe-shrouded, large humanoid forms walk into the frame. The beast comes gallopping into the screen. One of the robed men immediately shoots the beast with a concealed weapon. The beast crumples into a pile. Lester stands up, thanking his saviors. He is punched in the gut with a laserbeam, and the screen fades to black.
You wake up in a cage. It’s a brief cut-scene. You see an alien sitting across from you. This is very important: at the lower-right corner of the screen is one of the robed aliens. He immediately removes his robe. Underneath is a large, albino-gorilla-like muscular being wearing a skin-tight black shirt and briefs. This alien being is precisely identical to the alien beings mining in the background — and the alien sitting next to us in our cage. Why are we in the cage? As with most of the questions presented in Another World, this is a question we don’t need to ask. We can ask it — and then answer it — anyway: these aliens all look precisely the same. Lester doesn’t look anything like them. Lester is in the cage, perhaps, because he is an obviously intelligent being who looks nothing like the resident intelligent beings of this world. The narrative plays our brain on subconscious levels: if Lester is arrested for looking different, then these people might have some kind of racism in their hearts. That would make them inherently bad. We don’t hesitate to assume that the reason they locked up one of their own kind is because he is not bad. If the game’s first puzzle is getting out of the pool, and the second puzzle is escaping from the beast, the third is wondering why these terrible things keep happening to us. The solution to the puzzle involves a leap of conscience: escape from the cage. Escaping from the cage requires as much common sense as swimming out of the water. In the water, you pressed up. In the cage, you press right and left to make it swing. Make it swing once, and the guard in the lower-right shouts some unintelligible alien words at you. He fires his gun into the air. Guards appear in the background. Now you know you’re on the right track. Swing harder. The cage falls off its chain and crushes the guard dead. A quick cut-scene shows Lester’s hand approaching the floor, picking up a gun. The guards in the background panic.
The rest of the game begins.
The immediate, short-term, and long-term goals will, for the duration of the experience, be “move”, and “survive”. Moving will involve running and jumping; surviving will involve shooting and dodging.
Another World is a game centered on death. As we’ve established, Eric Chahi’s inspiration for creating it came from looking at Dragon’s Lair and wondering if he could create a similar graphical effect using much less storage space. There had to be a little more to the Dragon’s Lair inspiration than Eric Chahi has perhaps let on. Dragon’s Lair‘s initial appeal was its full-motion-video graphics. It was better than something that looked “like” a cartoon — it was a cartoon. That was enough, in Dragon’s Lair‘s day and age. People wouldn’t care about the control or depth of a game if it looked like absolutely nothing they’d ever seen before within the same medium. You play Dragon’s Lair by pressing the correct button as dictated by a glint on the screen. Press that button, and the hero will move, initiating a “successful” video segment. Don’t press that button, and the current segment of video will flow directly into the “failure” animation. Dragon’s Lair‘s conscience is a weird one to peg, however, because nearly as much attention is paid to “failure” as to “success”. Some would even argue that watching your hero die is more interesting than watching him succeed. If you have only successfully completed Dragon’s Lair without making any mistakes, then you haven’t seen the whole game. Another World is the same way, only — thanks to the beautiful animations taking up much less data storage space than full-motion video — there’s an actual game shoehorned into it.
Dragon’s Lair had been joyfully free of then-modern videogame genre restrictions: the action was shown from many bizarre, quasi-cinematic angles. Another World was intended from the outset to be an experiment in streamlining an artistic game experience. So it ended up as a side-scroller in the vein of Super Mario Bros. Chahi probably never had a doubt in his mind that many of the set-pieces in the game would rely on use of a context-sensitive Action Button. It’s the button you will immediately think to press when an alien grabs you buy the shoulders; press it in time and you kick him in the groin, and he drops you. No game has done Action Buttoning as well as Another World, try as games might. The simplicity of the situations — always one man, expressively and silently facing a faceless opponent in a unique struggle — and the honest, terse dread of every moment-to-moment conflict lend themselves well to a just-barely-subconscious instinct that knows to Press That One Button. The variety of set pieces exploits the Action Button’s function and timing in enough entertaining ways to qualify this game as a masterpiece, as the undisputed king of the “adventure” genre, far better than all those point-and-clickers with their byzantine puzzles with arcane solutions and tacked-on tacky humor. Then the game goes and takes one step closer to the edge of the Grand Canyon, when Lester picks up a gun; minutes later, we are playing The Greatest Videogame Ever.
Pick up the gun and proceed one screen to the right. You will see guards in the halls. The gun is the king in Another World: no living thing survives more than one shot. Landing that one shot is the trick. In your second fight, you will see a guard hold his gun out, and a ball of energy grow at the tip. Eventually, the ball of energy will become a shield roughlythe height of his body. He will then poke his arm out of the shield and fire at you. You can duck his shots. The game is telling you to hold your own Action Button down. Hold it down long enough, and you produce your own shield. Poke your arm out and shoot at his shield. Shoot his shield enough to break it. Or you can hold your trigger until the glowing ball appears, and then let go to fire a massive, shield-destroying shot. With the shield destroyed, fire another quick zap to disintegrate your enemy.
If Another World were made today, or one day later, or one day earlier, you maybe would have just had a gun that fired when you pressed the fire button. Maybe you would have gotten another gun, later, which fired really fast, and a third gun, which fired really big bullets. Another World‘s game design, however, was gracefully decided in what we’ve determined was the length of a snap of the creator’s fingers. A gorgeous one-off informed by all that was ever fun in videogames, and all that would ever come to be.
To recap, your gun can:
1. Fire enemy-killing lasers
2. Create a force shield capable of absorbing several shots
3. Fire a charged shot capable of destroying an enemy force shield in one burst
The level design escalates smoothly, then sharply. We learn how to shoot. We learn how to shield. We learn how to break shields. Then the game pushes us down an elevator shaft, the sink-or-swim approach. Soon, we’re making shields on staircases, or making two shields, or three. Soon, we have enemies attacking from two fronts. Eventually, we’re attacking enemies with craft. Each screen, each skirmish, becomes a little puzzle. Another World owes its elegance in no small part to its screen-by-screen nature. Like Pac-Man, like Donkey Kong, all action in the game takes place within one screen. What we can see right now is what matters. Maybe some literary theme is hiding behind the scenes of this, or maybe not. Either way, it works, because the creator only needed to think of every gunfight in the context of one screen.
Some will say that Another World‘s controls are hokey, or ropey. We say that they are exactly as they’re supposed to be. We’re not even going to cop-out and say that life is hokey and ropey, nor are we going to say that the characters in Gears of War move really slowly. We’re just going to say that everything bows to the game design. We believe that the highest compliment one can pay a single-player adventure game is that a two-player deathmatch mode, with each player controlling a clone of the main character, would be amazing. This is certainly the case in Another World: we can imagine a single-screen arena where players are free to set up shields, blast shields down, and take shots at one another. In that context, the controls would feel just right. It’d be at least as engaging as Pac-Man Vs., or as entertaining as four-player “Don’t Touch The Floor” in Bionic Commando: Rearmed.
The game flows along, through Action Button scenes, platform segments, environmental puzzles, split-second-long yet mesmerizing cut-scenes, and increasingly elaborate gunfights. Lester will eventually have to swim, solve a dastardly puzzle requiring him to flood a large cave, and pilot a tank in a death arena. All the while, you keep running, terrified. The story shows itself deliberately, with elaborate foreground and background animations. Eventually, there’s a “main bad guy”, who looks exactly like every other alien — including your buddy. The “final battle”, which you fight on your stomach, crawling at one-sixteenth your previous walking speed, involves a hysterically brilliant play on the physical appearance of the aliens, eliminating all doubt: no, Eric Chahi most definitely did not make all the aliens look the same because he was lazy. (Then again, to say he intended this conclusion all along would negate what he’d said about doing the level design randomly. In other words, Eric Chahi is even more of a genius for deciding to stage the final battle the way he did. Wow.)
The ending is beautiful, and you’ll never forget it.
Certain questions regarding Another World‘s continuity will only ever be asked by fourteen-year-old kids: at the beginning of the game, we see these aliens shooting a beast with a gun. If the only purpose of having a gun is to hunt for safety or for food, why is there a shield function? The answer to the question is, of course, another question: why are the aliens imprisoning one of their own, who happens to look exactly like they look? Eventually, if you want it, Another World becomes about more than survival. Eventually, a quite frankly spooky theme settles down gently over the experience: we are a man sprinting for freedom in an absolutely, mind-crushingly foreign universe. There it is: no matter how sharply the rules of life might suddenly change, any man will know from instinct alone what freedom is.
Right after the first gunfight, Lester and his Alien Buddy get on an elevator. You can go down — the right way — or you can go up. If you go up, you will find yourself in a small, dome-shaped room with a window. Walk over and look out the window. We see through Lester’s eyes. The first time you see it, you don’t know what to think.
It’s a view of the expanse of this terrifyingly foreign world. Immediately, you look at that, and you know you’re going to die. You know Lester is going to die, some day, even if — especially if — he survives this. All at once, the Looney Tunes nature of grisly death and oblivious rebirth subconsciously becomes an essential artistic element of Another World‘s design.
Playing Another World before age sixteen can, probably, make one a better human being in the end. It’s certainly more qualifiable as “art” than any Disney animation.
Aw, we shouldn’t have said that. That was kind of rude.
Another World is a lean game, designed through a series of what must have been excruciatingly difficult choices. Chahi chose not to incorporate every possible gun/shield-dynamic permutation into the game, because this isn’t a game “about” shooting. Overstaying his welcome was never Chahi’s intent. Chahi’s intent, presumably, was to make a game that begins, middles, and ends. He composed event sequences on the fly, maybe fiddled with the arrangement, and then set about removing what didn’t work perfectly well. This is something modern game designers don’t do, more often than not. Just ask the crew behind the Final Fantasy games: past a certain point in the development, if an idea is still sitting on the table, it will be in the game. It’s a terrifying staring contest. Luckily, one man can’t have a staring contest with himself, so Another World, with regard to flow, is absolutely perfect.
Modern game designers also toil over the question of how to balance story and action segments: if the game is too hard, the player won’t be able to witness the full extent of the story, which means we might as well not have a story. Attention, game developers: if you’re thinking this, maybe your game is, at its core, too long, too complicated, or just plain boring. Another World keeps the context front and center, and the most complicated it gets is offering us the opportunity to easily kill a near-invincible guard by climbing into the tunnel above his chamber and shooting a hanging green orb the instant we see his reflection pass under it. We’ve previously said that Lost Vikings and Portal are amazing games because the level designers stop at nothing to exploit every facet of their brilliant mechanics; now, we’re going to say that Another World is more brilliant because it possesses sparkling self-confidence, and uses its mechanics as a tool. It stays cool-headed, elegant, and noble until the end. It isn’t a “game” with an “engine”; it’s an experience, one big, elaborate “puzzle”. It’s a story. It just happens to contain the bones and sinews of an excellent game. As a “piece of art” where the focal theme is the utter dread of being a stranger in a strange land, both the very concept of dying and being reborn (offered the chance to try again) in a videogame and the Looney-Tunes-like snap-to presentation of the post-death rebirth lends itself perfectly to the theme. From the moment this man’s life is upset (again: transported from a laboratory to a bizarre alien world), we know deep down, instinctually, that he will die some day, and so will we. His multiple deaths in our effort to learn the ins and outs of the experience perfectly — and, (crucially,) accidentally — present us with a plausible “ending” at any and every deadly turn. No one can ever pronounce Another World‘s thoughtfulness “pretentious”, because it’s not. It’s unassuming, nonchalant, confident, and cool. In short: yes, it’s French.
Another World is just simply not a game in which to stand still. This is crucial: casual players the world over can aesthetically break any game in three to four seconds by standing still. During its conflict phases, Another World will not let you stand still. It works a miraculous magic on the player, compelling him to always be acting out his role.
The second fight we find ourselves in involves several guards coming from the left side of the screen. Our New Alien Friend pounds away at a computer panel. We immediately recognize our role, without some FPS-like commanding officer barking orders at us: keep the enemies back while our man opens the door. This is as fist-sized and logistical as the fights will get, or will ever need to get, for Another World to prove its point.
Other games saw fit to expand on Another World‘s spear-like, joyfully geometric mechanics in rudimentary, fundamental, or elaborate ways. Interplay’s Blackthorne is perhaps best described as Another World: The Videogame: the level designers picked up the slack and put Another World‘s crisp conflict model into a non-stop, overwhelmingly thorough puzzle-solving blast-a-thon. Years later, Oddworld Inhabitants, perhaps thinking they were being clever, unleashed Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, which they paraded as a brilliant, brand-new thing. Going by the way the developer hyped it to the media, they seriously believed it would be the Next Huge Thing, the next Super Mario. The game was essentially Another World, turned into a “videogame”, expanded, multiplied by eleven, and starring hideous character designs that not even a mother’s mother could love. (Thus we actually happen to like the game a lot.)
Modern games have inherited Another World‘s showmanship and close to none of its subtlety. BioShock pays fetishistic, loving attention to its own world, which it realizes with an awe-inspiring level of beauty: despite being very obviously a videogame, a “simulation”, its visual and sonic confidence exudes subconscious-like understanding of the greatness of Another World. Too bad the “game” part is convoluted and bogged down by a design document that no doubt contained an entire ream-long section labeled “Bullstuff”.
Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami has gone on record as considering Another World the absolute best game of all-time, and the primary influence on Resident Evil. Using Another World as a yardstick, we can say that Resident Evil is hilariously unsuccessful — it is laden with red keys, red doors, blue keys, blue doors, and an inventory management system that smacks of the developers being scared that the game wouldn’t have “enough stuff” in it. It goes without saying that Resident Evil possessed the opportunity to be as sophisticated and perfect as Another World; however, through the process of think-tanking and regularly scheduled Monday-morning hung-over brainstorms, through the absolute lack of “common sense” as a job requirement for the level designers (or: the absolute lack of the “level designer” in post-Famicom-era Japanese game development), the game became unnecessarily dirty. When it came time to “improve” the game in sequels, we ended up with only more bullstuff. Resident Evil 4, an amazing and beautiful game in its own right, saw Mikami getting conscientious, and leaning closer to the dream of Another World. The “horror movie” genre of videogame had perhaps been too ambitious, Mikami must have noticed. So they went about making an “action movie”. It worked tremendously well, and had it featured only one truly awesome gun and no speaking cut-scenes (seriously: heck that radio stuff), we’d probably love it a whole lot more than we already do.
Goichi Suda, CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture and director of games such as Killer 7, Flower, Sun, and Rain, The Silver Case, and No More Heroes, all titles so close to being masterpieces that they suck royally, is also a repeat professor of his love of Another World. Suda’s love of Another World stems from its absolute unwavering execution of atmospheric mood. You can see plenty of influence in Suda’s titles, if you squint hard enough. The confidence evident in the sound design and visual sense alone earn his games hall-of-fame status. However, the issue of game design has a problem — namely, that there isn’t any. We can certainly see what Suda is driving at with games like No More Heroes: he is imagining a concept and a world, and is keeping the game elements to a minimum so as to allow each boss encounter to be a game in and of itself. The problem is that he hasn’t hit on the right minimum yet.
Fumito Ueda would have to be the only Japanese game designer who “truly” “gets” the Another World aesthetic. He, too, praises Another World above all games. When we interviewed him on the subject of Shadow of the Colossus in 2004, we asked him some questions about Another World, and he replied by very frankly saying that it depresses him when he reads gushing reviews of ICO, which fail to note the copious Another World homages. Ueda is a game designer’s game designer, and he may or may not surpass Another World in the future. For now, however, his parents allow him the keys to the Ferrari, though not the Lamborghini: Ueda had apparently wanted Shadow of the Colossus to not feature any kind of HUD display at all, like Another World, only his higher-ups literally told him that having no HUD would result in the game being “looked-down upon” as “unsophisticated” by critics and players. What kind of hecked-up world do we live in, where (#1) people who have worked at a company for 30 years, being promoted only because they’re not doing anything worthy of being promoted (and laws of societal niceness dictate that we not tell a man implicitly that he’s “not making anything better”) are trusted over people with genuine creativity (#2) someone with a university degree can possibly think that a little icon showing a sword is absolutely necessary in a videogame where the main character stands in the center of the screen and one can clearly see, at all times, that he is holding a sword? It’s like face portraits by dialogue boxes in RPGs: these days, when the characters are so big and expressive, having a face portrait by the dialogue box is freaky and depressing. Either way, Shadow of the Colossus can’t be a perfect game, because there’s no explanation for why the bow has unlimited arrows. What a pity! We will gladly, turgidly anticipate his next works, however, because it’s clear he both loves Another World‘s vibe and appreciates Zelda‘s aims. A bullstuff-free, flowing game possessing Zelda‘s attention to detail could be amazing.
Of all the Japanese game designers claiming to love Another World more than any other game, ever, Hideo Kojima would have to be the most hilarious and ironic. He makes the longest, ugliest, most logically convoluted orchestrated fatuosities yet produced by modern man in the name of attempted entertainment; if he actually loves Another World, we have to say that his love has not inspired him, or, rather, his love has inspired him to run like the wind in the opposite direction. Furthermore, we would like to express our condolences to his wife.
Okay, maybe we’re being mean. Maybe, just maybe, we can see some Another World in the original Metal Gear Solid; some cinematics can be described as “virtuoso” (these tend to be the silent ones), and the setups for small-scale grunt conflicts express an eerie tightness which insinuates that Kojima, like Chahi, had allowed “play situations” to come along naturally. Likewise, we recall Fumito Ueda describing the production of Ico as “design by subtraction” — they designed puzzle-challenges one at a time, and then arranged them in the best logical order, eliminating the ones that were too easy, too hard, or redundant. Many confrontations in the Metal Gear Solid series feel the same way; it’s just that Kojima seems to adore the raw concept of the videogame on far too many levels. The fans have grown up alongside him, and they find the idea of Shakespeare in Japanese: Starring US Army Special Forces, Giant Robots, and Cyborg Ninjas to be as captivating as he must find it hilarious.
If anything, we arrive at the core of this analysis believing in the cold center of our hearts that the “design by subtraction” that Fumito Ueda speaks of is the only way to make an excellent videogame. We arrive at the conclusion of our list of the Best Games Ever awakened to the fact that Level Design is the most important part of any game, be it an epic cluster of entertainment purposely fashioned to be impenetrable to non-gamers or a sleek and simple rope-like experience. Game designers: think of a single, sharp, spear-like mechanic, stick with it, set it in stone, and then make awesome levels. If there’s a mood you want to go for, keep it in mind. In short: be cool, and you too can make a masterpiece. Even if your single mechanic is amazing, it doesn’t mean anything without great levels. However, even a bare-bones mechanic (like, say, “running and jumping”) can make for spectacular entertainment if the levels are great (Super Mario Bros. 3).
No one loves on Another World enough, these days. Five furious minutes of internet research have yielded us the information that no major gaming news / review site has ever put Another World on its list of the best games ever — not even at #100. These are lists that have hecking Hogan’s Alley or Kingdom Hearts on them, for God’s sake.
It’s safe to say that some of the right people like this game, however. We can’t exactly prove it, though when we played Call of Duty 4, there were times where we felt like everyone involved in that game must have instinctively gotten the point of Another World: for every moment of commanding officers shouting orders, there is a balancing poetic moment of fine level design; when the game twists the “conventions” of its “genre”, it does so matter-of-factly, without pretention, a post-Kojima kind of anti-bravado.
Gears of War‘s cover mechanic still feels to us more like something out of a 2D platform-action game — and a specific one, at that — than an FPS, which is probably why it works so well in 3D.
Half-Life 2‘s gravity gun is a whole game in and of itself, and the greater part of the game simply radiates with confidence and direction.
And then there’s the issue of Portal: like Another World, it begins disorientingly, and it ends apocalyptically. It tells a story with feet; it lets the player absorb the atmosphere and make of it what he or she will. It’s talky, though never annoying, because it’s also funny (at least to us). No one (even us) can accuse it of being “too linear”, because, like Another World — and unlike Half-Life 2 — your character literally is a prisoner in a restricted world.
Like Another World, Portal has often been criticized as being “too short”.
A game cannot be too short if it’s memorable. Portal‘s sterile atmosphere implants itself in our brains precisely because there exist moments of visual clash; the dialogue implants itself in our brains because it rides a change in theme. And the main reason the game works is because it has a brilliant mechanic: the Portal Gun. Another World is a better game than Portal, mostly, because we say so. Because it’s not glib, and offers no reason for no one not to like it. It is honest, humble, noble, and at the same time hugely artistic and expressive. It tells a story, it presents awesome, unforgettable gunfights, and it lingers in the back of the mind for an eternity. It is the closest videogames have yet come to a great film, and we probably shouldn’t ignore it anymore. Every element that causes critics to jump up and down with joy in modern games existed in a perfect, pure form in Another World. Everyone making games — or writing about them, or playing them — should either play it, play it again, or at least think about it. Because, seriously, though we can’t say with a straight face that we “need” more games like this, once we have a whole bunch more of them, we’ll definitely start wondering what we did without them.
–tim rogers
* Footnote: no, there is no particular reason we didn’t mention Flashback in this review. We thought about going back and adding it to the part re: Abe’s Oddysee, though we hesitated and now can’t remember the exact intended wording. Anyway, Flashback is a very nice game as well. It just tries a tiny bit too hard. We also almost mentioned Beyond Good and Evil because it too was envisioned by a French man, though we figured maybe we shouldn’t bother. That’d be like telling a Japanese person that you like Haruki Murakami and having them reply immediately with “I don’t know, man, I prefer Ryu Murakami.” Seriously, a man’s peers aren’t decided by his last name.
2008
text by tim rogers
★★★★
I hope you guys had fun reading this website, because I’m probably not going to bother writing on it anymore!
The reason would be Treasure’s Bangai-O Spirits, a game so perfect and so deep that when it comes right down to the wire, I’d probably rather be sealed in a sensory deprivation tank playing it against my best friend for millenia than working, vacationing in the Bahamas, or even having pseudo-violent sex. That’s the sign of a good game, right there — if you’d willingly give up an opportunity to let a girl live out her fantasy to rape a man just so that you could deflect projectiles for a couple more hours. I get this feeling, playing this game — if I keep deflecting projectiles, eventually I’ll be so good at deflecting projectiles that I won’t even need to close my eyes or tense my knees to ejaculate. I will simply be. I will flow.
Maybe that’s not enough for the videogame company PR dudes who troll this website (hi dad!), so let’s put it into more back-of-boxy language:
Bangai-oh Spirits is “Brain Training” for God. He spake unto the earth: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last, the Street Fighter II and the Street Fighter III, the Sin and Punishment and the Ikaruga, the carbon dioxide and the oxygen, the Bangai-oh Spirits for the Nintendo DS.”
This isn’t just the best game Treasure has ever made — hell, it isn’t even just the best game they can make, it’s a 210-gun salute to the head of the pathology they’ve waved proudly for the last decade and a half of their illustrious careers designing quirky little games that only morbidly obese people like myself seem capable of enjoying. It’s them dropping all their cards — five aces, including the elusive Golden Ace of Knives — on the table and putting a pistol in their mouth and saying heck you, I will pull this trigger, I swear I will.
This is hardly hyperbole.
Bangai-O Spirits is a puzzle game, a shooting game, a fighting game, an MMORPG. It is Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter III at the same time. In this age of Everyday Shooter and dozens of other one-man games that let you use two analog sticks to move and shoot at the same time, Treasure steps in with an update to their own Robotron riff, and they manage to outclass literally everyone, even without the multidirectional shooting gimmick.
What’s so good about the game? It’s kind of hard to put it in a few words, so we’ll have to break with tradition and actually discuss the way the game plays — not yet, though, don’t worry. I know, you wish I’d just keep talking about my penis for the duration of the review, though hey, sometimes we humans have to endure boring stuff.
The tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits is pretty boring. However, unlike an actual school, the long-winded tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits teaches you how to be objectively awesome. Each tutorial stage opens with a dialogue between three characters — a commander with an eyepatch, a young girl with large breasts, and a too-cool youth in a hip military uniform. In addition to teaching you how to use weapons, the commander also manages to enrage the cool youth: as the tutorials get more complicated and wordy, toward the end, the kid literally says that he didn’t realize he signed up for “an actual robot anime” — he just thought the robot and the anime characters on the box were there to draw in anime fans. The professor then gets defensive, insinuating that the end of Evangelion was “the best part”. Not making this up! When you beat the tutorial, the commander says, “We’ve defeated the Tutorial Army!” And the kid says, “That was fast. If we sell this game back now, do you think we can get at least 3,500 yen for it?”
Bangai-O Spirits: It burns!
The professor — and the girl — are quick to point out that the game has over 160 stages in the “Free play” mode, and that you can edit your own stages and play multiplayer, if you want. The kid shrugs this off, says that “stage-editing is for losers”.
And just like that — you’ll never see those three anime stereotypes again.
This is refreshing, when you consider that Treasure games have always had problems expressing story and character. Dynamite Headdy, their attempt to break into the mainstream with a “mascot” character, was a huge jumbled cluster of near-impossible challenges; it requires some degree of arcane voodoo magic to even get past the tutorial in that game, and it requires nerves of steel to like any of the bizarre characters. The music is Chinese water-torture. (The game itself is pretty alright.)
Treasure has gone through the weirdest phases of wanting to be popular and not giving a heck. Gunstar Heroes was an attempt to capitalize on a perceived opening in the action game market for people who didn’t like the look of Contra. It was apparently conceived as a kind of Sonic the Hedgehog with guns and fighting-game inspired close-quarters combat. Gunstar Heroes thrives whenever it’s not trying to tell a story, or be otherwise interesting. Each stage plays differently from the last, with a short shoot-em-up runup to the gimmick segments or boss parade: the Dice Palace stage, cited as the “best stage ever!” by game “journalists” with maybe a quarter-piece of their cranium missing, is all at once Treasure’s fragmentary genius and infuriating shortcomings rolled into one. It’s a line of pleasant little challenges — one-offs involving their pristine game engine — interrupted by an absolutely lazy hub where you roll a dice to move through a “board game” that’s just a straight line.
Gunstar Heroes begins to shine in stage five, which is titled “DESTROY THEM ALL” — contrary to what the lobotomites writing top-hundred lists will tell you, “DESTROY THEM ALL” is the “best stage ever”: all semblance of “level design” falls away, in the best way possible, and it’s just you, an entire enemy army, and occasional platforms. Flying enemies drop bombs, you jump up, grab them out of the air, and chuck them at towering robot walkers. Grunts run full-steam at you, and if you see an opening, you grab one and use him as a projectile, too. You do this over and over again for ten minutes, and the word “ENJOY” never vanishes from the stock-market ticker running across the bottom of your brain.
Why can’t Gunstar Heroes just be six straight hours of this? Why can’t it just never end? Let the computer just keep crunching the numbers and stuffting out bad guys — the more I kill, the more the computer stuffs. Zen Masters will tell you that there has to be balance, that without low points, high points wouldn’t feel as special, shadow lends context to light, et cetera, though really, Pac-Man Championship Edition is non-stop fun, and anyone who complains because there aren’t any NPCs to talk to is probably also a chimpanzee.
At any rate, Gunstar Heroes was something of a failure in Japan because
1. Most people on earth literally can’t read
2. It was on the MegaDrive, which was essentially the Xbox of its day.
Back then, people who owned MegaDrives in Japan were called “MegaDrivers”, just as the first wave of Xbox players called themselves “Xboxers”. Dynamite Headdy was Treasure’s idea of appealing to a broader audience — at least, in theory — and when the three-year-olds of the world found out that the instruction manual contained more words than “Happy” and “Fun”, it all went south.
Thus spake Alien Soldier, a schizophrenic, shattered velvet bag of demonic battle fragments. The full title of Alien Solider is, and I quote, “VISUAL SHOCK! SOUND SHOCK! NOW IS THE TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE ALIEN SOLDER FOR MEGADRIVERS CUSTOM“. In other words, they’re weren’t lying to themselves — or anyone, really. Alien Soldier‘s title screen contains perhaps the longest story crawl of the 16-bit era, and no amount of resetting the console will make it any less ridiculous. Watching the superplays embedded on the Sega Ages compilation disc are like attending a waterski wedding on the surface of the sun. The game’s arcane mechanics are a Treasure staple: encouraging the player to play in the most ridiculous, unattractive way possible. To wit: the strongest attack at your disposal isn’t the flaming, screen-spanning dash that you can only perform with full health (and even then, only once) — it’s the pixels-wide flames that erupt from your character’s back as he’s doing said dash. Playing the game to completion is equal to breaking it — finding the pixels that work, freezing there, and TKO’ing every opponent in the first instant of the fight.
Eventually, Treasure tried to make money, and mostly failed, because they thought a game needed a “story” to be a phenomenal hit, and the story in the relatively high-budget Sin and Punishment was so loopy and bizarre that you can’t overlook it; to say it was written on acid or after smoking much reefer is a criminal overstatment. It’s more like something written in one day by a man with really bad indigestion cascading into diarrhea. For its mechanics, it’s easily one of the best games of all-time, and though the cut-scenes are fiercely skippable, the very fact that it has a story (and that its music sounds like pornography for librarians) keeps it out of the specialest place in my heart. It also — and this is pure conjecture — kept the game from being released outside Japan, even though it was written entirely in English and intended primarily for US release.
All throughout the years, as Treasure floundered with the weirdest cartoon licenses (Tiny Toon Adventures, for god’s sake), I wished they’d just make a full-on fighting game with Gunstar Heroes mechanics. They kind of almost did that with Yuyu Hakusho for MegaDrive, and later Guardian Heroes for Saturn — and most recently two Bleach-based fighting games on the Nintendo DS — though the games always felt too focused on “personality” and “selling points”. And they never set the world on fire.
Treasure’s Ikaruga, which resulted seemingly from a sudden desire to make the cleanest, simplest shooting game of all time as a kind of counterpoint to their Radiant Silvergun, the clusterheckiest shooter ever conceived, ironically, was perhaps their most internationally acclaimed game; maybe this has had something to do with Treasure’s recent game design roll-backs.
Bangai-Oh! for Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64, has always been my favorite Treasure game, not so much for its “hilarious quirky dialogue” as for its crunchy shooting action. There’s very little fat in the game, and it’s quite an accomplishment that Bangai-O Spirits is even leaner.
ACTUALLY DISCUSSING THE GAME NOW
I’m not even going to bother discussing how this game differs from Bangai-Oh, because it doesn’t matter: Bangai-Oh hardly exists anymore. Instead, I’m going to try to explain to you why you should buy this game, and not something like, I don’t know, Super Smash Bros..
In Bangai-O Spirits, you control a giant robot — which happens to be only the size of one “block” of the playing field. I believe this was the core concept of the original game — control a cursor-sized player character that looks like a giant robot.
Your goal in this game is to destroy various targets in stages. A rough map of the stage, with the required targets highlighted, takes up the top screen. You move around on the lower screen.
You have five general kinds of attacks. Before each mission, you’re free to select which weapons you want to use.
Press the Y button to use one basic weapon, and the B button to use another one.
Press the A button to dash in the direction you’re facing. Press any direction while dashing to change direction.
Press the L button or the R button to use one of two “EX Attacks”. Hold the button to charge the EX attack, and release to unleash it. The more enemy bullets in your general area when you release the trigger, the fiercer the attack you’ll unleash. If you let go of the button just as a bullet is hitting you, the missiles emanating from your body will even increase in size.
There are seven types of basic weapons. None of them are “better” than any other. Each has a definite strength and a definite weakness. All bullets are capable of canceling out other bullets, meaning that “the best defense is a good offense” and “the best offense is a good defense” are more than just something karate teachers tell kids.
I will explain the weapon classes briefly:
1. Bound laser: Laser-like missiles that reflect off walls at 45-degree angles. Pros: Can be used to access unsuspecting enemies in tight spots. Cons: Very average strength.
2. Homing missiles: Missiles that chase enemies. Pros: will hunt enemies down for several seconds; no need to even aim, most of the time. Cons: Even weaker than the bound shot; sub-par mid-air turning radius.
3. Break shot: Special shots capable of canceling two enemy bullets instead of one. Pros: can be used to cut through an enemy’s bullet curtain. Cons: even weaker than homing shot.
4. Napalm shot: Super-powerful shot. Pros: relatively twice the power of a bound shot. Cons: very easily canceled — normal bound / homing shots can eat through two napalm shots before being canceled themselves; break shots can eat four napalm shots.
5. Sword: It’s a sword. Pros: ultra-powerful, ultra fast. Cons: ultra-short-range. Hard to move forward and close in while attacking.
6. Shield: It’s a shield. Position it by tapping a direction and pressing the attack button. Pros: eats any and all bullets endlessly. Stays in the direction where you put it. “Movable cover”, essentially. Doesn’t fade even when you fire your other weapon. Cons: kind of hard to get used to! (Though in a Treasure game, “Kind of hard to get used to” is often used to describe The One Thing The Game Designer Wants You To Do All The Time.)
7. Bat: A giant baseball bat. Pros: can deflect any projectiles back at the enemy. Can deflect dozens of projectiles at a time, even. Can even turn enemies into projectiles. Can also be used to hit physics objects (conveniently shaped like soccer balls, baseballs, basketballs). Cons: Kind of slow. Not much attack power on its own.
Some of these weapons can even be combined in Radiant Silvergun style — homing and bound, for example — by pressing both buttons at once.
Your default attack mode is “free” — you can move while shooting — and your robot can fly all around the stage, with delicious crispy coasting physics. However, should you tap an attack button twice and then hold it the second time, your character will enter “fixed” mode, and you’ll stop anywhere (even in mid-air) and be free to aim in any direction. Useful in so many ways.
Now I’ll explain the EX attacks. Man, I’m like IGN over here:
1. Homing: Fires a multitude of homing shots. Good for: wide-open spaces with lots of enemies.
2. Bound: Fires a multitude of bound shots. Good for: twisty tunnels and lots of projectiles.
3. Break: Fires a multitude of break shots. Good for: lots of bullets, feeling tricky.
4. Napalm: Fires a multitude of napalm shots. Good for: feeling lucky.
5. Freeze: Freezes enemy bullets in the air. The “Treasure Factor”. Good for: super-playing and “puzzle”-solving. The longer you hold the button, the longer the bullets freeze.
6. Reflect: Works like a bat, except in all directions all at once. Good for: people who know what the hell they’re doing.
All EX attacks (except Freeze) can be “focused” in a direction of your choosing. In the previous Bangai-Oh game, you could only blast the bullets in a circle around your character’s body. In Spirits, you can press a directional button in one of eight ways while charging your attack, and then release the button to unleash the attack in only that direction.
And that’s it. That’s the game’s engine. The instruction manual doesn’t even describe the weapons — it just tells you to play the tutorial and find out for yourself. It knows that if you’re holding that instruction manual, you’re a Treasure-gaming freak who doesn’t read manuals anyway.
The tutorial contains the game’s only instances of “Story”. Its little lessons cascade into something huge, and the last stage is a frustrating, amazing, idiotic feat of level design with an infuriating execution and an exhilirating climax. Once you get past it, you’re free — as you’ve always been — to play the “Free Play” mode, which has, yes, well over a hundred and four tens of stages. You can play the stages in any order. You don’t even have to clear one stage to move on to the next. The interface is DOS-like in its cleanliness. Press the right directional button to advance forward one stage. If you’ve cleared the stage, your best time and top score will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you want to play a stage, press the A button. Now you have the DOS-like weapon-select screen. Choose your arsenal and play the stage. If you die, sucks to be you. Choose “exit” to go back to the stage-select menu. Try different weapons.
Many stages are beatable with any weapon selection; few absolutely require use of the bat to obtain the “easy” solutions. Many stages feature hang-ups that force you to open the menu and restart. Some stages feature extended side-scrolls climaxing in epic one-on-five battles with steel-trap-minded opponents of equal abilities. Some stages are massive labyrinths with multiple targets and pursuing grunts. Some stages are vertical scrolls that force you to avoid cascading unbreakable blocks while breaking the correct breakable blocks in order to reach the target. Other stages begin with the player surrounded at point-blank range by four giant honkin’ beam cannons; the 3-2-1 countdown to the start of the stage is basically a countdown to the trigger being pulled. You have literally half of one second to figure out how to win.
All of the praises heaped on Wario Ware instead belong to this game; the yokels of the world jump on Wario for featuring Nintendo Characters, who are virtually like game journalists’ “childhood friends”, only better, because they actually exist. Wario Ware has “amazing” stages that begin with a screen of The Legend of Zelda — there’s Link, and there’s a cave in a wall. When the game starts, you have five seconds to get into the cave. Get in, and the game pats you on the head and moves to another challenge. Sure, there are some nice things to say for the vision of Wario Ware, though at the end of the day, it doesn’t make the player feel spiritually complete, much less any smarter: there’s something to be said for the game’s glee in forcing the player to sharpen his mind to a point where he can acknowledge in a microsecond what he’s supposed to do, though the game ultimately fails in the eyes of god (and me) for never telling the player why. Bangai-O Spirits is about a son-of-a-bitching giant robot with fantastic weapons; your character is a soldier fighting the bad guys. You have to survive so that you can fight again. The only way to survive is to DESTROY THEM ALL.
Sometimes it’s a puzzle game, sometimes it’s a platformer. Sometimes it’s a hardcore bullet-hell shooter. Sometimes it’s a fighting game meant to be played by robots with laser-eyes. It is Every Genre. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter what it is, because it’s Bangai-O. It’s mind-expanding. It’s a diamond-sharp core engine joyfully level-designed gang-bang-style by a team of dudes who have been putting the “crunch” in “scrunch” for over a decade now. On the one hand, they don’t give a stuff what order you play the levels in. On the other hand, they need you to play this game every day for the rest of your life. For this purpose, they have created a level-edit mode.
The level-edit mode is more than just level-design — it’s a shockingly deep elementary course in game design. I described the weapons above, right? If you have any imagination at all, your mind should be teeming with possibilities. Make a puzzle stage, make a rock-hard traditional-style platform stage. If you’ve got a crush on the “Reflect” EX attack, make a stage that puts a new spin on it. The game is saintly in its generosity. Like I said above, Treasure aren’t just shooting themselves in the foot with this game — they’re shooting themselves in the throat. If you be a man who loves hardcore action games, you don’t need anything else.
The platinum icing on this golden cake, however, is the multiplayer mode. I spent six minutes throwing together a long rectangular stage with soccer balls and two evil enemy Bangai-O clones in it, and then played a deathmatch with a friend. We used bats and EX reflect, and just had a screaming orgy, squealing like distorted schoolchildren for literally 25 rounds in a row. Remember when you were ten, and you played River City Ransom with your buddy, and you stood on a garbage can and your buddy kicked the garbage can, which made you slide toward the edge of the screen, so you jumped and kicked a guy in the head? Then, years later, remember when you first played Halo co-op, and your friend got in the driver’s seat of the Warthog and you got on the turret, and you guys drove around hecking stuff up? Well, even in this day and age where four friends can get on Xbox Live and play Halo 3 transcontinentally, with one guy driving the warthog, another guy manning the turret, a third in the passenger’s seat firing a sniper rifle, and a fourth on a Ghost flying around shooting lasers — Bangai-O Spirits manages to provide gaggingly huge thrills with tiny sprites and solid-color backgrounds. It’ll make you remember Halo, and then remember River City Ransom, and then remember Bangai-O Spirits — the game you are playing right now. At the low points, it’s like playing the best game ever; at the high points, what is on the screen in your hands is pretty much the same thing that huge-headed aliens see when they mind-heck each other for sleepless, foodless dozens of hours on end.
What might go down as the game’s biggest “mainstream” innovation is its ability to transmit data via audio files. It says on the back of the box: “For the first time in history, custom map and reload data can be transmitted as sound files.” That’s kind of neat. Here I’d thought, for the longest time, that Treasure despised the aural sense (what with the brapping scrapping scraping nonsense-bullstuff music and limp sound effects that tend to populate their games, this one kind-of included). It’s nice to see them acknowledging that human beings have ears, I suppose. To load map data, you put it on an iPod and then just hold a headphone over the DS microphone. Sounds wacky, I know. The first time it actually worked, it kind of scared me a little bit. I wouldn’t stuff my pants with amazement if this cute little feature, above all else, is what makes Treasure world-famous after all. Failing that — well, listen to a stage for yourself. Game or no game, I know some people who would pay good money to stand in a dark room and listen to grown men in Darth Vader suits make sounds like this for two hours and call it “music”. Hell, one of those people is me.
At present, the Amazon.co.jp score for this game is three and a half out of five stars. The first review on the page describes the game as fun and nifty and all, though the tutorial is perhaps too confusing for beginners, so he has to give the game two stars. Boo-hoo. Another reviewer says, and I quote, “I wish they would have just ported the N64 version.” As a person who has played and loved the N64 and Dreamcast versions both, I say that this game is easily the better version. Not only that, you might as well not even compare it to the originals. It is its own game. And besides, everyone knows that the guys who write reviews of games on Amazon.co.jp are coke-bottle-glasses-wearing greasy-haired horse-teethed freakazoids who wear dirty pale-green electrician’s uniforms all day, every day, even though they don’t have a job.
I really don’t know what else to say to recommend this game to you. Don’t think about it in relation to any other games. Consider this game, for all intents and purposes, the only game in existence. If you read the description of weapons and it sounded purely awesome, if you’ve played every Kenta Cho game and often tell people “Yeah, this stuff is better than that Xbox stuff”, if you bought an Xbox 360 because Jeff Minter designed the music visualizer, if you know why Panzer Dragoon Zwei is exponentially better than Rez, if you possess enough cold hard evidence of the heart to prove in front of a jury that Cave Story murdered Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, then even if you be a female, you are my brother, and we will join for great justice and we will love this game until and even after the end times come, until and even after we lose our corporeal bodies due to the explosion of the sun or nuclear war. We will live on, in spirit — in Bangai-O spirit.
This game is a joyful disease. Pass it on.
In other words:
Absolute highest recommendation.
–tim rogers
addendum: I just revisited the instruction manual and read the profiles of the three “characters” in the “story” mode. It says of Ruri, the girl, that it “seems as though she’s not in love with Masato”. It says of Masato, the boy, that it “seems as though he’s not Ruri’s brother”. Yeah, that’s not just game-of-the-year-worthy story exposition — that’s the Best thing ever, right there.
addendum the second: To clarify, the multiplayer mode doesn’t allow the two players to kill one another. Yes, it’s tragic, because this game would essentially destroy Senko no Ronde in that case, and, in all ways imaginable, become the Greatest Game Ever. The multiplayer mode is, instead, about shooting bad guys together, competing for points on a stage-for-stage basis. If you set up a custom stage so that there are a bunch of evil Bangai-O clones, working together is pretty fun! Like, really pretty fun. Amazingly fun, sometimes, especially if you set up a stage that, scientifically, just isn’t possible to win, and then proceed to lose fifty times in a row, until you suddenly win ten times in a row. Balancing a VS mode for something like this would have been code-murder. It would have been like making a whole separate game, which I’m sure Treasure didn’t have time for.
★★★★
I hope you guys had fun reading this website, because I’m probably not going to bother writing on it anymore!
The reason would be Treasure’s Bangai-O Spirits, a game so perfect and so deep that when it comes right down to the wire, I’d probably rather be sealed in a sensory deprivation tank playing it against my best friend for millenia than working, vacationing in the Bahamas, or even having pseudo-violent sex. That’s the sign of a good game, right there — if you’d willingly give up an opportunity to let a girl live out her fantasy to rape a man just so that you could deflect projectiles for a couple more hours. I get this feeling, playing this game — if I keep deflecting projectiles, eventually I’ll be so good at deflecting projectiles that I won’t even need to close my eyes or tense my knees to ejaculate. I will simply be. I will flow.
Maybe that’s not enough for the videogame company PR dudes who troll this website (hi dad!), so let’s put it into more back-of-boxy language:
Bangai-oh Spirits is “Brain Training” for God. He spake unto the earth: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last, the Street Fighter II and the Street Fighter III, the Sin and Punishment and the Ikaruga, the carbon dioxide and the oxygen, the Bangai-oh Spirits for the Nintendo DS.”
This isn’t just the best game Treasure has ever made — hell, it isn’t even just the best game they can make, it’s a 210-gun salute to the head of the pathology they’ve waved proudly for the last decade and a half of their illustrious careers designing quirky little games that only morbidly obese people like myself seem capable of enjoying. It’s them dropping all their cards — five aces, including the elusive Golden Ace of Knives — on the table and putting a pistol in their mouth and saying heck you, I will pull this trigger, I swear I will.
This is hardly hyperbole.
Bangai-O Spirits is a puzzle game, a shooting game, a fighting game, an MMORPG. It is Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter III at the same time. In this age of Everyday Shooter and dozens of other one-man games that let you use two analog sticks to move and shoot at the same time, Treasure steps in with an update to their own Robotron riff, and they manage to outclass literally everyone, even without the multidirectional shooting gimmick.
What’s so good about the game? It’s kind of hard to put it in a few words, so we’ll have to break with tradition and actually discuss the way the game plays — not yet, though, don’t worry. I know, you wish I’d just keep talking about my penis for the duration of the review, though hey, sometimes we humans have to endure boring stuff.
The tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits is pretty boring. However, unlike an actual school, the long-winded tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits teaches you how to be objectively awesome. Each tutorial stage opens with a dialogue between three characters — a commander with an eyepatch, a young girl with large breasts, and a too-cool youth in a hip military uniform. In addition to teaching you how to use weapons, the commander also manages to enrage the cool youth: as the tutorials get more complicated and wordy, toward the end, the kid literally says that he didn’t realize he signed up for “an actual robot anime” — he just thought the robot and the anime characters on the box were there to draw in anime fans. The professor then gets defensive, insinuating that the end of Evangelion was “the best part”. Not making this up! When you beat the tutorial, the commander says, “We’ve defeated the Tutorial Army!” And the kid says, “That was fast. If we sell this game back now, do you think we can get at least 3,500 yen for it?”
Bangai-O Spirits: It burns!
The professor — and the girl — are quick to point out that the game has over 160 stages in the “Free play” mode, and that you can edit your own stages and play multiplayer, if you want. The kid shrugs this off, says that “stage-editing is for losers”.
And just like that — you’ll never see those three anime stereotypes again.
This is refreshing, when you consider that Treasure games have always had problems expressing story and character. Dynamite Headdy, their attempt to break into the mainstream with a “mascot” character, was a huge jumbled cluster of near-impossible challenges; it requires some degree of arcane voodoo magic to even get past the tutorial in that game, and it requires nerves of steel to like any of the bizarre characters. The music is Chinese water-torture. (The game itself is pretty alright.)
Treasure has gone through the weirdest phases of wanting to be popular and not giving a heck. Gunstar Heroes was an attempt to capitalize on a perceived opening in the action game market for people who didn’t like the look of Contra. It was apparently conceived as a kind of Sonic the Hedgehog with guns and fighting-game inspired close-quarters combat. Gunstar Heroes thrives whenever it’s not trying to tell a story, or be otherwise interesting. Each stage plays differently from the last, with a short shoot-em-up runup to the gimmick segments or boss parade: the Dice Palace stage, cited as the “best stage ever!” by game “journalists” with maybe a quarter-piece of their cranium missing, is all at once Treasure’s fragmentary genius and infuriating shortcomings rolled into one. It’s a line of pleasant little challenges — one-offs involving their pristine game engine — interrupted by an absolutely lazy hub where you roll a dice to move through a “board game” that’s just a straight line.
Gunstar Heroes begins to shine in stage five, which is titled “DESTROY THEM ALL” — contrary to what the lobotomites writing top-hundred lists will tell you, “DESTROY THEM ALL” is the “best stage ever”: all semblance of “level design” falls away, in the best way possible, and it’s just you, an entire enemy army, and occasional platforms. Flying enemies drop bombs, you jump up, grab them out of the air, and chuck them at towering robot walkers. Grunts run full-steam at you, and if you see an opening, you grab one and use him as a projectile, too. You do this over and over again for ten minutes, and the word “ENJOY” never vanishes from the stock-market ticker running across the bottom of your brain.
Why can’t Gunstar Heroes just be six straight hours of this? Why can’t it just never end? Let the computer just keep crunching the numbers and stuffting out bad guys — the more I kill, the more the computer stuffs. Zen Masters will tell you that there has to be balance, that without low points, high points wouldn’t feel as special, shadow lends context to light, et cetera, though really, Pac-Man Championship Edition is non-stop fun, and anyone who complains because there aren’t any NPCs to talk to is probably also a chimpanzee.
At any rate, Gunstar Heroes was something of a failure in Japan because
1. Most people on earth literally can’t read
2. It was on the MegaDrive, which was essentially the Xbox of its day.
Back then, people who owned MegaDrives in Japan were called “MegaDrivers”, just as the first wave of Xbox players called themselves “Xboxers”. Dynamite Headdy was Treasure’s idea of appealing to a broader audience — at least, in theory — and when the three-year-olds of the world found out that the instruction manual contained more words than “Happy” and “Fun”, it all went south.
Thus spake Alien Soldier, a schizophrenic, shattered velvet bag of demonic battle fragments. The full title of Alien Solider is, and I quote, “VISUAL SHOCK! SOUND SHOCK! NOW IS THE TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE ALIEN SOLDER FOR MEGADRIVERS CUSTOM“. In other words, they’re weren’t lying to themselves — or anyone, really. Alien Soldier‘s title screen contains perhaps the longest story crawl of the 16-bit era, and no amount of resetting the console will make it any less ridiculous. Watching the superplays embedded on the Sega Ages compilation disc are like attending a waterski wedding on the surface of the sun. The game’s arcane mechanics are a Treasure staple: encouraging the player to play in the most ridiculous, unattractive way possible. To wit: the strongest attack at your disposal isn’t the flaming, screen-spanning dash that you can only perform with full health (and even then, only once) — it’s the pixels-wide flames that erupt from your character’s back as he’s doing said dash. Playing the game to completion is equal to breaking it — finding the pixels that work, freezing there, and TKO’ing every opponent in the first instant of the fight.
Eventually, Treasure tried to make money, and mostly failed, because they thought a game needed a “story” to be a phenomenal hit, and the story in the relatively high-budget Sin and Punishment was so loopy and bizarre that you can’t overlook it; to say it was written on acid or after smoking much reefer is a criminal overstatment. It’s more like something written in one day by a man with really bad indigestion cascading into diarrhea. For its mechanics, it’s easily one of the best games of all-time, and though the cut-scenes are fiercely skippable, the very fact that it has a story (and that its music sounds like pornography for librarians) keeps it out of the specialest place in my heart. It also — and this is pure conjecture — kept the game from being released outside Japan, even though it was written entirely in English and intended primarily for US release.
All throughout the years, as Treasure floundered with the weirdest cartoon licenses (Tiny Toon Adventures, for god’s sake), I wished they’d just make a full-on fighting game with Gunstar Heroes mechanics. They kind of almost did that with Yuyu Hakusho for MegaDrive, and later Guardian Heroes for Saturn — and most recently two Bleach-based fighting games on the Nintendo DS — though the games always felt too focused on “personality” and “selling points”. And they never set the world on fire.
Treasure’s Ikaruga, which resulted seemingly from a sudden desire to make the cleanest, simplest shooting game of all time as a kind of counterpoint to their Radiant Silvergun, the clusterheckiest shooter ever conceived, ironically, was perhaps their most internationally acclaimed game; maybe this has had something to do with Treasure’s recent game design roll-backs.
Bangai-Oh! for Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64, has always been my favorite Treasure game, not so much for its “hilarious quirky dialogue” as for its crunchy shooting action. There’s very little fat in the game, and it’s quite an accomplishment that Bangai-O Spirits is even leaner.
ACTUALLY DISCUSSING THE GAME NOW
I’m not even going to bother discussing how this game differs from Bangai-Oh, because it doesn’t matter: Bangai-Oh hardly exists anymore. Instead, I’m going to try to explain to you why you should buy this game, and not something like, I don’t know, Super Smash Bros..
In Bangai-O Spirits, you control a giant robot — which happens to be only the size of one “block” of the playing field. I believe this was the core concept of the original game — control a cursor-sized player character that looks like a giant robot.
Your goal in this game is to destroy various targets in stages. A rough map of the stage, with the required targets highlighted, takes up the top screen. You move around on the lower screen.
You have five general kinds of attacks. Before each mission, you’re free to select which weapons you want to use.
Press the Y button to use one basic weapon, and the B button to use another one.
Press the A button to dash in the direction you’re facing. Press any direction while dashing to change direction.
Press the L button or the R button to use one of two “EX Attacks”. Hold the button to charge the EX attack, and release to unleash it. The more enemy bullets in your general area when you release the trigger, the fiercer the attack you’ll unleash. If you let go of the button just as a bullet is hitting you, the missiles emanating from your body will even increase in size.
There are seven types of basic weapons. None of them are “better” than any other. Each has a definite strength and a definite weakness. All bullets are capable of canceling out other bullets, meaning that “the best defense is a good offense” and “the best offense is a good defense” are more than just something karate teachers tell kids.
I will explain the weapon classes briefly:
1. Bound laser: Laser-like missiles that reflect off walls at 45-degree angles. Pros: Can be used to access unsuspecting enemies in tight spots. Cons: Very average strength.
2. Homing missiles: Missiles that chase enemies. Pros: will hunt enemies down for several seconds; no need to even aim, most of the time. Cons: Even weaker than the bound shot; sub-par mid-air turning radius.
3. Break shot: Special shots capable of canceling two enemy bullets instead of one. Pros: can be used to cut through an enemy’s bullet curtain. Cons: even weaker than homing shot.
4. Napalm shot: Super-powerful shot. Pros: relatively twice the power of a bound shot. Cons: very easily canceled — normal bound / homing shots can eat through two napalm shots before being canceled themselves; break shots can eat four napalm shots.
5. Sword: It’s a sword. Pros: ultra-powerful, ultra fast. Cons: ultra-short-range. Hard to move forward and close in while attacking.
6. Shield: It’s a shield. Position it by tapping a direction and pressing the attack button. Pros: eats any and all bullets endlessly. Stays in the direction where you put it. “Movable cover”, essentially. Doesn’t fade even when you fire your other weapon. Cons: kind of hard to get used to! (Though in a Treasure game, “Kind of hard to get used to” is often used to describe The One Thing The Game Designer Wants You To Do All The Time.)
7. Bat: A giant baseball bat. Pros: can deflect any projectiles back at the enemy. Can deflect dozens of projectiles at a time, even. Can even turn enemies into projectiles. Can also be used to hit physics objects (conveniently shaped like soccer balls, baseballs, basketballs). Cons: Kind of slow. Not much attack power on its own.
Some of these weapons can even be combined in Radiant Silvergun style — homing and bound, for example — by pressing both buttons at once.
Your default attack mode is “free” — you can move while shooting — and your robot can fly all around the stage, with delicious crispy coasting physics. However, should you tap an attack button twice and then hold it the second time, your character will enter “fixed” mode, and you’ll stop anywhere (even in mid-air) and be free to aim in any direction. Useful in so many ways.
Now I’ll explain the EX attacks. Man, I’m like IGN over here:
1. Homing: Fires a multitude of homing shots. Good for: wide-open spaces with lots of enemies.
2. Bound: Fires a multitude of bound shots. Good for: twisty tunnels and lots of projectiles.
3. Break: Fires a multitude of break shots. Good for: lots of bullets, feeling tricky.
4. Napalm: Fires a multitude of napalm shots. Good for: feeling lucky.
5. Freeze: Freezes enemy bullets in the air. The “Treasure Factor”. Good for: super-playing and “puzzle”-solving. The longer you hold the button, the longer the bullets freeze.
6. Reflect: Works like a bat, except in all directions all at once. Good for: people who know what the hell they’re doing.
All EX attacks (except Freeze) can be “focused” in a direction of your choosing. In the previous Bangai-Oh game, you could only blast the bullets in a circle around your character’s body. In Spirits, you can press a directional button in one of eight ways while charging your attack, and then release the button to unleash the attack in only that direction.
And that’s it. That’s the game’s engine. The instruction manual doesn’t even describe the weapons — it just tells you to play the tutorial and find out for yourself. It knows that if you’re holding that instruction manual, you’re a Treasure-gaming freak who doesn’t read manuals anyway.
The tutorial contains the game’s only instances of “Story”. Its little lessons cascade into something huge, and the last stage is a frustrating, amazing, idiotic feat of level design with an infuriating execution and an exhilirating climax. Once you get past it, you’re free — as you’ve always been — to play the “Free Play” mode, which has, yes, well over a hundred and four tens of stages. You can play the stages in any order. You don’t even have to clear one stage to move on to the next. The interface is DOS-like in its cleanliness. Press the right directional button to advance forward one stage. If you’ve cleared the stage, your best time and top score will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you want to play a stage, press the A button. Now you have the DOS-like weapon-select screen. Choose your arsenal and play the stage. If you die, sucks to be you. Choose “exit” to go back to the stage-select menu. Try different weapons.
Many stages are beatable with any weapon selection; few absolutely require use of the bat to obtain the “easy” solutions. Many stages feature hang-ups that force you to open the menu and restart. Some stages feature extended side-scrolls climaxing in epic one-on-five battles with steel-trap-minded opponents of equal abilities. Some stages are massive labyrinths with multiple targets and pursuing grunts. Some stages are vertical scrolls that force you to avoid cascading unbreakable blocks while breaking the correct breakable blocks in order to reach the target. Other stages begin with the player surrounded at point-blank range by four giant honkin’ beam cannons; the 3-2-1 countdown to the start of the stage is basically a countdown to the trigger being pulled. You have literally half of one second to figure out how to win.
All of the praises heaped on Wario Ware instead belong to this game; the yokels of the world jump on Wario for featuring Nintendo Characters, who are virtually like game journalists’ “childhood friends”, only better, because they actually exist. Wario Ware has “amazing” stages that begin with a screen of The Legend of Zelda — there’s Link, and there’s a cave in a wall. When the game starts, you have five seconds to get into the cave. Get in, and the game pats you on the head and moves to another challenge. Sure, there are some nice things to say for the vision of Wario Ware, though at the end of the day, it doesn’t make the player feel spiritually complete, much less any smarter: there’s something to be said for the game’s glee in forcing the player to sharpen his mind to a point where he can acknowledge in a microsecond what he’s supposed to do, though the game ultimately fails in the eyes of god (and me) for never telling the player why. Bangai-O Spirits is about a son-of-a-bitching giant robot with fantastic weapons; your character is a soldier fighting the bad guys. You have to survive so that you can fight again. The only way to survive is to DESTROY THEM ALL.
Sometimes it’s a puzzle game, sometimes it’s a platformer. Sometimes it’s a hardcore bullet-hell shooter. Sometimes it’s a fighting game meant to be played by robots with laser-eyes. It is Every Genre. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter what it is, because it’s Bangai-O. It’s mind-expanding. It’s a diamond-sharp core engine joyfully level-designed gang-bang-style by a team of dudes who have been putting the “crunch” in “scrunch” for over a decade now. On the one hand, they don’t give a stuff what order you play the levels in. On the other hand, they need you to play this game every day for the rest of your life. For this purpose, they have created a level-edit mode.
The level-edit mode is more than just level-design — it’s a shockingly deep elementary course in game design. I described the weapons above, right? If you have any imagination at all, your mind should be teeming with possibilities. Make a puzzle stage, make a rock-hard traditional-style platform stage. If you’ve got a crush on the “Reflect” EX attack, make a stage that puts a new spin on it. The game is saintly in its generosity. Like I said above, Treasure aren’t just shooting themselves in the foot with this game — they’re shooting themselves in the throat. If you be a man who loves hardcore action games, you don’t need anything else.
The platinum icing on this golden cake, however, is the multiplayer mode. I spent six minutes throwing together a long rectangular stage with soccer balls and two evil enemy Bangai-O clones in it, and then played a deathmatch with a friend. We used bats and EX reflect, and just had a screaming orgy, squealing like distorted schoolchildren for literally 25 rounds in a row. Remember when you were ten, and you played River City Ransom with your buddy, and you stood on a garbage can and your buddy kicked the garbage can, which made you slide toward the edge of the screen, so you jumped and kicked a guy in the head? Then, years later, remember when you first played Halo co-op, and your friend got in the driver’s seat of the Warthog and you got on the turret, and you guys drove around hecking stuff up? Well, even in this day and age where four friends can get on Xbox Live and play Halo 3 transcontinentally, with one guy driving the warthog, another guy manning the turret, a third in the passenger’s seat firing a sniper rifle, and a fourth on a Ghost flying around shooting lasers — Bangai-O Spirits manages to provide gaggingly huge thrills with tiny sprites and solid-color backgrounds. It’ll make you remember Halo, and then remember River City Ransom, and then remember Bangai-O Spirits — the game you are playing right now. At the low points, it’s like playing the best game ever; at the high points, what is on the screen in your hands is pretty much the same thing that huge-headed aliens see when they mind-heck each other for sleepless, foodless dozens of hours on end.
What might go down as the game’s biggest “mainstream” innovation is its ability to transmit data via audio files. It says on the back of the box: “For the first time in history, custom map and reload data can be transmitted as sound files.” That’s kind of neat. Here I’d thought, for the longest time, that Treasure despised the aural sense (what with the brapping scrapping scraping nonsense-bullstuff music and limp sound effects that tend to populate their games, this one kind-of included). It’s nice to see them acknowledging that human beings have ears, I suppose. To load map data, you put it on an iPod and then just hold a headphone over the DS microphone. Sounds wacky, I know. The first time it actually worked, it kind of scared me a little bit. I wouldn’t stuff my pants with amazement if this cute little feature, above all else, is what makes Treasure world-famous after all. Failing that — well, listen to a stage for yourself. Game or no game, I know some people who would pay good money to stand in a dark room and listen to grown men in Darth Vader suits make sounds like this for two hours and call it “music”. Hell, one of those people is me.
At present, the Amazon.co.jp score for this game is three and a half out of five stars. The first review on the page describes the game as fun and nifty and all, though the tutorial is perhaps too confusing for beginners, so he has to give the game two stars. Boo-hoo. Another reviewer says, and I quote, “I wish they would have just ported the N64 version.” As a person who has played and loved the N64 and Dreamcast versions both, I say that this game is easily the better version. Not only that, you might as well not even compare it to the originals. It is its own game. And besides, everyone knows that the guys who write reviews of games on Amazon.co.jp are coke-bottle-glasses-wearing greasy-haired horse-teethed freakazoids who wear dirty pale-green electrician’s uniforms all day, every day, even though they don’t have a job.
I really don’t know what else to say to recommend this game to you. Don’t think about it in relation to any other games. Consider this game, for all intents and purposes, the only game in existence. If you read the description of weapons and it sounded purely awesome, if you’ve played every Kenta Cho game and often tell people “Yeah, this stuff is better than that Xbox stuff”, if you bought an Xbox 360 because Jeff Minter designed the music visualizer, if you know why Panzer Dragoon Zwei is exponentially better than Rez, if you possess enough cold hard evidence of the heart to prove in front of a jury that Cave Story murdered Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, then even if you be a female, you are my brother, and we will join for great justice and we will love this game until and even after the end times come, until and even after we lose our corporeal bodies due to the explosion of the sun or nuclear war. We will live on, in spirit — in Bangai-O spirit.
This game is a joyful disease. Pass it on.
In other words:
Absolute highest recommendation.
–tim rogers
addendum: I just revisited the instruction manual and read the profiles of the three “characters” in the “story” mode. It says of Ruri, the girl, that it “seems as though she’s not in love with Masato”. It says of Masato, the boy, that it “seems as though he’s not Ruri’s brother”. Yeah, that’s not just game-of-the-year-worthy story exposition — that’s the Best thing ever, right there.
addendum the second: To clarify, the multiplayer mode doesn’t allow the two players to kill one another. Yes, it’s tragic, because this game would essentially destroy Senko no Ronde in that case, and, in all ways imaginable, become the Greatest Game Ever. The multiplayer mode is, instead, about shooting bad guys together, competing for points on a stage-for-stage basis. If you set up a custom stage so that there are a bunch of evil Bangai-O clones, working together is pretty fun! Like, really pretty fun. Amazingly fun, sometimes, especially if you set up a stage that, scientifically, just isn’t possible to win, and then proceed to lose fifty times in a row, until you suddenly win ten times in a row. Balancing a VS mode for something like this would have been code-murder. It would have been like making a whole separate game, which I’m sure Treasure didn’t have time for.
text by Brandon Parker
★★★★
“FROM BACK WHEN PEOPLE READ BOOKS INSTEAD OF POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS TO MAKE THESE THINGS.”
Conquests of the Longbow was to adventure games what Myth was to real-time strategy, what River City Ransom was to side scrolling “beat them ups” (called so because you scroll to the side while beating “them” up, “them” being every man, woman and child who crosses your path). Nice innovational little games that nobody gave a stuff about. Hey, that was neat, now let’s move people we need to get the same-old-stuff assembly line up and running again. We’ve got status quos to meet, genre’s to stagnate, envelopes to pull, bars to lower, let’s get busy.
Compare King’s Quest V to Conquests of the Longbow. There’s only a year’s difference between the two yet the difference is, well, somewhat frightening. If we had continued evolving along this path I imagine we would be nothing but disembodied brains controlling our giant armored robot spider carapaces by now.
Meanwhile, have a look over here at Command & Conquer and Supreme Commander, there’s a whole 12 years difference between the two and they are practically the same damn game, they even both have the word command in the title! Although at least of strategy games you can say they have either narrowed in focus or increased in size and scale over time, however slightly. Over in adventure game land I don’t think they’ve figured out that newfangled “3d” thing yet.
In Conquests of the Longbow, you play as Robin Hood. He wakes up every morning at his hidden outlaw camp. He talks with his band of outlaws about what they plan on doing that day. If you’re in trouble out in the woods, you can blow on your hunting horn and summon your men to your aid. You and your men have got their own little hill out in the woods that offers a good vantage point of the highway running through Sherwood. From there you can commit your illegal banditry and highwayman activities. You can get disguises and sneak into Nottingham. If you want you can just wander around the woods, which are just a handful of different screens with randomized trees and foliage repeated over and over, but it’s beautiful. It’s green as hell, and it’s got birds chirping and at least they bothered to let you do that. I love the color green.
Early on, there’s a part where some young pro-Robin Hood kid’s get caught acting like hooligans in Nottingham and are to be executed by the end of the day. Playing the game as a kid, I got frustrated trying to figure out what to do here, I wandered around for hours. Eventually, Little John just showed up and told me, “I’ll take care of it.” And he did, although his method of open attack gets a few of your outlaws killed, but how about that? I had always figured that and sneaking in disguised were the only options, and that was it. Not so! Just the other day I found out you can go to the camp, blow on your horn and all your men show up and each offer their own different plan for you to try out. What the hell!? It just might be the best game ever, that’s what the hell. Wish I had known that 16 years ago though.
You’re thinking, well golly this game does sound kinda neat! Too bad it’s so old, if only they remade it, then maybe I could give muster enough give-a-stuff to play it. Well I mean to tell you that you are wrong, it would no longer be neat if it were made with nowadays game making techniques. It’d be a real goddamn tragedy is what it’d be, in addition to being a 3rd person action-adventure game, probably called Hood or Locksley. There’d be levels or ‘missions’ and the first one would be an unskipable tutorial for anyone who has never played a video game, used a cell phone, watched a DVD or fed themselves before. The controls and interface will be dumbed down for the 360 port and selecting the option to use a 360 controller on the PC version will literally lobotomize the game right in front of you. Golden arrows will be scattered around Sherwood Forest for no real logical reason, but collect 100/100 and you Unlock an Achievement. Also littering the forest for no reason other than it being video game logic are hundreds of monsters to kill with your sword, bow or Bitchin’ Druid Magic Attacks. The Merry Men are now idiotic AI companions you direct and give commands to with the directional pad. Robin Hood will have a rugged five o’clock shadow at all times.
That’s the difference between someone back in 1990 wanting to turn the Robin Hood myth they’ve read and researched into a sort of interactive experience, and someone in 2007 trying to come up with a Hot New “IP” for The Company. In the instruction manual for Longbow, there’s a bibliography at the back. This is where they tell you every book they read to come up with the game, because that is what they used to do, they read books instead of PowerPoint presentations and talked to human beings instead of focus groups to help come up with these things. Amazing! Incredible!
ACTION BUTTON MEETINGIf you’ve ever wondered why there aren’t very many Robin Hood games, this is why. After Longbow, there just wasn’t any point. Maybe someone could make a better Robin Hood film, book, or puppet show but a videogame? Forget it, it’s been done, and even pursuing Robin Hood in another field is questionable, that’s how good this game is.
And forget that trial in Chrono Trigger, this game was way ahead of that bullstuff. In this one if you lose the trial, instead of the Merry Men coming to rescue you then escaping through a time portal after killing a giant dragon tank, they just hang Robin and he dies. So in some ways it’s an improvement and in some other ways it’s not quite as awesome and sort of a downer actually.
In King’s Quest V, King Graham is out for a walk one day when he comes back home to find that his castle has disappeared. “Holy stuff” he must be thinking. “Where has my house gone off to?” So he goes questing to look for his castle, and on the way he has to go through some mountains. There’s a problem though, there’s a rattlesnake in the way. No, you can’t walk around it, you can’t wait for it to leave and you can’t find another path up the mountain. To get through these mountains in the east you have to go west into a desert. Then it’s to some woods to the north, then underground to where some gnomes live, then you talk to some bees, get tied up and locked in someones basement, etc., all to get a goddamn tambourine just to scare that snake away.
Now, that’s all fine and dandy for a King’s Quest game where abstract tomfoolery and obtuse puzzle solving is to be expected I guess. But you don’t want that in a Robin Hood game. You want to do Robin Hood things. In Longbow, instead of putting a rattlesnake in your path they would have just said “there’s snow blocking the mountain pass, wait for the spring thaw in a few days. In the meantime you can investigate the area, prepare for your journey, etc.”
There are no snakes in the path in Conquests of the Longbow, it all makes sense, except for the part where you have to turn into a tree, but oh well. Robin Hood, although a merry man, is also a serious one and on an important quest. He doesn’t have time to worry about bored rattlesnakes and in case you were wondering he never throws a pie in a yeti’s face. They could have just changed up King Graham’s palette a bit, drew a bow and quiver onto him and made a King’s Quest game with Robin Hood, but they didn’t, they made a real damn Robin Hood game with Robin Hood in it, and they also happened to make one of the better retellings of the Robin Hood myth to have ever been retold.
★★★★
“FROM BACK WHEN PEOPLE READ BOOKS INSTEAD OF POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS TO MAKE THESE THINGS.”
Conquests of the Longbow was to adventure games what Myth was to real-time strategy, what River City Ransom was to side scrolling “beat them ups” (called so because you scroll to the side while beating “them” up, “them” being every man, woman and child who crosses your path). Nice innovational little games that nobody gave a stuff about. Hey, that was neat, now let’s move people we need to get the same-old-stuff assembly line up and running again. We’ve got status quos to meet, genre’s to stagnate, envelopes to pull, bars to lower, let’s get busy.
Compare King’s Quest V to Conquests of the Longbow. There’s only a year’s difference between the two yet the difference is, well, somewhat frightening. If we had continued evolving along this path I imagine we would be nothing but disembodied brains controlling our giant armored robot spider carapaces by now.
Meanwhile, have a look over here at Command & Conquer and Supreme Commander, there’s a whole 12 years difference between the two and they are practically the same damn game, they even both have the word command in the title! Although at least of strategy games you can say they have either narrowed in focus or increased in size and scale over time, however slightly. Over in adventure game land I don’t think they’ve figured out that newfangled “3d” thing yet.
In Conquests of the Longbow, you play as Robin Hood. He wakes up every morning at his hidden outlaw camp. He talks with his band of outlaws about what they plan on doing that day. If you’re in trouble out in the woods, you can blow on your hunting horn and summon your men to your aid. You and your men have got their own little hill out in the woods that offers a good vantage point of the highway running through Sherwood. From there you can commit your illegal banditry and highwayman activities. You can get disguises and sneak into Nottingham. If you want you can just wander around the woods, which are just a handful of different screens with randomized trees and foliage repeated over and over, but it’s beautiful. It’s green as hell, and it’s got birds chirping and at least they bothered to let you do that. I love the color green.
Early on, there’s a part where some young pro-Robin Hood kid’s get caught acting like hooligans in Nottingham and are to be executed by the end of the day. Playing the game as a kid, I got frustrated trying to figure out what to do here, I wandered around for hours. Eventually, Little John just showed up and told me, “I’ll take care of it.” And he did, although his method of open attack gets a few of your outlaws killed, but how about that? I had always figured that and sneaking in disguised were the only options, and that was it. Not so! Just the other day I found out you can go to the camp, blow on your horn and all your men show up and each offer their own different plan for you to try out. What the hell!? It just might be the best game ever, that’s what the hell. Wish I had known that 16 years ago though.
You’re thinking, well golly this game does sound kinda neat! Too bad it’s so old, if only they remade it, then maybe I could give muster enough give-a-stuff to play it. Well I mean to tell you that you are wrong, it would no longer be neat if it were made with nowadays game making techniques. It’d be a real goddamn tragedy is what it’d be, in addition to being a 3rd person action-adventure game, probably called Hood or Locksley. There’d be levels or ‘missions’ and the first one would be an unskipable tutorial for anyone who has never played a video game, used a cell phone, watched a DVD or fed themselves before. The controls and interface will be dumbed down for the 360 port and selecting the option to use a 360 controller on the PC version will literally lobotomize the game right in front of you. Golden arrows will be scattered around Sherwood Forest for no real logical reason, but collect 100/100 and you Unlock an Achievement. Also littering the forest for no reason other than it being video game logic are hundreds of monsters to kill with your sword, bow or Bitchin’ Druid Magic Attacks. The Merry Men are now idiotic AI companions you direct and give commands to with the directional pad. Robin Hood will have a rugged five o’clock shadow at all times.
That’s the difference between someone back in 1990 wanting to turn the Robin Hood myth they’ve read and researched into a sort of interactive experience, and someone in 2007 trying to come up with a Hot New “IP” for The Company. In the instruction manual for Longbow, there’s a bibliography at the back. This is where they tell you every book they read to come up with the game, because that is what they used to do, they read books instead of PowerPoint presentations and talked to human beings instead of focus groups to help come up with these things. Amazing! Incredible!
ACTION BUTTON MEETINGIf you’ve ever wondered why there aren’t very many Robin Hood games, this is why. After Longbow, there just wasn’t any point. Maybe someone could make a better Robin Hood film, book, or puppet show but a videogame? Forget it, it’s been done, and even pursuing Robin Hood in another field is questionable, that’s how good this game is.
And forget that trial in Chrono Trigger, this game was way ahead of that bullstuff. In this one if you lose the trial, instead of the Merry Men coming to rescue you then escaping through a time portal after killing a giant dragon tank, they just hang Robin and he dies. So in some ways it’s an improvement and in some other ways it’s not quite as awesome and sort of a downer actually.
In King’s Quest V, King Graham is out for a walk one day when he comes back home to find that his castle has disappeared. “Holy stuff” he must be thinking. “Where has my house gone off to?” So he goes questing to look for his castle, and on the way he has to go through some mountains. There’s a problem though, there’s a rattlesnake in the way. No, you can’t walk around it, you can’t wait for it to leave and you can’t find another path up the mountain. To get through these mountains in the east you have to go west into a desert. Then it’s to some woods to the north, then underground to where some gnomes live, then you talk to some bees, get tied up and locked in someones basement, etc., all to get a goddamn tambourine just to scare that snake away.
Now, that’s all fine and dandy for a King’s Quest game where abstract tomfoolery and obtuse puzzle solving is to be expected I guess. But you don’t want that in a Robin Hood game. You want to do Robin Hood things. In Longbow, instead of putting a rattlesnake in your path they would have just said “there’s snow blocking the mountain pass, wait for the spring thaw in a few days. In the meantime you can investigate the area, prepare for your journey, etc.”
There are no snakes in the path in Conquests of the Longbow, it all makes sense, except for the part where you have to turn into a tree, but oh well. Robin Hood, although a merry man, is also a serious one and on an important quest. He doesn’t have time to worry about bored rattlesnakes and in case you were wondering he never throws a pie in a yeti’s face. They could have just changed up King Graham’s palette a bit, drew a bow and quiver onto him and made a King’s Quest game with Robin Hood, but they didn’t, they made a real damn Robin Hood game with Robin Hood in it, and they also happened to make one of the better retellings of the Robin Hood myth to have ever been retold.
text by tim rogers
☆☆☆☆
“A POSTCARD FROM A ROBOT.”
(Author’s note: I originally wrote this article for insertcredit.com nearly two years ago. Though I didn’t know it back then, the “mission” behind writing this review would essentially serve as the “inspiration” for starting this here “website”. So let’s go ahead and call this review right here, originally titled “postcard from a robot”, “the genesis of action button dot net”. i don’t think enough people read it when i first posted it, so i’m putting it here, and now. i just kind of felt it was weirdly relevant to the two new reviews going live today.)
heck you Namco. heck you Bandai. heck you Namco-Bandai. heck you Bandai-Namco.
heck you for being presumptuous. heck you for being insulting. heck you for sneering Tetsuya Takahashi off of Xenosaga. heck you for tempting that man to even make a single one of those games in the first place. heck you for assuming the first of those games would sell a million copies upon release. heck you for being disappointed when it didn’t sell a million copies.
heck you for pressuring Keita Takahashi into making a sequel to Katamari. heck you for refusing to believe that a man capable of birthing such a brilliant idea might actually have a couple more brilliant ideas.
heck you for seemingly deriving pleasure from wronging people with the last name “Takahashi.”
heck you announcing Ridge Racer 7 for PlayStation3 not six months after releasing Ridge Racer 6 on Xbox 360. heck you for taking nearly five years to increase the numeral from 5 to 6, and then increasing the numeral from 6 to 7 in a few short months.
heck you for Ridge Racer in general. I bet, within the walls of your company, it’s absolutely positively imperative that everyone use the politest language when addressing the secretary, using the coffee machine, or operating a stapler; I bet you require your employees to turn off their cellular phones when they take a stuff in the employee restrooms. I bet you’re really proud of that stuff. Yet apparently you don’t think it shameful that you’re always there to release a schlocked-together Ridge Racer for every new console. heck you for possessing that ballless notion that “people who just bought a new console are bound to buy any game, right?”
heck you for Tekken 5! heck you for Tekken in general! heck you especially for Tekken 4, though heck you super-especially for releasing Tekken 5 on PlayStation2, and then immediately releasing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection in the arcade. heck you for announcing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection for PSP, with its stuffty little directional pad and unresponsive buttons, instead of PlayStation2!
heck you for that game sucking to begin with!
heck you for the character costumes in Soul Calibur III! heck you for giving Yunsung neon green Adidas high-tops!
heck you for putting names like “Zasalamel” on the back of cars in Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360! heck you for treating the names of your insignificant fighting game characters like they were fashion brands! heck you for presuming I care!
heck you for presuming I want to play Pac-Man while Ridge Racer 6 loads? heck you for sneering at the irony of a guy greeted with Pac-Man when he’s waiting for a game to load on his new high-definition television!
heck you for putting that Pac-Man game in the loading screen, when it’s not even a “loading” screen! I mean, why put a “Loading” game in there when there’s also a “Press the A button to start the game” displayed from the second the “Loading” screen appears!
heck you for Pac-Man, while we’re at it!
No, really!
Can you not see how hecking &^#$#ed Pac-Man is? He’s a yellow circle with a mouth! You make him three-dimensional, and he’s just a sphere! A hecking sphere! Who gives a stuff about a sphere?
heck you for the Tales of… series — sure, some of them are fun, and I enjoy them, though heck you for having so many different teams working on different Tales of… games at any given time because even though the games are all well-made and stand apart from one another in terms of story, you’re deathly afraid of releasing an RPG with any other name because you’re positively convinced they won’t sell, because you’re positively convinced people wouldn’t know the game was worth buying, because they wouldn’t be able to judge quality for themselves, because people need names and numerals in order to make decisions. hecking lighten up!!
Also heck you sideways for Tales of the World, an “original” PSP RPG that basically stars you as a generic guy who meets all the characters from the Tales of… games. So it’s like Kingdom Hearts, without Disney? And, according to screenshots, in Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, EVERYONE IS LEVELING UP CONSTANTLY
LEVEL INFINITY
And most importantly, heck you to the moon for presuming, time and time again, I have nothing better to do than play videogames.
On top of all this, heck you for Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort, and all that it represents.
Basically, Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort (“Resort in the palm of your hand”) is a non-game. I almost typed “a non-game in the vein of Animal Crossing,” though I think that would be saying a little much. It’s not in the vein of Animal Crossing — it’s more in the vein of reading a six-month-old tennis magazine in a dentist’s office waiting room than it is in the vein of Animal Crossing.
To put it simply, the game is about a beverage-like island. The advertisements on the subway trains all over Tokyo this summer ask the passenger, “Would you like a tropical island?” using the same sentence structure with which a bartender would ask a customer if he’d like a beer. The island of this game is, then, to be drunk like shots of whiskey. The advertisement consists of a sticker plastered to the doors of the Ginza Line. Passengers who had been, a minute earlier, waiting on the platform at Ueno Station, fanning themselves with a plastic fan handed to them by someone at Yodobashi Camera an hour ago (mine said “Intel Core2 Duo Processors: On Sale Now!” on it) now stand, looking at this advertisement. “Would you like a tropical island, sir?” After just spending four uncomfortable minutes on a train platform where the air-conditioners are positioned at weird angles, and standing at the front of the line, the position most likely to score you a seat, means tragically dodging the overhead air-conditioning unit’s diagonal flow, you get on the train, and you have to stand, anyway. The tidal wave of air-conditioning in the train chills your sweat. Your shirt sticks stiffly to your skin, and then it does not. Like magic, your body temperature begins to do a little dance. Your eyes chance upon the advertisement on the door. “How about a tropical island right about now, sir?”
How does this make you feel? You’ve just felt refreshed, like diving into the ocean after spending a hectic afternoon being chased by bandits through the desert. The idea of a tropical island should at least have some emotional response.
I somehow doubt, however, that the marketers were thinking this far ahead.
When you hear the words “tropical island,” what do you think? What sensory reaction does it awaken in you? Do you recall sand pleasantly between your toes? Sand frustratingly beneath your swimsuit? Itchy sand in your pubic hair? Cold water on your toes? Warm water on your toes? Cold water up to your waist, suddenly turning warm? Beach balls? The smell of beach ball-vinyl? The heat of said vinyl, baked in the sun? Volleyballs? Smell of the ocean? The sound of seagulls?
The smell of the air-conditioning in the hotel. The sound of muzak at the hotel lounge. The way the sun plays your skin like a different organ than it is back at home. The bewildering sense of distance when you gaze at the ocean; though your home may lie in the direction behind you, when you watch those waves, if you have come from a place where no waves break, to see breaking waves should fill you with a feeling that wherever you live, it should be beyond this, out there somewhere. The sea has enchanted men and women and children for years, across many centuries and fictional universes. You can fall in love with nothing at all — a wonderful feeling — just by standing and staring at it.
If you’ve never been to a tropical island, you might hear the phrase “tropical island” and think, perhaps, of Hawaiian Punch, and the way it makes your teeth red.
They say it’s made of lava rocks, you know.
Either way — whether it’s the crushing, vaguely peaceful notion that, like the waves, our lives will eventually crash to a shore somewhere and break, or memories of summer stomach flu and vomiting Hawaiian Punch into a public pool in a manner that burned your nostrils, either of these experiences represent memories Portable Island cannot compete with.
If you see that advertisement on the train, you might fall into a standing heavy reverie about vacationing. You might feel like going somewhere far away, and for a few precious days existing in a place you do not normally exist. You might desire a paradigm shift; you might consider just about anything an escape.
This game is promising you a vacation in the palm of your hand. It is promising you relief from your everyday life. You put it in your PSP, and you play it on the train with headphones on. It’s supposed to make you feel calm. It’s supposed to make you feel peaceful and serene in short, violent bursts. It’s the aromatherapy of videogames; you have it turned on in your room, or your office, and there it is, a window to a world that is not your world, or anyone else’s. It’s at atmospheric modifier. It’s here to brighten your day, and sometimes engulf your attention.
I would sincerely like to believe that anyone able to be fooled by this parlor trick has not the social standing to ever board a train.
I don’t want to talk about the game, really. I really don’t want to. It’s not worth it. It’s a game about an island. Only you don’t do anything on the island. You relax. You can press buttons to lie down in the sand on the beach. You can walk up to the water. You can press a button between trees and attach a hammock. You can lie in the hammock, and tweak the analog stick to swing the hammock. You can aim a camera lens and take pictures of yourself in the hammock. You can lay your character in the hammock and then sit the PSP in a stand on your desk while you work on some inane project in the office. You can gaze at him every once in a while, and feel jealous. How you wish it were you in that hammock. The game is a ship in a bottle; much as you’d like to ride it, you can’t, because you yourself are not small enough to fit into a bottle.
When your character puts the hammock away, when he or she is done with it, the hammock disappears into the black hole of his or her pocket.
You can walk along rocks. There are penguins there. You can look at them. You can take pictures of them. If you want to go to a different part of the island, you can open your menu and warp there. You can collect food for turtles. You can throw the food on the ground near a turtle, and watch a turtle walk up and start eating it. Only you can’t squat low enough, and zoom in far enough to see his mouth on the food. He’s mostly just hovering and twitching over it.
You can change your character’s clothes. You can make him look like a beach bum, an Abercrombie kid, or a surfer. If you’ve chosen a female protagonist, you can make her wear a bikini or a trendy tropical dress. You can wear big floppy sun hats or Hawaiian shirts. You can touch the screen and think, “That is what I would be wearing if I were really heading to a tropical island this summer!”
If you use the game as a planning tool, the most important lessons it can teach you have mostly everything to do with videogames: fast-travel gets you where you’re going without having to press a boring amount of buttons, and items like mangos, when investigated, appear, accompanied with full descriptions, in the “item” menu. Mangos are high in vitamin C, says the menu. You can collect a whole lot of item descriptions, animal descriptions, and fish descriptions. The game doesn’t keep track of quantities of items collected. Otherwise, you’d feel like you were competing with something, and competition isn’t necessary of a vacation. This game is utopia in a box, and utopia consists of precisely one citizen.
According to an interview in Famitsu the week before the game’s release, the developers really love money and are genuinely afraid of the most efficient ways to get it. Takayuki Nakamura, the game’s producer, says people often tell him it seems like Boku no Natsuyasumi (“My Summer Vacation”) “for adults.” Director Shigeki Tooyama says, “People often ask, ‘Oh, do you regain your HP by sleeping in the hammock?'”
Producer Nakamura explains that the goal of their design is best summarized by the fishing activity: “In other games, the programmers have determined the plentitude and size of the fish. In this game, there is no action. You put out the fishing rod and watch. It’s relaxing. You don’t go on a vacation to be stressed.” I imagine he says this with a cheeky grin, like Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld pitching their idea for a television show “about nothing,” knowing it was a brilliant idea.
Their concept gets a thumbs-down; their execution gets a middle finger up. The game is very tacky. The only game the producers — and Famitsu‘s Mr. Hamamura, ever respectful — are careful not to mention in the brief interview is Animal Crossing, which is likely where Portable Island took its inspiration from. Animal Crossing is a relaxing game with a weird little economy system worked in; it is a game about living a life in a town with other residents. Portable Island is about being dead-alone on an island paradise. That the game doesn’t involve any skill for tasks like fishing is unfortunate; that it is set up in such a way as to make the player never feel like he’s anywhere, much less an island paradise, is near-tragic. That the developers skirt around so many questions in the interview, and talk about how AMAZED people are when they explain that the game has no HIT POINTS or LIFE METER or FINAL BOSS makes it impossible to believe they’ve never played Animal Crossing or Nintendogs. They’re being deliberate in the PR where they should have been deliberate with the game.
Could the game have been saved? Could it have been exciting, enthralling, captivating, and still been about a tropical island? I don’t see why not. Animal Crossing is about a peaceful village of animals, where there’s never a hurricane and there’s never a fire, and it somehow manages to captivate boys, girls, men, and women alike. Why is this? It’s because the game is about maintenance. There’s something to maintain. You clean up your room, you position furniture. You trade things with the animal residents, or with other players via the internet or wireless connection, and you sell them to earn money to buy other things, or a bigger house. You can go fishing, and tweak your fishing rod in hopes of catching bigger fish. You can sell the fish, and make money to buy things for your house. Time flows in real time; night falls, morning comes. Items in the shop change. There’s a mystical thrill out of seeing new items appear. That thrill turns real when you show that new piece of furniture to a friend and he or she says, “I want one of those, too!” As a videogame and as a piece of entertainment, Animal Crossing is a wonderful way to waste time on the train.
In Portable Island, when you collect items, they appear in a list. You can view this list in the menu. You can see a large photo of an item, and read a description of it. Is this supposed to be fun? Animal Crossing gives a graphic realization to each item; you can see it in your room, push it, and move it around. You can play with the positioning of every item in your house. In Portable Island, you’re staying in a hotel room that has to look exactly the same when you leave as it did when you arrived. Only you’re never leaving. Your main character, then, is a nutso conservative of the most mathematical variety, for adding up “room must be in the same condition when you leave as it was when you arrived” and “you will never leave” and ending up with “do not touch anything.”
You are alone on an island. You are very alone. There is nothing to do except sit by the waves, and ponder things like real-life credit-card balances.
That the producer suggests, in the abovementioned Famitsu interview, that anyone had ever likened his game to a Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults” smacks of the worst kind of bigheadedness. It’s a guy being bigheaded and uninformed, trying to hide his big head, and not realizing that everyone sees through it. No, Portable Island cannot be Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults,” because Boku no natsuyasumi is already “for adults.” The game is not merely a “simulator” of a vacation. It is a retelling of an actual, specific summer vacation, one experienced by a young boy, taken to his aunt and uncle’s country home in 1975. There are characters who talk about themselves. There’s a girl whose brother died. Each day begins with calisthenics and breakfast and ends when you go to bed. There’s a ghost story. In addition to collecting and trading fighting beetles, you will witness a young boy learning about others and learning about himself over the course of one bittersweet summer. The game reminds you that nothing, even (or especially) carefree days, lasts forever. This is a tale for adults who have grown up; kids look at Bokunatsu and think they’d rather play Pokemon. This, right here, is a game for the wisened men of the world.
Portable Island contains no love interest, no murder mystery, no ghost story. It’s just you, dead-alone on a hecking island. Turn the PSP on in the evening, and you can watch a sunset in a bottle. Why would you do this? At the same time, in the real world, a real sun is setting. You could set the game time to a different timezone, so that the sun will be rising in the game when it’s setting in the real world, though if you do this, you’ll be missing out on the alarm clock function.
Yes, the alarm clock function. Be aware that when I say that people don’t want games they can also use as alarm clocks, I am, of course, speaking for myself. I don’t want a game that can be used as an alarm clock. I have an alarm clock. It’s called my cellular phone. (Which also runs the original Ridge Racer.) I set the alarm before I go to bed. I tell the alarm to go off at 5:07AM with a light ring. Then I set a second alarm, to go off at 6:27AM, with a louder ring. I wake up and go running.
My phone is set to “original manner mode” — so I can configure how loudly each type of event is announced. A phone call always rings quietly. Phone emails are silent. My set alarms are as configured in the “alarm” menu. So I make one quiet, and one loud. This is my casual, modern-life acceptance of the fact that people will always hit the “snooze” button for an hour before actually waking up. So far, my brain hasn’t figured out the alarm is a filthy liar and started rebelling. Or maybe it has it figured out all along, and just doesn’t mind.
I have more fun programming my cellular phone than I do playing Portable Island.
In order to use Portable Island as an alarm clock, you need one of those PSP stands, you know, where you put the PSP in and it keeps it charged up. Before you put the game into sleep mode, you tell it what time you want it to go off. The game will then wake you up with “pleasant ocean sounds” when the time comes. Actually, you can set the ocean sounds to go off in a murmur ten minutes before the alarm proper.
Here I will say something about the sample quality of said ocean sounds: they’re pretty good, I guess.
The alarm clock function is featured on the advertisements on the Ginza Line. Right beneath “How about a tropical island to ease your worries, buddy?” are three photos. One of them shows the game as an alarm clock. “Wake up to pleasant ocean sounds! Brighten up your room with pleasant ocean sounds at any time of day!” That’s kind of creepy. Though I guess some people do stuff like that. They buy VHS tapes with tropical fish on them, because they can’t have an aquarium. Personally, I prefer the sound of the highway and the distant trains outside my apartment, especially when I’ve just gotten out of the shower and am drinking a cold glass of tea, and there’s a nice breeze coming in the window.
The other two pictures on the train advertisement display the “camera” function (take pictures of the game and save them to your Memory Stick!) and the musical instrument feature, respectively. The musical instrument feature is what professional journalists call a “crock of stuff”; you can play a ukulele, assorted percussion, or steel drums, using only the PSP’s buttons. The “assorted percussion” instrument is basically a throwaway. You just jag the face buttons and the directional buttons, making a cacophony. Or, well, it would be a cacophony, if the PSP’s headphone volume went up loud enough to allow a cacophony, or if the PSP’s speakers were strong enough to allow anyone else to hear the sound effects over the volume of the clattering train rails. The steel drums are slightly more interesting, because each button or direction pressed plays a specific note. You can actually put together melodies, if you have the patience, and/or love music despite a deep hatred for touching actual musical instruments.
The ukulele function is the one that’s getting all of the attention. Famitsu did a full feature on it, for example. All the way back at Tokyo Game Show 2005, Namco had hula-skirted booth personnel carrying PSPs around tempting people to try the ukulele. I was one such tempted. It was a novel idea at first. You hold the PSP upside-down while pressing and holding the face buttons (or a shoulder button plus face buttons for extra notes), and then flick the analog stick with your thumb to simulate strumming. (One of the options in this mode is to toggle the upstroke on or off, which is mystifying, because ukulele is quit the upstroked instrument. I say this as a man who’s screwed around with a ukulele whenever at a certain friend’s house.)
You can perform in time to songs, if you want. The game will simulate the other instruments, and you will strum the ukulele. It’s worth noting that the timing practice you’ll get by strumming the analog nub can actually gift you with some real skill at playing a ukulele. However, pressing and holding buttons on the PSP can’t exactly prepare you for playing a ukulele. There are no frets on a PSP. Moreover, the game does not grade your performance. Grading the player’s performance would, I imagine, go against the producers’ “relaxation” idea. As well produced as the musical mode is (probably handled by Namco’s Taiko drum game team), the songs all happen to be dismally fruity island numbers; having your significant other walk in on you practicing one of these would be like being caught by your mother masturbating to a pineapple fetishist’s magazine.
If you’re interested in ukuleles, for the price of this software you can purchase a real ukulele of above-average craftsmanship. It is about as portable as a PSP, and actually weighs less.
For the price of a PSP and this game, you can purchase a ukulele of superior construction, or else a Fender Japan Stratocaster electric guitar. Just saying.
You could also, yes, purchase an airplane ticket somewhere sunny, with some pocket money left over for a few beers, and sleep on the beach at night. Sleeping on the beach, you’ll find, is more comfortable than being packed into a late-night rush-hour train and staring at a fake young man lying on a fake hotel’s fake bed.
The game also has a “radio” function. Engage this function, and you can listen to any mp3s stored in your Memory Stick’s PSP/MUSIC folder played under a weird filter of static, seperated by the whisperings of a DJ whose English sounds vaguely (and with probably good reason) like a Japanese who grew up in Hawaii.
The inclusion of this tool is oddly flattering, and oddly insulting, depending on the flip of your mind’s coin at any given time. For one thing, I can listen to my mp3s on an iPod without this game’s randomizing help. And I can listen to them, maybe, in a cafe overlooking a rainy highway in Shibuya, during a devastating autumn where the nightingales flew south early, while waiting for a friend to show up and cheer me down. That Portable Island creates falsely picturesque context (listening to the radio on the beach, miles from civilization) for its presentation of the mp3s feels hollow given the game’s love of lack of conflict. Yet the basic premise feels like it might not be a bad idea in an actual game: if a game set on a tropical island would use your mp3s as background music during gameplay, interrupting them sometimes with tropical weather reports, it would be kind of neat. Yet this wouldn’t work for Portable Island, firstly because there is no actual “game” to speak of, and secondly because of the PSP’s hardware limitations. The system couldn’t possibly handle hammering the CPU, the UMD, and the Memory Stick all at once without expending the battery in thirty-five seconds.
This brings us to the main point of this critique: the PSP itself. The hardware limitations are this game’s ruin. Based on my hours of time playing it (to spite myself), and my seconds spent gazing at the advertisement on the Ginza Line, before the doors opened at my station and the ad slid into the abyss, I have come to the conclusion that any and all hope that this game will sell depends on, if not making the player feel like he or she truly is on a tropical island, at least reminding the player what a tropical island is like if he or she has gone, or imparting a little bit about what makes a tropical island great to players who have never had the opportunity to go to a tropical island.
At this goal, the game fails in all aspects. I could go into detail about how cheap the experience of actually “being” on the island feels, about how fast-travel forgives the laziness that prevents you from wanting to walk anywhere, how pressing a button to lie down in your bed feels clever until you realize now you’re staring at yourself in a bed, or how the island’s layout isn’t really that interesting, and most of the locations look the same. I won’t, however. I’ll just pick on the graphics and sound: the graphics look like little more than a polished-down PlayStation2 game. The sound — good samples, yes — is tinny and at a squeaky volume. It’s all very quiet and understated.
Let’s get it out in the open: This game is not virtual reality. This game is not a lucid dream. This game is definitely not the Holodeck on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
“Virtual reality” used to see bar patrons, six beers rich, paying four dollars to put on a plastic helmet and scream at flat-shaded pterodactyls for three minutes. There were maybe goals in this; the problem was it kept sobering people up, at which point they realized they were too old to pretend to do stuff that didn’t at least look real. Virtual reality, as an institution, collapsed, because ten years ago, when the most sophisticated polygons were in fighting games like Tekken, nothing a computer generated would end up looking worth the shame of putting on that plastic helmet. It would, in fact, be jarring, and disturbing, and sobering, though it might have been the developers’ intention to immerse the player in a world that felt real.
What I’m saying, then, Namco, is that until I can feel the sand between my toes, smell the sea, dip my toe into the waves, fall asleep, and work on a tan with the help of a computer program, please don’t make a game like Portable Island.
Well, I guess it’s a little too late for that.
Recently, the idea of virtual reality has started to creep back into the pop-culture pre-conscious. The head/movement-tracking technology necessary to make a game like Dactyl Nightmare more like a good dream is only recently being revisted, in the oddest little places, like Nintendo’s DS and Wii. Photorealistic graphics, as well, are being strived toward as we speak. In this light, we can pretend to appreciate Madden a little bit, as a game that, year by year, inches strategically toward total realism. Obviously, the average Madden fan doesn’t want to have to work like a football player to play the game, and that is why a sub-VR experience is fully tolerable. The ideal Madden would be, essentially, “realistic, interactive watching.” This is still a long way off. Though today’s fighting game characters look and move far more realistically than, say, they did ten years ago, if Oblivion is the best graphics can get in a game about a large, detailed world, then I’d say we’re a long way off of creating non-games that let mom star in her favorite soap-opera. How’s mom going to appreciate her favorite soap opera, if the male romantic lead in the game world looks uglier — and more like a haunted town’s female librarian — than she does in real life? See “The Uncanny Valley” for more.
In other words, there are technological leaps and bounds yet to be taken just to bring the audio/visual experience of gaming up to a level where something like Portable Island, a game about nothing, could be in the least bit successful. Then there’s the olfactory/tactile factor, and I reckon smellovision is still decades away.
So, until then, until that golden age where the “user interface” melts away, where all videogames will be “non-games,” until that day I can enjoy playing the part of Konstantin in Square-Enix’s Anna Karenina, I take it people will continue to escape from every day life with games that feature contests of wit and skill. You see, compared to a game of Gradius V, life is actually quite dull. There are many less meteors to dodge, fewer chances to fire lasers. To escape is not to relax — it is to live a fantasy. It is to fly, where we could previously only walk. To succeed at invented tests makes us feel proud. To fail at them makes us long to succeed, at times when there are so many real things around us that we need to maintain, we will gladly welcome a fleeting desire to succeed in something we can give up at any time. In games, we will run and jump, whereas in life, we seldom do more than walk.
There’s a hypothetical question for the moment, now that we’re thinking about it: could a game about walking be fun? Perhaps more poignantly, could a game about running be fun? Recently, Rockstar released a Table Tennis game, to the whoa whoa shocking shock of many games publications. People went nuts — “The makers of Grand Theft Auto bring you TABLE TENNIS!!!” — that the game didn’t involve killer prostitutes or, at least, selling drugs to minors, or shooting up high schools. Yet, one of the developers, interviewed in some videogame rag I read I don’t remember when, said they made the game out of a desire to perfect a representation of one simple action. So they chose the simplest action that could still be interesting and involving for two players: tennis. Well, table tennis, because the scale is smaller, and would allow them the breathing room to give optimal attention to all aspects of presentation. EA’s recent Fight Night: Round 3 tries the same thing — removing the “videogamey” elements of a sports game, forsaking life meters in favor of on-character damage indicators, telling us the score only as the score would be told if it were a real sporting event — that is, via voiced television announcers. Is this the future of sports games? Without a doubt. Is it the future of all other videogames? Only if a certain few designers like Fumito Ueda have their way.
Now, remember the first time you played Super Mario 64? It might have been at a demo kiosk somewhere. You might not have known how to hold the controller right away. Yet, eventually, it started to click. The idea of pushing the analog stick a little bit to make Mario walk, and pushing it all the way to make him run was a wonderful thrill. It was often said that you didn’t even have to enter the castle to have fun, the first time you played the game; of all the things the game did right (and, to some extent, wrong), the utter joy of your first run around the castle was a pop culture miracle in and of itself. Without music, without enemies, without the possibility of dying (outside of jumping off the top of the castle), we were able to have fun simply moving around in a videogame, and with the use of only two buttons, really. Future entries into the 3D platforming-adventure genre, such as the first Jak and Daxter, would later be criticized as “About as much fun as Super Mario 64 — if you couldn’t enter the castle.” Once we’d seen the thrills that lay inside the castle, the idea of just running around outside forever seemed ridiculous.
So it occurs to me, quite naturally, that before we can make a hypothetical videogame retelling of Anna Karenina (or, perhaps, War and Peace) that involves the player playing any role he wishes, we need to first make a game about running. And I don’t mean a kitschy simulation like cavia’s Naoko Takahashi’s Let’s Run a Marathon! — I mean, a game where the player actually presses buttons to run, all alone in a desert, or perhaps a city at night. The game will not allow the player to be free to enter buildings. However, it will be so enchanting in its simplicity and serenity that no one would dare think to enter a building. Why enter a building, when there is this thrill right here, this thrill of running?
Recall the scene in the film “Adaptation” where Robert McKee yells at Charlie Kauffman for accusing real life of being boring, with nothing happening. He says there are people dying everywhere, every day; there are people getting shot, people killing other people out of jealousy or politics. He says it’s presumptuous to try to make entertainment imitate your own life, just because your own life is boring. What he is implying is that if it is only possible to write what you know, and the only thing you know is idleness, and if idleness is not worth the time it takes to tell of, you should perhaps seek to know something else before seeking to tell a story.
Yet, in running, there is conflict. The goal changes from moment to moment. You will breathe differently as your heart is beating now than you will breathe when your heart is beating more quickly. When an exhale intersects with both feet being off the ground, the inhale feels different than it does at other times. The goal in running is to keep running. Simpler than Pong, with a ball and two paddles, this Hypothetical Videogame About Running would, ideally, seek to literally and concretely reconstruct, if only in audio-visual aspects, the perpetual struggle of a man against a believable road containing no obstacles. Without a single health gauge, ideally, the game’s conflict would be to not give in to tiredness; there would be no power-ups. At the end of a session, a player would not think he had wasted his time; he would not say, “I should have just gone out running for real,” because the game will impart on him the idea that all we do until we are killed by time is kill time. That all we can ever do is attempt to escape.
Perhaps that’s putting it a little desolately.
What I am perhaps endeavoring to say is that, in a videogame consisting of images on a screen (as in, not a VR program), starring a human character, game designers are responsible for
1. placing the character in an interesting situation
and/or
2. endowing the character’s every movement with a joy-like friction.
Perhaps I got a little too prosaic with that second rule.
There is no joy in the movement of the character in Portable Island. If there were, the designers wouldn’t see fit to include a fast-travel function for traveling around to the different parts of the island instantly. There is no contest, and no struggle. There are no interesting situations. That it was made by men who have played games “about nothing,” yet also feature struggles of the hand/eye or psychological variety, men who have no doubt made videogames about giant robots destroying buildings, or girls crying because of situations involving virus-carrying aliens. These are men whose “creative” switches have only two settings — nuts or nothing. One or zero. There’s nothing in between. Digital. No analog.
It’s tempting to say that the idea of a game where you do nothing, where nothing relies on skill, nor even on persistence, could be done well. It’s tempting to say that a game where you merely relax could, under some circumstances, be a tonic for a certain kind of life gone astray. Maybe girls who work in tough offices, and live with their stern parents, and enjoy taking the time to gaze at a far-off sunset in the palms of their hands, yearning for a life that turned out a little bit differently. These girls — these parasitic princesses of the modern era — deserve love, no doubt. They deserve flowers and they deserve the joy that comes with being told they are an essential ingredient of someone’s world.
Yet they also deserve the thrill of discovering how it feels when patience is awarded. They deserve the rush that comes with the realization that in this world, there are things that we can do. Portable Island wastes no time in advertising itself as a “soothing experience” for the soul. Therefore, it leaves itself wide-open for the following criticism:
Is this game a fitting escape, then, from our rigorous life at the office? What does it soothe? What needs soothing? The official site shows a picture of a man with Portable Island in his white PSP, kicking up a racket of sea sounds as he pounds away at some fierce code on his Sony Vaio. The game is positioning itself as something to be enjoyed passively, though I reckon any man with a computer can also download a music program to aid him in listening to sounds he’d prefer to hear over false ocean noises.
Another game tried, a while back, to appeal to the unfortunate princesses of the modern era. That game was Nintendogs; it sought to soothe the wailing desires of little boys and girls who wanted dogs and could have them. Yet, as a videogame, stupid as it was (I found it quite insipid and repetitive), it also contained real, momentarily flickering tests of circumstance. You throw the frisbee and watch it fly. There is joy in its flight. The dog catches it. There’s something nice about that. If your connection to the dog is a strong one — if your heart, as it were, is pure going into Nintendogs, it will entertain you for hours on end. A child unable to have a puppy could own this game and love it, and eventually be given a puppy for his or her birthday, and love the puppy for entirely different reasons. In the same way, yes, a human can love a robot, though only if the robot doesn’t, up front, guarantee it will be able to return this love — or, more specifically, if the robot makes it sparkling clear at the outset that “I am a robot; I cannot treat a human as a human would treat a human, because I am not a human. I am a robot.”
If Portable Island is indeed an effort to cure or a compensate for something lacking from our real lives, then I argue, on the basis of the above points, that it is a failure. There may be people on Amazon.co.jp who say they like it, though I reckon the girl who says “Children would find it boring; it’s clearly a game for adults who understand life’s finer pleasures” is a viral plant and the one guy who says the game “soothes” his worries gave Madonna’s album “Who’s that Girl?” four out of five stars, so he’s obviously a flake. (It deserves only three.) He also gave Nintendo’s Brain Training three stars out of five, indicating that he, too, might be a viral plant of Bandai-Namco.
Unlike Nintendogs or Animal Crossing, Portable Island is never a place we are; rather, it is a place someone we know has been. Inserting Portable Island into the PSP and flipping the POWER switch is not unlike sending your robotic butler to Hawaii and monitoring him with a hidden camera. On the island, he is free to do anything as long as it is possible to do, only he doesn’t seem to actually do any of these things, because he is a robot, and robots and butlers just don’t know what to do on vacation. Expecting him to turn around and do something fascinating in this vacuum of a world would be like expecting your coffee machine to start dispensing photocopies of gorilla handprints.
And so therein lies the rub; even a pacifist finds it impossible to play Grand Theft Auto without committing an act of violence, because the game is programmed with more attention to the physics that result from violence than the pyhsics that result from standing around doing nothing. In Portable Island, the pacifist is given a world where violence — or action — is not allowed even in imagination. While Grand Theft Auto might unknowingly aspire to be a mural painted by a naughty child, Portable Island is a postcard from a robot.
Repeat after me: we do not need postcards from robots. Though the robot might really be on the island in the photograph, the robot is only sending the postcard because someone else told him to. At least, when your aunt sends you a postcard from the Bahamas, she’s doing it because she’s thinking of you, or she wants you to think she’s thinking of you. Portable Island, a postcard from a robot, is not thinking of you, because it’s not thinking of anything. And that brings us to the problem with the world:
The most basic way to put it is that there is a problem with this world. That problem, put in simple words, tells us that “without war, there can be no peace; without hate, there can be no love.” Why is this so? Without yin, there cannot be yang; without light, there cannot be dark. Without the bad days, there can be no context for what makes good days so good. Every rock and roll band that stands on a stage in an arena faces sometimes tens of thousands of people who, without knowing it, are asking, deep in their hearts, “Why can’t it always be love? Why can’t it always be peace?” They are lacking in something; the rock and roll star, history’s greatest robot, without making a promise or a presumption, gives them what they need at that exact moment, and though the rock and roll star might create a memory or two in each of those people, it can’t guarantee them a safe and joyful future.
The problem with this world is that we can’t always be love, and we can’t always be peace. If this problem were willed human form, and it stood before you, what would you do? Would you punch it in the face with hopes of knocking its block off? Or would you jump to the ground and sink your teeth into its ankles? Would either course of action be the “right” one? The answer is simple, and at the same time, it is nothing at all. Let’s get pretentious and damning, then:
Each work of expression humankind creates will sit at the bottom of a gazed-down-upon canyon for centuries to come, as messages from the past. Portable Island is a message from a land so far away it might as well not even exist, from a person so dry they might not even be real. As an “artistic” endeavor, it is presumptuous, ankle-biting trash that the modern world would have been better off without.
That’s putting it simply.
note how they use a photo of a real island on the box. that fact will be important in the following section.
As mentioned, you can use the camera function to take a picture of the screen — maybe with a little zoom-in or zoom-out — and save the screenshots to your Memory Stick Duo. Yet, should you import the screenshots to your computer, maybe for printing out, you’ll find they are all watermarked in the lower-right corner with rather large white font:
COPYRIGHT 2006 BANDAI-NAMCO
What the hell is this, really? Is this at all necessary?
I can imagine printing one of these and taking it to my grandmother in the hospital. (Actually, my grandmother’s dead; roll with it, though.)
“Did you ever take that trip to the tropical island? Did those bad boys at that office of yours ever give you the time off?”
“Yeah, yeah they did, grandma.”
“Did you take a picture of the sunset for me?”
“Yes, I did, look.”
“Oh, this is lovely . . . wait, what’s this? Who’s . . . Ban-dai-Nam-co?”
“Oh, that, um . . .”
“ARE YOU GAY!?”
It would probably ruin her last few days on earth.
In a way, the idea of watermarking the screenshots the player takes within the game is pretty heavy. It raises a lot of questions. The watermark in Portable Island is such a sterile, ugly, huge one. It clutters up as large a chunk of the screenshot as possible, just so anyone looking at it knows exactly what company made this game.
Why not lighten up a little bit with it, though? Why not put the “Portable Island” logo down there, instead, plus a “Bandai-Namco” logo? Why make it so legal, and sterile?
Tiny font in the instruction manual reads, “Each screenshot will be watermarked for legal purposes.” What legal purposes? So that no one can use a screenshot from this game on their blog, and fool people into believing they’ve actually been to a tropical island? Are the graphics even good enough for that?
The only situation I can think of wherein having copyright information on each screenshot of the game would be a legally “necessary” thing would be if someone were to find a way to make the characters take on lewd poses or participate in scandalous situations. And then, the watermark would only exist to confirm to the public who is responsible for this mess. That’s a pretty sanctimonious reason for watermarking a screenshot.
If I were to ask a member of the development team about why the watermark appears on each screenshot, and why it’s so ugly, I’d no doubt be told, “Hey, it’s Japanese copyright law.” Yet, as one who lives his life by the letters of Japanese copyright law, I know it’s not necessary to protect such assets. You don’t have to put your name on each screenshot unless you’re overflowing with pride and want everyone to know it was you who did that. (That, or if you think people will use the screenshots for money purposes. Though trying to imagine anyone making money selling Portable Island screenshots to a vacation magazine only leads me to a conclusion that makes Namco look like assholes, so I’ll let go.)
Yet Namco is not proud. This game was appropriated a modest budget, was delayed for a while, was shrugged at by many executives, and somehow just emerged.
Once more, the fact that these Japanese game developers are all, on the average, run by chain-smoking combed-over sixty-something men with hair the color of cigarette ashes and teeth like fat-caked fishbones comes frighteningly into view. Bandai-Namco must put their name on the screenshots generated by the game because
1. The screenshots contain no characters immediately recognizable to the general public as Bandai-Namco properties (Pac-Man, Gundam, M.O.M.O, Tekken‘s Panda or Marshall Law)
2. If this situation had come up in the past, this is certainly how the elders would have handled it.
For heck’s sake, though, you’re spoiling how people enjoy games. They enjoy showing things and saying, “I took this picture in this videogame.” If they say, “Hey, I took this picture in this game called Portable Island,” if they let the name of the product emerge naturally in one conversation, then that’s a larger commercial success than subjecting a thousand indifferent people to your watermark. I mean, really, do you think the average consumer is going to look at a picture of a computer-generated polygon man in a hammock and say, “BANDAI-NAMCO, HUH? I SURE HAVE A LOT OF RESPECT FOR THAT CORPORATE CONGLOMERATE, NOW!”
Get over yourselves!! If your game was interesting to begin with, people would ask the name when they saw the screenshot. They’d say, “Hey, what game is that from?” Maybe you’re afraid that’s never going to happen? As it is now, putting your name on a screenshot of a generic island paradise is like hanging your kid’s C-minus on your refrigerator, because you’re pretty sure he couldn’t do any better if you asked him nicely.
(And while we’re at it — videogame websites, stop watermarking screenshots. You didn’t hecking make the games. Even if you took the screenshots.)
A recent Famitsu shows that Sega will release a PSP version of their Homestar home planetarium in October. The original homestar was something you place in your living room and turn off the lights, and suddenly, right there, on your ceiling, there’s a starry sky the likes of which you’ll never see in Tokyo (light pollution, you see). The Homestar was popular to a point where it’s now marked down enormously in electronic stores all over Japan.
Well, bewilderingly, there’s a PSP “version” coming. In addition to allowing you to gaze at the starry sky in the palm of your hand, there will be trivia modes and educational tours of the cosmos.
I can understand a home planetarium working on a ceiling, though come on, in the palm of your hand? There was a survey recently that said most PSP gamers in Japan play their PSPs at home. I guess this game is meant to be the evolution of reading a book under the covers with a flashlight?
Still, though: No. For one thing, my PSP screen has five or six dead pixels in it. What if I mistake a dead pixel cluster for the North Star? The educational aspect of the software would be failing then, wouldn’t it?
This is the latest in a fleet of “non-games” for the PSP, flagshipped by Portable Island. I watch each of them come, and think Nintendo really needs to hurry up, release the Wii, blow away the public, and convince every developer that the DS isn’t just a pop-culture fad-fluke. They need to show these people a little discipline.
What if I want to gaze at stars on the train to work? The PSP’s screen is so shiny that the black background would reflect the harsh train lighting. This would mean I’d be gazing at my own face and not imaginary stars. In the same way, I can mess with the timezones on my Portable Island, by locating the magical clock-idol deep in the island jungle (or by warping to the general vicinity), and make it so the sun is setting when I wake up in the morning, making the sky over the beach on my ride to work splattered with stars. The harsh orange lights on board the Ginza Line reflect in the PSP screen, and there I am, seeing up my own nostrils. My nose is kind of oily. I should quit eating some of the things I eat. I should probably try to be healthy, like I keep saying I will be, eventually. “Eventually” is a rough concept. I should quit listening to music that makes me yearn to make things better, and start actually trying to make things better. For myself, I mean.
I soak in some air-conditioning and think back to that advertisement on the train. Why release this game in the summer? Why not release it in the winter? It would make more sense to release it in the winter, especially with the slogan being “On Portable Island, it’s always summer.”
Hey. I know another place where it’s always summer. Yeah. A tropical island.
–tim rogers wanted to find a reason to mention that you fly to Portable Island on ‘ban-nam airlines’
☆☆☆☆
“A POSTCARD FROM A ROBOT.”
(Author’s note: I originally wrote this article for insertcredit.com nearly two years ago. Though I didn’t know it back then, the “mission” behind writing this review would essentially serve as the “inspiration” for starting this here “website”. So let’s go ahead and call this review right here, originally titled “postcard from a robot”, “the genesis of action button dot net”. i don’t think enough people read it when i first posted it, so i’m putting it here, and now. i just kind of felt it was weirdly relevant to the two new reviews going live today.)
heck you Namco. heck you Bandai. heck you Namco-Bandai. heck you Bandai-Namco.
heck you for being presumptuous. heck you for being insulting. heck you for sneering Tetsuya Takahashi off of Xenosaga. heck you for tempting that man to even make a single one of those games in the first place. heck you for assuming the first of those games would sell a million copies upon release. heck you for being disappointed when it didn’t sell a million copies.
heck you for pressuring Keita Takahashi into making a sequel to Katamari. heck you for refusing to believe that a man capable of birthing such a brilliant idea might actually have a couple more brilliant ideas.
heck you for seemingly deriving pleasure from wronging people with the last name “Takahashi.”
heck you announcing Ridge Racer 7 for PlayStation3 not six months after releasing Ridge Racer 6 on Xbox 360. heck you for taking nearly five years to increase the numeral from 5 to 6, and then increasing the numeral from 6 to 7 in a few short months.
heck you for Ridge Racer in general. I bet, within the walls of your company, it’s absolutely positively imperative that everyone use the politest language when addressing the secretary, using the coffee machine, or operating a stapler; I bet you require your employees to turn off their cellular phones when they take a stuff in the employee restrooms. I bet you’re really proud of that stuff. Yet apparently you don’t think it shameful that you’re always there to release a schlocked-together Ridge Racer for every new console. heck you for possessing that ballless notion that “people who just bought a new console are bound to buy any game, right?”
heck you for Tekken 5! heck you for Tekken in general! heck you especially for Tekken 4, though heck you super-especially for releasing Tekken 5 on PlayStation2, and then immediately releasing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection in the arcade. heck you for announcing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection for PSP, with its stuffty little directional pad and unresponsive buttons, instead of PlayStation2!
heck you for that game sucking to begin with!
heck you for the character costumes in Soul Calibur III! heck you for giving Yunsung neon green Adidas high-tops!
heck you for putting names like “Zasalamel” on the back of cars in Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360! heck you for treating the names of your insignificant fighting game characters like they were fashion brands! heck you for presuming I care!
heck you for presuming I want to play Pac-Man while Ridge Racer 6 loads? heck you for sneering at the irony of a guy greeted with Pac-Man when he’s waiting for a game to load on his new high-definition television!
heck you for putting that Pac-Man game in the loading screen, when it’s not even a “loading” screen! I mean, why put a “Loading” game in there when there’s also a “Press the A button to start the game” displayed from the second the “Loading” screen appears!
heck you for Pac-Man, while we’re at it!
No, really!
Can you not see how hecking &^#$#ed Pac-Man is? He’s a yellow circle with a mouth! You make him three-dimensional, and he’s just a sphere! A hecking sphere! Who gives a stuff about a sphere?
heck you for the Tales of… series — sure, some of them are fun, and I enjoy them, though heck you for having so many different teams working on different Tales of… games at any given time because even though the games are all well-made and stand apart from one another in terms of story, you’re deathly afraid of releasing an RPG with any other name because you’re positively convinced they won’t sell, because you’re positively convinced people wouldn’t know the game was worth buying, because they wouldn’t be able to judge quality for themselves, because people need names and numerals in order to make decisions. hecking lighten up!!
Also heck you sideways for Tales of the World, an “original” PSP RPG that basically stars you as a generic guy who meets all the characters from the Tales of… games. So it’s like Kingdom Hearts, without Disney? And, according to screenshots, in Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, EVERYONE IS LEVELING UP CONSTANTLY
LEVEL INFINITY
And most importantly, heck you to the moon for presuming, time and time again, I have nothing better to do than play videogames.
On top of all this, heck you for Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort, and all that it represents.
Basically, Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort (“Resort in the palm of your hand”) is a non-game. I almost typed “a non-game in the vein of Animal Crossing,” though I think that would be saying a little much. It’s not in the vein of Animal Crossing — it’s more in the vein of reading a six-month-old tennis magazine in a dentist’s office waiting room than it is in the vein of Animal Crossing.
To put it simply, the game is about a beverage-like island. The advertisements on the subway trains all over Tokyo this summer ask the passenger, “Would you like a tropical island?” using the same sentence structure with which a bartender would ask a customer if he’d like a beer. The island of this game is, then, to be drunk like shots of whiskey. The advertisement consists of a sticker plastered to the doors of the Ginza Line. Passengers who had been, a minute earlier, waiting on the platform at Ueno Station, fanning themselves with a plastic fan handed to them by someone at Yodobashi Camera an hour ago (mine said “Intel Core2 Duo Processors: On Sale Now!” on it) now stand, looking at this advertisement. “Would you like a tropical island, sir?” After just spending four uncomfortable minutes on a train platform where the air-conditioners are positioned at weird angles, and standing at the front of the line, the position most likely to score you a seat, means tragically dodging the overhead air-conditioning unit’s diagonal flow, you get on the train, and you have to stand, anyway. The tidal wave of air-conditioning in the train chills your sweat. Your shirt sticks stiffly to your skin, and then it does not. Like magic, your body temperature begins to do a little dance. Your eyes chance upon the advertisement on the door. “How about a tropical island right about now, sir?”
How does this make you feel? You’ve just felt refreshed, like diving into the ocean after spending a hectic afternoon being chased by bandits through the desert. The idea of a tropical island should at least have some emotional response.
I somehow doubt, however, that the marketers were thinking this far ahead.
When you hear the words “tropical island,” what do you think? What sensory reaction does it awaken in you? Do you recall sand pleasantly between your toes? Sand frustratingly beneath your swimsuit? Itchy sand in your pubic hair? Cold water on your toes? Warm water on your toes? Cold water up to your waist, suddenly turning warm? Beach balls? The smell of beach ball-vinyl? The heat of said vinyl, baked in the sun? Volleyballs? Smell of the ocean? The sound of seagulls?
The smell of the air-conditioning in the hotel. The sound of muzak at the hotel lounge. The way the sun plays your skin like a different organ than it is back at home. The bewildering sense of distance when you gaze at the ocean; though your home may lie in the direction behind you, when you watch those waves, if you have come from a place where no waves break, to see breaking waves should fill you with a feeling that wherever you live, it should be beyond this, out there somewhere. The sea has enchanted men and women and children for years, across many centuries and fictional universes. You can fall in love with nothing at all — a wonderful feeling — just by standing and staring at it.
If you’ve never been to a tropical island, you might hear the phrase “tropical island” and think, perhaps, of Hawaiian Punch, and the way it makes your teeth red.
They say it’s made of lava rocks, you know.
Either way — whether it’s the crushing, vaguely peaceful notion that, like the waves, our lives will eventually crash to a shore somewhere and break, or memories of summer stomach flu and vomiting Hawaiian Punch into a public pool in a manner that burned your nostrils, either of these experiences represent memories Portable Island cannot compete with.
If you see that advertisement on the train, you might fall into a standing heavy reverie about vacationing. You might feel like going somewhere far away, and for a few precious days existing in a place you do not normally exist. You might desire a paradigm shift; you might consider just about anything an escape.
This game is promising you a vacation in the palm of your hand. It is promising you relief from your everyday life. You put it in your PSP, and you play it on the train with headphones on. It’s supposed to make you feel calm. It’s supposed to make you feel peaceful and serene in short, violent bursts. It’s the aromatherapy of videogames; you have it turned on in your room, or your office, and there it is, a window to a world that is not your world, or anyone else’s. It’s at atmospheric modifier. It’s here to brighten your day, and sometimes engulf your attention.
I would sincerely like to believe that anyone able to be fooled by this parlor trick has not the social standing to ever board a train.
I don’t want to talk about the game, really. I really don’t want to. It’s not worth it. It’s a game about an island. Only you don’t do anything on the island. You relax. You can press buttons to lie down in the sand on the beach. You can walk up to the water. You can press a button between trees and attach a hammock. You can lie in the hammock, and tweak the analog stick to swing the hammock. You can aim a camera lens and take pictures of yourself in the hammock. You can lay your character in the hammock and then sit the PSP in a stand on your desk while you work on some inane project in the office. You can gaze at him every once in a while, and feel jealous. How you wish it were you in that hammock. The game is a ship in a bottle; much as you’d like to ride it, you can’t, because you yourself are not small enough to fit into a bottle.
When your character puts the hammock away, when he or she is done with it, the hammock disappears into the black hole of his or her pocket.
You can walk along rocks. There are penguins there. You can look at them. You can take pictures of them. If you want to go to a different part of the island, you can open your menu and warp there. You can collect food for turtles. You can throw the food on the ground near a turtle, and watch a turtle walk up and start eating it. Only you can’t squat low enough, and zoom in far enough to see his mouth on the food. He’s mostly just hovering and twitching over it.
You can change your character’s clothes. You can make him look like a beach bum, an Abercrombie kid, or a surfer. If you’ve chosen a female protagonist, you can make her wear a bikini or a trendy tropical dress. You can wear big floppy sun hats or Hawaiian shirts. You can touch the screen and think, “That is what I would be wearing if I were really heading to a tropical island this summer!”
If you use the game as a planning tool, the most important lessons it can teach you have mostly everything to do with videogames: fast-travel gets you where you’re going without having to press a boring amount of buttons, and items like mangos, when investigated, appear, accompanied with full descriptions, in the “item” menu. Mangos are high in vitamin C, says the menu. You can collect a whole lot of item descriptions, animal descriptions, and fish descriptions. The game doesn’t keep track of quantities of items collected. Otherwise, you’d feel like you were competing with something, and competition isn’t necessary of a vacation. This game is utopia in a box, and utopia consists of precisely one citizen.
According to an interview in Famitsu the week before the game’s release, the developers really love money and are genuinely afraid of the most efficient ways to get it. Takayuki Nakamura, the game’s producer, says people often tell him it seems like Boku no Natsuyasumi (“My Summer Vacation”) “for adults.” Director Shigeki Tooyama says, “People often ask, ‘Oh, do you regain your HP by sleeping in the hammock?'”
Producer Nakamura explains that the goal of their design is best summarized by the fishing activity: “In other games, the programmers have determined the plentitude and size of the fish. In this game, there is no action. You put out the fishing rod and watch. It’s relaxing. You don’t go on a vacation to be stressed.” I imagine he says this with a cheeky grin, like Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld pitching their idea for a television show “about nothing,” knowing it was a brilliant idea.
Their concept gets a thumbs-down; their execution gets a middle finger up. The game is very tacky. The only game the producers — and Famitsu‘s Mr. Hamamura, ever respectful — are careful not to mention in the brief interview is Animal Crossing, which is likely where Portable Island took its inspiration from. Animal Crossing is a relaxing game with a weird little economy system worked in; it is a game about living a life in a town with other residents. Portable Island is about being dead-alone on an island paradise. That the game doesn’t involve any skill for tasks like fishing is unfortunate; that it is set up in such a way as to make the player never feel like he’s anywhere, much less an island paradise, is near-tragic. That the developers skirt around so many questions in the interview, and talk about how AMAZED people are when they explain that the game has no HIT POINTS or LIFE METER or FINAL BOSS makes it impossible to believe they’ve never played Animal Crossing or Nintendogs. They’re being deliberate in the PR where they should have been deliberate with the game.
Could the game have been saved? Could it have been exciting, enthralling, captivating, and still been about a tropical island? I don’t see why not. Animal Crossing is about a peaceful village of animals, where there’s never a hurricane and there’s never a fire, and it somehow manages to captivate boys, girls, men, and women alike. Why is this? It’s because the game is about maintenance. There’s something to maintain. You clean up your room, you position furniture. You trade things with the animal residents, or with other players via the internet or wireless connection, and you sell them to earn money to buy other things, or a bigger house. You can go fishing, and tweak your fishing rod in hopes of catching bigger fish. You can sell the fish, and make money to buy things for your house. Time flows in real time; night falls, morning comes. Items in the shop change. There’s a mystical thrill out of seeing new items appear. That thrill turns real when you show that new piece of furniture to a friend and he or she says, “I want one of those, too!” As a videogame and as a piece of entertainment, Animal Crossing is a wonderful way to waste time on the train.
In Portable Island, when you collect items, they appear in a list. You can view this list in the menu. You can see a large photo of an item, and read a description of it. Is this supposed to be fun? Animal Crossing gives a graphic realization to each item; you can see it in your room, push it, and move it around. You can play with the positioning of every item in your house. In Portable Island, you’re staying in a hotel room that has to look exactly the same when you leave as it did when you arrived. Only you’re never leaving. Your main character, then, is a nutso conservative of the most mathematical variety, for adding up “room must be in the same condition when you leave as it was when you arrived” and “you will never leave” and ending up with “do not touch anything.”
You are alone on an island. You are very alone. There is nothing to do except sit by the waves, and ponder things like real-life credit-card balances.
That the producer suggests, in the abovementioned Famitsu interview, that anyone had ever likened his game to a Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults” smacks of the worst kind of bigheadedness. It’s a guy being bigheaded and uninformed, trying to hide his big head, and not realizing that everyone sees through it. No, Portable Island cannot be Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults,” because Boku no natsuyasumi is already “for adults.” The game is not merely a “simulator” of a vacation. It is a retelling of an actual, specific summer vacation, one experienced by a young boy, taken to his aunt and uncle’s country home in 1975. There are characters who talk about themselves. There’s a girl whose brother died. Each day begins with calisthenics and breakfast and ends when you go to bed. There’s a ghost story. In addition to collecting and trading fighting beetles, you will witness a young boy learning about others and learning about himself over the course of one bittersweet summer. The game reminds you that nothing, even (or especially) carefree days, lasts forever. This is a tale for adults who have grown up; kids look at Bokunatsu and think they’d rather play Pokemon. This, right here, is a game for the wisened men of the world.
Portable Island contains no love interest, no murder mystery, no ghost story. It’s just you, dead-alone on a hecking island. Turn the PSP on in the evening, and you can watch a sunset in a bottle. Why would you do this? At the same time, in the real world, a real sun is setting. You could set the game time to a different timezone, so that the sun will be rising in the game when it’s setting in the real world, though if you do this, you’ll be missing out on the alarm clock function.
Yes, the alarm clock function. Be aware that when I say that people don’t want games they can also use as alarm clocks, I am, of course, speaking for myself. I don’t want a game that can be used as an alarm clock. I have an alarm clock. It’s called my cellular phone. (Which also runs the original Ridge Racer.) I set the alarm before I go to bed. I tell the alarm to go off at 5:07AM with a light ring. Then I set a second alarm, to go off at 6:27AM, with a louder ring. I wake up and go running.
My phone is set to “original manner mode” — so I can configure how loudly each type of event is announced. A phone call always rings quietly. Phone emails are silent. My set alarms are as configured in the “alarm” menu. So I make one quiet, and one loud. This is my casual, modern-life acceptance of the fact that people will always hit the “snooze” button for an hour before actually waking up. So far, my brain hasn’t figured out the alarm is a filthy liar and started rebelling. Or maybe it has it figured out all along, and just doesn’t mind.
I have more fun programming my cellular phone than I do playing Portable Island.
In order to use Portable Island as an alarm clock, you need one of those PSP stands, you know, where you put the PSP in and it keeps it charged up. Before you put the game into sleep mode, you tell it what time you want it to go off. The game will then wake you up with “pleasant ocean sounds” when the time comes. Actually, you can set the ocean sounds to go off in a murmur ten minutes before the alarm proper.
Here I will say something about the sample quality of said ocean sounds: they’re pretty good, I guess.
The alarm clock function is featured on the advertisements on the Ginza Line. Right beneath “How about a tropical island to ease your worries, buddy?” are three photos. One of them shows the game as an alarm clock. “Wake up to pleasant ocean sounds! Brighten up your room with pleasant ocean sounds at any time of day!” That’s kind of creepy. Though I guess some people do stuff like that. They buy VHS tapes with tropical fish on them, because they can’t have an aquarium. Personally, I prefer the sound of the highway and the distant trains outside my apartment, especially when I’ve just gotten out of the shower and am drinking a cold glass of tea, and there’s a nice breeze coming in the window.
The other two pictures on the train advertisement display the “camera” function (take pictures of the game and save them to your Memory Stick!) and the musical instrument feature, respectively. The musical instrument feature is what professional journalists call a “crock of stuff”; you can play a ukulele, assorted percussion, or steel drums, using only the PSP’s buttons. The “assorted percussion” instrument is basically a throwaway. You just jag the face buttons and the directional buttons, making a cacophony. Or, well, it would be a cacophony, if the PSP’s headphone volume went up loud enough to allow a cacophony, or if the PSP’s speakers were strong enough to allow anyone else to hear the sound effects over the volume of the clattering train rails. The steel drums are slightly more interesting, because each button or direction pressed plays a specific note. You can actually put together melodies, if you have the patience, and/or love music despite a deep hatred for touching actual musical instruments.
The ukulele function is the one that’s getting all of the attention. Famitsu did a full feature on it, for example. All the way back at Tokyo Game Show 2005, Namco had hula-skirted booth personnel carrying PSPs around tempting people to try the ukulele. I was one such tempted. It was a novel idea at first. You hold the PSP upside-down while pressing and holding the face buttons (or a shoulder button plus face buttons for extra notes), and then flick the analog stick with your thumb to simulate strumming. (One of the options in this mode is to toggle the upstroke on or off, which is mystifying, because ukulele is quit the upstroked instrument. I say this as a man who’s screwed around with a ukulele whenever at a certain friend’s house.)
You can perform in time to songs, if you want. The game will simulate the other instruments, and you will strum the ukulele. It’s worth noting that the timing practice you’ll get by strumming the analog nub can actually gift you with some real skill at playing a ukulele. However, pressing and holding buttons on the PSP can’t exactly prepare you for playing a ukulele. There are no frets on a PSP. Moreover, the game does not grade your performance. Grading the player’s performance would, I imagine, go against the producers’ “relaxation” idea. As well produced as the musical mode is (probably handled by Namco’s Taiko drum game team), the songs all happen to be dismally fruity island numbers; having your significant other walk in on you practicing one of these would be like being caught by your mother masturbating to a pineapple fetishist’s magazine.
If you’re interested in ukuleles, for the price of this software you can purchase a real ukulele of above-average craftsmanship. It is about as portable as a PSP, and actually weighs less.
For the price of a PSP and this game, you can purchase a ukulele of superior construction, or else a Fender Japan Stratocaster electric guitar. Just saying.
You could also, yes, purchase an airplane ticket somewhere sunny, with some pocket money left over for a few beers, and sleep on the beach at night. Sleeping on the beach, you’ll find, is more comfortable than being packed into a late-night rush-hour train and staring at a fake young man lying on a fake hotel’s fake bed.
The game also has a “radio” function. Engage this function, and you can listen to any mp3s stored in your Memory Stick’s PSP/MUSIC folder played under a weird filter of static, seperated by the whisperings of a DJ whose English sounds vaguely (and with probably good reason) like a Japanese who grew up in Hawaii.
The inclusion of this tool is oddly flattering, and oddly insulting, depending on the flip of your mind’s coin at any given time. For one thing, I can listen to my mp3s on an iPod without this game’s randomizing help. And I can listen to them, maybe, in a cafe overlooking a rainy highway in Shibuya, during a devastating autumn where the nightingales flew south early, while waiting for a friend to show up and cheer me down. That Portable Island creates falsely picturesque context (listening to the radio on the beach, miles from civilization) for its presentation of the mp3s feels hollow given the game’s love of lack of conflict. Yet the basic premise feels like it might not be a bad idea in an actual game: if a game set on a tropical island would use your mp3s as background music during gameplay, interrupting them sometimes with tropical weather reports, it would be kind of neat. Yet this wouldn’t work for Portable Island, firstly because there is no actual “game” to speak of, and secondly because of the PSP’s hardware limitations. The system couldn’t possibly handle hammering the CPU, the UMD, and the Memory Stick all at once without expending the battery in thirty-five seconds.
This brings us to the main point of this critique: the PSP itself. The hardware limitations are this game’s ruin. Based on my hours of time playing it (to spite myself), and my seconds spent gazing at the advertisement on the Ginza Line, before the doors opened at my station and the ad slid into the abyss, I have come to the conclusion that any and all hope that this game will sell depends on, if not making the player feel like he or she truly is on a tropical island, at least reminding the player what a tropical island is like if he or she has gone, or imparting a little bit about what makes a tropical island great to players who have never had the opportunity to go to a tropical island.
At this goal, the game fails in all aspects. I could go into detail about how cheap the experience of actually “being” on the island feels, about how fast-travel forgives the laziness that prevents you from wanting to walk anywhere, how pressing a button to lie down in your bed feels clever until you realize now you’re staring at yourself in a bed, or how the island’s layout isn’t really that interesting, and most of the locations look the same. I won’t, however. I’ll just pick on the graphics and sound: the graphics look like little more than a polished-down PlayStation2 game. The sound — good samples, yes — is tinny and at a squeaky volume. It’s all very quiet and understated.
Let’s get it out in the open: This game is not virtual reality. This game is not a lucid dream. This game is definitely not the Holodeck on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
“Virtual reality” used to see bar patrons, six beers rich, paying four dollars to put on a plastic helmet and scream at flat-shaded pterodactyls for three minutes. There were maybe goals in this; the problem was it kept sobering people up, at which point they realized they were too old to pretend to do stuff that didn’t at least look real. Virtual reality, as an institution, collapsed, because ten years ago, when the most sophisticated polygons were in fighting games like Tekken, nothing a computer generated would end up looking worth the shame of putting on that plastic helmet. It would, in fact, be jarring, and disturbing, and sobering, though it might have been the developers’ intention to immerse the player in a world that felt real.
What I’m saying, then, Namco, is that until I can feel the sand between my toes, smell the sea, dip my toe into the waves, fall asleep, and work on a tan with the help of a computer program, please don’t make a game like Portable Island.
Well, I guess it’s a little too late for that.
Recently, the idea of virtual reality has started to creep back into the pop-culture pre-conscious. The head/movement-tracking technology necessary to make a game like Dactyl Nightmare more like a good dream is only recently being revisted, in the oddest little places, like Nintendo’s DS and Wii. Photorealistic graphics, as well, are being strived toward as we speak. In this light, we can pretend to appreciate Madden a little bit, as a game that, year by year, inches strategically toward total realism. Obviously, the average Madden fan doesn’t want to have to work like a football player to play the game, and that is why a sub-VR experience is fully tolerable. The ideal Madden would be, essentially, “realistic, interactive watching.” This is still a long way off. Though today’s fighting game characters look and move far more realistically than, say, they did ten years ago, if Oblivion is the best graphics can get in a game about a large, detailed world, then I’d say we’re a long way off of creating non-games that let mom star in her favorite soap-opera. How’s mom going to appreciate her favorite soap opera, if the male romantic lead in the game world looks uglier — and more like a haunted town’s female librarian — than she does in real life? See “The Uncanny Valley” for more.
In other words, there are technological leaps and bounds yet to be taken just to bring the audio/visual experience of gaming up to a level where something like Portable Island, a game about nothing, could be in the least bit successful. Then there’s the olfactory/tactile factor, and I reckon smellovision is still decades away.
So, until then, until that golden age where the “user interface” melts away, where all videogames will be “non-games,” until that day I can enjoy playing the part of Konstantin in Square-Enix’s Anna Karenina, I take it people will continue to escape from every day life with games that feature contests of wit and skill. You see, compared to a game of Gradius V, life is actually quite dull. There are many less meteors to dodge, fewer chances to fire lasers. To escape is not to relax — it is to live a fantasy. It is to fly, where we could previously only walk. To succeed at invented tests makes us feel proud. To fail at them makes us long to succeed, at times when there are so many real things around us that we need to maintain, we will gladly welcome a fleeting desire to succeed in something we can give up at any time. In games, we will run and jump, whereas in life, we seldom do more than walk.
There’s a hypothetical question for the moment, now that we’re thinking about it: could a game about walking be fun? Perhaps more poignantly, could a game about running be fun? Recently, Rockstar released a Table Tennis game, to the whoa whoa shocking shock of many games publications. People went nuts — “The makers of Grand Theft Auto bring you TABLE TENNIS!!!” — that the game didn’t involve killer prostitutes or, at least, selling drugs to minors, or shooting up high schools. Yet, one of the developers, interviewed in some videogame rag I read I don’t remember when, said they made the game out of a desire to perfect a representation of one simple action. So they chose the simplest action that could still be interesting and involving for two players: tennis. Well, table tennis, because the scale is smaller, and would allow them the breathing room to give optimal attention to all aspects of presentation. EA’s recent Fight Night: Round 3 tries the same thing — removing the “videogamey” elements of a sports game, forsaking life meters in favor of on-character damage indicators, telling us the score only as the score would be told if it were a real sporting event — that is, via voiced television announcers. Is this the future of sports games? Without a doubt. Is it the future of all other videogames? Only if a certain few designers like Fumito Ueda have their way.
Now, remember the first time you played Super Mario 64? It might have been at a demo kiosk somewhere. You might not have known how to hold the controller right away. Yet, eventually, it started to click. The idea of pushing the analog stick a little bit to make Mario walk, and pushing it all the way to make him run was a wonderful thrill. It was often said that you didn’t even have to enter the castle to have fun, the first time you played the game; of all the things the game did right (and, to some extent, wrong), the utter joy of your first run around the castle was a pop culture miracle in and of itself. Without music, without enemies, without the possibility of dying (outside of jumping off the top of the castle), we were able to have fun simply moving around in a videogame, and with the use of only two buttons, really. Future entries into the 3D platforming-adventure genre, such as the first Jak and Daxter, would later be criticized as “About as much fun as Super Mario 64 — if you couldn’t enter the castle.” Once we’d seen the thrills that lay inside the castle, the idea of just running around outside forever seemed ridiculous.
So it occurs to me, quite naturally, that before we can make a hypothetical videogame retelling of Anna Karenina (or, perhaps, War and Peace) that involves the player playing any role he wishes, we need to first make a game about running. And I don’t mean a kitschy simulation like cavia’s Naoko Takahashi’s Let’s Run a Marathon! — I mean, a game where the player actually presses buttons to run, all alone in a desert, or perhaps a city at night. The game will not allow the player to be free to enter buildings. However, it will be so enchanting in its simplicity and serenity that no one would dare think to enter a building. Why enter a building, when there is this thrill right here, this thrill of running?
Recall the scene in the film “Adaptation” where Robert McKee yells at Charlie Kauffman for accusing real life of being boring, with nothing happening. He says there are people dying everywhere, every day; there are people getting shot, people killing other people out of jealousy or politics. He says it’s presumptuous to try to make entertainment imitate your own life, just because your own life is boring. What he is implying is that if it is only possible to write what you know, and the only thing you know is idleness, and if idleness is not worth the time it takes to tell of, you should perhaps seek to know something else before seeking to tell a story.
Yet, in running, there is conflict. The goal changes from moment to moment. You will breathe differently as your heart is beating now than you will breathe when your heart is beating more quickly. When an exhale intersects with both feet being off the ground, the inhale feels different than it does at other times. The goal in running is to keep running. Simpler than Pong, with a ball and two paddles, this Hypothetical Videogame About Running would, ideally, seek to literally and concretely reconstruct, if only in audio-visual aspects, the perpetual struggle of a man against a believable road containing no obstacles. Without a single health gauge, ideally, the game’s conflict would be to not give in to tiredness; there would be no power-ups. At the end of a session, a player would not think he had wasted his time; he would not say, “I should have just gone out running for real,” because the game will impart on him the idea that all we do until we are killed by time is kill time. That all we can ever do is attempt to escape.
Perhaps that’s putting it a little desolately.
What I am perhaps endeavoring to say is that, in a videogame consisting of images on a screen (as in, not a VR program), starring a human character, game designers are responsible for
1. placing the character in an interesting situation
and/or
2. endowing the character’s every movement with a joy-like friction.
Perhaps I got a little too prosaic with that second rule.
There is no joy in the movement of the character in Portable Island. If there were, the designers wouldn’t see fit to include a fast-travel function for traveling around to the different parts of the island instantly. There is no contest, and no struggle. There are no interesting situations. That it was made by men who have played games “about nothing,” yet also feature struggles of the hand/eye or psychological variety, men who have no doubt made videogames about giant robots destroying buildings, or girls crying because of situations involving virus-carrying aliens. These are men whose “creative” switches have only two settings — nuts or nothing. One or zero. There’s nothing in between. Digital. No analog.
It’s tempting to say that the idea of a game where you do nothing, where nothing relies on skill, nor even on persistence, could be done well. It’s tempting to say that a game where you merely relax could, under some circumstances, be a tonic for a certain kind of life gone astray. Maybe girls who work in tough offices, and live with their stern parents, and enjoy taking the time to gaze at a far-off sunset in the palms of their hands, yearning for a life that turned out a little bit differently. These girls — these parasitic princesses of the modern era — deserve love, no doubt. They deserve flowers and they deserve the joy that comes with being told they are an essential ingredient of someone’s world.
Yet they also deserve the thrill of discovering how it feels when patience is awarded. They deserve the rush that comes with the realization that in this world, there are things that we can do. Portable Island wastes no time in advertising itself as a “soothing experience” for the soul. Therefore, it leaves itself wide-open for the following criticism:
Is this game a fitting escape, then, from our rigorous life at the office? What does it soothe? What needs soothing? The official site shows a picture of a man with Portable Island in his white PSP, kicking up a racket of sea sounds as he pounds away at some fierce code on his Sony Vaio. The game is positioning itself as something to be enjoyed passively, though I reckon any man with a computer can also download a music program to aid him in listening to sounds he’d prefer to hear over false ocean noises.
Another game tried, a while back, to appeal to the unfortunate princesses of the modern era. That game was Nintendogs; it sought to soothe the wailing desires of little boys and girls who wanted dogs and could have them. Yet, as a videogame, stupid as it was (I found it quite insipid and repetitive), it also contained real, momentarily flickering tests of circumstance. You throw the frisbee and watch it fly. There is joy in its flight. The dog catches it. There’s something nice about that. If your connection to the dog is a strong one — if your heart, as it were, is pure going into Nintendogs, it will entertain you for hours on end. A child unable to have a puppy could own this game and love it, and eventually be given a puppy for his or her birthday, and love the puppy for entirely different reasons. In the same way, yes, a human can love a robot, though only if the robot doesn’t, up front, guarantee it will be able to return this love — or, more specifically, if the robot makes it sparkling clear at the outset that “I am a robot; I cannot treat a human as a human would treat a human, because I am not a human. I am a robot.”
If Portable Island is indeed an effort to cure or a compensate for something lacking from our real lives, then I argue, on the basis of the above points, that it is a failure. There may be people on Amazon.co.jp who say they like it, though I reckon the girl who says “Children would find it boring; it’s clearly a game for adults who understand life’s finer pleasures” is a viral plant and the one guy who says the game “soothes” his worries gave Madonna’s album “Who’s that Girl?” four out of five stars, so he’s obviously a flake. (It deserves only three.) He also gave Nintendo’s Brain Training three stars out of five, indicating that he, too, might be a viral plant of Bandai-Namco.
Unlike Nintendogs or Animal Crossing, Portable Island is never a place we are; rather, it is a place someone we know has been. Inserting Portable Island into the PSP and flipping the POWER switch is not unlike sending your robotic butler to Hawaii and monitoring him with a hidden camera. On the island, he is free to do anything as long as it is possible to do, only he doesn’t seem to actually do any of these things, because he is a robot, and robots and butlers just don’t know what to do on vacation. Expecting him to turn around and do something fascinating in this vacuum of a world would be like expecting your coffee machine to start dispensing photocopies of gorilla handprints.
And so therein lies the rub; even a pacifist finds it impossible to play Grand Theft Auto without committing an act of violence, because the game is programmed with more attention to the physics that result from violence than the pyhsics that result from standing around doing nothing. In Portable Island, the pacifist is given a world where violence — or action — is not allowed even in imagination. While Grand Theft Auto might unknowingly aspire to be a mural painted by a naughty child, Portable Island is a postcard from a robot.
Repeat after me: we do not need postcards from robots. Though the robot might really be on the island in the photograph, the robot is only sending the postcard because someone else told him to. At least, when your aunt sends you a postcard from the Bahamas, she’s doing it because she’s thinking of you, or she wants you to think she’s thinking of you. Portable Island, a postcard from a robot, is not thinking of you, because it’s not thinking of anything. And that brings us to the problem with the world:
The most basic way to put it is that there is a problem with this world. That problem, put in simple words, tells us that “without war, there can be no peace; without hate, there can be no love.” Why is this so? Without yin, there cannot be yang; without light, there cannot be dark. Without the bad days, there can be no context for what makes good days so good. Every rock and roll band that stands on a stage in an arena faces sometimes tens of thousands of people who, without knowing it, are asking, deep in their hearts, “Why can’t it always be love? Why can’t it always be peace?” They are lacking in something; the rock and roll star, history’s greatest robot, without making a promise or a presumption, gives them what they need at that exact moment, and though the rock and roll star might create a memory or two in each of those people, it can’t guarantee them a safe and joyful future.
The problem with this world is that we can’t always be love, and we can’t always be peace. If this problem were willed human form, and it stood before you, what would you do? Would you punch it in the face with hopes of knocking its block off? Or would you jump to the ground and sink your teeth into its ankles? Would either course of action be the “right” one? The answer is simple, and at the same time, it is nothing at all. Let’s get pretentious and damning, then:
Each work of expression humankind creates will sit at the bottom of a gazed-down-upon canyon for centuries to come, as messages from the past. Portable Island is a message from a land so far away it might as well not even exist, from a person so dry they might not even be real. As an “artistic” endeavor, it is presumptuous, ankle-biting trash that the modern world would have been better off without.
That’s putting it simply.
note how they use a photo of a real island on the box. that fact will be important in the following section.
As mentioned, you can use the camera function to take a picture of the screen — maybe with a little zoom-in or zoom-out — and save the screenshots to your Memory Stick Duo. Yet, should you import the screenshots to your computer, maybe for printing out, you’ll find they are all watermarked in the lower-right corner with rather large white font:
COPYRIGHT 2006 BANDAI-NAMCO
What the hell is this, really? Is this at all necessary?
I can imagine printing one of these and taking it to my grandmother in the hospital. (Actually, my grandmother’s dead; roll with it, though.)
“Did you ever take that trip to the tropical island? Did those bad boys at that office of yours ever give you the time off?”
“Yeah, yeah they did, grandma.”
“Did you take a picture of the sunset for me?”
“Yes, I did, look.”
“Oh, this is lovely . . . wait, what’s this? Who’s . . . Ban-dai-Nam-co?”
“Oh, that, um . . .”
“ARE YOU GAY!?”
It would probably ruin her last few days on earth.
In a way, the idea of watermarking the screenshots the player takes within the game is pretty heavy. It raises a lot of questions. The watermark in Portable Island is such a sterile, ugly, huge one. It clutters up as large a chunk of the screenshot as possible, just so anyone looking at it knows exactly what company made this game.
Why not lighten up a little bit with it, though? Why not put the “Portable Island” logo down there, instead, plus a “Bandai-Namco” logo? Why make it so legal, and sterile?
Tiny font in the instruction manual reads, “Each screenshot will be watermarked for legal purposes.” What legal purposes? So that no one can use a screenshot from this game on their blog, and fool people into believing they’ve actually been to a tropical island? Are the graphics even good enough for that?
The only situation I can think of wherein having copyright information on each screenshot of the game would be a legally “necessary” thing would be if someone were to find a way to make the characters take on lewd poses or participate in scandalous situations. And then, the watermark would only exist to confirm to the public who is responsible for this mess. That’s a pretty sanctimonious reason for watermarking a screenshot.
If I were to ask a member of the development team about why the watermark appears on each screenshot, and why it’s so ugly, I’d no doubt be told, “Hey, it’s Japanese copyright law.” Yet, as one who lives his life by the letters of Japanese copyright law, I know it’s not necessary to protect such assets. You don’t have to put your name on each screenshot unless you’re overflowing with pride and want everyone to know it was you who did that. (That, or if you think people will use the screenshots for money purposes. Though trying to imagine anyone making money selling Portable Island screenshots to a vacation magazine only leads me to a conclusion that makes Namco look like assholes, so I’ll let go.)
Yet Namco is not proud. This game was appropriated a modest budget, was delayed for a while, was shrugged at by many executives, and somehow just emerged.
Once more, the fact that these Japanese game developers are all, on the average, run by chain-smoking combed-over sixty-something men with hair the color of cigarette ashes and teeth like fat-caked fishbones comes frighteningly into view. Bandai-Namco must put their name on the screenshots generated by the game because
1. The screenshots contain no characters immediately recognizable to the general public as Bandai-Namco properties (Pac-Man, Gundam, M.O.M.O, Tekken‘s Panda or Marshall Law)
2. If this situation had come up in the past, this is certainly how the elders would have handled it.
For heck’s sake, though, you’re spoiling how people enjoy games. They enjoy showing things and saying, “I took this picture in this videogame.” If they say, “Hey, I took this picture in this game called Portable Island,” if they let the name of the product emerge naturally in one conversation, then that’s a larger commercial success than subjecting a thousand indifferent people to your watermark. I mean, really, do you think the average consumer is going to look at a picture of a computer-generated polygon man in a hammock and say, “BANDAI-NAMCO, HUH? I SURE HAVE A LOT OF RESPECT FOR THAT CORPORATE CONGLOMERATE, NOW!”
Get over yourselves!! If your game was interesting to begin with, people would ask the name when they saw the screenshot. They’d say, “Hey, what game is that from?” Maybe you’re afraid that’s never going to happen? As it is now, putting your name on a screenshot of a generic island paradise is like hanging your kid’s C-minus on your refrigerator, because you’re pretty sure he couldn’t do any better if you asked him nicely.
(And while we’re at it — videogame websites, stop watermarking screenshots. You didn’t hecking make the games. Even if you took the screenshots.)
A recent Famitsu shows that Sega will release a PSP version of their Homestar home planetarium in October. The original homestar was something you place in your living room and turn off the lights, and suddenly, right there, on your ceiling, there’s a starry sky the likes of which you’ll never see in Tokyo (light pollution, you see). The Homestar was popular to a point where it’s now marked down enormously in electronic stores all over Japan.
Well, bewilderingly, there’s a PSP “version” coming. In addition to allowing you to gaze at the starry sky in the palm of your hand, there will be trivia modes and educational tours of the cosmos.
I can understand a home planetarium working on a ceiling, though come on, in the palm of your hand? There was a survey recently that said most PSP gamers in Japan play their PSPs at home. I guess this game is meant to be the evolution of reading a book under the covers with a flashlight?
Still, though: No. For one thing, my PSP screen has five or six dead pixels in it. What if I mistake a dead pixel cluster for the North Star? The educational aspect of the software would be failing then, wouldn’t it?
This is the latest in a fleet of “non-games” for the PSP, flagshipped by Portable Island. I watch each of them come, and think Nintendo really needs to hurry up, release the Wii, blow away the public, and convince every developer that the DS isn’t just a pop-culture fad-fluke. They need to show these people a little discipline.
What if I want to gaze at stars on the train to work? The PSP’s screen is so shiny that the black background would reflect the harsh train lighting. This would mean I’d be gazing at my own face and not imaginary stars. In the same way, I can mess with the timezones on my Portable Island, by locating the magical clock-idol deep in the island jungle (or by warping to the general vicinity), and make it so the sun is setting when I wake up in the morning, making the sky over the beach on my ride to work splattered with stars. The harsh orange lights on board the Ginza Line reflect in the PSP screen, and there I am, seeing up my own nostrils. My nose is kind of oily. I should quit eating some of the things I eat. I should probably try to be healthy, like I keep saying I will be, eventually. “Eventually” is a rough concept. I should quit listening to music that makes me yearn to make things better, and start actually trying to make things better. For myself, I mean.
I soak in some air-conditioning and think back to that advertisement on the train. Why release this game in the summer? Why not release it in the winter? It would make more sense to release it in the winter, especially with the slogan being “On Portable Island, it’s always summer.”
Hey. I know another place where it’s always summer. Yeah. A tropical island.
–tim rogers wanted to find a reason to mention that you fly to Portable Island on ‘ban-nam airlines’
2007
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE BEST GAME EVER ABOUT POINTS A AND B.”
After playing Portal, it becomes abundantly clear that every videogame produced should probably be required by law to contain at least one fantastical item that the player wishes he could have in real life. The closest any game has ever gotten to Portal‘s Portal Gun would have to be the Castrol Tom’s Supra in Gran Turismo, which is kind of sad because that’s just a car.
Simply put, the Portal Gun lets you shoot a Blue Portal and a Red Portal; go in the Blue Portal, come out the Red Portal. Go in the Red Portal, come out the Blue Portal.
The beginning of the game streamlines the dynamic by providing you with Red Portals and letting you place Blue Portals. Even then, it’s enough to confuse most peoples’ girlfriends (if they exist). The very first puzzle after the player receives the ability to shoot both Red and Blue Portals involves a door across a very, very wide chasm. In order to get there, you just shoot a Portal of any color at the wall near the door and then shoot a Portal at the wall near where you stand. Enter the Portal nearest to you and, with a pan-flash worthy of Super Mario Bros., power flickers to life in virgin regions of your brain. It used to be, chasms were the point of games; in Portal, they’re just a casualty of the game’s brutally inventive, genre-breaking concept. The only way to play this game is to break what you already know about other games, which I suppose is especially true if you know nothing at all about games. This game is vandalism for the gamer’s mind; it breaks into the game design profession’s ladies department at midnight and straps diamond dildos on all the mannequins.
Any human being worth conversing with will, upon encountering that first genius chasm in Portal, begin to literally quiver whilst contemplating the possibilities of owning a real-life Portal gun. An elaborate example would involve putting one portal in, say, an apartment in Rome, and another one in your apartment in Philadelphia. Not everyone has an apartment in Rome, however. A simpler example — I wouldn’t mind having a portal in my bedroom and another one in my office five kilometers away. Would be nice to not have to commute! Have one portal on the sofa cushion and another on the ceiling above your toilet, for example, to turn defecating into something of a game. Sex with your girlfriend could become severely interesting, as you do her from in her apartment via a portal in your apartment, then pull out and close the portal, leaving her bewildered and alone. Or — and this was actually the first one I thought of — with very simple portal placement, you could finally experience auto-fellatio without straining your abdominal muscles (or having ribs removed). Just remember to close the portals when you’re done, or the next person stepping into your apartment is going to immediately know exactly what you were doing.
As Portal starts building in cleverness — with the introduction of surfaces that cannot be portaled — your mind may or may not calm down, and start to ponder potential puzzles. The first time the game threw a momentum-based puzzle my way, I immediately thought it would be awesome if there was a puzzle where you have to cross a long chasm by placing two portals on the floor far beneath your feet. When the game eventually tossed out one such puzzle, it felt really nice. Like the game was listening. Good games are like this — they make you start to expect to see your name in the credits.
The “story” of Portal, in typical Valve fashion, is told entirely as you’re actually playing the game. You wake up in a kind of test-tube bed with hideous music playing on a nearby radio. You are informed that you are a test subject. The droning computer voice refers to you as “[Subject Name Here]”, which at first seems like a funny little joke, and then eventually — if you duck into enough optional side rooms — seems less like a one-off and more like a sinister hint.
Sinister hint or not, it’s entirely up to you how much you read into the story — if at all — just as it’s up to you to play this game in the first place. Having gone into this game cold turkey, I had no idea what kind of “plot” there would be, if any, so I was weirdly shocked (this was at two in the morning) when I got to the first “side room” — dilapidated and littered with garbage, a stark contrast to the sterile white of the testing center. A cold wave came over me: no, the spectacular dialogue (spoken only by the computer voice) in this game isn’t just for optional amusement. There really is a story back there, somewhere.
My first side-room experience happened to come just minutes after I thought, what if we get to break out of this testing center and use the portal gun in real life? In a way, using the portal gun in a simulated videogamefacsimile of “real life” was more appealing, in that moment, than actually using a real portal gun in real real life, probably because the fake real life was a more immediate possibility. In the end, which was great, the game only met me halfway, though what a spectacular halfway it was.
Some said the game was too short; some people have also said that the greatest compliment a pop song can receive is “it’s too short”, though those people probably don’t regularly play three-hour videogames, and thus many of them might find Portal to be too long. (I happen to think there are many better things to say about pop music. “This song made me quit smoking”, for example, can be a better compliment than “It’s too short”. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear the song that made someone quit smoking?) I suppose the crux of this well-waged argument is that Portal is both short and not conducive to replaying. This is perhaps a fair criticism, though that first play-through is so much of a brain marathon that it’s going to stick with you for months, or even years. I’d rather play a three-hour game with a razor-sharp concept, hilariously quotable dialogue, and a vaguely sketched story that just keeps coming back to you than, say, scrounge around big environments looking to collect all 101 hecking Dalmatians. Also, as a short game, and as one that can be played mostly by utilizing actual common sense, it’s exceptionally easy to recommend it to people who don’t own any Devil May Cry T-shirts. In the end, Portal‘s three hours contain more story and more personality than probably any 100-hour game has ever had before it; it draws a new line in the sand between games that are about showing us something cool and games that are giving us something to do in the interim period between the game’s release and the day that the buy-back rate at used game shops falls through the floor. With this writing, I’d like to implore the Worldwide Videogame Industry to “make more games like Portal“, though seeing as when Famitsu implored the Japanese Videogame Industry to “make more games like Brain Training” we ended up with literally whole shop floors devoted to brain-training games, it’s probably not a good idea. I mean, there’s only so much you can do with portals, and even less you can do with a whole shelf full of games about portals.
While we’re at it, let’s say that consulting GameFAQs for this game should probably be illegal.
As with Katamari, there’s really no reason to make a sequel to Portal; again, as with Katamari, the only way to make a sequel would be to expand on the concept only logistically. An actual evolution of Katamari would present the player with a tiny clump in an actual, breathing, realistic metropolis. An evolution of Portal would see the escaped test subject fleeing from the feds in a sprawling real-world environment, with a certain destination clearly in mind (let’s say the penthouse office suite of a specific skyscraper) and numerous puzzles laid out in logical places throughout the city, solvable only with the portal gun; the player navigates from puzzle to puzzle as the indirect result of her being chased by shadowy men in radiation suits. Eventually, the game would come together like one huge puzzle.
Maybe you’d even have two portal guns, and be able to use four portals at a time. Man!
It occurs to me that it would be kind of cool if Valve were to collaborate a bit with Rockstar to make the portal gun a downloadable item in Grand Theft Auto IV. They don’t even have to produce any specific missions for it — if you pay, say, five dollars, then the portal gun is permanently placed in your character’s house. Man, that’s a good idea. Someone should give me a job, or something. I’m genuinely surprised at how I just can’t find the proper words to adequately congratulate myself, here.
The writing in Portal is so good, from moment to moment, that it births within me the unshakable and vaguely self-important impression that its writer, Erik Wolpaw (of Psychonauts and Old Man Murray) hates me personally. (There’s no better compliment I can give any piece of writing.) Still, the amount of rabid internet pseudo-posturing concerning the words “Weighted Companion Cube” or “Still Alive” (Protip: play the game to figure out what these words mean) is a bit bewildering. Half of the people who praise the Weighted Companion Cube as a fresh breath of emotion in a videogame industry that is otherwise desensitized to violence against grandmothers and grandfathers are also the sons of the same invisible bitch who step forward to “lol” whenever Kotaku posts a story about the current state of the “Ninjas vs. Pirates” meme. Scientists are hard at work in cooperation with the police, by the way, in proving the hypothesis that half of the people who claim to still find the words “Ninjas” and “Pirates” funny when used in the same sentence either played high school football or tried out for it. That some people will “LOL” at any mention of the Weighted Companion Cube or embroider little custom-made pillows of it while still commenting on web forums that “it’s kind of a shame that even if you wait like ten minutes to dispose of the cube GLaDOS still tells you you destroyed the cube faster than any past test subject” illustrates that these people are only pretending to have a sense of humor. (Here, if I wanted, I could turn this article into a pseudo-literary analysis of how GLaDOS is simply trying to make essentially every test subject feel like they’re more horrible than most other people, and how this is a subtle commentary on how videogames desensitize people, et cetera, though I’m probably the only person who would find that hilarious.) The best conclusion that can be reached, I suppose, is that people in general aren’t capable of truly appreciating quality for what it is, and the nagging feeling in the center of the brain that forces them to regurgitate the most boring key phrases of an otherwise virtuosic tableau of exciting phrases (I loved the “Didn’t we have some fun, though?” line, for example) is a yearning to understand why they enjoyed what they just enjoyed. Really, you have to just let it flow, man.
As good as Portal‘s writing is (and it is indeed excellent), at the end of the day, it’s really no more earth-shattering than the visual production values of God of War: in other words, it’s the bare minimum that videogame-reviewing reviewers and videogame-playing players should be expecting. Luckily for Portal, it also has a magnificent game concept, perfect pacing, and is actually playable from start to finish by someone who didn’t grow up with an unopened box of Super Mario Bros. & Legend of Zelda cereal (“collector’s item”) under their bed. For all it represents, it’s also Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2007. Sorry if you were expecting a ceremony for that! I might as well use this paragraph to say that Portal is “kind of tied” with Pac-Man: Championship Edition, in that if you play both of these games in one day, you’ve had about as much fun as it’s possible to have with videogames released in 2007. I often think of Portal sometimes while playing Pac-Man: Championship Edition, which I guess makes this sentence less of a tangent. Though the hell with it, tangents are more fun, and Portal is so good that talking about it is quite frankly boring. I’ll use the rest of this paragraph to say that the Action Button Dot Net Runner Up Game of the Year, 2007 is Stuntman Ignition, which, as it were, has much better graphics than Guitar Hero. I also pause here to spoil that Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2008 is most likely going to be Sega / Creative Assembly’s Viking: Battle for Asgard, because I love vikings, I love Creative Assembly, I consider Spartan: Total Warrior the sharpest game ever made, and most importantly because I have seen screenshots and I will not be swayed.
(*tied with pac-man: championship edition)
Getting back on topic, then: some kids have seen fit to both solve the puzzles in Portal and solve them as fast as possible, which is a little redundant, like seeing how fast you can write out all the answers on a calculus test with an answer key right next to you. Portal, unlike some (most) games, is not about the finger exercise — it’s about the experience of getting through it, letting it open your mind a little bit, putting it away, and then ceaselessly, turgidly, relentlessly forcing your friends to borrow it until everyone you know has played it and thanked you. To digress, the only game that’s better under this description would be God Hand, because I recommend that one fiercely and still play it. Then again, why would I want to play a game over and over again? Yearning for “replay value” is a sickness that dwells deep in the heart of every mainstream game reviewer. The best games aren’t ones with swathes of collectible bullstuff; they’re ones like Portal, or Cave Story — games that, art or pop-art or whatever the hell they are (Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood has called Cave Story “art”, and I’m pretty sure he’s smarter than me (not being sarcastic), so who knows), are so undeniably, tightly put-together that clearing them makes us never want to see them again, makes us wonder why the people who made them aren’t out, I don’t know, hecking curing cancer, developing the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, or something. In this day and age when even a (metaphorically) fat-fingered bastard like me can learn to script events in the Unreal Engine, Portal (no, not BioShock) is precisely the kind of videogame everyone out there needs to play. In short, it’s substance over style, and the style is spectacular.
Did you ever have this experience: a band or a book or a film that someone recommended to you very casually — maybe they said “I guess you might like them”, or something else mealy-mouthed enough to make you wonder what this jerk knows about what you like — and then, when you finally got around to listening to that band / reading that book / seeing that movie you were hecking blown away, and disappointed by all of your friends, because not a single one of them knows you well enough to know that this thing that they got to before you is precisely the sort of thing you’d love? I have that experience all the time, most recently with this game Portal, and the television show “The Sopranos”, which I started watching on a bizarre whim (it’s so good I haven’t touched a videogame in weeks). If you, dear reader, have actually read to the end of this inane, half-autistic nonsense right here (one of three articles written on one lunch break, meaning it took less than twenty minutes and was written hungry) and you still haven’t played Portal, you are hereby ordered to consider this the strongest possible recommendation.
★★★★
“THE BEST GAME EVER ABOUT POINTS A AND B.”
After playing Portal, it becomes abundantly clear that every videogame produced should probably be required by law to contain at least one fantastical item that the player wishes he could have in real life. The closest any game has ever gotten to Portal‘s Portal Gun would have to be the Castrol Tom’s Supra in Gran Turismo, which is kind of sad because that’s just a car.
Simply put, the Portal Gun lets you shoot a Blue Portal and a Red Portal; go in the Blue Portal, come out the Red Portal. Go in the Red Portal, come out the Blue Portal.
The beginning of the game streamlines the dynamic by providing you with Red Portals and letting you place Blue Portals. Even then, it’s enough to confuse most peoples’ girlfriends (if they exist). The very first puzzle after the player receives the ability to shoot both Red and Blue Portals involves a door across a very, very wide chasm. In order to get there, you just shoot a Portal of any color at the wall near the door and then shoot a Portal at the wall near where you stand. Enter the Portal nearest to you and, with a pan-flash worthy of Super Mario Bros., power flickers to life in virgin regions of your brain. It used to be, chasms were the point of games; in Portal, they’re just a casualty of the game’s brutally inventive, genre-breaking concept. The only way to play this game is to break what you already know about other games, which I suppose is especially true if you know nothing at all about games. This game is vandalism for the gamer’s mind; it breaks into the game design profession’s ladies department at midnight and straps diamond dildos on all the mannequins.
Any human being worth conversing with will, upon encountering that first genius chasm in Portal, begin to literally quiver whilst contemplating the possibilities of owning a real-life Portal gun. An elaborate example would involve putting one portal in, say, an apartment in Rome, and another one in your apartment in Philadelphia. Not everyone has an apartment in Rome, however. A simpler example — I wouldn’t mind having a portal in my bedroom and another one in my office five kilometers away. Would be nice to not have to commute! Have one portal on the sofa cushion and another on the ceiling above your toilet, for example, to turn defecating into something of a game. Sex with your girlfriend could become severely interesting, as you do her from in her apartment via a portal in your apartment, then pull out and close the portal, leaving her bewildered and alone. Or — and this was actually the first one I thought of — with very simple portal placement, you could finally experience auto-fellatio without straining your abdominal muscles (or having ribs removed). Just remember to close the portals when you’re done, or the next person stepping into your apartment is going to immediately know exactly what you were doing.
As Portal starts building in cleverness — with the introduction of surfaces that cannot be portaled — your mind may or may not calm down, and start to ponder potential puzzles. The first time the game threw a momentum-based puzzle my way, I immediately thought it would be awesome if there was a puzzle where you have to cross a long chasm by placing two portals on the floor far beneath your feet. When the game eventually tossed out one such puzzle, it felt really nice. Like the game was listening. Good games are like this — they make you start to expect to see your name in the credits.
The “story” of Portal, in typical Valve fashion, is told entirely as you’re actually playing the game. You wake up in a kind of test-tube bed with hideous music playing on a nearby radio. You are informed that you are a test subject. The droning computer voice refers to you as “[Subject Name Here]”, which at first seems like a funny little joke, and then eventually — if you duck into enough optional side rooms — seems less like a one-off and more like a sinister hint.
Sinister hint or not, it’s entirely up to you how much you read into the story — if at all — just as it’s up to you to play this game in the first place. Having gone into this game cold turkey, I had no idea what kind of “plot” there would be, if any, so I was weirdly shocked (this was at two in the morning) when I got to the first “side room” — dilapidated and littered with garbage, a stark contrast to the sterile white of the testing center. A cold wave came over me: no, the spectacular dialogue (spoken only by the computer voice) in this game isn’t just for optional amusement. There really is a story back there, somewhere.
My first side-room experience happened to come just minutes after I thought, what if we get to break out of this testing center and use the portal gun in real life? In a way, using the portal gun in a simulated videogamefacsimile of “real life” was more appealing, in that moment, than actually using a real portal gun in real real life, probably because the fake real life was a more immediate possibility. In the end, which was great, the game only met me halfway, though what a spectacular halfway it was.
Some said the game was too short; some people have also said that the greatest compliment a pop song can receive is “it’s too short”, though those people probably don’t regularly play three-hour videogames, and thus many of them might find Portal to be too long. (I happen to think there are many better things to say about pop music. “This song made me quit smoking”, for example, can be a better compliment than “It’s too short”. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear the song that made someone quit smoking?) I suppose the crux of this well-waged argument is that Portal is both short and not conducive to replaying. This is perhaps a fair criticism, though that first play-through is so much of a brain marathon that it’s going to stick with you for months, or even years. I’d rather play a three-hour game with a razor-sharp concept, hilariously quotable dialogue, and a vaguely sketched story that just keeps coming back to you than, say, scrounge around big environments looking to collect all 101 hecking Dalmatians. Also, as a short game, and as one that can be played mostly by utilizing actual common sense, it’s exceptionally easy to recommend it to people who don’t own any Devil May Cry T-shirts. In the end, Portal‘s three hours contain more story and more personality than probably any 100-hour game has ever had before it; it draws a new line in the sand between games that are about showing us something cool and games that are giving us something to do in the interim period between the game’s release and the day that the buy-back rate at used game shops falls through the floor. With this writing, I’d like to implore the Worldwide Videogame Industry to “make more games like Portal“, though seeing as when Famitsu implored the Japanese Videogame Industry to “make more games like Brain Training” we ended up with literally whole shop floors devoted to brain-training games, it’s probably not a good idea. I mean, there’s only so much you can do with portals, and even less you can do with a whole shelf full of games about portals.
While we’re at it, let’s say that consulting GameFAQs for this game should probably be illegal.
As with Katamari, there’s really no reason to make a sequel to Portal; again, as with Katamari, the only way to make a sequel would be to expand on the concept only logistically. An actual evolution of Katamari would present the player with a tiny clump in an actual, breathing, realistic metropolis. An evolution of Portal would see the escaped test subject fleeing from the feds in a sprawling real-world environment, with a certain destination clearly in mind (let’s say the penthouse office suite of a specific skyscraper) and numerous puzzles laid out in logical places throughout the city, solvable only with the portal gun; the player navigates from puzzle to puzzle as the indirect result of her being chased by shadowy men in radiation suits. Eventually, the game would come together like one huge puzzle.
Maybe you’d even have two portal guns, and be able to use four portals at a time. Man!
It occurs to me that it would be kind of cool if Valve were to collaborate a bit with Rockstar to make the portal gun a downloadable item in Grand Theft Auto IV. They don’t even have to produce any specific missions for it — if you pay, say, five dollars, then the portal gun is permanently placed in your character’s house. Man, that’s a good idea. Someone should give me a job, or something. I’m genuinely surprised at how I just can’t find the proper words to adequately congratulate myself, here.
The writing in Portal is so good, from moment to moment, that it births within me the unshakable and vaguely self-important impression that its writer, Erik Wolpaw (of Psychonauts and Old Man Murray) hates me personally. (There’s no better compliment I can give any piece of writing.) Still, the amount of rabid internet pseudo-posturing concerning the words “Weighted Companion Cube” or “Still Alive” (Protip: play the game to figure out what these words mean) is a bit bewildering. Half of the people who praise the Weighted Companion Cube as a fresh breath of emotion in a videogame industry that is otherwise desensitized to violence against grandmothers and grandfathers are also the sons of the same invisible bitch who step forward to “lol” whenever Kotaku posts a story about the current state of the “Ninjas vs. Pirates” meme. Scientists are hard at work in cooperation with the police, by the way, in proving the hypothesis that half of the people who claim to still find the words “Ninjas” and “Pirates” funny when used in the same sentence either played high school football or tried out for it. That some people will “LOL” at any mention of the Weighted Companion Cube or embroider little custom-made pillows of it while still commenting on web forums that “it’s kind of a shame that even if you wait like ten minutes to dispose of the cube GLaDOS still tells you you destroyed the cube faster than any past test subject” illustrates that these people are only pretending to have a sense of humor. (Here, if I wanted, I could turn this article into a pseudo-literary analysis of how GLaDOS is simply trying to make essentially every test subject feel like they’re more horrible than most other people, and how this is a subtle commentary on how videogames desensitize people, et cetera, though I’m probably the only person who would find that hilarious.) The best conclusion that can be reached, I suppose, is that people in general aren’t capable of truly appreciating quality for what it is, and the nagging feeling in the center of the brain that forces them to regurgitate the most boring key phrases of an otherwise virtuosic tableau of exciting phrases (I loved the “Didn’t we have some fun, though?” line, for example) is a yearning to understand why they enjoyed what they just enjoyed. Really, you have to just let it flow, man.
As good as Portal‘s writing is (and it is indeed excellent), at the end of the day, it’s really no more earth-shattering than the visual production values of God of War: in other words, it’s the bare minimum that videogame-reviewing reviewers and videogame-playing players should be expecting. Luckily for Portal, it also has a magnificent game concept, perfect pacing, and is actually playable from start to finish by someone who didn’t grow up with an unopened box of Super Mario Bros. & Legend of Zelda cereal (“collector’s item”) under their bed. For all it represents, it’s also Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2007. Sorry if you were expecting a ceremony for that! I might as well use this paragraph to say that Portal is “kind of tied” with Pac-Man: Championship Edition, in that if you play both of these games in one day, you’ve had about as much fun as it’s possible to have with videogames released in 2007. I often think of Portal sometimes while playing Pac-Man: Championship Edition, which I guess makes this sentence less of a tangent. Though the hell with it, tangents are more fun, and Portal is so good that talking about it is quite frankly boring. I’ll use the rest of this paragraph to say that the Action Button Dot Net Runner Up Game of the Year, 2007 is Stuntman Ignition, which, as it were, has much better graphics than Guitar Hero. I also pause here to spoil that Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2008 is most likely going to be Sega / Creative Assembly’s Viking: Battle for Asgard, because I love vikings, I love Creative Assembly, I consider Spartan: Total Warrior the sharpest game ever made, and most importantly because I have seen screenshots and I will not be swayed.
(*tied with pac-man: championship edition)
Getting back on topic, then: some kids have seen fit to both solve the puzzles in Portal and solve them as fast as possible, which is a little redundant, like seeing how fast you can write out all the answers on a calculus test with an answer key right next to you. Portal, unlike some (most) games, is not about the finger exercise — it’s about the experience of getting through it, letting it open your mind a little bit, putting it away, and then ceaselessly, turgidly, relentlessly forcing your friends to borrow it until everyone you know has played it and thanked you. To digress, the only game that’s better under this description would be God Hand, because I recommend that one fiercely and still play it. Then again, why would I want to play a game over and over again? Yearning for “replay value” is a sickness that dwells deep in the heart of every mainstream game reviewer. The best games aren’t ones with swathes of collectible bullstuff; they’re ones like Portal, or Cave Story — games that, art or pop-art or whatever the hell they are (Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood has called Cave Story “art”, and I’m pretty sure he’s smarter than me (not being sarcastic), so who knows), are so undeniably, tightly put-together that clearing them makes us never want to see them again, makes us wonder why the people who made them aren’t out, I don’t know, hecking curing cancer, developing the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, or something. In this day and age when even a (metaphorically) fat-fingered bastard like me can learn to script events in the Unreal Engine, Portal (no, not BioShock) is precisely the kind of videogame everyone out there needs to play. In short, it’s substance over style, and the style is spectacular.
Did you ever have this experience: a band or a book or a film that someone recommended to you very casually — maybe they said “I guess you might like them”, or something else mealy-mouthed enough to make you wonder what this jerk knows about what you like — and then, when you finally got around to listening to that band / reading that book / seeing that movie you were hecking blown away, and disappointed by all of your friends, because not a single one of them knows you well enough to know that this thing that they got to before you is precisely the sort of thing you’d love? I have that experience all the time, most recently with this game Portal, and the television show “The Sopranos”, which I started watching on a bizarre whim (it’s so good I haven’t touched a videogame in weeks). If you, dear reader, have actually read to the end of this inane, half-autistic nonsense right here (one of three articles written on one lunch break, meaning it took less than twenty minutes and was written hungry) and you still haven’t played Portal, you are hereby ordered to consider this the strongest possible recommendation.
1993
text by Ario Barzan
★★★☆
“LIKE FEELING THE SHORELINE BRUSH AGAINST YOUR FEET ON PLANET X.”
In the earlier days, videogame companies were in the business of pumping often terminally hip mascot-hopefuls out by the truckload. The eagerness to catch on like Mario or Sonic did, the wishful, perhaps less than noble, sweat, was almost palpable. The Great Giana Sisters, Boogerman, and Aero the Acrobat were but a few. Sometimes, figures’ escapades would continue on, for whatever reason (though to occasional delight). Bubsy, a pants-less bobcat who starred in a diseased tsunami of a game, and who mimicked tapping the TV’s screen if you waited long enough, would seal his fate in 3D. Rygar, shield-slinging warrior, made a gorgeous, kind of boring comeback on the Playstation 2. To this day, there still is the rare release promoting a cartoon-ish character with the glimmer of Franchise in their look – Psychonauts and Blinx come to mind.
Put alongside this slew of odd characters and the history of video games, Plok is a rare find, because not only is the game damn good – it is also immensely obscure, and has never been capitalized on further. This is puzzling. When you see Plok himself, he’s clean and approachable. Two prime colors comprise his design: yellow and red. His head resembles a Hershey’s Kiss with eyes. His body comes close to a person you’d see a six-year old make with silly putty. Unadorned, honest, Plok is a good guy who you are satisfied guiding. If you leave the controls alone, he doesn’t crack any painful witticisms or start juggling oranges or some stuff – he’ll simply move his shoulders up and down to visualize breathing.
The game calmly, surely eases you into its world. Plok is a territorial fellow, and when his flag has been stolen, he sets out to a nearby island to retrieve it from the miscreants. The start-off point is a hilly, un-broken path that acquaints you with the mechanics. Plok attacks by shooting his limbs out – all four of them if you tap the button fast enough. He has a normal, short jump, along with a higher spin jump. And, well, he can crouch. The landscape is divided into two pieces – an immediate, glossy foreground dotted with floating flowers and funky trees, and a distant background of the ocean and bodies of land, rendered in an Impressionistic hand.
At the end of each level, you will arrive at a flagpole, only to find it’s a fake. And at the start of each new one, signs of an oncoming evening will become more evident. When you confront the boss, the fact that it’s a couple of giants with lips for heads is acceptable after the previous weirdness – but the game suddenly sends shivers down your spine, perks your eyebrows up, because this is where Plok truly begins. The boss anthem is a thudding thing with a sense of humor and a 90’s dance rhythm, a song that is so sudden, so wonderful, so this isn’t on an SNES…is it?, it makes you wait around after the cretins have been finished off just to hear its entirety. The nighttime colors are beautiful and you can feel the whisper of promises.
This is an enormous part of what sets Plok apart from the crowd. It wants to impress ambience onto you. It wants to show you that it has soul. The thing’s got style, a real feel. True to the sensation, the narrative follows suit and shows that while you were gone trying to find your flag, the Flea Queen has replaced all of Plok’s flags with her own. It’s only by ridding the established number of her offspring (who don’t look like fleas, at all) that you can clear each stage. Before you may object to the “gotta catch ‘em all†situation, you’re on a surreal beach, waves at the base of the screen, a morning sun shining on the far-off water, with crashing, glorious music playing. And as you go on, you realize that the level design has changed, has become quite good. Everything before was a prelude to get you ready for the actual structure. It is manageable, though exact and textured enough to keep you on your toes.
One of the highlights enters soon afterwards, wherein Plok comes home and, wondering where his grandfather buried a magical amulet, dozes off. Gameplay resumes moments later, and everything is in black and white as you take a leap back into history and assume the role of the grandfather when he was looking for the amulet. The stage names appear on flickering, silent film plaques, a jittery piano and frumpy backup puff out, Grandpappy Plok has a mustache, and the lip-headed dudes you fought before are a trio, rather than a duo. It’s “old-schoolâ€-tough and grin-inducingly clever.
Part of what makes Plok so absorbing is its focus. The world isn’t crammed with a deluge of crazy varmints attacking you as if they’re starving and you’re the steak, or heaps of power ups, or complex puzzles (enjoyable as those things may be!) – the conflict is between you, the eccentric land, and appropriately dispersed critters. Environments are lovingly crafted, mindful of leaving room for thinking, and bold when need be. A certain segment has you traveling through a melancholy, abandoned town with “For Sale†signs poking out of the ground and boarded up buildings. As Plok makes his way past bumblebees and projectile-spitting flowers, up lopsided cliffs topped by pasta vegetation, forested hills beyond giving way to the sky, the music pulls your eyes open and grips your hands. It is stuff you can listen to outside of the source and yearn to go back to something you never even had (as I’ve found the case to be with Earthbound’s soundtrack).
There are no save points or password system. This might be a problem, were it a bit longer. Fortunately, Plok is digestible in one sitting. Such a decision on the part of designers completes a subtle role, as well. Since you’re not leaving the system and having other occurrences in between, playing becomes singularly connected.
If one stumbling block does rear up, it’s the final portion: the Flea Pit. It isn’t poorly made, so much as it can’t stand up to the panache of the rest with its bubbling tar pits and crags. Also, every so often, it contradicts the overall reasonable difficulty. To be honest, right before this transition, I generally switch the game off. I’m satisfied with what I’ve been offered. For me, the quest ends when Plok finishes reclaiming his flags.
At the core is adventure. There’s the necessary objective, but that plays second fiddle to the compulsion spurred in the mind to navigate that peculiar, smart universe. Plok is not perfect, but it is one of kind, and unquestionably worthy of being tracked down.
★★★☆
“LIKE FEELING THE SHORELINE BRUSH AGAINST YOUR FEET ON PLANET X.”
In the earlier days, videogame companies were in the business of pumping often terminally hip mascot-hopefuls out by the truckload. The eagerness to catch on like Mario or Sonic did, the wishful, perhaps less than noble, sweat, was almost palpable. The Great Giana Sisters, Boogerman, and Aero the Acrobat were but a few. Sometimes, figures’ escapades would continue on, for whatever reason (though to occasional delight). Bubsy, a pants-less bobcat who starred in a diseased tsunami of a game, and who mimicked tapping the TV’s screen if you waited long enough, would seal his fate in 3D. Rygar, shield-slinging warrior, made a gorgeous, kind of boring comeback on the Playstation 2. To this day, there still is the rare release promoting a cartoon-ish character with the glimmer of Franchise in their look – Psychonauts and Blinx come to mind.
Put alongside this slew of odd characters and the history of video games, Plok is a rare find, because not only is the game damn good – it is also immensely obscure, and has never been capitalized on further. This is puzzling. When you see Plok himself, he’s clean and approachable. Two prime colors comprise his design: yellow and red. His head resembles a Hershey’s Kiss with eyes. His body comes close to a person you’d see a six-year old make with silly putty. Unadorned, honest, Plok is a good guy who you are satisfied guiding. If you leave the controls alone, he doesn’t crack any painful witticisms or start juggling oranges or some stuff – he’ll simply move his shoulders up and down to visualize breathing.
The game calmly, surely eases you into its world. Plok is a territorial fellow, and when his flag has been stolen, he sets out to a nearby island to retrieve it from the miscreants. The start-off point is a hilly, un-broken path that acquaints you with the mechanics. Plok attacks by shooting his limbs out – all four of them if you tap the button fast enough. He has a normal, short jump, along with a higher spin jump. And, well, he can crouch. The landscape is divided into two pieces – an immediate, glossy foreground dotted with floating flowers and funky trees, and a distant background of the ocean and bodies of land, rendered in an Impressionistic hand.
At the end of each level, you will arrive at a flagpole, only to find it’s a fake. And at the start of each new one, signs of an oncoming evening will become more evident. When you confront the boss, the fact that it’s a couple of giants with lips for heads is acceptable after the previous weirdness – but the game suddenly sends shivers down your spine, perks your eyebrows up, because this is where Plok truly begins. The boss anthem is a thudding thing with a sense of humor and a 90’s dance rhythm, a song that is so sudden, so wonderful, so this isn’t on an SNES…is it?, it makes you wait around after the cretins have been finished off just to hear its entirety. The nighttime colors are beautiful and you can feel the whisper of promises.
This is an enormous part of what sets Plok apart from the crowd. It wants to impress ambience onto you. It wants to show you that it has soul. The thing’s got style, a real feel. True to the sensation, the narrative follows suit and shows that while you were gone trying to find your flag, the Flea Queen has replaced all of Plok’s flags with her own. It’s only by ridding the established number of her offspring (who don’t look like fleas, at all) that you can clear each stage. Before you may object to the “gotta catch ‘em all†situation, you’re on a surreal beach, waves at the base of the screen, a morning sun shining on the far-off water, with crashing, glorious music playing. And as you go on, you realize that the level design has changed, has become quite good. Everything before was a prelude to get you ready for the actual structure. It is manageable, though exact and textured enough to keep you on your toes.
One of the highlights enters soon afterwards, wherein Plok comes home and, wondering where his grandfather buried a magical amulet, dozes off. Gameplay resumes moments later, and everything is in black and white as you take a leap back into history and assume the role of the grandfather when he was looking for the amulet. The stage names appear on flickering, silent film plaques, a jittery piano and frumpy backup puff out, Grandpappy Plok has a mustache, and the lip-headed dudes you fought before are a trio, rather than a duo. It’s “old-schoolâ€-tough and grin-inducingly clever.
Part of what makes Plok so absorbing is its focus. The world isn’t crammed with a deluge of crazy varmints attacking you as if they’re starving and you’re the steak, or heaps of power ups, or complex puzzles (enjoyable as those things may be!) – the conflict is between you, the eccentric land, and appropriately dispersed critters. Environments are lovingly crafted, mindful of leaving room for thinking, and bold when need be. A certain segment has you traveling through a melancholy, abandoned town with “For Sale†signs poking out of the ground and boarded up buildings. As Plok makes his way past bumblebees and projectile-spitting flowers, up lopsided cliffs topped by pasta vegetation, forested hills beyond giving way to the sky, the music pulls your eyes open and grips your hands. It is stuff you can listen to outside of the source and yearn to go back to something you never even had (as I’ve found the case to be with Earthbound’s soundtrack).
There are no save points or password system. This might be a problem, were it a bit longer. Fortunately, Plok is digestible in one sitting. Such a decision on the part of designers completes a subtle role, as well. Since you’re not leaving the system and having other occurrences in between, playing becomes singularly connected.
If one stumbling block does rear up, it’s the final portion: the Flea Pit. It isn’t poorly made, so much as it can’t stand up to the panache of the rest with its bubbling tar pits and crags. Also, every so often, it contradicts the overall reasonable difficulty. To be honest, right before this transition, I generally switch the game off. I’m satisfied with what I’ve been offered. For me, the quest ends when Plok finishes reclaiming his flags.
At the core is adventure. There’s the necessary objective, but that plays second fiddle to the compulsion spurred in the mind to navigate that peculiar, smart universe. Plok is not perfect, but it is one of kind, and unquestionably worthy of being tracked down.
1989
text by Thom Moyles
★☆☆☆
“NOT INSULTING, IT'S JUST DUMB.”
When Sega Classics came out, there was a hue and cry about how horrible the remake of Golden Axe was, about how it was a desecration of the original game, how an all-time classic had been destroyed, etc. This is funny because it’s actually a faithful recreation of the original. It’s just uglier (okay, far uglier). That the game was now rendered in blocky 3D should have been enough to pull the wool from everybody’s eyes and reveal that really, Golden Axe is a terrible game. Only nobody could take the shock of this revelation and instead pretended that it was this new version of Golden Axe that was awful, that their memory of the original was actually as great as it seemed when they wandered up to the towering arcade cabinet and gasped at the gigantic sprites and impressive visual effects, that when they finally built up the courage to put their popsicle-sticky hands on the buttons and put in quarter after quarter, they had been experiencing gaming at its finest. People will believe just about anything to let themselves think that they’ve never been fooled.
You know, I have some fond memories of reading Archie comics in the mountain sun while on vacation with my parents. This doesn’t mean, were I to go back to the yellowed and brittled comics still stuck in an outhouse somewhere north of Yosemite, that I’m somehow obligated to argue that they’re actually any good. I’m older now and besides a brief nostalgic burst when I first see something that rises to the surface of my memory from decades in the murk, I can’t ignore the often-sloppy penmanship, the banal plots or the insipid jokes. Likewise, when I see Golden Axe, I’ll put in a quarter, remember playing it on a boardwalk with a kid twice my age and doing better than him and I still won’t be able to stop thinking about how slow your character moves, how cheap some of the enemies are and how, if you really want to get to the end of the game, all you’re going to need is what would have been a fairly flush bankroll for a 10-year-old in the 1980s (or just a lot of patience, if you’re lucky enough to be near one of those second-run arcades that charges a flat fee and sticks all the old machines in the back on free play).
Even though I have pleasant memories of Golden Axe, they’re also pretty damning, in that I can vividly remember seeing the ending, which was the first time that I’d ever seen an ending for an arcade game. What I can’t remember is whether I beat the game or whether I was just watching some other kid blow his wad to the tune of 4 dollars in change. Now, I also remember the fight against Death Adder, so it’s most likely that I did in fact beat the game myself, especially since I remember putting in about two bucks worth of quarters during that fight because God Dammit Mabel, not today, not today! That I can’t remember whether I did so or not personally is because playing Golden Axe was not a matter of skill, it was a matter of attrition aimed at your wallet. It was a movie, only if the usher kept jabbing you every minute or so for your spare change and if you didn’t give it to him, they drew the curtains.
There were two times in my life where I was crushed by the difference between a console port and the arcade original. The first, Cyberball for the Genesis, redeemed itself after my initial shock because the developers realized that with the change from the quarter-pushing glitz and emphasis on multi-player of the arcade to the ugly sprites, tinny sound and unilimited-tries context of the family den, that the game itself had to change to match the context. So the game slowed down, became more strategic and the money you used to upgrade your team was now based on scoring and gaining yards, rather than pushing in quarters. Golden Axe, on the other hand, was the same game, just uglier. In the same way that the Cyberball port disguised the shallowness of the original, Golden Axe on the Genesis set the shortcomings of the underlying design in sharp relief.
Without those huge colorful sprites, the game was fully revealed as the quarter-sucker that it was a decade before the Sega Classics remake caused a massive Selective Memory Event. Without the draw of seeing what would come next (okay, maybe there was some draw in seeing how spectacularly disa ppointing the end result would be when compared to the original arcade version), there wasn’t much point to slowly walking right and taking turns trading glacial blows with other brown-ish looking sprites until you eventually got bored and put in something worthwhile, in much the same way that once you’d been all the way through the arcade version, there wasn’t any point in doing so again.
Now, don’t let this make you think that I hate Golden Axe. Golden Axe isn’t insulting, it’s just dumb. It’s a relic of older days worn smooth by adoring hands. To those of you who still cherish your sepia-toned memories of Golden Axe, I urge you to hang on to them for dear life and remember, you can’t go back again.
★☆☆☆
“NOT INSULTING, IT'S JUST DUMB.”
When Sega Classics came out, there was a hue and cry about how horrible the remake of Golden Axe was, about how it was a desecration of the original game, how an all-time classic had been destroyed, etc. This is funny because it’s actually a faithful recreation of the original. It’s just uglier (okay, far uglier). That the game was now rendered in blocky 3D should have been enough to pull the wool from everybody’s eyes and reveal that really, Golden Axe is a terrible game. Only nobody could take the shock of this revelation and instead pretended that it was this new version of Golden Axe that was awful, that their memory of the original was actually as great as it seemed when they wandered up to the towering arcade cabinet and gasped at the gigantic sprites and impressive visual effects, that when they finally built up the courage to put their popsicle-sticky hands on the buttons and put in quarter after quarter, they had been experiencing gaming at its finest. People will believe just about anything to let themselves think that they’ve never been fooled.
You know, I have some fond memories of reading Archie comics in the mountain sun while on vacation with my parents. This doesn’t mean, were I to go back to the yellowed and brittled comics still stuck in an outhouse somewhere north of Yosemite, that I’m somehow obligated to argue that they’re actually any good. I’m older now and besides a brief nostalgic burst when I first see something that rises to the surface of my memory from decades in the murk, I can’t ignore the often-sloppy penmanship, the banal plots or the insipid jokes. Likewise, when I see Golden Axe, I’ll put in a quarter, remember playing it on a boardwalk with a kid twice my age and doing better than him and I still won’t be able to stop thinking about how slow your character moves, how cheap some of the enemies are and how, if you really want to get to the end of the game, all you’re going to need is what would have been a fairly flush bankroll for a 10-year-old in the 1980s (or just a lot of patience, if you’re lucky enough to be near one of those second-run arcades that charges a flat fee and sticks all the old machines in the back on free play).
Even though I have pleasant memories of Golden Axe, they’re also pretty damning, in that I can vividly remember seeing the ending, which was the first time that I’d ever seen an ending for an arcade game. What I can’t remember is whether I beat the game or whether I was just watching some other kid blow his wad to the tune of 4 dollars in change. Now, I also remember the fight against Death Adder, so it’s most likely that I did in fact beat the game myself, especially since I remember putting in about two bucks worth of quarters during that fight because God Dammit Mabel, not today, not today! That I can’t remember whether I did so or not personally is because playing Golden Axe was not a matter of skill, it was a matter of attrition aimed at your wallet. It was a movie, only if the usher kept jabbing you every minute or so for your spare change and if you didn’t give it to him, they drew the curtains.
There were two times in my life where I was crushed by the difference between a console port and the arcade original. The first, Cyberball for the Genesis, redeemed itself after my initial shock because the developers realized that with the change from the quarter-pushing glitz and emphasis on multi-player of the arcade to the ugly sprites, tinny sound and unilimited-tries context of the family den, that the game itself had to change to match the context. So the game slowed down, became more strategic and the money you used to upgrade your team was now based on scoring and gaining yards, rather than pushing in quarters. Golden Axe, on the other hand, was the same game, just uglier. In the same way that the Cyberball port disguised the shallowness of the original, Golden Axe on the Genesis set the shortcomings of the underlying design in sharp relief.
Without those huge colorful sprites, the game was fully revealed as the quarter-sucker that it was a decade before the Sega Classics remake caused a massive Selective Memory Event. Without the draw of seeing what would come next (okay, maybe there was some draw in seeing how spectacularly disa ppointing the end result would be when compared to the original arcade version), there wasn’t much point to slowly walking right and taking turns trading glacial blows with other brown-ish looking sprites until you eventually got bored and put in something worthwhile, in much the same way that once you’d been all the way through the arcade version, there wasn’t any point in doing so again.
Now, don’t let this make you think that I hate Golden Axe. Golden Axe isn’t insulting, it’s just dumb. It’s a relic of older days worn smooth by adoring hands. To those of you who still cherish your sepia-toned memories of Golden Axe, I urge you to hang on to them for dear life and remember, you can’t go back again.
text by tim rogers
★★⋆☆
“DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO 'THE NEW RETRO'.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4 to the “Five years or less away from being considered ‘Retro Gaming'” club. The third version of this game (after the Gamecube original and the PlayStation 2 port) is for the Nintendo Wii, and the inclusion of precise, snappy motion controls simultaneously perfects the beautiful skeleton that’s existed for three years and exposes all the tiniest flaws to new scrutiny.
First, know this: if you or someone you trust has recently expressed doubts about playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii because you’re “not sure how the motion controls could add anything to the experience”, or maybe because you’ve “played that Red Steel (1/2*) game, and boy that sucked ass“, you need to wake up and smell the wrong and/or get the heck over yourself. Motion controls make this game control perfectly. I do not use that word lightly: perfectly. If you want to shoot a zombie in the head, you point the remote at his head and you press the B button (on the bottom of the remote) to command Leon S. Kennedy to whip out his firearm and aim it right at that nasty Hispanic cranium, and then you press the Action Button to fire the shot. Some will puzzle about this game, and declare with a weird degree of mouth-breathing fetishism that they need not possess in order to continue living that this game was perfect with the Nintendo Gamecube controller so they’ll only buy the Wii version for its true 16:9 video output, and only if you can play it with the Gamecube controller. Really, though, this isn’t Zelda, with motion controls shoehorned in cutely: this is a game about shooting mobs of deranged men in the head in rapid succession, and the point-and-shoot interface here is about as good as it gets. If you’d rather consider holding a big pillowy shoulder button down and moving an analog stick to aim “perfect”, be my guest, and be also wrong. You’re probably the kind of person who wanted a dual-analog-stick control scheme in Metroid Prime, because the auto-lock thing is “so fake” and “for babies”. Yeah, I’m sure the boys in the foxholes in World War I enjoyed drawing figure-eights against the starry skies of Germany with their gun muzzles.
Wii remote aiming is visceral and weirdly real; it feels like a lightgun shooter felt before you were too mature to realize how vapid Duck Hunt was — and it’s deep, because you’re controlling the character’s movement, as well. The sound of a spent shotgun cartridge hitting a wooden floor echoing out of the speaker in the middle of the videogame controller in your hands is worth the price admission to anyone with a Shadow of the Colossus limited-edition print poster on his wall. Pointing, aiming and shooting with the Wii remote is unabashedly fantastic stuff. No, it’s nothing like aiming with a mouse and a keyboard. It’s not that tacky. It feels real — you aim, you shoot. Moving Leon with the nunchuk is pretty smooth as well. Sometimes the position of the nunchuk shifts around in my hand so that I’m holding it a little funny, and I accidentally press it to the left or right when I mean to go up, though I guess that’s my fault for not knowing the palms of my own hands very well, or my fault (again) for not buying the rubber sweat-grip-thing for the nunchuk, or even Nintendo’s fault for not making the nunchuk out of a surface more conducive to gripping ecstatically while hip-deep in the semi-undead.
If pressed to mention a negative aspect of the Wii remote controls, I’d have to say that the lack of an option to turn the aiming reticle off is kind of stupid. I mean, it’s so intuitive as-is. You know when you’re pointing at a zombie’s head, because you can see the remote pointing at the television. Hell, the remote even thumps in your hand when you aim the gun at an enemy. Why can’t we rely completely on the tactile feedback? Wouldn’t that add a neat little element of challenge? Instead, there’s the aiming reticle, crowding up the screen. Hey, at least it’s not as bad as the enormous HUD in Zelda: Twilight Princess.
And that’s about it. As the old saying goes, it takes only one blinged-out young man with diamond-encrusted platinum teeth (we call those “ice teeth”) to steal a tricky ho off an old playah, and Gears of War has long held Resident Evil 4 over its thigh and spanked the ever-loving stuff out of it. If the game industry were working correctly (Protip: it’s kind of not), this is how it would be for the next couple of years: game A revolutionizes a genre, and then game B arrives, taking the revolution into account, while marrying the genre back into the family where it belongs and rendering game A pretty much irrelevant. Gears of War has perfected the Resident Evil 4 formula: the challenges are faster and the enemies are more thrilling to kill. The set-pieces are simple and more honest; in Gears of War, climbing up a staircase into a mansion feels meatier and more meaningful than the original Resident Evil‘s entire zombie-infested mansion. After Gears of War, Resident Evil 4 feels more like a frequently-interrupted stroll through some rustic horror film scenery.
Dead or Alive producer Tomonobu Itagaki once somewhat-famously quipped, of Resident Evil 4, that though he appreciated the game for its integration of concepts, he couldn’t exactly stand playing it for too long because of how the main character had to stop and stand in place every time he fired his pistol. “What kind of man stops to fire a pistol?” asked Itagaki, to the fist-pumping, aww-yeahing, and hilarity of much of the internet. The truth is, a man who doesn’t want to throw his back out is the kind of man who stops to fire a pistol. Though you know what? I can let Itagaki’s ignorance slide; he’s obviously the kind of man who learned everything he needs to know about real life from Contra III: The Alien Wars. He knows what this world is about: brawny men hefting two-ton beef-cannons and strut-rushing into the collective face of the red-fleshed alien bitch-menace. And you know what else? Maybe he’s kind of right. There’s a certain avant-garde love to be found in this recent art-like obsession with detailing, in fiction of whatever format, the real-life-like reactions of ordinary people to fantastic situations. We’re a couple half-decades away from “summer blockbuster” being synonymous with a film about a labcoat-wearing scientist defeating a Hummer full of werewolves with a champagne glass full of orange Skittles.
Either way, why not let Leon move when he’s firing his gun? Really? The situation around him is already pretty hecked-up; disbelief all over the place is going to be suspended through the roof. We’ve got hundreds of psychic Spanish-speakers sharing a half a dozen faces, starting fires and brandishing pitchforks, over here. Leon is able to pause the action whenever he wants, and eat one of many green herbs that he finds conveniently lying all over the place. Why stay dead-realistic about the gun aiming, then? I’m not asking for rocket shoes and X-ray vision or anything. In fact, I could hardly even care less about being able to walk and shoot simultaneously. I’m sure it would be nice, though, really, I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it.
“I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it”. That’s a pretty meek way of putting it, though hey. There you go.
What other game-design misdemeanors do we put up with in the name of “enjoying” a “classic”? How about the completely, terribly bullstuff story? Resident Evil 4‘s story is pretty bad. Sorry to have to break it to you, kiddo. Does its story have to be good? I guess not; Super Mario Bros. had a lame-ass story about a guy rescuing the princess of a fungus fairyland from a turtle-dragon, though it manages to ascend to the status of almost art because it carries itself with noblest distinction.
Resident Evil 4 is not so noble. It’s lazy, in fact: it begins with a man named Leon S. Kennedy, who once fought zombies on his first day as a police officer (because a rookie cop was a good choice for a main character of a game (Resident Evil 2) set during a zombie outbreak in a small town), now on his way to a city in a Spanish-speaking country the name of which was omitted because Capcom Japan feared legal action from a tourism department or two, to rescue the president’s daughter from an unknown organization with unknown demands. “The president’s daughter” is the primary goal of this mission at the start because “The president” seemed too difficult for the story planners: on the one hand, the United States of America Tourism Department might end up suing Capcom because of the implication that the American President’s bodyguards are weak enough to allow him to be captured, which might increase the possibility of terrorism attempts; on the other hand, this is a Japanese videogame, and there is significantly less opportunity to show the president’s panties than there is to show the president’s daughter‘s panties, because the president probably wouldn’t be wearing a skirt, even on vacation.
Right from the start, the storytelling is hokey; the little secrets and somethings they’re not telling us are either groaningly obvious or sighingly contrived. The “president’s daughter” could be a brilliant MacGuffin, though in order for that to happen, it would have to stay a MacGuffin. You rescue her, because the planners were eager to get a skirt on the screen, and the “real plot” begins. That a “real plot” exists at all is kind of &^#$#ed; in the end, all they’re doing is giving Leon reasons to shoot beastly men in the head (or reasons to shoot them anywhere except the head), and each longwinded radio conversation screen functions something like a ten-minute cut-scene between world 2-4 and world 3-1 of Super Mario Bros., during which Super Mario meets a gnarly old man in the woods, eats sausages while discussing the meaning of life until sundown, and is eventually driven, on the old man’s bitching Harley, to the castle gates at World 3 under cover of midnight: thus, the sky being blue in World 2 and black in World 3. In other words, who the heck cares? In other words: don’t you dare say to me that Resident Evil 4 is a silly action game, and the story “doesn’t matter”. The simple fact that it has a story is confirmation enough, straight from the developers’ mouths, that they believed a story was necessary.
This weird, cautious self-importance manages to seep into the game’s soil and poison its reservoir in the tiniest spots. The story’s “chapters” are made up of large, ingenious interconnecting set-pieces teeming with the semi-undead; usually, to get from one section to another, you need to open up a few treasure boxes and find magic items — crests or whatever — to open doors. The first time I played this game, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ever once reach a door and find I didn’t have the right items. Why have the items at all? Why advertise the game’s genre as “Survival Horror” on the box (yes, that’s what the genre is listed as in the Japanese version), if it’s more of an “Adventure Horror”? Sure, “survival” in this case indicates that we must move forward at all costs, which means finding those crests, keys, or whatever. The menu screen is pretty nice — Diablo-like, space-based, kind of a mini-game in and of itself — though really, why have herbs and whatnot, anyway? This game lets you continue at the beginning of an area when you die, just like any old FPS. And death normally comes pretty suddenly, after a short burst of hard hits. Why not just have a Gears of War-esque “run away, take cover, and wait” healing system? I suppose that would be because the enemies aren’t very smart, and running away from them isn’t always difficult.
Let’s see how many more times we can mention Gears of War: how about the radio communication segments? Why does this have to take up the whole screen? I’m sure that the little camera whirling around Leon as he detaches the radio from his belt and holds it up to his ear has become something of a gaming archetype in recent years, though really, let’s look at this, here. When the screen fades to the radio correspondence mode, Leon is holding the radio up to his ear. Yet now we see a video image of him. And we see a video image of whoever he’s talking to. Of course, as he’s holding the radio up to his ear, this means that the camera in front of Leon must be hovering on an invisible wire over his face, and that the image of his current conversation partner is kind of sitting against his cheek. At first, the game’s eagerness to show you the radio is kind of understandable, because you’ve never seen the person that Leon is going to be talking to, so they might as well show you. Eventually, though, little things stick out like gangrenous thumbs: why the hell is the name of the character speaking displayed above the (huge) subtitle window? There are obviously only two faces visible at any given time, and if we can’t tell the difference between the two characters’ voices, then it’s not our fault — it’s the storytellers’. Why, in Gears of War, the main character only ever converses on the radio with someone he’s seen in person before, and even then, it’s only in voiceover. Sure, radio transmission also forces the main character to stick his finger in his ear and slow his trotting pace down to a crawl, though hey! At least it doesn’t swamp up the whole hecking screen and make our trigger fingers itchy. Dead Rising did something kind of right smack in the middle of Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, with the walkie-talkie banter being displayed only in text and requiring the main character to hold the walkie talkie up to his head powerlessly. Either Gears of War 2 or Resident Evil 5 will have fixed this I’m guessing.
Either way, here it is, broken as can be, stinking up several parts of Resident Evil 4; the break-ins aren’t as frequent as in, say, Metal Gear Solid 3, though I dare say that they are also not one-tenth as well-written.
And here I will also compliment Resident Evil 4, by saying that even though the interruptions are not frequent, they are terribly painful, because I want to continue playing the game.
And now I will frown: the voice acting, as per Capcom, is pretty bone-chillingly atrocious, which may or may not have been for “camp” value, or maybe not. If the bad voice-acting, the stuffty story, and the weird inconsistencies like the radio-screen video-image paradox are, in any way, ever confirmed to be throwbacks, elbow-nudges, or send-ups of other “videogame cliches”, then I will be boarding an airplane with a pair of ceramic brass knuckles in my carry-on baggage, I swear. Resident Evil is already a send-up of horror movie cliches, now made thrilling because I’m in control of the action. We don’t need “ironic” videogame references stuffting in the game design gene pool, please.
If you read the internet (Protip: You’re doing so right now), you might have seen a story with “OMG” in the headline, which detailed the censorship of the Japanese version of this game. The censorship is not new news; the previous Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions were censored in exactly the same way. Namely, there’s no blood (none, of any kind, at all, et cetera) and the satisfying, explosive pop-splash of shooting a man in the head is deleted in favor of making every single location on an enemy’s body cause the same amount of damage when shot. Yes, this means you can shoot an enemy in the head five or six times in a row. Yes, this kind of breaks the game as the story starts to develop. Capcom is a fan of doing this to their games on both sides of every ocean: here in Japan, for example, where the content rating system consists of four ratings that are not “enforced” (A (all ages), B (12-13), C (13-17), D (17 and up)) and one rating that is “enforced” (Z (ages 18 and up only)), companies like Capcom are left with no other choice than to cast a vote of no-confidence in the system, and censor their games out of “social responsibility”. The simplest way of looking at it is this: the ratings board is stating from the start that none of their ratings matter except the one that does, so why should retailers trust the one rating that does, if the board is admitting that all of the other ratings are bullstuff? And, ironically, as with anything containing “mature” content (blood, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, income taxes), games like Resident Evil 4 are mostly popular amongst snot-nosed twelve-year-olds, anyway. It’s a shame, then, that the censorship practices have to kind of break the game — not as bad as in the US release of Monster Hunter, though, where the blood was removed because the enemies’ similarities to animals elevated the game to something of an animal-cruelty simulator, which is not to be chuckled at in this time of hooker-killing-simulators. Unfortunately, blood was also the game’s indicator of when you were hitting an enemy in the right spot (Monster Hunter keeps numbers out of the gameplay), so the game was essentially broken.
It’s a weird culture-clash, I tell you. The best solution, probably, is to just leave the games how they are intended to be, and everyone will be happy. I’ll be damned if the mere sight of a realistic man pointing a gun at a realistic man-monster wasn’t enough to cause an actual girl who dresses mostly in pink to avert her eyes from the screen. Should she keep her eyes on the screen after the “bang”, even she would raise critical questions about the absence of blood.
Like Ninja Gaiden on the PlayStation 3, Resident Evil 4 is getting a somewhat-deserved second wind on the Wii. It’s a breezy game despite its heavy subject matter, and despite the intrusion of some nasty game design archetypes and some groan-worthy narrative choices, it has exceptional flow, some awesome bosses, and tons of visceral crunch. The Wii version is the best version available, and I’m trying real hard to not mention how heart-breaking it is that the game can’t display in at least 720p resolutions, or how I wish Gears of War could use this control scheme, because hey, these things just aren’t possible. You have to make do with what you have.
I’ve saved the best for last: you know those brain-dead quick-timer events in the Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions, where you have to press a button quickly in order to make Leon cinematically avoid chains of certain perils? If you answered “Yes, that’s one of the dumbest trends in videogames today”, then you’re correct. They’re all gone in the Wii version — kind of. Rather than press buttons in time, all you have to do for every quick-timer event is shake the controller from side to side as vigorously as possible. Even long, elaborate sequences require no more than a vigorous controller shaking. I was prepared to call this the worst part of the game, and bemoan it as the lamest possible forced implementation of the Wii motion controls. I was going to say that, in a game where the motion controls are used so maturely and cleanly, they really didn’t have to put this in here. That was until I figured out the secret — you don’t have to shake the controller side-to-side. No, no, if you’re a man, you already know the best way to grip the controller. I tell you, I was sitting here in the middle of the night, window open, cool spring breeze wafting in, jerking this Wiimote like it was a pretty plastic penis, and there, on the screen in front of me, not some hot babe engaged in pornographic pleasure — no, it was Leon S. Kennedy running toward the screen, huffing and puffing, a boulder hot on his heels. There was a sudden, electric disconnect between Leon’s huffing and puffing and the jacking-off-like motion of my hand on the Wiimote, and a big spark jumped up in my throat and I had what was probably the best laugh I’ve had in months. Of course, I thought, of course. Thank you, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, for making that perfectly clear to me. I’d been on the fence about it for years.
★★⋆☆
“DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO 'THE NEW RETRO'.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4 to the “Five years or less away from being considered ‘Retro Gaming'” club. The third version of this game (after the Gamecube original and the PlayStation 2 port) is for the Nintendo Wii, and the inclusion of precise, snappy motion controls simultaneously perfects the beautiful skeleton that’s existed for three years and exposes all the tiniest flaws to new scrutiny.
First, know this: if you or someone you trust has recently expressed doubts about playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii because you’re “not sure how the motion controls could add anything to the experience”, or maybe because you’ve “played that Red Steel (1/2*) game, and boy that sucked ass“, you need to wake up and smell the wrong and/or get the heck over yourself. Motion controls make this game control perfectly. I do not use that word lightly: perfectly. If you want to shoot a zombie in the head, you point the remote at his head and you press the B button (on the bottom of the remote) to command Leon S. Kennedy to whip out his firearm and aim it right at that nasty Hispanic cranium, and then you press the Action Button to fire the shot. Some will puzzle about this game, and declare with a weird degree of mouth-breathing fetishism that they need not possess in order to continue living that this game was perfect with the Nintendo Gamecube controller so they’ll only buy the Wii version for its true 16:9 video output, and only if you can play it with the Gamecube controller. Really, though, this isn’t Zelda, with motion controls shoehorned in cutely: this is a game about shooting mobs of deranged men in the head in rapid succession, and the point-and-shoot interface here is about as good as it gets. If you’d rather consider holding a big pillowy shoulder button down and moving an analog stick to aim “perfect”, be my guest, and be also wrong. You’re probably the kind of person who wanted a dual-analog-stick control scheme in Metroid Prime, because the auto-lock thing is “so fake” and “for babies”. Yeah, I’m sure the boys in the foxholes in World War I enjoyed drawing figure-eights against the starry skies of Germany with their gun muzzles.
Wii remote aiming is visceral and weirdly real; it feels like a lightgun shooter felt before you were too mature to realize how vapid Duck Hunt was — and it’s deep, because you’re controlling the character’s movement, as well. The sound of a spent shotgun cartridge hitting a wooden floor echoing out of the speaker in the middle of the videogame controller in your hands is worth the price admission to anyone with a Shadow of the Colossus limited-edition print poster on his wall. Pointing, aiming and shooting with the Wii remote is unabashedly fantastic stuff. No, it’s nothing like aiming with a mouse and a keyboard. It’s not that tacky. It feels real — you aim, you shoot. Moving Leon with the nunchuk is pretty smooth as well. Sometimes the position of the nunchuk shifts around in my hand so that I’m holding it a little funny, and I accidentally press it to the left or right when I mean to go up, though I guess that’s my fault for not knowing the palms of my own hands very well, or my fault (again) for not buying the rubber sweat-grip-thing for the nunchuk, or even Nintendo’s fault for not making the nunchuk out of a surface more conducive to gripping ecstatically while hip-deep in the semi-undead.
If pressed to mention a negative aspect of the Wii remote controls, I’d have to say that the lack of an option to turn the aiming reticle off is kind of stupid. I mean, it’s so intuitive as-is. You know when you’re pointing at a zombie’s head, because you can see the remote pointing at the television. Hell, the remote even thumps in your hand when you aim the gun at an enemy. Why can’t we rely completely on the tactile feedback? Wouldn’t that add a neat little element of challenge? Instead, there’s the aiming reticle, crowding up the screen. Hey, at least it’s not as bad as the enormous HUD in Zelda: Twilight Princess.
And that’s about it. As the old saying goes, it takes only one blinged-out young man with diamond-encrusted platinum teeth (we call those “ice teeth”) to steal a tricky ho off an old playah, and Gears of War has long held Resident Evil 4 over its thigh and spanked the ever-loving stuff out of it. If the game industry were working correctly (Protip: it’s kind of not), this is how it would be for the next couple of years: game A revolutionizes a genre, and then game B arrives, taking the revolution into account, while marrying the genre back into the family where it belongs and rendering game A pretty much irrelevant. Gears of War has perfected the Resident Evil 4 formula: the challenges are faster and the enemies are more thrilling to kill. The set-pieces are simple and more honest; in Gears of War, climbing up a staircase into a mansion feels meatier and more meaningful than the original Resident Evil‘s entire zombie-infested mansion. After Gears of War, Resident Evil 4 feels more like a frequently-interrupted stroll through some rustic horror film scenery.
Dead or Alive producer Tomonobu Itagaki once somewhat-famously quipped, of Resident Evil 4, that though he appreciated the game for its integration of concepts, he couldn’t exactly stand playing it for too long because of how the main character had to stop and stand in place every time he fired his pistol. “What kind of man stops to fire a pistol?” asked Itagaki, to the fist-pumping, aww-yeahing, and hilarity of much of the internet. The truth is, a man who doesn’t want to throw his back out is the kind of man who stops to fire a pistol. Though you know what? I can let Itagaki’s ignorance slide; he’s obviously the kind of man who learned everything he needs to know about real life from Contra III: The Alien Wars. He knows what this world is about: brawny men hefting two-ton beef-cannons and strut-rushing into the collective face of the red-fleshed alien bitch-menace. And you know what else? Maybe he’s kind of right. There’s a certain avant-garde love to be found in this recent art-like obsession with detailing, in fiction of whatever format, the real-life-like reactions of ordinary people to fantastic situations. We’re a couple half-decades away from “summer blockbuster” being synonymous with a film about a labcoat-wearing scientist defeating a Hummer full of werewolves with a champagne glass full of orange Skittles.
Either way, why not let Leon move when he’s firing his gun? Really? The situation around him is already pretty hecked-up; disbelief all over the place is going to be suspended through the roof. We’ve got hundreds of psychic Spanish-speakers sharing a half a dozen faces, starting fires and brandishing pitchforks, over here. Leon is able to pause the action whenever he wants, and eat one of many green herbs that he finds conveniently lying all over the place. Why stay dead-realistic about the gun aiming, then? I’m not asking for rocket shoes and X-ray vision or anything. In fact, I could hardly even care less about being able to walk and shoot simultaneously. I’m sure it would be nice, though, really, I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it.
“I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it”. That’s a pretty meek way of putting it, though hey. There you go.
What other game-design misdemeanors do we put up with in the name of “enjoying” a “classic”? How about the completely, terribly bullstuff story? Resident Evil 4‘s story is pretty bad. Sorry to have to break it to you, kiddo. Does its story have to be good? I guess not; Super Mario Bros. had a lame-ass story about a guy rescuing the princess of a fungus fairyland from a turtle-dragon, though it manages to ascend to the status of almost art because it carries itself with noblest distinction.
Resident Evil 4 is not so noble. It’s lazy, in fact: it begins with a man named Leon S. Kennedy, who once fought zombies on his first day as a police officer (because a rookie cop was a good choice for a main character of a game (Resident Evil 2) set during a zombie outbreak in a small town), now on his way to a city in a Spanish-speaking country the name of which was omitted because Capcom Japan feared legal action from a tourism department or two, to rescue the president’s daughter from an unknown organization with unknown demands. “The president’s daughter” is the primary goal of this mission at the start because “The president” seemed too difficult for the story planners: on the one hand, the United States of America Tourism Department might end up suing Capcom because of the implication that the American President’s bodyguards are weak enough to allow him to be captured, which might increase the possibility of terrorism attempts; on the other hand, this is a Japanese videogame, and there is significantly less opportunity to show the president’s panties than there is to show the president’s daughter‘s panties, because the president probably wouldn’t be wearing a skirt, even on vacation.
Right from the start, the storytelling is hokey; the little secrets and somethings they’re not telling us are either groaningly obvious or sighingly contrived. The “president’s daughter” could be a brilliant MacGuffin, though in order for that to happen, it would have to stay a MacGuffin. You rescue her, because the planners were eager to get a skirt on the screen, and the “real plot” begins. That a “real plot” exists at all is kind of &^#$#ed; in the end, all they’re doing is giving Leon reasons to shoot beastly men in the head (or reasons to shoot them anywhere except the head), and each longwinded radio conversation screen functions something like a ten-minute cut-scene between world 2-4 and world 3-1 of Super Mario Bros., during which Super Mario meets a gnarly old man in the woods, eats sausages while discussing the meaning of life until sundown, and is eventually driven, on the old man’s bitching Harley, to the castle gates at World 3 under cover of midnight: thus, the sky being blue in World 2 and black in World 3. In other words, who the heck cares? In other words: don’t you dare say to me that Resident Evil 4 is a silly action game, and the story “doesn’t matter”. The simple fact that it has a story is confirmation enough, straight from the developers’ mouths, that they believed a story was necessary.
This weird, cautious self-importance manages to seep into the game’s soil and poison its reservoir in the tiniest spots. The story’s “chapters” are made up of large, ingenious interconnecting set-pieces teeming with the semi-undead; usually, to get from one section to another, you need to open up a few treasure boxes and find magic items — crests or whatever — to open doors. The first time I played this game, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ever once reach a door and find I didn’t have the right items. Why have the items at all? Why advertise the game’s genre as “Survival Horror” on the box (yes, that’s what the genre is listed as in the Japanese version), if it’s more of an “Adventure Horror”? Sure, “survival” in this case indicates that we must move forward at all costs, which means finding those crests, keys, or whatever. The menu screen is pretty nice — Diablo-like, space-based, kind of a mini-game in and of itself — though really, why have herbs and whatnot, anyway? This game lets you continue at the beginning of an area when you die, just like any old FPS. And death normally comes pretty suddenly, after a short burst of hard hits. Why not just have a Gears of War-esque “run away, take cover, and wait” healing system? I suppose that would be because the enemies aren’t very smart, and running away from them isn’t always difficult.
Let’s see how many more times we can mention Gears of War: how about the radio communication segments? Why does this have to take up the whole screen? I’m sure that the little camera whirling around Leon as he detaches the radio from his belt and holds it up to his ear has become something of a gaming archetype in recent years, though really, let’s look at this, here. When the screen fades to the radio correspondence mode, Leon is holding the radio up to his ear. Yet now we see a video image of him. And we see a video image of whoever he’s talking to. Of course, as he’s holding the radio up to his ear, this means that the camera in front of Leon must be hovering on an invisible wire over his face, and that the image of his current conversation partner is kind of sitting against his cheek. At first, the game’s eagerness to show you the radio is kind of understandable, because you’ve never seen the person that Leon is going to be talking to, so they might as well show you. Eventually, though, little things stick out like gangrenous thumbs: why the hell is the name of the character speaking displayed above the (huge) subtitle window? There are obviously only two faces visible at any given time, and if we can’t tell the difference between the two characters’ voices, then it’s not our fault — it’s the storytellers’. Why, in Gears of War, the main character only ever converses on the radio with someone he’s seen in person before, and even then, it’s only in voiceover. Sure, radio transmission also forces the main character to stick his finger in his ear and slow his trotting pace down to a crawl, though hey! At least it doesn’t swamp up the whole hecking screen and make our trigger fingers itchy. Dead Rising did something kind of right smack in the middle of Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, with the walkie-talkie banter being displayed only in text and requiring the main character to hold the walkie talkie up to his head powerlessly. Either Gears of War 2 or Resident Evil 5 will have fixed this I’m guessing.
Either way, here it is, broken as can be, stinking up several parts of Resident Evil 4; the break-ins aren’t as frequent as in, say, Metal Gear Solid 3, though I dare say that they are also not one-tenth as well-written.
And here I will also compliment Resident Evil 4, by saying that even though the interruptions are not frequent, they are terribly painful, because I want to continue playing the game.
And now I will frown: the voice acting, as per Capcom, is pretty bone-chillingly atrocious, which may or may not have been for “camp” value, or maybe not. If the bad voice-acting, the stuffty story, and the weird inconsistencies like the radio-screen video-image paradox are, in any way, ever confirmed to be throwbacks, elbow-nudges, or send-ups of other “videogame cliches”, then I will be boarding an airplane with a pair of ceramic brass knuckles in my carry-on baggage, I swear. Resident Evil is already a send-up of horror movie cliches, now made thrilling because I’m in control of the action. We don’t need “ironic” videogame references stuffting in the game design gene pool, please.
If you read the internet (Protip: You’re doing so right now), you might have seen a story with “OMG” in the headline, which detailed the censorship of the Japanese version of this game. The censorship is not new news; the previous Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions were censored in exactly the same way. Namely, there’s no blood (none, of any kind, at all, et cetera) and the satisfying, explosive pop-splash of shooting a man in the head is deleted in favor of making every single location on an enemy’s body cause the same amount of damage when shot. Yes, this means you can shoot an enemy in the head five or six times in a row. Yes, this kind of breaks the game as the story starts to develop. Capcom is a fan of doing this to their games on both sides of every ocean: here in Japan, for example, where the content rating system consists of four ratings that are not “enforced” (A (all ages), B (12-13), C (13-17), D (17 and up)) and one rating that is “enforced” (Z (ages 18 and up only)), companies like Capcom are left with no other choice than to cast a vote of no-confidence in the system, and censor their games out of “social responsibility”. The simplest way of looking at it is this: the ratings board is stating from the start that none of their ratings matter except the one that does, so why should retailers trust the one rating that does, if the board is admitting that all of the other ratings are bullstuff? And, ironically, as with anything containing “mature” content (blood, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, income taxes), games like Resident Evil 4 are mostly popular amongst snot-nosed twelve-year-olds, anyway. It’s a shame, then, that the censorship practices have to kind of break the game — not as bad as in the US release of Monster Hunter, though, where the blood was removed because the enemies’ similarities to animals elevated the game to something of an animal-cruelty simulator, which is not to be chuckled at in this time of hooker-killing-simulators. Unfortunately, blood was also the game’s indicator of when you were hitting an enemy in the right spot (Monster Hunter keeps numbers out of the gameplay), so the game was essentially broken.
It’s a weird culture-clash, I tell you. The best solution, probably, is to just leave the games how they are intended to be, and everyone will be happy. I’ll be damned if the mere sight of a realistic man pointing a gun at a realistic man-monster wasn’t enough to cause an actual girl who dresses mostly in pink to avert her eyes from the screen. Should she keep her eyes on the screen after the “bang”, even she would raise critical questions about the absence of blood.
Like Ninja Gaiden on the PlayStation 3, Resident Evil 4 is getting a somewhat-deserved second wind on the Wii. It’s a breezy game despite its heavy subject matter, and despite the intrusion of some nasty game design archetypes and some groan-worthy narrative choices, it has exceptional flow, some awesome bosses, and tons of visceral crunch. The Wii version is the best version available, and I’m trying real hard to not mention how heart-breaking it is that the game can’t display in at least 720p resolutions, or how I wish Gears of War could use this control scheme, because hey, these things just aren’t possible. You have to make do with what you have.
I’ve saved the best for last: you know those brain-dead quick-timer events in the Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions, where you have to press a button quickly in order to make Leon cinematically avoid chains of certain perils? If you answered “Yes, that’s one of the dumbest trends in videogames today”, then you’re correct. They’re all gone in the Wii version — kind of. Rather than press buttons in time, all you have to do for every quick-timer event is shake the controller from side to side as vigorously as possible. Even long, elaborate sequences require no more than a vigorous controller shaking. I was prepared to call this the worst part of the game, and bemoan it as the lamest possible forced implementation of the Wii motion controls. I was going to say that, in a game where the motion controls are used so maturely and cleanly, they really didn’t have to put this in here. That was until I figured out the secret — you don’t have to shake the controller side-to-side. No, no, if you’re a man, you already know the best way to grip the controller. I tell you, I was sitting here in the middle of the night, window open, cool spring breeze wafting in, jerking this Wiimote like it was a pretty plastic penis, and there, on the screen in front of me, not some hot babe engaged in pornographic pleasure — no, it was Leon S. Kennedy running toward the screen, huffing and puffing, a boulder hot on his heels. There was a sudden, electric disconnect between Leon’s huffing and puffing and the jacking-off-like motion of my hand on the Wiimote, and a big spark jumped up in my throat and I had what was probably the best laugh I’ve had in months. Of course, I thought, of course. Thank you, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, for making that perfectly clear to me. I’d been on the fence about it for years.
1995
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“HANDS-DOWN THE BEST 'JAPANESE RPG' OF ALL-TIME.”
In 1986, Enix’s Yuji Horii made Dragon Quest; in 1987, Squaresoft’s Hironobu Sakaguchi made Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi claimed to not have been inspired by Dragon Quest. The reason his game had turned out very similarly to Dragon Quest was because both Sakaguchi and Horii were mainly influenced by at-the-time unheard-of (in Japan) obsessions with the Ultima series of PC role-playing games and the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop, basement-bottom imagination-requiring adventures. Dragon Quest was to Ultima what Pac-Man was to Missile Command — a slimming reinterpretation that somehow managed to be both more mysterious and less vague. Final Fantasy was to Ultima as Super Mario Bros. was to Centipede — it’s more fun, more straightforward.
The two series grew up side-by-side, Final Fantasy continuing to dazzle and entertain (the sequel included a half-dozen vehicles for the player to ride, including big ostrich-like birds called Chocobos, a canoe, a boat, an ice-boat, and an airship), and Dragon Quest striving to perfect its original aims. At the outset of the 16-bit-era, Final Fantasy games had evolved to tell stories that involved hovercrafts, giant robots, and a trip to the moon; Dragon Quest, meanwhile, was all about telling simple little stories with simple, palm-sized gimmicks. The Super Famicom saw the two producers (and their talented teams) at the top of their games: Dragon Quest V, a casual, lighthearted yet affecting roman-fleuve, and Final Fantasy VI, a thrilling, operatic story spanning two eras of history and starring fourteen main characters. When it was announced that, for whatever miraculous reason, the two teams would work together on a game called Chrono Trigger, everyone who touched the issue of Weekly Famitsu carrying the exclusive preview literally and figuratively exploded.
This was in 1995, when just about anyone’s big brother or sister was reading Interview with a Vampire and writing in their diary about how they thought it would be so cool to be a vampire, too. Those of us who cared about videogames couldn’t have witnessed a more amazing alignment of the stars: the makers of the two hottest Japanese game series were teaming up (back then, that they would someday unite to form one super-corporation was kind of unthinkable) to produce the kind of game they were each individually good at, and it would be about time travel.
The Wikipedia article on Chrono Trigger can fill you in with all the details on the production of Chrono Trigger. Yuji Horii wrote the majority of the scenario before the production of the game began. The theme was to be “time travel”, which was simultaneously a simple, childish game concept, like something a six-year-old Catholic boy would include at the end of his nightly prayers (“Please God, let them make a videogame about time-travel”) and something infinitely more ambitious than anyone had previously ever attempted in RPG stories. Horii has admitted openly to being inspired by the story of an old American science-fiction TV series called “Time Tunnel”, though there’s an almost-certain hint of “Doctor Who” in the way the story flows from casual episodes to world-threatening chaos and back again. The tale begins when a young boy runs into a young girl (literally) at a fair; there’s a spark of friendship between them, and just when they’re getting to know one another, the boy’s machine-loving tomboy friend uses the girl in a demonstration of her teleporting device, which malfunctions and sends the girl into a mysterious vortex. The boy follows her unthinkingly, and finds her four hundred years in the past, where she’s been mistaken for the missing queen of the very kingdom that was celebrating its one-thousandth year in the boy and girl’s home time period. The boy ends up rescuing the missing queen, and subsequently the girl, though once he gets her back to the future, he’s arrested for having absconded with her.
There’s a virtuoso sequence here, involving a court trial and imprisonment of the main character. The game has ingeniously recorded the actions of the player at the fair, where you had an opportunity to steal and eat a man’s lunch or even make a kid cry. If you were nice, you can find a girl’s missing cat and score positive points with the jury. How well you do doesn’t matter in the end, though — you’re gonna get jailed. In a breathtaking use of fast zooms and side-angle shots, with an amazing swell of music, Chrono Trigger impresses the player with a feeling of dread: the main character is being led across a bridge, under an ominous moon, hands and legs shackled, by an evil man. Here, all of the tools of the “Japanese RPG” developer’s idea kit are being used simultaneously, transforming the game at once to the 1990s videogame equivalent of “Gone with the Wind”. The crucial pieces are all in place, both physically and emotionally — and though the player might have just endured the more subdued colors of an older world, and a boss battle in a possessed church, the terror of being wrongly accused and imprisoned, awaiting the death penalty, in one’s own time period really hammers something home. Of course, your friends are on hand to break you out of prison, and in the thrilling escape from the prison, your brainy friend notices a time gate, and uses a handy device she created to pop open the gate and escape into an unknown time period — which happens to be the barren, destroyed world of the year 2300 AD, where the last surviving humans huddle, starving, in dilapidated domed cities, kept alive only by a machine that rejuvenates their bodies while leaving their stomachs empty. A little bit of spelunking into the mutant-infested outskirts of a dead future city brings the party to a computer that, when activated, shows them the last record of the prosperous human civilization of 1999 AD: the day when a giant demonic alien parasite named Lavos burst out of the crust of the earth and rained napalm over all civilization. Having witnessed this catastrophe, the three friends swear to unlock the secrets of time travel and prevent the destruction of the world.
The one-two-three emotional punch of Chrono Trigger opening stages lays everything on the line. We have pleasant chumming and character-development at the Millennial Fair, we have quirky medieval time-traveling hijinks in 600 AD, we have the trial and conviction in the present, and then the revelation of the premature end of the world. The rest of the story sees the characters spanning seven crucial eras of world history, jumping all the way back to the year 65,000,000 BC to find a stone to repair the legendary sword Masamune, which must be wielded by a hero (now turned into a humanoid frog) to defeat an evil wizard named Magus, who they suspect is attempting to summon Lavos from the ether in the year 600. It turns out to all just be a wild goose chase — Magus isn’t really a bad guy; he’s summoning Lavos because he wants to kill the monster, to set right some tragedy that occurred in the past, and we realize we’ve just spent the past dozen hours of gameplay messing up his whole righteous plan.
The tale splits in wild directions from this point. It’s like a hit television series striding into its second season — new characters are introduced, old characters change, major overarching plot details rise slowly from the ashes. The wildest, most imaginative fragments of the game’s tale take place in the year 12,000 BC, at the height of an enlightened civilization, where a mysterious prophet intones warnings of armageddon to a vain queen set on building an enormous palace beneath the ocean — which will draw all of its electrical power from the sleeping parasite nested in the earth’s core. These script for these sequences was written by Masato Kato, the man who had been responsible for the invention of in-game cinematics in Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden.
The developmental theme of Chrono Trigger, then, was “talent”. Something tells me it was all Yuji Horii’s idea — get talented people together under a unified purpose, let everyone do what they excel at, and then bundle the results up into a highly polished package. Masato Kato, for example, would go on to pen stories for Xenogears and Chrono Trigger‘s prodigal (as in, one day it will return to us, and we will see about actually loving it) sequel Chrono Cross, and he’d mostly pump out noisy nonsense, though in moderation — in Chrono Trigger — his talents sparkle.
Whether you like him or not, even Akira Toriyama shines in Chrono Trigger, and mostly by doing exactly what’s expected of him. The main character, Crono, is a reworking of his spiky-haired Son Goku stereotype, now given a samurai sword and a headband; the girl, Marle, is a cleaning-up of Bulma from Dragon Ball, now dressed in white; Lucca, with her big glasses and boyish haircut, is clearly a teenaged rebirthing of Arare-chan, the heroine of the manga that put Toriyama on the map, Doctor Slump. Frog is the typical Toriyama beastman oddity, vaguely familiar yet unlike anything he’s drawn before or since, and Frog’s nemesis Magus is a vampire-like, scythe-wielding, caped man with a widow’s peak and a chalky complexion. He might remind you of what Vegeta would look like if Dragon Ball had been influenced by Lord of the Rings instead of Journey to the West. Robo the robot (from the future) exhibits Toriyama’s thoughtful talent for making technology look like high fashion, and Ayla the cavewoman is, well, the token breasty blonde. It’s a hell of a mish-mashed collection of characters and caricatures, though Toriyama pulls it all of with exceptional grace.
Chrono Trigger‘s art design is quite remarkable from a modern perspective, in this day and age where every Tales of… game that Namco cranks out opens with a fully animated cut-scene under music by a hot Japanese pop act: the Tales of… openings are always at least halfway lifeless, with the “camera” panning in front of stationary characters who change pose just as the pop song reaches a drum fill and the pan ends. Meanwhile, many years ago, Chrono Trigger was able to drop jaws and inspire daydreams with only poster-sized stationary images that are actually not featured anywhere in the game. Akira Toriyama’s massive talent — again, whether you like him or not — is scarcely more visible than in the promotional paintings he did of Chrono Trigger‘s characters in various dangerous situations. The sweep of the clouds, the etched lines of the landscapes, the throwaway details — everything good about Toriyama’s decades-long Dragon Ball series is captured in his Chrono Trigger scenes: a battle against Magus outside his castle in 600 AD, a scene with Lucca repairing Robo’s innards at her home in 1000 AD, the time machine Epoch soaring through the skies of 1999 AD, a battle in a mysterious coliseum, an epic battle of Crono, Marle, and Frog against a giant snow beast (which amazingly graced the American release’s cover art, even in the anime-fearing 1990s, when game publishers were usually inclined to commission some airbrushed Dungeons and Dragons stuff), and a virtuoso scene of the characters asleep around a campfire while curious monsters peek in from the trees. These out-game scenes, leaked into pop-culture through Japanese magazines, did more to establish the tone and wonder of the game than any in-game cut-scene or animated theme-song intro has ever done.
Yes, Chrono Trigger might just be the best-produced Japanese videogame of all time, where the word “produced” is taken at face value. Just two years after Chrono Trigger, we’d see Final Fantasy VII, and more than immediately (that is, well before the game was even released), the old guard was announced prematurely dead, and the world as we knew it grew obsessed with simplistic, manufactured angst, canned armageddon, fierce mathematics masquerading as “character customization”, and increasingly less blocky computer-animated full-motion video. Around this point, Hironobu Sakaguchi, no doubt shell-shocked from his wonderful experience helming Chrono Trigger, retreated from the world of videogames, and saw about directing a major motion picture.
Ten years have passed, and now Sakaguchi is back. And, perhaps ironically, his current vision has a lot in common with the conception of Chrono Trigger. Remembering that day and age when he and a team of talented, respected men assembled and instantly sold 2.3 million copies of a brand-new videogame franchise based on their names alone, Sakaguchi has sounded the call, and begun working on new legends — Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, both with characters by white-hot artists (Blue Dragon sees Toriyama reprising and dialing down his Chrono Trigger vibe; Lost Odyssey sees masterpiece-maker Takehiko Inoue’s original videogame debut), and one of them with a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, modern Japan’s equivalent of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
When one speaks of Chrono Trigger, the first names to crop up usually belong to artist Akira Toriyama, scenario-writer Yuji Horii, and music composer Yasunori Mitsuda. Though it was Sakaguchi’s gumption that made a videogame out of this glob of brain-ambrosia. High off of the — dare we say it — conscientious artistic success of Final Fantasy VI, Sakaguchi must have seen Chrono Trigger as the perfect opportunity to sharpen his pen. Final Fantasy VI‘s major stylistic achievement had occurred in virtuoso segments like the “Opera House”, where things are happening in the story — the beautiful female general Celes is impersonating an opera diva who a notorious gambler is slated to kidnap during the climax of her big performance, because the adventurers want to commandeer the gambler’s flying ship; meanwhile, a rogue octopus who hates our heroes for selfish reasons decides to sabotage Celes’ opera performance. As the unenthusiastic Celes, the player has to learn the lines of the opera, so as to sing convincingly; as the daring Locke, the player has to make his way around backstage, flipping the right switches to gain access to the rafters and take down the octopus so that the performance can go on. There’s a neat little twist ending to the whole fiasco. In the end, nearly every participating player was wowed. The “Opera House” scene, however, had just been an experiment, and one that required literally gallons of precious creative juices, so the rest of Final Fantasy VI (though not without its gems) was a tiny bit thin in comparison. In Chrono Trigger, few scenes stand out like the “Opera House” did in Final Fantasy VI, though we dare say that there’s not a single storyline event that isn’t more thrilling than anything event that’s occurred in any other RPG since. The raid on Magus’s castle in 600 AD is particularly amazing — though you barely do any more than walk down straight corridors, the planning is miraculous: mini-bosses pop out at just the right moments, and speak just enough dialogue before the fights to endear themselves as rounded characters. There’s a side-scrolling trek across parapets, an ominous descent down a dark, long staircase, during which the satanic chanting music builds in volume and intensity. Enter the door at the bottom of the stairs, and the chanting stops at once: silence. It’s not just an RPG dungeon — you’re not plunging into a crypt to dig up some magic mirror or something, you’re raiding a castle with the purpose of killing a guy, and the flawless presentation keeps you believing all the way up to the thrilling showdown and the cliffhanging revelation.
Future RPGs would tackle Chrono Trigger from the wrong angle — the game was, for better or for worse, the death knell of fantastic RPG dungeons. It birthed a tendency to keep everything straightforward and clean, with bosses popping up when needed. Xenosaga and Final Fantasy X pull the player forward through lifeless corridors laced with random battles and occasional boss battles prefaced by cute little dialogues. These games, however, are bloodless corpses when stood up beside Chrono Trigger, a miracle born of its creators’ attention and love, and of its tremendously tight, personality-fueled writing. (Note: if you’ve only played the English version, I assure you that the writing in the Japanese version is magnitudes smarter.)
Reviewers of the age praised Chrono Trigger for a multitude of reasons, including its fantastic plot, its multiple endings, and its great graphics. Electronic Gaming Monthly was sure, also, to praise the fact that its cartridge was 32 megabytes in size. Many critics semi-wrongly pumped their fists at the game’s method of presenting battles. Previous RPGs had faded to black occasionally and changed to a “battle screen” for each battle; Chrono Trigger, however, keeps all three characters visible on the screen at all times, and at specific points in dungeons (perhaps more accurately called “traveling sequences”), when enemies jump in from the sidelines, menus simply slide onto the screen and the characters draw their weapons; the battles then progress just as any pseudo-realtime battle in a Final Fantasy, now with a semi-pointless distance variable thrown into the mix. This wasn’t the “death” of the “random battle”, as many reviewers seemed to believe — it was just a conscientious workaround, a placeholder for something awesome — which would continue to elude RPG producers for the better half of a decade. For one thing, almost every battle in the game is unavoidable. Random battles, then, are most insulting because you can’t see the enemies before the battle begins — which I guess makes sense. Though hey, the typical RPG uses higher-quality character models during battle scenes than they use during field screens, meaning that the battles are deemed more important than the plot events by a majority of the games’ staffs. Really, has an RPG (not counting Dragon Quest, where your party members are usually invisible) ever had in-battle character models of lower graphical quality than the field models? I’m going to say no — maybe that’s the chief symptom of the RPG malaise: the developers find battling more important than adventuring, and it’s a weeping pity that, nine times out of ten, the battle systems in RPGs are just plain not exciting.
I might possibly review this game again someday, several times. It might even be useful to review it every time a new big RPG comes out. Maybe I’ll play that big new RPG, be thoroughly disappointed by it, and then replay Chrono Trigger, and review Chrono Trigger again, based on what the new game did wrong. One might say that this review is a counterpoint to my Blue Dragon review, where I score the game pretty highly; after playing Blue Dragon, I played Chrono Trigger again, and Blue Dragon is actually quite bland in comparison — though not as bland as, say, Final Fantasy X. All Blue Dragon lacks, when compared to Chrono Trigger, is smoother battle transitions and a rock-solid, palm-sized story gimmick. (Like, say, time travel–no, that’s been taken.) Compared to Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest Swords lacks dramatic weight in its action stages as well as the rock-solid, compelling story gimmick and exceptional writing.
Most pointedly, replaying Chrono Trigger again for the purposes of this review made me remember Hironobu Sakaguchi’s recent declaration of love for Epic Games’ shooter Gears of War. In Gears of War‘s campaign mode, I couldn’t help remembering Chrono Trigger when, around every shattered city block, enemy gunfire rained from the sky and my men swore aloud, shouted orders, and scattered to find cover. What’s that, if not a RPG battle transition? Are we not “playing” a “role” in Gears of War, anyway? Sakaguchi is a man of love, life, and details, and Chrono Trigger is the best project he’s ever been involved with. (It’s the best project that anyone involved with it has ever been involved with, in fact.) Surely, the battle presentation was a revolution waiting to happen; what if they would have thought a little harder, though? What if they would have incorporated a Secret of Mana-style action-packed, button-jabbing battle system? I’m sure Sakaguchi didn’t do it because Secret of Mana felt too thin. What about a crispy, poppy, 16-bit Zelda-like battle system, with simple, pleasant guarding and item management? No, he’d wanted each battle to have a kind of dramatic weight — a Zelda flow would have made the game feel too loose in comparison to an actual Zelda title, and there wasn’t enough staff to bring everything up to speed. Over a decade later, Gears of War must have been a tremendous revelation: maybe it’s possible, now, to stage intriguing, cinema-worthy battles of spectacle during straightforward trudges through fascinating surroundings. That Gears of War recycles and reuses the same three play mechanics (take cover, fire guns, throw grenades into emergence holes) a million times without ever feeling old should be a wonder to anyone who’s ever slogged through a Tales of… game.
I always ask, these days — what if someone were to take the Gundam story that has fascinated generations of Japanese manboys and give it a full, loving RPG treatment, complete with towns and atmosphere, customization, animated cut-scenes and an enthralling, action-packed battle system? I know this won’t happen because game companies don’t want to set the bar higher than they’re willing to jump. Why haven’t any Neon Genesis Evangelion games — ever — allowed the player to control a giant robot? Why are they all alternate-universe high school love stories, or detective murder mysteries, or sequels to alternate-universe high school love stories, or pachinko-slot-machine simulators? In the late 1990s, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Final Fantasy VII gangbanged the Japanese RPG format from opposite, grisly angles, and the developers have been auto-erotic asphyxiating themselves with ropes made of money ever since.
It’s amazing, in this light, that Chrono Trigger ever got made. The amount of creativity and balls that went into its production is just about unthinkable in the present climate. The story is as lovingly presented and conceived as an entire four-season sci-fi television series, the characters are as endearing as anything ever put into a classic Japanese animated series, the ingenious multiple endings and “New Game +” mode keep the fan-service close to the game’s heart, and the music of Yasunori Mitsuda is studded with innumerable gems as evocative of Ryuichi Sakamoto as of Rick Astley (see here), all equal parts three-minute-pop-song, new-age experiment, and classic videogame BGM. Future games would try to disassemble Chrono Trigger‘s winning formula and sell it piece by piece, which makes a lot of sense when one considers that yes, videogames are a commodity. Though it really is kind of sad, when you go back and play Chrono Trigger again, and witness how obscenely together it is, and wonder why no one ever summoned the conscience required to tighten up its noble ambitions. Here’s to Dragon Quest X, then, and to whatever Sakaguchi’s planning for after Lost Odyssey, and to White Knight Story. The kid deep inside us, who grew up in the 1980s watching reruns of 1970s Japanese animations about plucky boys somehow outsmarting grave fates will live again — we look forward to how.
★★★★
“HANDS-DOWN THE BEST 'JAPANESE RPG' OF ALL-TIME.”
In 1986, Enix’s Yuji Horii made Dragon Quest; in 1987, Squaresoft’s Hironobu Sakaguchi made Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi claimed to not have been inspired by Dragon Quest. The reason his game had turned out very similarly to Dragon Quest was because both Sakaguchi and Horii were mainly influenced by at-the-time unheard-of (in Japan) obsessions with the Ultima series of PC role-playing games and the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop, basement-bottom imagination-requiring adventures. Dragon Quest was to Ultima what Pac-Man was to Missile Command — a slimming reinterpretation that somehow managed to be both more mysterious and less vague. Final Fantasy was to Ultima as Super Mario Bros. was to Centipede — it’s more fun, more straightforward.
The two series grew up side-by-side, Final Fantasy continuing to dazzle and entertain (the sequel included a half-dozen vehicles for the player to ride, including big ostrich-like birds called Chocobos, a canoe, a boat, an ice-boat, and an airship), and Dragon Quest striving to perfect its original aims. At the outset of the 16-bit-era, Final Fantasy games had evolved to tell stories that involved hovercrafts, giant robots, and a trip to the moon; Dragon Quest, meanwhile, was all about telling simple little stories with simple, palm-sized gimmicks. The Super Famicom saw the two producers (and their talented teams) at the top of their games: Dragon Quest V, a casual, lighthearted yet affecting roman-fleuve, and Final Fantasy VI, a thrilling, operatic story spanning two eras of history and starring fourteen main characters. When it was announced that, for whatever miraculous reason, the two teams would work together on a game called Chrono Trigger, everyone who touched the issue of Weekly Famitsu carrying the exclusive preview literally and figuratively exploded.
This was in 1995, when just about anyone’s big brother or sister was reading Interview with a Vampire and writing in their diary about how they thought it would be so cool to be a vampire, too. Those of us who cared about videogames couldn’t have witnessed a more amazing alignment of the stars: the makers of the two hottest Japanese game series were teaming up (back then, that they would someday unite to form one super-corporation was kind of unthinkable) to produce the kind of game they were each individually good at, and it would be about time travel.
The Wikipedia article on Chrono Trigger can fill you in with all the details on the production of Chrono Trigger. Yuji Horii wrote the majority of the scenario before the production of the game began. The theme was to be “time travel”, which was simultaneously a simple, childish game concept, like something a six-year-old Catholic boy would include at the end of his nightly prayers (“Please God, let them make a videogame about time-travel”) and something infinitely more ambitious than anyone had previously ever attempted in RPG stories. Horii has admitted openly to being inspired by the story of an old American science-fiction TV series called “Time Tunnel”, though there’s an almost-certain hint of “Doctor Who” in the way the story flows from casual episodes to world-threatening chaos and back again. The tale begins when a young boy runs into a young girl (literally) at a fair; there’s a spark of friendship between them, and just when they’re getting to know one another, the boy’s machine-loving tomboy friend uses the girl in a demonstration of her teleporting device, which malfunctions and sends the girl into a mysterious vortex. The boy follows her unthinkingly, and finds her four hundred years in the past, where she’s been mistaken for the missing queen of the very kingdom that was celebrating its one-thousandth year in the boy and girl’s home time period. The boy ends up rescuing the missing queen, and subsequently the girl, though once he gets her back to the future, he’s arrested for having absconded with her.
There’s a virtuoso sequence here, involving a court trial and imprisonment of the main character. The game has ingeniously recorded the actions of the player at the fair, where you had an opportunity to steal and eat a man’s lunch or even make a kid cry. If you were nice, you can find a girl’s missing cat and score positive points with the jury. How well you do doesn’t matter in the end, though — you’re gonna get jailed. In a breathtaking use of fast zooms and side-angle shots, with an amazing swell of music, Chrono Trigger impresses the player with a feeling of dread: the main character is being led across a bridge, under an ominous moon, hands and legs shackled, by an evil man. Here, all of the tools of the “Japanese RPG” developer’s idea kit are being used simultaneously, transforming the game at once to the 1990s videogame equivalent of “Gone with the Wind”. The crucial pieces are all in place, both physically and emotionally — and though the player might have just endured the more subdued colors of an older world, and a boss battle in a possessed church, the terror of being wrongly accused and imprisoned, awaiting the death penalty, in one’s own time period really hammers something home. Of course, your friends are on hand to break you out of prison, and in the thrilling escape from the prison, your brainy friend notices a time gate, and uses a handy device she created to pop open the gate and escape into an unknown time period — which happens to be the barren, destroyed world of the year 2300 AD, where the last surviving humans huddle, starving, in dilapidated domed cities, kept alive only by a machine that rejuvenates their bodies while leaving their stomachs empty. A little bit of spelunking into the mutant-infested outskirts of a dead future city brings the party to a computer that, when activated, shows them the last record of the prosperous human civilization of 1999 AD: the day when a giant demonic alien parasite named Lavos burst out of the crust of the earth and rained napalm over all civilization. Having witnessed this catastrophe, the three friends swear to unlock the secrets of time travel and prevent the destruction of the world.
The one-two-three emotional punch of Chrono Trigger opening stages lays everything on the line. We have pleasant chumming and character-development at the Millennial Fair, we have quirky medieval time-traveling hijinks in 600 AD, we have the trial and conviction in the present, and then the revelation of the premature end of the world. The rest of the story sees the characters spanning seven crucial eras of world history, jumping all the way back to the year 65,000,000 BC to find a stone to repair the legendary sword Masamune, which must be wielded by a hero (now turned into a humanoid frog) to defeat an evil wizard named Magus, who they suspect is attempting to summon Lavos from the ether in the year 600. It turns out to all just be a wild goose chase — Magus isn’t really a bad guy; he’s summoning Lavos because he wants to kill the monster, to set right some tragedy that occurred in the past, and we realize we’ve just spent the past dozen hours of gameplay messing up his whole righteous plan.
The tale splits in wild directions from this point. It’s like a hit television series striding into its second season — new characters are introduced, old characters change, major overarching plot details rise slowly from the ashes. The wildest, most imaginative fragments of the game’s tale take place in the year 12,000 BC, at the height of an enlightened civilization, where a mysterious prophet intones warnings of armageddon to a vain queen set on building an enormous palace beneath the ocean — which will draw all of its electrical power from the sleeping parasite nested in the earth’s core. These script for these sequences was written by Masato Kato, the man who had been responsible for the invention of in-game cinematics in Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden.
The developmental theme of Chrono Trigger, then, was “talent”. Something tells me it was all Yuji Horii’s idea — get talented people together under a unified purpose, let everyone do what they excel at, and then bundle the results up into a highly polished package. Masato Kato, for example, would go on to pen stories for Xenogears and Chrono Trigger‘s prodigal (as in, one day it will return to us, and we will see about actually loving it) sequel Chrono Cross, and he’d mostly pump out noisy nonsense, though in moderation — in Chrono Trigger — his talents sparkle.
Whether you like him or not, even Akira Toriyama shines in Chrono Trigger, and mostly by doing exactly what’s expected of him. The main character, Crono, is a reworking of his spiky-haired Son Goku stereotype, now given a samurai sword and a headband; the girl, Marle, is a cleaning-up of Bulma from Dragon Ball, now dressed in white; Lucca, with her big glasses and boyish haircut, is clearly a teenaged rebirthing of Arare-chan, the heroine of the manga that put Toriyama on the map, Doctor Slump. Frog is the typical Toriyama beastman oddity, vaguely familiar yet unlike anything he’s drawn before or since, and Frog’s nemesis Magus is a vampire-like, scythe-wielding, caped man with a widow’s peak and a chalky complexion. He might remind you of what Vegeta would look like if Dragon Ball had been influenced by Lord of the Rings instead of Journey to the West. Robo the robot (from the future) exhibits Toriyama’s thoughtful talent for making technology look like high fashion, and Ayla the cavewoman is, well, the token breasty blonde. It’s a hell of a mish-mashed collection of characters and caricatures, though Toriyama pulls it all of with exceptional grace.
Chrono Trigger‘s art design is quite remarkable from a modern perspective, in this day and age where every Tales of… game that Namco cranks out opens with a fully animated cut-scene under music by a hot Japanese pop act: the Tales of… openings are always at least halfway lifeless, with the “camera” panning in front of stationary characters who change pose just as the pop song reaches a drum fill and the pan ends. Meanwhile, many years ago, Chrono Trigger was able to drop jaws and inspire daydreams with only poster-sized stationary images that are actually not featured anywhere in the game. Akira Toriyama’s massive talent — again, whether you like him or not — is scarcely more visible than in the promotional paintings he did of Chrono Trigger‘s characters in various dangerous situations. The sweep of the clouds, the etched lines of the landscapes, the throwaway details — everything good about Toriyama’s decades-long Dragon Ball series is captured in his Chrono Trigger scenes: a battle against Magus outside his castle in 600 AD, a scene with Lucca repairing Robo’s innards at her home in 1000 AD, the time machine Epoch soaring through the skies of 1999 AD, a battle in a mysterious coliseum, an epic battle of Crono, Marle, and Frog against a giant snow beast (which amazingly graced the American release’s cover art, even in the anime-fearing 1990s, when game publishers were usually inclined to commission some airbrushed Dungeons and Dragons stuff), and a virtuoso scene of the characters asleep around a campfire while curious monsters peek in from the trees. These out-game scenes, leaked into pop-culture through Japanese magazines, did more to establish the tone and wonder of the game than any in-game cut-scene or animated theme-song intro has ever done.
Yes, Chrono Trigger might just be the best-produced Japanese videogame of all time, where the word “produced” is taken at face value. Just two years after Chrono Trigger, we’d see Final Fantasy VII, and more than immediately (that is, well before the game was even released), the old guard was announced prematurely dead, and the world as we knew it grew obsessed with simplistic, manufactured angst, canned armageddon, fierce mathematics masquerading as “character customization”, and increasingly less blocky computer-animated full-motion video. Around this point, Hironobu Sakaguchi, no doubt shell-shocked from his wonderful experience helming Chrono Trigger, retreated from the world of videogames, and saw about directing a major motion picture.
Ten years have passed, and now Sakaguchi is back. And, perhaps ironically, his current vision has a lot in common with the conception of Chrono Trigger. Remembering that day and age when he and a team of talented, respected men assembled and instantly sold 2.3 million copies of a brand-new videogame franchise based on their names alone, Sakaguchi has sounded the call, and begun working on new legends — Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, both with characters by white-hot artists (Blue Dragon sees Toriyama reprising and dialing down his Chrono Trigger vibe; Lost Odyssey sees masterpiece-maker Takehiko Inoue’s original videogame debut), and one of them with a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, modern Japan’s equivalent of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
When one speaks of Chrono Trigger, the first names to crop up usually belong to artist Akira Toriyama, scenario-writer Yuji Horii, and music composer Yasunori Mitsuda. Though it was Sakaguchi’s gumption that made a videogame out of this glob of brain-ambrosia. High off of the — dare we say it — conscientious artistic success of Final Fantasy VI, Sakaguchi must have seen Chrono Trigger as the perfect opportunity to sharpen his pen. Final Fantasy VI‘s major stylistic achievement had occurred in virtuoso segments like the “Opera House”, where things are happening in the story — the beautiful female general Celes is impersonating an opera diva who a notorious gambler is slated to kidnap during the climax of her big performance, because the adventurers want to commandeer the gambler’s flying ship; meanwhile, a rogue octopus who hates our heroes for selfish reasons decides to sabotage Celes’ opera performance. As the unenthusiastic Celes, the player has to learn the lines of the opera, so as to sing convincingly; as the daring Locke, the player has to make his way around backstage, flipping the right switches to gain access to the rafters and take down the octopus so that the performance can go on. There’s a neat little twist ending to the whole fiasco. In the end, nearly every participating player was wowed. The “Opera House” scene, however, had just been an experiment, and one that required literally gallons of precious creative juices, so the rest of Final Fantasy VI (though not without its gems) was a tiny bit thin in comparison. In Chrono Trigger, few scenes stand out like the “Opera House” did in Final Fantasy VI, though we dare say that there’s not a single storyline event that isn’t more thrilling than anything event that’s occurred in any other RPG since. The raid on Magus’s castle in 600 AD is particularly amazing — though you barely do any more than walk down straight corridors, the planning is miraculous: mini-bosses pop out at just the right moments, and speak just enough dialogue before the fights to endear themselves as rounded characters. There’s a side-scrolling trek across parapets, an ominous descent down a dark, long staircase, during which the satanic chanting music builds in volume and intensity. Enter the door at the bottom of the stairs, and the chanting stops at once: silence. It’s not just an RPG dungeon — you’re not plunging into a crypt to dig up some magic mirror or something, you’re raiding a castle with the purpose of killing a guy, and the flawless presentation keeps you believing all the way up to the thrilling showdown and the cliffhanging revelation.
Future RPGs would tackle Chrono Trigger from the wrong angle — the game was, for better or for worse, the death knell of fantastic RPG dungeons. It birthed a tendency to keep everything straightforward and clean, with bosses popping up when needed. Xenosaga and Final Fantasy X pull the player forward through lifeless corridors laced with random battles and occasional boss battles prefaced by cute little dialogues. These games, however, are bloodless corpses when stood up beside Chrono Trigger, a miracle born of its creators’ attention and love, and of its tremendously tight, personality-fueled writing. (Note: if you’ve only played the English version, I assure you that the writing in the Japanese version is magnitudes smarter.)
Reviewers of the age praised Chrono Trigger for a multitude of reasons, including its fantastic plot, its multiple endings, and its great graphics. Electronic Gaming Monthly was sure, also, to praise the fact that its cartridge was 32 megabytes in size. Many critics semi-wrongly pumped their fists at the game’s method of presenting battles. Previous RPGs had faded to black occasionally and changed to a “battle screen” for each battle; Chrono Trigger, however, keeps all three characters visible on the screen at all times, and at specific points in dungeons (perhaps more accurately called “traveling sequences”), when enemies jump in from the sidelines, menus simply slide onto the screen and the characters draw their weapons; the battles then progress just as any pseudo-realtime battle in a Final Fantasy, now with a semi-pointless distance variable thrown into the mix. This wasn’t the “death” of the “random battle”, as many reviewers seemed to believe — it was just a conscientious workaround, a placeholder for something awesome — which would continue to elude RPG producers for the better half of a decade. For one thing, almost every battle in the game is unavoidable. Random battles, then, are most insulting because you can’t see the enemies before the battle begins — which I guess makes sense. Though hey, the typical RPG uses higher-quality character models during battle scenes than they use during field screens, meaning that the battles are deemed more important than the plot events by a majority of the games’ staffs. Really, has an RPG (not counting Dragon Quest, where your party members are usually invisible) ever had in-battle character models of lower graphical quality than the field models? I’m going to say no — maybe that’s the chief symptom of the RPG malaise: the developers find battling more important than adventuring, and it’s a weeping pity that, nine times out of ten, the battle systems in RPGs are just plain not exciting.
I might possibly review this game again someday, several times. It might even be useful to review it every time a new big RPG comes out. Maybe I’ll play that big new RPG, be thoroughly disappointed by it, and then replay Chrono Trigger, and review Chrono Trigger again, based on what the new game did wrong. One might say that this review is a counterpoint to my Blue Dragon review, where I score the game pretty highly; after playing Blue Dragon, I played Chrono Trigger again, and Blue Dragon is actually quite bland in comparison — though not as bland as, say, Final Fantasy X. All Blue Dragon lacks, when compared to Chrono Trigger, is smoother battle transitions and a rock-solid, palm-sized story gimmick. (Like, say, time travel–no, that’s been taken.) Compared to Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest Swords lacks dramatic weight in its action stages as well as the rock-solid, compelling story gimmick and exceptional writing.
Most pointedly, replaying Chrono Trigger again for the purposes of this review made me remember Hironobu Sakaguchi’s recent declaration of love for Epic Games’ shooter Gears of War. In Gears of War‘s campaign mode, I couldn’t help remembering Chrono Trigger when, around every shattered city block, enemy gunfire rained from the sky and my men swore aloud, shouted orders, and scattered to find cover. What’s that, if not a RPG battle transition? Are we not “playing” a “role” in Gears of War, anyway? Sakaguchi is a man of love, life, and details, and Chrono Trigger is the best project he’s ever been involved with. (It’s the best project that anyone involved with it has ever been involved with, in fact.) Surely, the battle presentation was a revolution waiting to happen; what if they would have thought a little harder, though? What if they would have incorporated a Secret of Mana-style action-packed, button-jabbing battle system? I’m sure Sakaguchi didn’t do it because Secret of Mana felt too thin. What about a crispy, poppy, 16-bit Zelda-like battle system, with simple, pleasant guarding and item management? No, he’d wanted each battle to have a kind of dramatic weight — a Zelda flow would have made the game feel too loose in comparison to an actual Zelda title, and there wasn’t enough staff to bring everything up to speed. Over a decade later, Gears of War must have been a tremendous revelation: maybe it’s possible, now, to stage intriguing, cinema-worthy battles of spectacle during straightforward trudges through fascinating surroundings. That Gears of War recycles and reuses the same three play mechanics (take cover, fire guns, throw grenades into emergence holes) a million times without ever feeling old should be a wonder to anyone who’s ever slogged through a Tales of… game.
I always ask, these days — what if someone were to take the Gundam story that has fascinated generations of Japanese manboys and give it a full, loving RPG treatment, complete with towns and atmosphere, customization, animated cut-scenes and an enthralling, action-packed battle system? I know this won’t happen because game companies don’t want to set the bar higher than they’re willing to jump. Why haven’t any Neon Genesis Evangelion games — ever — allowed the player to control a giant robot? Why are they all alternate-universe high school love stories, or detective murder mysteries, or sequels to alternate-universe high school love stories, or pachinko-slot-machine simulators? In the late 1990s, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Final Fantasy VII gangbanged the Japanese RPG format from opposite, grisly angles, and the developers have been auto-erotic asphyxiating themselves with ropes made of money ever since.
It’s amazing, in this light, that Chrono Trigger ever got made. The amount of creativity and balls that went into its production is just about unthinkable in the present climate. The story is as lovingly presented and conceived as an entire four-season sci-fi television series, the characters are as endearing as anything ever put into a classic Japanese animated series, the ingenious multiple endings and “New Game +” mode keep the fan-service close to the game’s heart, and the music of Yasunori Mitsuda is studded with innumerable gems as evocative of Ryuichi Sakamoto as of Rick Astley (see here), all equal parts three-minute-pop-song, new-age experiment, and classic videogame BGM. Future games would try to disassemble Chrono Trigger‘s winning formula and sell it piece by piece, which makes a lot of sense when one considers that yes, videogames are a commodity. Though it really is kind of sad, when you go back and play Chrono Trigger again, and witness how obscenely together it is, and wonder why no one ever summoned the conscience required to tighten up its noble ambitions. Here’s to Dragon Quest X, then, and to whatever Sakaguchi’s planning for after Lost Odyssey, and to White Knight Story. The kid deep inside us, who grew up in the 1980s watching reruns of 1970s Japanese animations about plucky boys somehow outsmarting grave fates will live again — we look forward to how.
2006
text by tim rogers
★★★☆
“A BOTTOMLESS BOWL OF CAP'N CRUNCH ON A FIFTY-HOUR SATURDAY MORNING.”
Quite accidentally — that’s how obsessive-compulsize behavior gets started. Case in point: I was eight years old when I first played Dragon Quest, and the game boggled my overweight mind from so many directions — here I’d spent most of my sentient life making Super Mario run and jump, and here was a game that required me to open a menu and click a command to open a door. I needed to sit and review the instruction manual, which I did upon waking early one Saturday morning. I poured a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and read over the instruction manual at my family’s dinner table.
Ever since then, I can’t play a new RPG without reading the instruction manual over a bowl of cold cereal. They used to be big and fascinating. They used to have cryptic, six-to-twelve-page-long story descriptions and tons of character art; Final Fantasy VI for the Super Famicom easily had the best RPG instruction manual of all-time. Most RPGs these days don’t break much new ground in their instruction manuals; part of me wants to groan at every Square-Enix manual, where they will spell everything out in extended notation: “Use the directional buttons up or down to move the cursor up or down; when the cursor has highlighted the ‘Fight’ command, press the O button to confirm.” Namco’s Tales of manuals, on the other hand, are fresh, clean, and honest, three words you’re seldom to hear used about anything made by Namco: they all start with a big chart, in which the directional buttons’ use is described as “On the field: move character” “In menus: move cursor” and the O button is described as “In menus: confirm” “On the field: speak / investigate”. Square-Enix’s games’ manuals earn their lengths by describing the menu selection confirming process every time they explain the function of a different menu selection. Tales of games earn their length and weight when they drift into extended segments about the unique in-game magic systems.
RPG instruction manuals nowadays are rendered unnecessary by droning, in-game tutorials that make sure no newbie is left behind. The manuals continue to exist, it seems, to satisfy the obsessive, now-archetypal desire that sleeps deep within the RPG-playing hordes: the package must be heavy. It must be heavy, and it must be shiny. People like me didn’t use a razor blade to open our Super Nintendo games for nothing: we wanted as much plastic clinging to the package, forever, as possible. This was part of the reason why we balked at Final Fantasy VII‘s being on the PlayStation: because the Nintendo 64 was going to have proper boxes for its games, boxes with plastic wrap, and plenty of room for superfluous maps and posters and posters of maps. Promises of three discs — three ridiculous discs — swayed us, and we stayed when we saw the big instruction manual; years later, with Final Fantasy X, it became dreadfully apparent that DVD cases, made of soft plastic, are lighter than CD jewel cases, and DVDs hold more information, making multi-disc games obsolete; and thus the Heavy-box RPG of yore has faded into the past. People tried to bring it back, by stuffing trinkets and/or soundtrack CDs into the cases, though those people happened to mostly be idiots or, worse, Working Designs.
The Heavy-box RPG has returned to spectacular form, however, with Hironobu Sakaguchi, Mistwalker, and Artoon’s Blue Dragon, which sports a forty-seven-page (not too huge, not too short) glossy instruction manual and a foil-stamped mirror-shiny label (reversible!) over a DVD case that weighs about as much as a loaded laser pistol will weigh in the year 2148. Taped to the outside of the case, when I bought the game back in December of 2006, was a fat, pristine plastic package of stickers to put on anything I wanted, as long as anything I wanted was an Xbox 360 or related peripheral. Breathing through my mouth, I tore open the package, and screamed like a clown on fire when I saw what lay inside: an Xbox-green plastic hinging apparatus, containing one disc on each side, and then a third disc sitting on a spindle inside the back of the case. Three discs! Why hadn’t I, in all my obsessive, news-combing, information-gathering frenzy, known that this game was three discs? Why hadn’t Microsoft advertised such a fact? I suppose game companies aren’t proud of three discs, or of heavy boxes, anymore. It’s something to reflect on that a country like Japan is able to produce values of this caliber, when they’ve gone out of their way to reject value in all other forms; a six-pack of beer, here, is precisely the price of six cans of beer, plus ten extra yen for the package.
Hironobu Sakaguchi saw a grand vision; it told him to get together the most talented artists, programmers, game designers, writers, and musicians, and throw them at several videogames until he had successfully defeated his former home of Square-Enix. In minds as idealistic and pure-hearted as Sakaguchi’s, there’s no way this plan could fail: if you’re able to think on his wavelength there’s no way his RPG Lost Odyssey, featuring the art of Takehiko Inoue and a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu — both immense talents from outside the videogame industry — will not be awesome. However, this corner of the industry is currently in a stinking state of inbreeding; the first young man in line to purchase Final Fantasy XII, when allowed to ask a question of Square-Enix president Yoichi Wada before a television audience, meekly spoke “Please remake Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3 thank you” and shuffled away. The people like Tetsuya Nomura; they don’t care that he got started as a one-bit pixel-chopper in the Super Famicom days, or that his art style has slowly fluctuated from idiocy to madness. As far as the hardest-cored RPG fans are concerned, Nomura is one of them. Never mind that the first RPGs in the legacy of Japanese RPGs were made by bold, daring people on risk-taking budgets, pouring more money into the pockets of an artist who ended up only ever drawing a couple of shots for the instruction manual than they would pay the programmers. Yuji Horii scored white-hot manga artist Akira Toriyama for Dragon Quest back in 1986, and the move helped the game sell millions. Sakaguchi, meanwhile, in building his counter-Dragon Quest, sought out semi-fine artist Yostuffaka Amano to lend a lofty air to Final Fantasy.
Since those two series exploded all over the world, kids with access to pens and pencils have sought to be as awesome as their idols, and this has resulted in many a Japanese elementary schoolchild telling his teacher he longed to design characters for RPGs when he grew up. What kids are doing, with their cute little dreams, is cutting out the middleman — which, in this case, happens to be “Earn recognition outside the field of videogames before being asked to collaborate on a videogame” — and the videogame industry has never stopped to slap them and tell them to eat their vegetables. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not! I’m certainly not one to judge people provably more successful than me (I’ve never designed characters for a major videogame, et cetera), though certainly, the quality is growing me-too-ish and even dull. Namco’s Tales of games are an ironically good example of uneven distribution of talent. They’ll get a hot rock band like Bump of Chicken to do the theme song, and then let said theme song play out over an animated scene of ferocious vapidity: the camera pans slowly toward each character as they stand perfectly still, and then, just as the camera stops, the character makes some crudely vague gesture with their weapon or magical pet. Sakaguchi must have seen this tsunami coming from miles away. He apparently wanted no part of Final Fantasy VII because he thought the technology wasn’t up to the vision yet. He wanted to keep making games on Nintendo systems, with sprite graphics, while the other half of his team worked squeaked out FMV-laden adventures. When Square subsequently got huge, he probably entertained the idea of sacking Nomura and using the Huge Revenues to hire an awesome artist, like Kentarou Miura, artist of the manga Berserk, which had inspired both the story and the character designs for Final Fantasy VII. He knew from the start that he wouldn’t be able to do this, though; the managers around him were growing increasingly hard-headed, and success would only make their heads harder, and their souls paranoid as hell. Sakaguchi knew that with great power came great potential to piss off one’s fans, and he knew that RPG fans were, more than anything else, fans of the package: if someone likes Final Fantasy VII, then they are fans of Nobuo Uematsu’s music, and of Tetsuya Nomura’s characters. The managers would have considered swapping in a new artist to be like admitting that the previous one hadn’t quite been exactly all that he could have been. It would have been like confessing to a lapse in judgment. It would have been flipping off the fans. To exist in the world, for an artist, is to have fans. Sakaguchi probably knew all these things, and he would have rather loved for Squaresoft to die in loud obscurity.
Even if that had happened — and even though it didn’t — I’ll tell you what that all makes Sakaguchi: it makes him a man. A trooper. He’s wanted little else than to stick to his guns. Even his majorly unsuccessful film debut, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”, while bland, was the work of a man: it wanted nothing more than to push an envelope, and whether you liked it or not (hint: I didn’t), even if the people’s faces were creepy and surreal, it’s just not kosher to diss Sakaguchi about it, when you consider that he was the first to attempt to make a feature-length computer-animated motion picture about realistic-looking human beings, and that no one’s tried such a feat since.
You have to wonder, though, playing Blue Dragon: would Sakaguchi have stayed a film director for life, had “The Spirits Within” been popular? It was well-made enough, and it was even critically acclaimed. Had it set the world on fire, would Sakaguchi still be a film director today? Blue Dragon leaves one with the distinct impression of “maybe”, and that either way, Sakaguchi truly possesses more of the love-like attention to detail necessary to craft a videogame world than any RPG producer outside of Yuji Horii. Sakaguchi said in an interview prior to Blue Dragon‘s release that he wanted to stick with what he knew, with the field and the format he spent years working in, that of the Japanese RPG. After leading the Final Fantasy series slowly down a flaming corridor from utter normalcy to complete nonsense, after spending more time reinventing himself than he ever spent being himself, Sakaguchi has finally settled down, given in, and admitted that there is something he can do better than he can do anything else. Back in the old days, it was a pissing contest, Hironobu Sakaguchi versus Yuji Horii, Final Fantasy versus Dragon Quest, Relentless Reinvention versus Astute Revision. A few hours of Blue Dragon is enough to sound the gong: the war is over, Yuji Horii kind of won, and Hironobu Sakaguchi wears his fatalism pretty well.
If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG before, or if you hate them, or especially if you despise them, you’re probably just going to sigh a lot at Blue Dragon. If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG, at least, you might be able to really get into the game. It’s as good a first RPG as any, and it’s a better one than most. Though if you hate the genre, be not fooled by the precious, amazing graphics. It’s the same old-school game, the same old-school story progressions, the same old-school focus on numbers that go up and hit points that go down. In design, it’s far more reined-in and focused than perhaps any Japanese RPG has ever been, though if you don’t like these games, you’re not going to like this one. If you’ve played dozens of these games and ever loved one of them while hating a couple other ones, chances are you’ll be able to play Blue Dragon, like it a fair deal, and shrug at the end and kind of feel like you’re qualified to judge it as superiorly well-made. Just don’t walk in expecting it to find your hecking car keys and/or change peanut butter into jelly.
There’s certainly a fine-wine quality about this game. Akira Toriyama’s character designs are subtle — the most amazing hairstyle is a pretty average shaggy ponytail — darker, and less fantastic than something he’d submit for Dragon Quest, though if you’ve ever appreciated his work, you’ll no doubt consider these designs sublime. Likewise, Nobuo Uematsu’s musical compositions, while lacking the chintzy flourishes and brassy motifs of his celebrated Final Fantasy VI soundtrack, are rounder and far more musician-like than anything he’s ever composed. Some tracks even approach a Kenji-Ito-like level of pop-song-esque fullness; when Ito makes such music, it tends to stand out so strongly that it distracts from the game, so that the graphics become a background for the music. Uematsu’s score is just subtle enough to fit in, and just catchy enough to make buyers of the soundtrack scratch their heads and wonder why it’s not a little more catchy. And Hironobu Sakaguchi’s scenario is a thing of beauty. After ripping through literally a dozen Tales of games over the years (such was my hunger for scenario-heavy entertainment-focused RPGs), it’s revealing how effortlessly Sakaguchi manages to make “Go to the castle to speak to the king” seem like something legendary heroes really do have to do every other day. Blue Dragon is Sakaguchi blowing steam out of his system; he plays the RPG cliches like a trumpet. Not minutes after we go to a castle to speak with a king, here’s an enemy army invading. Here’s the sky clouded purple. Here’s an opportunity for our heroes to help. The story starts as something of a fractured steampunk yarn, in which our young heroes fight several battles and eventually find themselves aboard a giant flying fortress.
We get to know the characters as they journey back home, and shortly after they discover their purpose — after about fifteen hours of action-packed wandering — the game does something of a snickering little 180. It’s as though, suddenly, the game is now in color, even though it hadn’t quite been in black and white before. It’s something of a low-key “Wizard of Oz”, then. Beyond all expectations, there’s a point where, suddenly, the gorgeous graphics become infinitely more gorgeous, where the lazy threads of the story suddenly and fiercely tie themselves tight together, and the game straightens up and begins, finally, to gain momentum. This is fascinating among modern RPGs, where the plot usually starts hot and heavy, and then gradually loses steam. In Blue Dragon, you’re plinking around dungeons until, at last, the game adopts something of a Chrono Trigger stance, and starts creating elaborate events and set-pieces. More than anything else — even the Active Time Battle system, yes, especially that — this is Sakaguchi’s contribution to the Japanese RPG: where Dragon Quest focused on tricky mazes filled with complex puzzles, Final Fantasy games, as of IV, shifted their focus to short, straightforward, corridor-like dungeons in which dynamic things were happening. A play-through of some of Blue Dragon‘s more complex, domino-like events will perhaps reveal why Sakaguchi is currently so in love with Gears of War: that’s precisely the kind of thing Sakaguchi has always been trying to make, only without the guns, or the action. Sakaguchi’s curb stomps be words.
Once Blue Dragon hits its crescendo, you probably won’t stop playing. Its final act — its third disc — manages to make you actually care about these big-headed kid-like characters (who are all supposed to be sixteen years old, which is kind of creepy, given how tiny their hands are) and what happens to them.
On the whole, it feels like Final Fantasy IV, plot full of gleeful twists and turns. At many points, you can almost imagine the scenario writer snickering as he writes the scene where the characters finally get on a boat and almost instantly get attacked by a sea monster. Every other battle or event in Blue Dragon is like an all-new episode of the only cartoon in the world that could cause you to wake up at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning after a full week of hating elementary school. If there’s anything negative I can say about it, it’s that the beginning part isn’t nearly as much fun as the middle part, though I only noticed that in hindsight: I had been, truthfully, hyperventilating in my excitement to play the game, so I hardly noticed. I had high-definition three-dimensional quasi-realistic super-deformed Akira Toriyama characters before me — the game could have been an interactive paper-doll-dressing simulation, and I would have played it for at least twenty hours.
As I warned earlier, if you hate the genre of Japanese RPG, you won’t like this game. Though if you sincerely like the genre, as far as RPGs go, this one’s pretty great. The battle system is mostly borrowed from Final Fantasy X — an excellent move, as that battle system could benefit from a second chance and some tweaking — though instead of three characters, you have five. Characters’ turns come up based on their agility statistic; you choose an action for them; they execute the action. The similarity to Final Fantasy X‘s battle system is more than skin-deep — it penetrates to the soul. FFX made a ballsy move by eliminating the Active Time Battle system, which is what had differentiated Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest in the first place. The designers of FFX knew that the Active Time Battle system was, effectively, bullstuff. It was a heavy handed and somewhat jack-offish way of making the player feel rushed during battles, though someone, somewhere, must have realized that making players hurry to make menu choices was kind of unnecessarily mean. FFX made the conscientious choice by making the battles truly time-based, tactical contests, rather than forcing players to press buttons and squeal like speds.
The battle system is as stoic as it is frantic. You can see characters’ and enemies’ turns displayed at the top of the screen; highlight an enemy with your attack cursor, and his position in the timeline, also, will be displayed. Use this knowledge to plan your tactics, et cetera. Only FFX kind of flunked out early, by having somewhat tacky disparities: you can only have three party members at a time, and at the start of the game, you basically have one character who can use white magic (for healing), one character who can use black magic (for killing enemies that can only be killed by black magic), one character with an aerial attack (for killing flying enemies), and one character with an armor-piercing attack (for killing armored enemies). This made the battle system kind of cheap: “Oh, there’s a flying enemy — gotta switch in my flying-enemy-killing dude now!” The effect was kind of like walking into an empty room thirty hours into a Zelda game and being asked to light a torch in order to open the door, which you’ve been doing for thirty hecking hours now, even though you’d only ever been playing the game for maybe fifteen minutes.
FFX eventually let you customize your characters, and make them all equal — maybe make them all able to kill flying, piercing, or magical enemies. Blue Dragon, slightly similarly, starts with all of your characters in a gray area. Like in Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy V, you’re constantly changing the focus of your characters, and hard work (of the level-grinding variety) is rewarded by winning your characters extra, class-specific abilities that can be equipped to any other job class. As you level up your “Black” class, for example, you’ll earn “Black Magic Level 1” or “Level 2” or “Level 3”, allowing you to use different levels of black magic even if you’ve switched back to the “White” class. In this way, you’re mixing and matching your abilities to make “custom” characters — though this isn’t always what makes the battle system interesting. That would be the charge attacks; in any other game using a pseudo-real-time battle system, like Final Fantasy Tactics, magic spells and special attacks carry a basic casting time. Choose to cast a fire spell, and then wait patiently until it’s casted. In Blue Dragon, you can cast any spell or special attack right away — or you can cast it later. It’s all your choice: just after you’ve selected a spell and a target, a charge meter is displayed; the charge meter is marked at the appropriate places with icons representing your fellow party members and the enemy party. Hold down the attack button to charge your attack. Let go when you think you’ve held it down for long enough. At first, it seems like an innocent little tedium-breaker, though it ends up being executed rather brilliantly. Not a third of the way into the game, enemies start showing up who can kill your party members in one violent hit, 100% of the time. You’ll need to hit them before they hit you, while also hitting them hard. A lesser game, like Grandia III, would concentrate your party’s tactics on slowing the enemies down, or canceling their actions. Blue Dragon, on the other hand, forces you to think hard about your own actions. Say you’re fighting an enemy you know to be somewhat vulnerable to paralysis spells. You want to cast a paralysis spell on him, so as to render him immobile for your boys to beat on him for a couple of rounds, and you want to charge the spell up as much as possible — charging increases effectiveness — though you also want the spell to execute before the enemy’s next turn. So you need to think about it for a bit, and you might end up making a compromise that costs one character his (revivable) life. A similar “fine-wine” delicacy creeps into dozens upon dozens of battles throughout the game, and again, if you love these games, it’s a real treat.
There’s a freewheeling, casino-like nature to battling, so that when you win, whatever you get feels like a pay-out. The ability to battle multiple enemy parties at once at first feels kind of a throwaway feature, though it ends up miraculously making grinding more than entertaining for anyone who’s ever played, say, a “Mysterious Dungeon” game. Press the right trigger on the field map to see a list of all the enemies within battling range — choose to fight all of them, and you’ll fight each party, one after another, in sequence. Between enemy parties, a slot machine will pop up on screen, and award you with a bonus: increased strength, speed, et cetera. Interestingly, the only negative effect on the slots is “remove all bonuses”. The game understands, as all Dragon Quest games do, that the game doesn’t lose when players win. It’s already an oath of bravery to take on six enemy parties at once, so the game cuts you a little slack and applauds appropriately when you win.
After more than twenty hours of playing this game, a question popped into my head, and I had to consult the instruction manual. I can’t remember this happening with any other game in the last ten years. My question was about the little red blip on the magic / special attack charge meter. Did I get a bonus if I stopped the bar on that red blip? Or did it do less damage? I honestly couldn’t tell. The instruction manual told me that stopping the bar on the red blip (sometimes very difficult) resulted in the spell doing maximum damage and costing only half as much MP as usual. I felt a little dumb for having not noticed that, though I quickly justified my dumbness by remembering that I’d been avoiding the red blip most of the time because it seldom puts me in a good strategic position. Sometimes the red blip appears at the beginning of the charge bar, sometimes at the end. The battle system kind of starts to philosophically unravel when you realize that a red blip at the beginning is subtly stressing how important it is to attack as quickly as possible and as hard as possible. It’s a slick little quirk, almost worthy of a Romancing SaGa game, though it’s far more philanthropic. Either way, it’s applaudable that the game doesn’t spell this out for you — nor, really, does it spell out anything for you. It expects you to figure things out for yourself, or to read the manual.
That day, I spent an extra twenty minutes or so re-reading the manual. There’s a two-page section at the end, called “Jiro’s tips”, where Jiro, the boy-genius of your party, offers dozens of tips, such as “If the monsters are too strong, try leveling up!” or “You should probably save your game whenever you see a save point!” In the lower-right corner of the second page of the tips section is Maro, the semi-unintelligent, loudmouthed character. He says: “Hey, let me give some tips, too!” and then gives the reader precisely two tips: “Accessories and armor boost your stats” and “Raise your agility statistic to attack more quickly!” Why it has to be Maro giving these two tips, I have no idea. Though I guess that’s the long and short of it, for you. Why bother releasing a Japanese-style RPG, when the genre has been astray so long, and innovated so infrequently, misunderstood by its detractors whenever it does wrong, misunderstood by its fans whenever it tries to reach out? Why step into this minefield, and make another breezy, entertaining game that’s happy not really changing anything? Why, because accessories and armor boost your stats, of course.
★★★☆
“A BOTTOMLESS BOWL OF CAP'N CRUNCH ON A FIFTY-HOUR SATURDAY MORNING.”
Quite accidentally — that’s how obsessive-compulsize behavior gets started. Case in point: I was eight years old when I first played Dragon Quest, and the game boggled my overweight mind from so many directions — here I’d spent most of my sentient life making Super Mario run and jump, and here was a game that required me to open a menu and click a command to open a door. I needed to sit and review the instruction manual, which I did upon waking early one Saturday morning. I poured a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and read over the instruction manual at my family’s dinner table.
Ever since then, I can’t play a new RPG without reading the instruction manual over a bowl of cold cereal. They used to be big and fascinating. They used to have cryptic, six-to-twelve-page-long story descriptions and tons of character art; Final Fantasy VI for the Super Famicom easily had the best RPG instruction manual of all-time. Most RPGs these days don’t break much new ground in their instruction manuals; part of me wants to groan at every Square-Enix manual, where they will spell everything out in extended notation: “Use the directional buttons up or down to move the cursor up or down; when the cursor has highlighted the ‘Fight’ command, press the O button to confirm.” Namco’s Tales of manuals, on the other hand, are fresh, clean, and honest, three words you’re seldom to hear used about anything made by Namco: they all start with a big chart, in which the directional buttons’ use is described as “On the field: move character” “In menus: move cursor” and the O button is described as “In menus: confirm” “On the field: speak / investigate”. Square-Enix’s games’ manuals earn their lengths by describing the menu selection confirming process every time they explain the function of a different menu selection. Tales of games earn their length and weight when they drift into extended segments about the unique in-game magic systems.
RPG instruction manuals nowadays are rendered unnecessary by droning, in-game tutorials that make sure no newbie is left behind. The manuals continue to exist, it seems, to satisfy the obsessive, now-archetypal desire that sleeps deep within the RPG-playing hordes: the package must be heavy. It must be heavy, and it must be shiny. People like me didn’t use a razor blade to open our Super Nintendo games for nothing: we wanted as much plastic clinging to the package, forever, as possible. This was part of the reason why we balked at Final Fantasy VII‘s being on the PlayStation: because the Nintendo 64 was going to have proper boxes for its games, boxes with plastic wrap, and plenty of room for superfluous maps and posters and posters of maps. Promises of three discs — three ridiculous discs — swayed us, and we stayed when we saw the big instruction manual; years later, with Final Fantasy X, it became dreadfully apparent that DVD cases, made of soft plastic, are lighter than CD jewel cases, and DVDs hold more information, making multi-disc games obsolete; and thus the Heavy-box RPG of yore has faded into the past. People tried to bring it back, by stuffing trinkets and/or soundtrack CDs into the cases, though those people happened to mostly be idiots or, worse, Working Designs.
The Heavy-box RPG has returned to spectacular form, however, with Hironobu Sakaguchi, Mistwalker, and Artoon’s Blue Dragon, which sports a forty-seven-page (not too huge, not too short) glossy instruction manual and a foil-stamped mirror-shiny label (reversible!) over a DVD case that weighs about as much as a loaded laser pistol will weigh in the year 2148. Taped to the outside of the case, when I bought the game back in December of 2006, was a fat, pristine plastic package of stickers to put on anything I wanted, as long as anything I wanted was an Xbox 360 or related peripheral. Breathing through my mouth, I tore open the package, and screamed like a clown on fire when I saw what lay inside: an Xbox-green plastic hinging apparatus, containing one disc on each side, and then a third disc sitting on a spindle inside the back of the case. Three discs! Why hadn’t I, in all my obsessive, news-combing, information-gathering frenzy, known that this game was three discs? Why hadn’t Microsoft advertised such a fact? I suppose game companies aren’t proud of three discs, or of heavy boxes, anymore. It’s something to reflect on that a country like Japan is able to produce values of this caliber, when they’ve gone out of their way to reject value in all other forms; a six-pack of beer, here, is precisely the price of six cans of beer, plus ten extra yen for the package.
Hironobu Sakaguchi saw a grand vision; it told him to get together the most talented artists, programmers, game designers, writers, and musicians, and throw them at several videogames until he had successfully defeated his former home of Square-Enix. In minds as idealistic and pure-hearted as Sakaguchi’s, there’s no way this plan could fail: if you’re able to think on his wavelength there’s no way his RPG Lost Odyssey, featuring the art of Takehiko Inoue and a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu — both immense talents from outside the videogame industry — will not be awesome. However, this corner of the industry is currently in a stinking state of inbreeding; the first young man in line to purchase Final Fantasy XII, when allowed to ask a question of Square-Enix president Yoichi Wada before a television audience, meekly spoke “Please remake Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3 thank you” and shuffled away. The people like Tetsuya Nomura; they don’t care that he got started as a one-bit pixel-chopper in the Super Famicom days, or that his art style has slowly fluctuated from idiocy to madness. As far as the hardest-cored RPG fans are concerned, Nomura is one of them. Never mind that the first RPGs in the legacy of Japanese RPGs were made by bold, daring people on risk-taking budgets, pouring more money into the pockets of an artist who ended up only ever drawing a couple of shots for the instruction manual than they would pay the programmers. Yuji Horii scored white-hot manga artist Akira Toriyama for Dragon Quest back in 1986, and the move helped the game sell millions. Sakaguchi, meanwhile, in building his counter-Dragon Quest, sought out semi-fine artist Yostuffaka Amano to lend a lofty air to Final Fantasy.
Since those two series exploded all over the world, kids with access to pens and pencils have sought to be as awesome as their idols, and this has resulted in many a Japanese elementary schoolchild telling his teacher he longed to design characters for RPGs when he grew up. What kids are doing, with their cute little dreams, is cutting out the middleman — which, in this case, happens to be “Earn recognition outside the field of videogames before being asked to collaborate on a videogame” — and the videogame industry has never stopped to slap them and tell them to eat their vegetables. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not! I’m certainly not one to judge people provably more successful than me (I’ve never designed characters for a major videogame, et cetera), though certainly, the quality is growing me-too-ish and even dull. Namco’s Tales of games are an ironically good example of uneven distribution of talent. They’ll get a hot rock band like Bump of Chicken to do the theme song, and then let said theme song play out over an animated scene of ferocious vapidity: the camera pans slowly toward each character as they stand perfectly still, and then, just as the camera stops, the character makes some crudely vague gesture with their weapon or magical pet. Sakaguchi must have seen this tsunami coming from miles away. He apparently wanted no part of Final Fantasy VII because he thought the technology wasn’t up to the vision yet. He wanted to keep making games on Nintendo systems, with sprite graphics, while the other half of his team worked squeaked out FMV-laden adventures. When Square subsequently got huge, he probably entertained the idea of sacking Nomura and using the Huge Revenues to hire an awesome artist, like Kentarou Miura, artist of the manga Berserk, which had inspired both the story and the character designs for Final Fantasy VII. He knew from the start that he wouldn’t be able to do this, though; the managers around him were growing increasingly hard-headed, and success would only make their heads harder, and their souls paranoid as hell. Sakaguchi knew that with great power came great potential to piss off one’s fans, and he knew that RPG fans were, more than anything else, fans of the package: if someone likes Final Fantasy VII, then they are fans of Nobuo Uematsu’s music, and of Tetsuya Nomura’s characters. The managers would have considered swapping in a new artist to be like admitting that the previous one hadn’t quite been exactly all that he could have been. It would have been like confessing to a lapse in judgment. It would have been flipping off the fans. To exist in the world, for an artist, is to have fans. Sakaguchi probably knew all these things, and he would have rather loved for Squaresoft to die in loud obscurity.
Even if that had happened — and even though it didn’t — I’ll tell you what that all makes Sakaguchi: it makes him a man. A trooper. He’s wanted little else than to stick to his guns. Even his majorly unsuccessful film debut, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”, while bland, was the work of a man: it wanted nothing more than to push an envelope, and whether you liked it or not (hint: I didn’t), even if the people’s faces were creepy and surreal, it’s just not kosher to diss Sakaguchi about it, when you consider that he was the first to attempt to make a feature-length computer-animated motion picture about realistic-looking human beings, and that no one’s tried such a feat since.
You have to wonder, though, playing Blue Dragon: would Sakaguchi have stayed a film director for life, had “The Spirits Within” been popular? It was well-made enough, and it was even critically acclaimed. Had it set the world on fire, would Sakaguchi still be a film director today? Blue Dragon leaves one with the distinct impression of “maybe”, and that either way, Sakaguchi truly possesses more of the love-like attention to detail necessary to craft a videogame world than any RPG producer outside of Yuji Horii. Sakaguchi said in an interview prior to Blue Dragon‘s release that he wanted to stick with what he knew, with the field and the format he spent years working in, that of the Japanese RPG. After leading the Final Fantasy series slowly down a flaming corridor from utter normalcy to complete nonsense, after spending more time reinventing himself than he ever spent being himself, Sakaguchi has finally settled down, given in, and admitted that there is something he can do better than he can do anything else. Back in the old days, it was a pissing contest, Hironobu Sakaguchi versus Yuji Horii, Final Fantasy versus Dragon Quest, Relentless Reinvention versus Astute Revision. A few hours of Blue Dragon is enough to sound the gong: the war is over, Yuji Horii kind of won, and Hironobu Sakaguchi wears his fatalism pretty well.
If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG before, or if you hate them, or especially if you despise them, you’re probably just going to sigh a lot at Blue Dragon. If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG, at least, you might be able to really get into the game. It’s as good a first RPG as any, and it’s a better one than most. Though if you hate the genre, be not fooled by the precious, amazing graphics. It’s the same old-school game, the same old-school story progressions, the same old-school focus on numbers that go up and hit points that go down. In design, it’s far more reined-in and focused than perhaps any Japanese RPG has ever been, though if you don’t like these games, you’re not going to like this one. If you’ve played dozens of these games and ever loved one of them while hating a couple other ones, chances are you’ll be able to play Blue Dragon, like it a fair deal, and shrug at the end and kind of feel like you’re qualified to judge it as superiorly well-made. Just don’t walk in expecting it to find your hecking car keys and/or change peanut butter into jelly.
There’s certainly a fine-wine quality about this game. Akira Toriyama’s character designs are subtle — the most amazing hairstyle is a pretty average shaggy ponytail — darker, and less fantastic than something he’d submit for Dragon Quest, though if you’ve ever appreciated his work, you’ll no doubt consider these designs sublime. Likewise, Nobuo Uematsu’s musical compositions, while lacking the chintzy flourishes and brassy motifs of his celebrated Final Fantasy VI soundtrack, are rounder and far more musician-like than anything he’s ever composed. Some tracks even approach a Kenji-Ito-like level of pop-song-esque fullness; when Ito makes such music, it tends to stand out so strongly that it distracts from the game, so that the graphics become a background for the music. Uematsu’s score is just subtle enough to fit in, and just catchy enough to make buyers of the soundtrack scratch their heads and wonder why it’s not a little more catchy. And Hironobu Sakaguchi’s scenario is a thing of beauty. After ripping through literally a dozen Tales of games over the years (such was my hunger for scenario-heavy entertainment-focused RPGs), it’s revealing how effortlessly Sakaguchi manages to make “Go to the castle to speak to the king” seem like something legendary heroes really do have to do every other day. Blue Dragon is Sakaguchi blowing steam out of his system; he plays the RPG cliches like a trumpet. Not minutes after we go to a castle to speak with a king, here’s an enemy army invading. Here’s the sky clouded purple. Here’s an opportunity for our heroes to help. The story starts as something of a fractured steampunk yarn, in which our young heroes fight several battles and eventually find themselves aboard a giant flying fortress.
We get to know the characters as they journey back home, and shortly after they discover their purpose — after about fifteen hours of action-packed wandering — the game does something of a snickering little 180. It’s as though, suddenly, the game is now in color, even though it hadn’t quite been in black and white before. It’s something of a low-key “Wizard of Oz”, then. Beyond all expectations, there’s a point where, suddenly, the gorgeous graphics become infinitely more gorgeous, where the lazy threads of the story suddenly and fiercely tie themselves tight together, and the game straightens up and begins, finally, to gain momentum. This is fascinating among modern RPGs, where the plot usually starts hot and heavy, and then gradually loses steam. In Blue Dragon, you’re plinking around dungeons until, at last, the game adopts something of a Chrono Trigger stance, and starts creating elaborate events and set-pieces. More than anything else — even the Active Time Battle system, yes, especially that — this is Sakaguchi’s contribution to the Japanese RPG: where Dragon Quest focused on tricky mazes filled with complex puzzles, Final Fantasy games, as of IV, shifted their focus to short, straightforward, corridor-like dungeons in which dynamic things were happening. A play-through of some of Blue Dragon‘s more complex, domino-like events will perhaps reveal why Sakaguchi is currently so in love with Gears of War: that’s precisely the kind of thing Sakaguchi has always been trying to make, only without the guns, or the action. Sakaguchi’s curb stomps be words.
Once Blue Dragon hits its crescendo, you probably won’t stop playing. Its final act — its third disc — manages to make you actually care about these big-headed kid-like characters (who are all supposed to be sixteen years old, which is kind of creepy, given how tiny their hands are) and what happens to them.
On the whole, it feels like Final Fantasy IV, plot full of gleeful twists and turns. At many points, you can almost imagine the scenario writer snickering as he writes the scene where the characters finally get on a boat and almost instantly get attacked by a sea monster. Every other battle or event in Blue Dragon is like an all-new episode of the only cartoon in the world that could cause you to wake up at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning after a full week of hating elementary school. If there’s anything negative I can say about it, it’s that the beginning part isn’t nearly as much fun as the middle part, though I only noticed that in hindsight: I had been, truthfully, hyperventilating in my excitement to play the game, so I hardly noticed. I had high-definition three-dimensional quasi-realistic super-deformed Akira Toriyama characters before me — the game could have been an interactive paper-doll-dressing simulation, and I would have played it for at least twenty hours.
As I warned earlier, if you hate the genre of Japanese RPG, you won’t like this game. Though if you sincerely like the genre, as far as RPGs go, this one’s pretty great. The battle system is mostly borrowed from Final Fantasy X — an excellent move, as that battle system could benefit from a second chance and some tweaking — though instead of three characters, you have five. Characters’ turns come up based on their agility statistic; you choose an action for them; they execute the action. The similarity to Final Fantasy X‘s battle system is more than skin-deep — it penetrates to the soul. FFX made a ballsy move by eliminating the Active Time Battle system, which is what had differentiated Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest in the first place. The designers of FFX knew that the Active Time Battle system was, effectively, bullstuff. It was a heavy handed and somewhat jack-offish way of making the player feel rushed during battles, though someone, somewhere, must have realized that making players hurry to make menu choices was kind of unnecessarily mean. FFX made the conscientious choice by making the battles truly time-based, tactical contests, rather than forcing players to press buttons and squeal like speds.
The battle system is as stoic as it is frantic. You can see characters’ and enemies’ turns displayed at the top of the screen; highlight an enemy with your attack cursor, and his position in the timeline, also, will be displayed. Use this knowledge to plan your tactics, et cetera. Only FFX kind of flunked out early, by having somewhat tacky disparities: you can only have three party members at a time, and at the start of the game, you basically have one character who can use white magic (for healing), one character who can use black magic (for killing enemies that can only be killed by black magic), one character with an aerial attack (for killing flying enemies), and one character with an armor-piercing attack (for killing armored enemies). This made the battle system kind of cheap: “Oh, there’s a flying enemy — gotta switch in my flying-enemy-killing dude now!” The effect was kind of like walking into an empty room thirty hours into a Zelda game and being asked to light a torch in order to open the door, which you’ve been doing for thirty hecking hours now, even though you’d only ever been playing the game for maybe fifteen minutes.
FFX eventually let you customize your characters, and make them all equal — maybe make them all able to kill flying, piercing, or magical enemies. Blue Dragon, slightly similarly, starts with all of your characters in a gray area. Like in Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy V, you’re constantly changing the focus of your characters, and hard work (of the level-grinding variety) is rewarded by winning your characters extra, class-specific abilities that can be equipped to any other job class. As you level up your “Black” class, for example, you’ll earn “Black Magic Level 1” or “Level 2” or “Level 3”, allowing you to use different levels of black magic even if you’ve switched back to the “White” class. In this way, you’re mixing and matching your abilities to make “custom” characters — though this isn’t always what makes the battle system interesting. That would be the charge attacks; in any other game using a pseudo-real-time battle system, like Final Fantasy Tactics, magic spells and special attacks carry a basic casting time. Choose to cast a fire spell, and then wait patiently until it’s casted. In Blue Dragon, you can cast any spell or special attack right away — or you can cast it later. It’s all your choice: just after you’ve selected a spell and a target, a charge meter is displayed; the charge meter is marked at the appropriate places with icons representing your fellow party members and the enemy party. Hold down the attack button to charge your attack. Let go when you think you’ve held it down for long enough. At first, it seems like an innocent little tedium-breaker, though it ends up being executed rather brilliantly. Not a third of the way into the game, enemies start showing up who can kill your party members in one violent hit, 100% of the time. You’ll need to hit them before they hit you, while also hitting them hard. A lesser game, like Grandia III, would concentrate your party’s tactics on slowing the enemies down, or canceling their actions. Blue Dragon, on the other hand, forces you to think hard about your own actions. Say you’re fighting an enemy you know to be somewhat vulnerable to paralysis spells. You want to cast a paralysis spell on him, so as to render him immobile for your boys to beat on him for a couple of rounds, and you want to charge the spell up as much as possible — charging increases effectiveness — though you also want the spell to execute before the enemy’s next turn. So you need to think about it for a bit, and you might end up making a compromise that costs one character his (revivable) life. A similar “fine-wine” delicacy creeps into dozens upon dozens of battles throughout the game, and again, if you love these games, it’s a real treat.
There’s a freewheeling, casino-like nature to battling, so that when you win, whatever you get feels like a pay-out. The ability to battle multiple enemy parties at once at first feels kind of a throwaway feature, though it ends up miraculously making grinding more than entertaining for anyone who’s ever played, say, a “Mysterious Dungeon” game. Press the right trigger on the field map to see a list of all the enemies within battling range — choose to fight all of them, and you’ll fight each party, one after another, in sequence. Between enemy parties, a slot machine will pop up on screen, and award you with a bonus: increased strength, speed, et cetera. Interestingly, the only negative effect on the slots is “remove all bonuses”. The game understands, as all Dragon Quest games do, that the game doesn’t lose when players win. It’s already an oath of bravery to take on six enemy parties at once, so the game cuts you a little slack and applauds appropriately when you win.
After more than twenty hours of playing this game, a question popped into my head, and I had to consult the instruction manual. I can’t remember this happening with any other game in the last ten years. My question was about the little red blip on the magic / special attack charge meter. Did I get a bonus if I stopped the bar on that red blip? Or did it do less damage? I honestly couldn’t tell. The instruction manual told me that stopping the bar on the red blip (sometimes very difficult) resulted in the spell doing maximum damage and costing only half as much MP as usual. I felt a little dumb for having not noticed that, though I quickly justified my dumbness by remembering that I’d been avoiding the red blip most of the time because it seldom puts me in a good strategic position. Sometimes the red blip appears at the beginning of the charge bar, sometimes at the end. The battle system kind of starts to philosophically unravel when you realize that a red blip at the beginning is subtly stressing how important it is to attack as quickly as possible and as hard as possible. It’s a slick little quirk, almost worthy of a Romancing SaGa game, though it’s far more philanthropic. Either way, it’s applaudable that the game doesn’t spell this out for you — nor, really, does it spell out anything for you. It expects you to figure things out for yourself, or to read the manual.
That day, I spent an extra twenty minutes or so re-reading the manual. There’s a two-page section at the end, called “Jiro’s tips”, where Jiro, the boy-genius of your party, offers dozens of tips, such as “If the monsters are too strong, try leveling up!” or “You should probably save your game whenever you see a save point!” In the lower-right corner of the second page of the tips section is Maro, the semi-unintelligent, loudmouthed character. He says: “Hey, let me give some tips, too!” and then gives the reader precisely two tips: “Accessories and armor boost your stats” and “Raise your agility statistic to attack more quickly!” Why it has to be Maro giving these two tips, I have no idea. Though I guess that’s the long and short of it, for you. Why bother releasing a Japanese-style RPG, when the genre has been astray so long, and innovated so infrequently, misunderstood by its detractors whenever it does wrong, misunderstood by its fans whenever it tries to reach out? Why step into this minefield, and make another breezy, entertaining game that’s happy not really changing anything? Why, because accessories and armor boost your stats, of course.