text by Brendan Lee

★⋆☆☆

"BORING."

Most people are in complete agreement that shooters are second only to Those Rhythm Games in terms of sheer Pavlovian click-here-for-joy vacuity. If you’re the type of diehard that gets off on solitary pattern memorization – – and you’re, you know, not prone to epilepsy – – they’re pretty much the ultimate that this life has to offer you.



At least until they begin selling pre-chewed Pop Tarts.

It’s a format that’s rapidly wilting, shooters. People have, by and large, figured out the punchline; only the occasional efforts by a rambunctious, tow-headed doujin community and a handful of rickety old-skoolers have been able to slap enough maids and squirrel-voiced seiyuu into shooters to satisfy their few remaining devotees. Sadly, gamers don’t know how to move on, as a rule. They collectively realize that if you stare at a corpse long and hard enough, eventually some small movement will arise – – that it’s just the worms come to gnaw at the gristle is the sort of observation that only the pickiest of spoilsports would bother coughing into their hands.

The same innate sense of lonely isolation that has preserved the hardcore shooter fanbase is the enemy, in this age of multiplayer . . . and Senko no Ronde (flatly retitled WarTech for the Xbox 360) has the right idea. It is, in fact, a valiant effort to create a cooperative arcade culture from a fundamentally solitary gaming format. In this case, it means a mash-up: a dash of classic shooter dynamics, a jigger of close-quarters punch-up, and a large dollop swiped directly from Virtual On. The mix at least looks utterly compelling – – even if you don’t entirely buy into its Xenosaga-cum-Zegapain PastelBot regime. Any bit of the game you happen to see in motion has you sitting and playing for at least one round . . . it is its own attract mode, and it clearly knows it.

And then you play. And . . . well, it’s just kind of syrup-slow and boring, most of the time. Honestly, if they were expecting to build the same kind of army of nicotine-thumbed fighting fans that has allowed ARC to keep swapping out Guilty Gear color palettes, they should have actually given them something to keep their reflexes from going numb. The Rounders (PastelBots) move like capsule toys through delicious honey, and the Boss Mode combat has one of the worst my-turn-your-turn dynamics since Killer Instinct. The controls are intuitive enough for those with a little patience, but the way the game transitions from one battle mode to another is jarring and annoying enough to create the illusion that they aren’t. When you’re transitioning from the standard space battlefield to close-quarters combat, the camera zooms in to SHOW YOU ALL THE ACTION, and you’re immediately disoriented. When one of the PastelBots (Rounders) switches to Boss Mode, you get a little flashcard of slapdash anime clip-art and a chirpy voice to accompany the entire screen changing on you. If you’ve grown to accept random battles in RPGs and selecting FIGHT from text boxes, you’ll probably be able to shift gears along with Senko no Ronde as it shows you how many games it can try to be, but . . . I dunno, I been working on this thing where I’m less spastic lately.

And another thing: that Boss Mode. It’s . . . well, it’s damn creaky. Once the screen’s done its Big Woosh changing thing and your eyes have uncrossed, you (or your opponent) get the opportunity to be really Big and shoot a million jillion Glow Orbs all around – – just like the bosses in all those beloved shooters. It’s pointless and unnerving, especially with the Rounders inability to dodge with any speed or sensitivity . . . and it’s kind of a psychological kick in the balls for anyone who ever spent their time memorizing bullet patterns on more classically-conceptualized shooting titles. The game kind of realizes this, so don’t expect to spend much time Bossing it around – – it’s just a little Nostalgia Snack, and over before it begins. What a waste: it’s development time that could have been spent on making the normal combat more interesting and responsive.

These kinds of format mash-ups can work, on occasion . . . if you look at something like, say, Data East’s The Great Ragtimeshow, you’ll find a game that successfully blended Metal Slug‘s sense of humor and vehicular variety, the air combat of classic shooters, and an amazing feel for the era’s best platforming into a game that’s a visual feast and an utter joy (and hey, this was 1992). It takes a great deal of vision to make this kind of thing work, though, and it’s painfully obvious when a developer is just trying to ham-fist another format on top of another to help prop up weak gameplay.

Senko no Ronde, for all of the hype and keyfroth, is an also-ran: too wrapped up in making its Game Salad to remember that we’d ordered a hamburger. There may be something out there to defibrillate the paunchy mess of moe-shooters and frame-count twitch-fighters that are littering Japan’s arcades (and increasingly your Xbox 360), but this certainly ain’t it.

text by Ario Barzan

★★★★

“KICKING ASS AND WRITING SYMPHONIES AT THE SAME TIME.”

Ask me about RPG's, and I'll admit to once having a thing for them: an affinity that drove me to emulate Tales of Phantasia on a stuttering computer and max out the timer on Final Fantasy VII. Ask me to tell you what the thing was, and I can't, exactly. I'd like to think the unmentionable was a phase, that the games were an outlet for nervous ticks at an unstable period. Now, the phrase "random battle" will get a rolling of eyes, a sigh, maybe a bar of soap in your mouth.



Final Fantasy XII has recently been called a Beacon of Nobility. I’m sorry, though: it was only a step forward on the long staircase RPG's need to climb to escape from their stone-age. See, back in 1995, Secret of Evermore was doing what should be done now. It was, presumably, Square USA's answer to Secret of Mana, and it got damn near everything right.

Select a new file, and you'll find those first moments slightly…off. The setting: dingy Podunk – a nameless name. Trash rolls about on the street, a couple youths play marbles, and a boy and dog emerge out of a theater showing “The Lost Adventures of Vexx.” It’s humble, and clunky. In no time at all, a cat grabs the canine’s attention, and he sprints away in the pursuit of happiness. As the boy follows, the chase leads to an old mansion, setting in motion Very Unusual Things. Once inside, bumbling curiosity activates a mechanism – a transporter that shifts the kid and his pet over to another dimension. This dimension is Evermore, a combination of personal Utopias. Utopias of whom? Why, the scientific minds behind the project.

Charming as this concept is, if you go invest in RPG’s for their plots, you are not going to be thrilled with Evermore. If, on the other hand, you are like me, and realize that most “fabulous” video game plots are poor summer movies, and prefer to revel in what the medium is better at doing now, then you’re in luck. The plot is there to dictate advancements in setting, but it is by no means a backbone. Sparse and never-too-serious events take the boy to different locales, each representing historical periods. Prehistoria segues into Antiqua, then Gothica, and, finally, Omnitopia.

Let’s throw the trash-bag out. In what seems to be a common cold of video games, Evermore’s conclusive chunk is weak: an obtuse splurge of glass tubes and pristine interiors. The rest is picked at the peak of freshness, so what happened? Omnitopia is, however, small, and not a flow murderer. Also, the dialogue. But, no, at the same time, it’s not bad, really. Just funny, in the way that it would be funny to see a figure skateboarding in a Friedrich painting. The stuff’s saved by being brief and reasonably pleasant.

Onto the good. On the chance one has played Mana, they’re already acquainted with part of Evermore’s system. Everything is presented from a lightly lopsided bird’s-eye view. Press Y to bring up a ring menu (very slick), and hold A when the percentage display on the bottom, representing stamina, allows you to dash. The boy’s dog acts as a secondary character whose aggressiveness can be toggled on an A.I. scale.

As the boy progresses through trials or passive events, he is rewarded with, or given, weapons, be it a bazooka, sword, or…bone. Use that weapon enough, and it will deal more damage. After a certain point, you can hold down the attack button to charge your attack. Effects vary – if you’re wielding a spear, it launches across the screen for long-range damage.

Not to worry. Combat supports improving statistics’ hardiness. It is actualized, seamless – no swirling vortexes, chess board positioning, or victory animations here, folks. And, hell, it’s well done. What a blessing. Dragon Quest VIII was lovely, lovely enough to make R2 my MVP button, but that didn’t stop its NES mechanics from plunging the package into flames of torment. Here’s the thing. DQVIII, and the bulk of RPG’s, are the British army, and Secret of Evermore is the feisty American force that runs around, hides in trees, and doesn’t stand for the horsestuff of lining up and trading blows.

There’s a compact, brisk intelligence to fighting. Unravel your rival’s capabilities, and when the choice moment comes, line up and strike the bastard, resulting with the sound of hitting a table with one’s knuckles. This is not as easy as it sounds. Many enemies are faster, or, if they are slower, unexpectedly lunge out with territorial ferocity, making well-played victories against them an “A” on the proverbial paper. Bosses do not forsake their title. You’ll go from fighting a crab-like arachnid in the skull of a dead behemoth, to a gladiator in a Colosseum, to a freak-show-gone-loose (think Bigfoot, but ten times bigger…and only his head is visible) accompanied by possessed puppets on a stage.

Rather than spells being introduced by leveling up, they’re taught to you by a people. And in place of magic points are raw materials, which can be combined to specific effects. It’s guaranteed that you’ll miss out on the bulk of these spells the first time through, and even the second. Evermore is crawling with so many secret locations that it’s kind of mind-boggling. It’s also rich with said materials. Try nudging suspicious crannies: they will often yield something.

Most important of all is this: A lush wonder surrounds the journey. You need to give Evermore a little time. It doesn’t have an immediate sparkle. Where its inspiration is truly outdone is in the ripeness of emotion.

You can feel this in the visuals’ layers: sights give the impression of a mystery beyond what’s in front. This is a bit of a wonder, considering Western games’ ugly art history that continues to perpetuate itself (the best recent, popular example is Oblivion – an attractive, albeit generic, world with character models that look like the team modeled and mirror-imaged hecking middle-aged cosplayers). There’s the amazing, gravitational soundtrack by Jeremy Soule – his first project in the medium, and still his best. And it’s not only in the music – it’s in the lack of music. Evermore’s world is not afraid of quietness. There are forests, ecosystems, whose leaves rustle as animals chirp and hoot, and vast, windy expanses with grumbling pits.

Here is also why the game succeeds: structure. FFXII improved combat’s flow by removing a number of unnecessary abstractions, though hell if its containers for the combat weren’t blunt. By contrast, Evermore’s dungeons are curious, nuanced complexes testing not only your offensive skills, but your navigational and puzzle-solving abilities. In them, a hint of surreal Metroid design emerges, as well. Get inquisitive or lucky enough, and you might walk past a wall and through an unseeable maze to appear in a secluded chamber. Maybe there will be a person who can teach you a spell, or maybe a series of pots will await their opening.

Honest-to-God life was invested into towns and villages. Nobilia, Antiqua’s capital, is a flood of happenings – chickens being fed by children, an old man preaching apocalyptic messages, people in their trading booths waiting for customers (keep track of the bartering system for great deals!); there is no other Super Nintendo site that matches this level of inhabitance.

When I was a kid (I can hear the groans. Hush), one of my favorite things was to be outside for hours, lifting up rocks, logs, whatever, to see the life underneath. Evermore is those rocks, those logs. If you want to poke around, it lets you, and rewards you with impeccable atmosphere and sublime, little game-y elements. You’re thrown into the thick of things, and there’s a whole world out there, one that trusts the competence of the player behind the controller. Its craft holds up because it’s not bound by flimsy tech demos or self-absorption; it is universally, wonderfully made. Go out, get a copy, make a cup of tea, and settle down for a slice of joy.

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“AT TIMES ADMIRABLE AND CUTE AS SOME WEIRD ENGRISH SPOKEN BY A SHOP-KEEPER IN A BARELY-KNOWN 8-BIT GAME TRANSLATED BY A TEAM OF TWO JAPANESE GIRLS AND FOUR DICTIONARIES.”

There’s a track by Ryuichi Sakamoto in Seiken Densetsu 4 (aka Dawn of Mana) — the back of the box says so — life-long listener though I am, it took me Actual Internet Research to figure out which track that was. This says many things: first of all, that it’s not clear which of the many bouncy cut-scenes that opens the game is the “opening”, because I reckon if you’re going to get Ryuichi Sakamoto to do a track for your conceptually bland action-adventure videogame, you’d probably want to make it the opening. There’s a scene narrated by an old man with a semi-hateful, mouthful-of-gravel voice, there’s a scene where the elemental spirits from the earlier “Mana” games float and bob around and talk to each other in portentous tones and helium voices about the big events that are probably happening soon, and there’s a scene where a boy and a girl frolic in a field. There’s a scene with credits, too, and the credits are in English, and they say “Opening theme by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Music by Kenji Ito”. Does that mean that the music that’s playing at that scene is the “opening theme”? Well, some games list the performer / composer of the “ending theme” in the opening credits, don’t they? It’s puzzling, after a while.



The composer of the rest of the music in this game, a Mr. Kenji Ito, has been aspiring the Ryuichi Sakamoto’s virtuoso for years, along with other bright game composers, such as Yasunori Mitsuda. What my ears told me when I first played this game was somewhat profound: Kenji Ito is able to surround a single track by Ryuichi Sakamoto and render it invisible. For years, those in the know have understood that Kenji Ito knows what the hell he’s doing — he’s perhaps the top of the top class of Japanese game composers, able to give background music for a Generic Snow Village in, say, Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song the produced roundness and fullness of a hit pop number. He’s not just a “game music composer” — he’s a musician. Conversely, one could argue that Ryuichi Sakamoto has been making Japanese RPG soundtrack music since before videogames ever existed.

The most interesting thing about Sakamoto’s presence in this game at all is that it represents a rare, shining beam of artistic conscience from Square-Enix, who has recently been content to put Mickey Mouse in a black robe and have him murder monsters with a giant key. For Final Fantasy XII, Square had the kind of sneering arrogance to assume that they could make a star out of whoever they let sing the theme song, hence the selection of limp-voiced big-haired piano-banging she-geek Angela Aki. This was evidence that Square had pride in Final Fantasy XII as a game — either that, or they were over-budget, and wanted to hire someone who wasn’t expensive. For Kingdom Hearts, they’ve been hiring hot young pop-star Hikaru Utada, whose English lyrics make me wish I owned a pistol. Why put a world-class, historically important, undeniably “Japanese” super-man like Ryuichi Sakamoto to work on Seiken Densetsu 4? To draw attention to the game, of course. Seiken Densetsu — or, “The Mana Series” is as dead as it is alive; it’s the purgatory of Japanese RPGs. The second one — released in America as “Secret of Mana“, was awesome because you could play it with two friends. The third-one was paper-thin and beloved. The numerous recent spin-offs (including an obnoxiously thin DS outing) have taken the series apart and given players only a shard of what they might have been able to love in a previous installment.

None of the game itself is as illustrious as the career of Mr. Sakamoto, though the physics engine is quite nice. You play the game as a big-haired boy wearing too many garments. You can fight enemies with a sword, a whip, or a slingshot. There’s a weird net-like feeling of physics drifting down on top of the whole package — you can whap objects with your sword, and if you aim them right, they’ll smack into and kill enemies. There might be a stack of objects — hit it with your sword and watch it jiggle. It’ll never jiggle the same way twice. Grab a rock with the whip and throw it; watch stuff break. Hit something with a slingshot, and it moves. The physics are finely tuned, though in the most bizarre little way. It feels like everything’s totally random, even when it’s most obviously not. Most applause-worthy is the sheer number of physics objects. They’re seriously all over the place — Square had already licensed the Havok Physics Engine, so god damn it, they were going to use it as much as possible.

Part of me wants to sigh and/or groan at this game for being linear and kind of boring. There’s a cut-scene involving cartoon-headed characters that are supposed to evoke nostalgic yiffing, and though I loved Secret of Mana like any other man who was once a boy, I do not yiff; then there’s a title card, and then you’re in a dungeon. Progress through the dungeon, whomping physics objects, knocking over enemies, picking up millions of little colored baubles and being congratulated via quick onscreen messages whenever your maximum hit points or some other statistic raise by some small integer. Eventually you’ll reach a locked door; kill the right enemy to get the key, open the door, continue romping through the dungeon. The dungeon ends with another snore-tastic cut-scene in which characters yip and/or weep, and then there’s another dungeon, which you start with your levels reset to zero. It’s all very linear and kind of boring in the context of real-world joy (candlelit sex, et cetera), though at least it’s honest about itself: it’s a dungeon-blaster. It’s an action videogame. It’s colorful, quick, kinetic, bursty, and poppy. It’s not great, and it doesn’t solve the mystery of nuclear fusion or find my missing guitar pick or anything, though it’s still a nice, cute little game that sometimes has some neat little spikes of challenge.

Many fans were outraged or, at the least, disappointed to hear that this game would be just one-player, and that it would apparently just be a stage-based action-adventure thinking-man’s beat-em-down. Says a “customer preview” on Gamestop.com’s list page for Dawn of Mana: “I for one would rather they stick to the traditional 2D graphics for this one.” Another reader calls the series — up until this bastardizing installment, of course — “near-perfection”. This is kind of a shame. This is evidence that, more dangerous than narcotics or alcohol is our children’s tendency to not understand what they really want. I say, if you want 2D graphics, play the original Secret of Mana again. Or play Children of Mana for DS. With a couple of friends on Wi-Fi, it’s not so terrible, and it has some sparkling Kenji Ito music.

Dawn of Mana is something new, as weird as that is for Square (unless you liked and/or remember Threads of Fate), and it mostly works. It’s the physics engine that nails it in. Though it acts weird sometimes, it rarely stops being fascinating. It’s hard to believe that Square would put such a rock-solid, crunchy core into a game that they were convinced could have been nothing at all and still sold thousands of copies to “devoted series fans”. It’s nice to see the effort, though it’s weird that they give the physics objects a name: they call them “MONO” — in all English letters, like that. (“MONO” is Japanese for “object”.) This is really weird and jarring when the first couple help windows describe how to use the physics objects to your advantage. Why give them a name?

Maybe it was because, since the Final Fantasy titles all became multi-hojillion-sellers, the producers at Square have required all RPGs to have an in-game “system” with an arbitrary name — the “Active Time Battle System” or “Active Dimension Battle System”, for example. If that’s why they called the physics objects “MONO”, then that’s kind of a hilarious little dodge, admirable and cute as some weird Engrish spoken by a shop-keeper in a barely-known 8-bit game translated by a team of two Japanese girls and four dictionaries.

Going back to the Gamestop page — sorry, I have to do this — the first three of four bullet points describing this game are as follows:



“Experience the beloved world of Mana in a fully 3D environment for the first time.

Explore sweeping plains and mountains that stretch as far as the eye can see, brought vividly to life by the detailed visuals that fans have come to expect from the Mana series.

*Experience an interactive world that encourages players to “touch” the world of Mana.“

Aren’t these three all describing the same hecking thing? Why not, I don’t know, encourage the kids who learned to read from online videogame retailers to hunt down (read: bittorrent) some culture by listing that the game “Features a theme song by virtuoso composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the father of new age and electronic music!” or even try to make the game sound fun, by saying that it “Features a new, detailed physics engine for countless battle possibilities”? Or is that what they’re talking about with a weird line about “‘Touch’ the World of Mana”?

So what we have here, ultimately, is a poppy, cute game with terrific music that can be listened to on its own without shame (if you, like me, are the type of person to ever have those Ryuichi Sakamoto Mood days), a drippingly schlocky story about people with too much hair who manage to wear entire wardrobes, set in a series that Square expects people to love because earlier entries in the series were pretty fun for gamers who managed to actually have friends when Nirvana was still the coolest band in the world. Square expected this game to sell by name alone, which was slightly weird behavior, seeing as the previous “World of Mana” game, Children of Mana for DS, didn’t sell at all. A funny story is that Square apparently under-shipped Final Fantasy III for DS because Children of Mana had sold less than half a million copies, proving to them that the DS was just a fad for the “non-gamers”. And then Final Fantasy III sold through half a million. This should have proved to Square that a game will sell if it is good enough to get people talking, though instead, it seems to have proved that games will sell if they have numbers in their titles. As a result, Seiken Densetsu 4 is now available at most Japanese game specialty shops for around $20 new. Which is to say, if the number in the title is what interests you in Seiken Densetsu 4: Dawn of Mana, you’ll probably enjoy it less than people who are just looking to have a good time with pseudo-real object physics.

text by Thom Moyles

☆☆☆☆

“IS THE MOST WORTHWHILE PIECE OF SOFTWARE THAT YOU COULD PUT IN YOUR DS.”

Electroplankton is definitely my favorite piece of software for the DS, probably one of the best portable pieces of software I own and one of the most pleasing pieces of electronic entertainment that I’ve devoted my time towards. It’s a ballsy experiment that wants to be loved, a joyful piece of work that’s happy without making you want to throw up in your mouth (Mario (since the N64), I’m looking at you). Yet, I’m giving it zero stars (out of four). I’m doing this because Electroplankton isn’t a game. And heck, this is a site for game reviews.

Now, this is a little unfair. After all, I’m not going to follow this up with successive zero-star reviews of kanji dicitionaries or any of the other assorted titles for the DS that are clearly not games. That would be a pretty jerky move and would be like if we suddenly started giving zero-star reviews to motorcycles because hey, those aren’t games either. No, Electroplankton is a pretty unique case, in that while it’s not a game, it’s not clearly something else, since generally those other DS titles have a purpose, like trying to teach you Japanese characters or simulating a guitar. Electroplankton, in comparison, is enough like a game to confuse people. After all, there aren’t any explicit goals, which both eliminates it from being a purposeful piece of software like a kanji dictionary and hilariously enough, also from what we typically think of as a game.

Electroplankton‘s modules are based on the theory of “found music” or musique concrète, which basically boils down to “music can be what you find, rather than what you create”. These modules are set up so that a series of small interactions on the part of the user act as triggers for generating musical sequences. The interactions are simple enough that the user can figure out how to manipulate each module in a short period of time and vague enough that the user is never really composing in the traditional sense. They’re hitting things to see what happens and most of the time, you’ll eventually get something you like. The key to the success of Electroplankton in this area is that the modules are mostly very well-designed, allowing the user to generate a wide variety of pleasing tones without sounding like a 5-year-old smashing their hands on a piano.

A major part of musique concrète is the concept of play, which is why Electroplankton is such a confusing piece of software. The best way to put it seems to be that you don’t play Electroplankton, you play with it. The semantic assumption of the latter is that the act of playing is teleological, or to be less of a dick about it, that there’s an end to the means. The way that we understand how to play a game is to progress. It’s this lack of progression that separates Electroplankton from something like SimCity. Electroplankton is a pure sandbox in the sense that the entirety of the experience is to create something temporary, an aural equivalent of the Zen Sand Tray that’s supposed to help executives relax their balls. These things are commonly referred to as ‘toys’ and that’s a good enough term for what Electroplankton does, with the caveat that the usual reaction to ‘toy’ is to assume a lack of significance, which is indicative of a disturbing lack of imagination.

When Electroplankton was shown to a dementedly grinning E3 audience, it was presented by a DJ with a full set of rack-mounted equipment and accompanied on the big screen with quick cuts of gnarly graphics and effects, all while Reggie Fils-Aime gyrated and gurned on-stage. This was, of course, viciously &^#$#ed. If you’re going to make techno music, get a sampler and a synthesizer. Hell, the way things are going now, you’d probably just need the sampler. Using Electroplankton as part of your compositions would be a gimmick, a chiptune-esque trope that says “the most important thing about my music is not my music”. While the actual presentation was astonishingly dumb, I can’t really blame Nintendo for taking the easy way out. Wheeling out somebody on a bed who’s using a nice set of headphones, who just noodles around for 10 minutes before finding something that they find particularly pleasing and then maybe stretches their head back with their eyes closed, while this is nice, while this is a great example of how Electroplankton is the most worthwhile piece of software that you could put in your DS, this is not exactly something that’s going to set Reggie’s loins on fire. Better have Shiggy come out with a sword and shield then.

There is some pandering taking place. The plankton that are basically a collection of samples from Mario Bros. are a one-trick pony wearing a garish red cap and vomiting liquid cotton candy all over your Legend of Zelda bedsheets. In other words, it’s horribly boring and a little repugnant after you get over the novelty of it all. The 4-track recording plankton is also more of a grudging acknowledgement of the DS’s microphone than a good foundation for musical creation. In either of these cases, you’d be much better off getting an actual 4-track or making actual chiptunes than playing around with something that can’t give you the complete functionality of what it’s emulating without offering you anything special on its own.

This is not to say that there’s anything especially profound about Electroplankton. It’s an honest little piece of code that lets you make fun noises through tactile interactions. It succeeds at what it does because it was made by somebody who has a good idea of what sounds good and how people might want to generate sounds, not to mention an interface and graphical style that’s charming without being twee. It’s a success that’s blemished by the wondering and waffling over whether it’s a game or not. This is similar to the too-common message-board argument of whether games are “art” or what “art” is. Ultimately, it’s a waste of everybody’s time and it was with that in mind that a precedent had to be set, that a flag had to be stuck in the ground..

text by Brandon Parker

★⋆☆☆

“STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT.”

I think there’s a lot action video games could learn from wrestling video games. In most action video games, you run up, hit your opponent a few times, possibly with attacks that are either weak or strong. While that opponent is still going through his dying animation you’ve already killed the next six or so guys. There’s not a lot of time to get personal with your enemy.



Now me, I prefer circling around my opponent for a bit, sizing him up. We stare at each other for awhile maybe, move our fingers like we’re playing an invisible piano or what-have-you, then we start grabbing each other. There’s just something more satisfying to me about grabbing onto a man, trying to bend him into painful and awkward looking positions, reversing and countering my opponents moves while coming back from an ass beating, and generally just seeing two guys grappling on each other, pulling out their moves and trying to gain the upper hand.

The problem with wrestling video games for me is, they try too much to be like wrestling television. The wrestling you see on television is fake. Everyone knows this. For those who forget, you need only to make a wrestling related purchase and the sales clerk will undoubtedly inquire of you, “You know wrestling is fake, right?” as a reminder. It’s possible he might not say this verbally, look for clues in his body language such as a rolling of the eyes. You can also hear it from friends and family, if you have any of those and are comfortable enough around them to bring up the subject of wrasslin’.

Video games are fake simulations of “things,” you push buttons and if the game is good enough are tricked into thinking the task you’re performing is enjoyable. But wrestling is already a simulation. You watch it and if it’s good enough are tricked into thinking the two guys wrestling each other are really two guys pissed off at each other and wanting to beat the other guy, and JESUS look what he just did to that guys HEAD! Video games have their own limitations that require you to have a suspension of disbelief, I don’t see any reason they need to take on wrestling’s limitations as well.

In SmackDown vs. Raw 2007, there’s a part in the single-player storyline where you get hit on the head with a magic wand and as a consequence are turned into a female. This part got me a little excited, I think I even leaned forward to get a closer look. Here, I thought, maybe the designers have finally realized they don’t have to be shackled into pretending the game is a real TV show with real actor people. But they took the easy way out like the compromising bitches they are and went for the, “it was all just a dream,” bullstuff.

In a wrestling video game, Undertaker can really be a guy who comes back from the dead, instead of a guy who pretends to be dead. An old woman can really give birth to a hand. Why not have somebody, say Kurt Angle or whoever, get knifed to death in the locker room by some crazy wrestler out for revenge. Maybe Kurt spilled coffee on him, I don’t know. Anyway, say later on you’re investigating the murder, new clues surface, etc., and it turns out the guy who murdered Kurt is your opponent this Sunday, at the PAY-PER-VIEW! Not only that, you’re wrestling him in a flaming cage and there’s going to be a lion in there as well. You’re going to need help for this one so you talk to Papa Shango, who resurrects Kurt Angle as a wrestler eating zombie with his voodoo magic so you two can go and get your vengeance at what I’m sure is the VENGEANCE pay-per-view. If Vince McMahon could get away with that I know he’d do it. So why hold back in the video game?

You know what my ideal wrestling game is? Let me tell you. Imagine somebody, let’s say Shawn Michaels, is trudging through some type of African savanna or Australian badlands type of terrain. He comes across a watering hole. He’s thirsty, so he gets a drink. Mmm, that’s good. Wait! He hears a gazelle approaching, so he climbs up into a nearby tree. The gazelle cautiously approaches the watering hole. He looks around for predators and, seeing none, lowers his head to get a drink. Shawn Michaels strikes! “ELBOW DROP FROM THE TOP OF THE OAK TREE ONTO THAT GAZELLE, BAH GAWD! HE JUST KILLED THAT DAMN GAZELLE!! HE’S GOT NO SOOWWWWLLL!“ The Heartbreak Kid lifts up that damn dead gazelle and lugs it across his back, carrying it across the wasteland to his tribal leader Triple H. A great feast is prepared for the coming attack on the Luchadore tribe a few hills over, but they get into an argument over the food. For example, Triple H might say, “I want the heart.” Then Shawn Michaels may say, “No.” Then they beat each other with steel folding chairs.



So I guess it would be something like wrestling, Snake Eater and Afrika. Some sort of survival grappling game. Compared to this ideal game, this, rogue nation of wrestle heaven, I have to say that WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 doesn’t really come close. As a simulation of an actual episode of WWE television it’s pretty accurate though, but that’s more like living in wrestle hell. You have to listen to assy rock music at every menu and loading screen and have a roster of mostly generic and uninteresting people to play as. There’s also the repetitive commentary and stupid stuff like “bra & panty” matches.

I don’t have time for that nonsense. I’m a man and I just want to see two other men of great athletic skill pretend to fight each other. It’s also a bonus if there’s a compelling reason for their pretend fight. This hardly happens on TV wrestling though. So while it’s accurate as a TV wrestling simulator, they should worry more about making a fun wrestling game instead. It’s like a video game based on the game Madden based on the sport of football, when instead it should be a game based on modern day gladiatorial combat.

I still recommend you give it a play though if you’ve never played a wrestling game before or get embarrassed just from seeing it on television while flipping through channels. It’d be good for you to experience something new. You should round up three or more other people, get a controller for each of them, a multi-tap if you need one of those, and have yourselves a 6 man ladder match. It’s fun beating the stuff out of your friends, trying to be the first to climb up a ladder while anywhere around 4 other guys are trying to knock it down or get up there themselves. Next time you play Fight Night you’ll wish they had Tornado-Tag Matches.

text by Alex Felix

★★☆☆

“TETHERED TO THE WALL OVER YOUR TOILET.”

I have played Bejeweled maybe twice, ever, in my history as somebody who plays videogames. I would have played it more than just the two times, except it didn’t really hold my attention, insofar as I’m not the kind of person who needs colored gems or whatever else to fiddle around with while I’m doing other very important things with a computer. It demands too much of my attention; it asks too little. To this end, certainly, I am not a “casual gamer.” I very well may be the opposite of that, although I’d have no way of knowing, because any and all monikers thus far ascribed to people who occupy such a status are horrifically embarrassing and you can’t very well be “hardcore” on your own terms, now, can you?



“Videogames are serious business,” is how the joke goes, I believe.

Puzzle Quest – a game which received no press whatsoever up until the day of its release presumably due to nobody caring and/or its having a development time of about three months – “is like Bejeweled, only as an RPG.” Any major gaming news outlet will tell you this in approximately six seconds, and then you’re in luck, because there is nothing else to be said about Puzzle Quest.

And yet this game is scoring eights and nines all over the place.

Puzzle Quest, you see, lets you level up. Funnily enough, the actual up-leveling here is probably the least interesting since Final Fantasy IV, wherein the player was told “Cecil gained a level!” and was then supplied with a bunch of numbers to evidence this; you weren’t really meant to pay attention to these numbers beyond the fact that they were going up, mind you – that’s an innovation we’re blessed with only in modern times. In Puzzle Quest, by comparison, you’re asked to personally select which numbers you’d like to go up, and then, in an act of appalling mockery, the game helpfully shows you the tiny, tiny fractions by which this will cause the other, actually “important” numbers to increase in kind.

(An example: say you choose to invest one point in “Fire Mastery” rather than “Air Mastery” or “Cunning” – this will in turn boost your “Fire Resistance” by a quarter of a percent, and give you an additional two percent chance of getting a free turn when you match “Fire Gems.” Numbers go up, but only barely.)

Yet I cannot stop playing Puzzle Quest. It is, objectively, a pretty good videogame. It takes an apathetic but not awful role-playing game framework and gives you Bejeweled in lieu of random battles. Bejeweled, for those not in the know, is a more or less traditional “puzzle” game whose gameplay centers around matching similar gems out of seven or eight distinct types in a crossword-puzzle grid. In Puzzle Quest, certain gems boost corresponding mana stockpiles, and other gems damage your opponent, and if you have enough of a given type of mana (blue, red, yellow, or green), you can choose to forego the gem-matching process entirely for one turn and cast a spell, instead.

It turned out better than it had to. Taking into account that the puzzle pieces fall Connect-Four style when those below them are matched and therefore removed from play, and the fact that your opponent gets a crack at the board for each time you do, you end up having to think pretty far in advance. I get the feeling that the developers had no idea just how workable of a game they were making, at times: it happens occasionally that there’s only one move you could make on your turn, and that’s going to set the evil Skeleton guy up for something huge on his turn, but – wait! You’ve got enough mana to cast the “Cure Poison” spell, and even though nobody’s poisoned, that’ll save you from having to make a move at all, and – when it works, it works.

The depressing thing about all of this, as should be abundantly clear by now, is that the game had to give me incentive to play it. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m not the sort of guy who carries around Bejeweled in his DS (“Zoo Keeper,” actually, is the name of the DS iteration, for who knows what reason, although damned if it doesn’t have little animal faces in lieu of colored gems). I play and enjoy Puzzle Quest instead because it gives me that wonderful false sense of accomplishment when I make progress in the game and purchase new weapons with fake money that will be waiting for me the next time I turn the game on. I earned that fake money by doing the exact same thing during the first ten minutes I spent playing Puzzle Quest as I will do during the last ten minutes I spend playing Puzzle Quest. It is a gloriously transparent RPG, replete with a storyline that goes on too long and isn’t interesting to anybody.



(To be fair: when you get into a random battle with a monster whom you have already fought a certain number of times, you are given the option to “capture” it instead, which results in a sort of brain teaser-type puzzle rather than the ordinary “battle” setup, and these are more often than not a treat – “Look!” it begs you; designed rather than generated content; Eastern rather than Western game design – what are the implications?! The implications, apparently, are that your character ends up riding the rat you “captured” – because they do that in Warcraft, and rest assured that’d be mortifying enough if not for the stat boost)

Puzzle Quest should be tethered to the wall over your toilet. As a DS game, it will no doubt keep your brain sharp, and that’s hardly an aspect of your life where you want spontaneity, besides.

text by Andrew Toups

★☆☆☆

“A CAUTIONARY TALE TO NAIVE INDEPENDENT DEVELOPERS WITH 'INNOVATIVE' IDEAS.”

The box art for Sigma Star Saga brazenly informs you of the game’s “Gamespot E3 2005 Editors’ Choice Finalist” status. This makes sense, I reckon, because Sigma Star Saga is a perfect E3 game. It’s got a wonderful little concept (action RPG + shoot-em-up hybrid!) which fits perfectly into a 10 minute E3 demo. I had the good fortune to attend E3 in 2005, but since I had my finger on pulse of the industry-crucial korean sex-MMO market, I was too busy to play the demo of this particular title. But if I had to guess, the demo probably showcased the game’s introduction, which plays a bit like R-Type and rocks the heck out like most of Contra: Hard Corps. Over the course of the first introductory stage, your little space craft will crash out of the window of a building, fly through a city that strongly calls to mind Megaman Zero’s Neo Arcadia, and take out an enormous enemy mothership, all while intergalactic conflict and struggle rage on in the background. You’re dodging bullets and shooting down enemy fighters, and for those glorious few minutes, before even introducing any RPG elements, the game is wonderful and exciting. Why, based on that short segment, I’d probably award it my own personal Gamestop E3 2005 Editor’s Choice Finalist: Andrew hecking Toups Edition badge.

Shame that the rest of the game is such stuff.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. Here’s a nice bullet-pointed list of the game’s post intro-sequence virtues:

There’s some nice artwork
The plot is fairly clever
*It’s got heart, goddamnit

And that about sums it up! Now onto the criticism!

(Well, okay. The music ain’t bad, either.)

The great, hilarious innovation of Sigma Star Saga — which is rated “E for everyone” despite featuring a female protagonist who has clearly been infected with a genitalia-eating parasite — is that it combines a top-down action RPG with a 2D horizontal scrolling shooter. I guess this isn’t such a bad idea. I mean, I can imagine some starry-eyed, baseball cap-wearing young man over at Wayforward thinking “Gee. I sure like old school top-down action RPG’s like Secret of Mana and Blaster Master. I also sure like 2D scrolling shooters like R-Type and Life Force. Why, I know, I’ll make a game that combines the two!” This aww-shucks, pie-in-the-sky idealism must have been what saw the game’s development through some of the most ill-advised design decisions I’ve ever come across in my long, illustrious career as a games journalist.

Of course, that’s the risk that innovation entails. Pursuing big ideas means more than just having the skill to fulfill them — it also means having the vision to make it all fit together.

The crux of the problem is that the game takes one of the most annoying abstractions of JRPG’s — random battles — as the means for combining the two genres in question here. So you’re wandering about in action RPG mode, bopping enemies with your little stungun, and then you’re magically zapped up to a pseudo-randomly generated shooting stage. There are about a half-dozen ships which you may find yourself piloting through about a half dozen repeating stage templates for each planet, both of which are chosen at random for every encounter. At the beginning of each stage, a number appears on the right side of the screen which denotes how many enemies must be defeated before you “win”.

Unlike most RPG’s, this game actually goes to great lengths to explain away how bizarre and incongruous these random encounters are, but really, what’s the point? I mean, it’s nice, yes — and to be honest I’d probably have enjoyed Final Fantasy VIII even more if they had thought of some ludicrous explanation involving alternate realities and DIMENSIONAL COMPRESSION to explain why, when you’re moving your little correctly-proportioned party across the disproportionately rendered overworld, you’re suddenly teleported into a different space to do battle (although, really, Final Fantasy VIII is one of those games which is more enjoyable for what it does wrong than what it does right… well that’s a whole other article) — yet the entire idea of random battles is really a jerry-rigged solution to a problem which this game shouldn’t even have, and it feels even more unnatural and tacked-on as a result, regardless of how well it fits into the game universe. This being said, if the designers of this game had been just a bit smarter about how they implemented the shooter stages, they probably could’ve gotten away with it.

Shooter stage design relies on precision — planning enemy patterns and obstacle placement means that you have to have a pretty clear idea of a few crucial variables, including (but not limited to) the size of the player’s hitbox, the strength of his shots, the movement speed. Sigma Star Saga‘s great, crucial error, is that it lacks the sensitivity of stage design to accommodate randomizing these factors. The randomly-chosen ships vary greatly in size: one is a small, nimble scout-like ship, another looks to be the equivalent of the Spaceball One from Spaceballs. The stage designs, in an effort to be consistently challenging, I suppose, regularly feature passages which are impossible to navigate if you’ve been given an inappropriately-sized craft. Likewise, because shot power is a function of your craft’s level, there are also situations in which nearly every enemy you encounter will take more shots to destroy than it is possible for your underleveled craft to fire before they disappear off screen, meaning you’re stuck looping through the same goddamned unimaginative and cookie-cutter shooter segment, over and over and over again, taking out the same set of 4 weak enemies that you’re actually capable of killing. This is, of course, assuming that you aren’t stuck in the former unenviable scenario to began with. The end result of all this is that you will quite often find yourself in unwinnable situations, even if you’ve spent the last half hour level-grinding and can destroy every enemy with one hit.

It’s not as if you can’t make a shooting game that can handle a wide variety of ships without being “broken”. R-Type Final, for instance, admirably handles this task. That game, however, was made by people who have probably spent the better part of their adult lives making shoot-em-ups; Sigma Star Saga, by contrast, comes across as being made by a guy who played Life Force way back in the day on his NES, using the 30 lives code, and vaguely remembers that it had this totally sweet fire level.

The game has other problems too — during the RPG sections, character sprites take up so much of the screen that you never get any sense of layout to the dungeonsplanets, and the absence of any recognizable landmarks means not only that you will frequently get lost, but that there aren’t any interesting sights around the next corner to motivate you to continue exploring.

In conclusion, looking at Wayforward’s website, their recent offerings have been limited almost entirely to licensed shovelware for portable titles. I’d like to say that the moral of the story is that if you’re going to make an experimental game which combines space combat and RPG elements, be sure to do it right or else be damned to a career of finding ways to graft the Spongebob Squarepants license into the popular genre-du-jour. However, Star Control 2 developers Toys for Bob have found themselves in a similarly unenviable position, so I guess you’re hecked either way. Still if you want to play a good hybrid shooter/RPG, avoid this well-intentioned but ill-fortuned trainwreck and play Star Control 2 or maybe Compile’s excellent, underrated Guardian Legend.

text by Brendan Lee

★☆☆☆

“THE NINTH ONE OF THESE.”

. . . or, perhaps much more appropriately, Mavis Beacon Teaches Nothing.

There is a certain fun-ness about hitting things!

And that is pretty much the rhythm genre it its entire moldering nutshell. I used to think – – god, I used to think – – that the rhythm genre was more or less slouching towards some sort of apex; I figured that there would be a time not too far away where people would shuffle up to some sort of Great Machine, slot a couple of coins, and start slouching their way up Rockstar Mountain, one flashing jittery headrush at a time.

I mean, how could they not? I seen kids up there in Utsunomiya, up there in the Tochigi-ken, where I’ve got to admit there isn’t a whole hecking lot to do, but whatever there is to do they take it pretty damn serious, whether it’s drinking straight vodka until they vomit 3/4 of the way up their esophagus or practicing bubble-era Para Para moves in front of any and all available reflective surfaces. I seen a guy play Drummania like he had a book report due on Treasure Island in 7 minutes and his mother was on fire. That’s gotta be a transferable skill, huh? I mean, huh? You can’t seriously have your own sticks that you wrapped with your own grip tape, have the gloves and everything, and the bravado and the girl on the side clapping and jumping up and down with the pigtails and bubblegum and the mouthing the words to the song as you pound away. I mean, can you? Huh? At some point, you’re going to go into the studio, and you’re going to take everything you learned and ball it into a mental burst of white-hot static, and Atomic Love is going to shoot out of your hands, and you and your best rebellious mates will be off on their way to chauffeured limousines and maid-shaped swimming pools, right?

The thing is, right now I’m pretty sure no, uh-uh . . . No. Not. Ever. I’ve seen these games pretend to be pretty much everything to all people – – and thusly, people pretending to be pretty much everything to all these games . . . people pretending to rap, or dance, or hallucinate some kind of plasticky balls-in-hand jamfest to Huey Lewis (and the News!)’s Power of Love. I’ve seen them pretend to stroke the shamisen and rustle the maracas like a juicing epileptic with nervous polio. I’ve seen them pump their fists in the air and finish off a perfect behind-the-back leper jam on Magic Music Magic. I’ve seen them pretend to DJ in a way that would make a real DJ start reading The Watchtower and shop for slacks at the Farm and Fleet.

Those people will never do those things in real life (if they didn’t already do them before), because picking up and playing an instrument will never give the same kind of dime-bag-o’-meth-behind-the-Pick-‘n’-Save-style kicks that pre-recorded crowds can give you. That young rebel-without-a-clue picking out Smoke on the Water in his rented apartment over a struggling bowling alley can squint out his dirty cracked window and see the crowds, feel the crowds, blow an invisible kiss to the front row HOney in the ragged Slayer tank top . . . or he can pick up Elite Beat Agents and be a superstar right hecking now.

The ninth one of these, Namco.

Number nine.

They’re all synchronized with all of Namco’s other properties, too, don’t worry, so you’ve got your Idolm@ster in there . . . and whoever else Namco’s got their tongue into. You got your Mario Brothers in there, you got your Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. And when you make it, you can stand out in front of S@y in Akihabara with Two Drums Guy, drawing chuckles from dimpled conflagrations of gently sagging real estate conferencers from Brisbane, laughing and smiling and pointing at someone who has put an awful hecking lot of yen into becoming the best that there is at one of the most purely cynical forms of entertainment in existence.

Someday, I hope, long after Jesus Christ has returned in his Golden Impreza and the righteous have called shotgun, they’ll find one of these things ditched in some prehistoric landfill, and they’ll soak off the corrosion and re-rubberize the drum heads and synthesize some wooden-analogue sticks and jimmy the coin slot and have themselves a go at this. And I think I can say with some degree of certainty that they will shake their heads, and wonder (with a cybernetic archeologist’s encyclopedic knowledge of ancient pop culture):

These people really wanted to be good at something, I guess. And when they couldn’t be – – when they couldn’t muster up enough juice to actually put on their hecking sandals and shuffle over to somebody with talent and patience . . . well, I guess they found a machine to go ahead and tell them that everything would be okay, that they were good enough as they were, and that they deserved a cheering crowd as much as Steve Vai or Menudo.

Then they will go off and have some fantastic nachos, which will be free in the future, come in easy-to-apply patch form, and require the death of an unborn Micronesian infant who never learned how to dream.

text by tim rogers

★★★☆

“A SUMMARY OF ALL THAT IS JOYFUL IN THE WORLD, PLUS MEMORIES OF HOW &^#$#ED WE WERE.”

Few people without exceptionally large calculators can tell you the precise difference between Wonder Boy and Monster World. The first game, made by a developer called Westone and published by Sega, starred a muscly blond man in vague green shorts running to the right, perpetually jumping over things, throwing hammers, or riding a skateboard. What was Wonder Boy’s political position, other than that his name sounded kind of pleasantly gay? No one was quite sure. Just a year after the release of the original Wonder Boy, a monkey-headed boy in a red jumpsuit, named Alex Kidd, popped along, and things got ambiguous. Which one was Sega’s mascot? Alex Kidd, who got sent to “Miracle World” versus Wonder Boy’s “Monster World” (miracles are semantically better than monsters any day) got his game built into the Sega Master System II, so I think that means he wins. Also, to be brutally honest, Alex Kidd in Miracle World is a far more playable game than the first Wonder Boy, or even Wonder Boy in Monster Land. Regardless, there are people who will cop an elitist attitude about either series at the drop of a hat. I knew a guy once who suggested that he would play Mario Party if it were published by Sega and called Alex Kidd Party (“The party genre is the perfect chance to reintroduce Alex Kidd to the gamers of today” — not kidding), and a friend over my house a few months ago said, as I was playing New Adventure Island on the Virtual Console, “Way to rip off Wonder Boy.” Yes, Adventure Island is a rip-off of Wonder Boy, in all ways, shapes, and forms. It’s a rip-off because the developer, Westone, confident that they had a pleasant game engine that could benefit from some revision, had sold the rights to Hudson Soft for development on other consoles. This means basically two things, in the end: that Adventure Island, the first and last platform action game to star a real-life videogame industry celebrity (Takahashi Meijin) as the player character, ended up on the winning console, the Famicom, and saw far more success there than it would have with Sega, and secondly, that the near-infinite tweaks and nips and tucks made to the Adventure Island game design render the original Wonder Boy pretty much unplayable to modern gamers.

The easiest way to explain the difference between the Wonder Boy and Monster World series is this: there is no Wonder Boy series. It’s just one game, the one with the yellow-haired kid who occasionally rides a skateboard. Once they introduced Monster World to the market, Wonder Boy was gone — hell, in Wonder Boy V Monster World III, his name is given as “Shion” — that’s the same name as the main character of Xenosaga. The words “Wonder Boy” stayed above the title for perplexing reasons. Namely, they stayed there so that Sega could point at the series and say, yeah, look at this! He’s Shion, the Wonder Boy, Five, in Monster World — Three. We’ve definitely got enough money to make sequels! We’re hard enough to make two sequels at once, heckers. Our games are totally selling well enough! They’re even selling well enough that we don’t even need to settle on a genre — platformer, side-scrolling dungeon crawler, fixed-scroll platform shooter (the sometimes-excellent Monster Lair), you name it! We can make stuff up and call it a sequel!

In reality they were just stalling for time, thirsting for something that was worth making sequels to — Sonic the Hedgehog, for lack of a better word. Years after this (*warning: fiction ahead), Sony Computer Entertainment America would hold a board meeting to discuss potential games to develop for the Sony PlayStation 3 Computer Entertainment System, and some man with a neckbeard and a matching tie would stand up with a laser pointer and motion at a PowerPoint presentation and say, “We should make a new game in the Warhawk series. Here are the reasons why: first of all, Warhawk was a PlayStation One launch game. We call this ‘going back to the roots’. Secondly, it was an excellent game, getting morbidly high review scores and everything. Thirdly, because we own the trademark. And fourthly — and most importantly — because no one remembers what the hell it is. It would be like starting a new series!” Do you see the connection? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Me, though, I love Wonder Boy (as a concept), and I love Warhawk (as game design), so I’m personally prepared to let this analogy slide. Be a dear and let it slide with me.

At any rate, Monster World Complete Collection does not use the words “Wonder Boy” in the title, and for a good reason. Look at this list of titles, diligently stolen from Play-Asia.com: “Wonder Boy”, “Wonder Boy in Monster Land”, “Wonder Boy III – Monster Lair”, “Monster World II”, “Wonder Boy V Monster World III” and “Monster World IV”. What a crossword puzzle this world ends up as, sometimes. Notice how there is one Monster “Land” and one “Lair” before one is inexplicably called “World II”. A little semantic detective work would tell us that “Wonder Boy in Monster Land” is the culprit — it’s both the reason that some people are tricked into thinking there is a Wonder Boy “series” and the reason that the third of the games with “Monster” in the title is called Monster World II. Furthermore, it’s also the reason that there is no game called “Wonder Boy II”. Man, typing all this up is almost more fun than playing the games. Less loading times and everything.

Some of them really blow, in fact, unless you’re blind with your own nostalgia. At least the graphics are nice — the collection is masterfully re . . . uh, mastered, and the 480p modes look incredible on an HDTV. Monster World IV looks delicious in 480p with scanlines. The back of the box, classic Sega, advertises that there are over sixteen games in the collection, which is just as cute as a Chihuahua with a mutilated hind leg and one of those cone-shaped collars to keep him from licking himself. If you squint very hard you’re likely to find three games — Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair, Wonder Boy V Monster World III (perhaps the best game title of all-time), and Monster World IV. The “sixteen” so proudly proclaimed by the makers refers to the various versions included of each game: Mega Drive, Genesis (yes, the English version), Master System, and Sega’s various arcade hardwares. It’s a peculiar walk down a deserted Memory Lane that allows us to observe that, this far from the original release, the arcade versions are better than some of the home versions, the home versions are better than some of the arcade versions, and the Game Gear (portable) versions are hideous, though not as hideous as the Mark III version of Wonder Boy. Man, they ported the stuff out of Wonder Boy — maybe that’s why so many people think there’s a “series”. Many of the “sixteen games” in this “Complete Collection” are just different versions of Wonder Boy; another of the games — the Master System port of Wonder Boy V Monster World III — contains such horrid collision detection that it’s unplayable (the enemy sprite must literally intersect with your character before you can score a hit). And one of the games — Monster World II, for Game Gear only — is such a clippy drudge that to put it on a collection with more or less fifteen “games” on it and raise the numeral on the back of the package by one integer is more or less the same thing as recording the moans of a man masturbating in the shower and calling it an operetta.

The reason this collection scores three stars, then? It’s a simple question of value, and the answer is a one-two punch. The first hit is because this game makes me feel like I’ve actually grown up, to not find this stuff funny anymore. That’s pretty good, for a videogame! And the second is a miraculous revelation — it makes me feel like a critic or something, all of a sudden, to play through all these games and know which one is worth any time at all. Monster World IV, released for the Sega Mega Drive in 1994, aka one of the best videogames of all-time, aka a summary of all that is joyful in the world. Before there was Cave Story and after there was Super Metroid, before all these Castlevania games on portable systems, where you can keep fighting monsters over and over again to gain levels so that nothing is difficult anymore, there was Monster World IV, a side-scrolling RPG with bright graphics, brilliant cross-section portrayals of towns, extremely difficult bosses, dungeons that stretch the limit between enthralling and frustrating as hell, physics that feel unworldly though never cheap or wrong, a cute sense of humor, and one twelve-bar happy melody threaded in and out of various themes. There’s a volcano level in it, for example. It’s set in some kind of weird Arabian-Nights-ish setting, which makes it either the precursor of Sonic and the Secret Rings or a potential conspirator to terrorism that America would deem unfit for release in the noble Best Buys of Interstate Highway 70. The original MegaDrive cartridge version of Monster World IV‘s Akihabara Blue Book Value is 3,900 yen used; moreover, you’d have to buy a MegaDrive. If you have a Japanese PS2, hey. Mathematically, this collection is worth the price for this game alone. That is, if you’re the type of person to actually play your games. I reckon a lot of self-professed Wonder Boy “fans” aren’t the type to open the box, if you catch my meaning. Well, rest assured, importers, that the instruction manual within is as gorgeous as you’d expect for the Sega Ages series (though I reckon most people inclined to call instruction manuals “gorgeous” aren’t the type to open the box, et cetera). There’s some original artwork for Monster World IV all over the damned thing — neon signs pointing you toward which game to play — and hey, for the manual and Monster World IV alone, we’d gladly have given this a perfect score. My manual, however, had a hideously dog-eared final back cover straight out of the box, which may or may not be Sega’s fault. Here at action button dot net, we stand firm in our belief that When in doubt, it’s always Sega’s fault, so three stars it is.

In closing: the retro compilation of the month. Astounding, amazing, humbling. It used to be that some bastards like Namco would put three 128-kilobyte computer entertainment programs on a 1.5 gigabyte UMD and then air a Japanese TV commercial in which a man dressed up as a magician displays how you can send an entire game to your friend’s PSP while a bunch of hicks ooh and ahh, and I’d sit there on my sofa screaming until I was unconscious. Now we’ve got too much on these discs. Isn’t that nice? And did you hear about Wonder Boy V Monster World III showing up on Nintendo Wii Virtual Console? 600 yen, yeah. Man, heck that stuff.

text by tim rogers

★★★☆

“WHY KIDS DON'T PLAY WITH LEGO ANYMORE.”

You know that new “Rocky” film, “Rocky Balboa”? It’s being released in Japan as — I stuff you not — “Rocky: The Final”. Isn’t that ridiculous? Far from merely illustrating how weird Hollywood is about pushing movies in Japan, it sounds like the name of a videogame, probably not the last in its series, about a shy young man who miraculously attends a high school full of balloon-breasted three-year-olds. According to a friend in the subtitling business, the American film studio will give the Japanese subtitlist one supervised viewing of the script, followed by one supervised viewing of the film, followed by a final supervised viewing of the script, during which they feed Japanese sentences of appropriate length into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing the English script. The Hollywood man then packs the laptop into a briefcase and flies back to California, where the subtitles are applied. The concept of “movie studios” doesn’t really exist in Japan. You’ll find that films are pushed by the weirdest sponsors. More or less the same companies that, say, own baseball stadiums in America: cellular phone companies, insurance firms, beer companies — or, more often than not, the public transit authority. Hence, “Rocky: The Final”.



The videogame Crackdown is called “Riot Act” in Japan, which doesn’t sound nearly as terrible. Though I reckon that, if Microsoft were a little more open, creative, and willing to succeed in Japan, they could have done any of a number of things to make it more exciting. What any of those things are, I don’t really know, though for starters, they probably could have somehow gotten Johnny Depp’s face on the box, and renamed it “2100 Jump Street”.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Yesss!! Two paragraphs of build-up, and then a punchline that goes nowhere! You’ve gotta love it.

At any rate, Crackdown is a good game. Like Dead Rising before it, it is for the Xbox 360, and it is something of a “sandbox” game with a purpose. Dead Rising is something of a psychological magic trick, in that in convinces the player that the game has to be played right — the events of the story take place on a tight time line, and the player character is utterly swamped in undead. No amount of killing the undead can look unnecessary — especially in a game world where the bosses are all other ordinary people flipped out of their minds, trying to kill anything with two legs. Dead Rising has glorious morals and a tiger-tight (if ridiculous) plot. It does not, however, let you steal cars and/or cap hookers’ asses.

Crackdown is kind of a thoughtful step back from Dead Rising. Dead Rising had tried to be a sandbox game with definite borders, an enclosed setting, and plenty of conscience. Players complained about the game’s perfectionism-inducing attitude — it’s hellishly, brilliantly strict with save points. Crackdown is another conscientious take on the “sandbox” genre, maybe made by people who, like me, think it’s kind of silly that the average post-GTA developer would hear a psychiatrist speak the words “go anywhere and do anything” and free-associate “blow up everything and kill everyone”. It’s clear that games are blunt instruments made for bashing; at the very least, we play games to do things that we can’t do in real life, or else to kill time with something outside the context of ham sandwiches or mayonnaise. Why must our escape always plop us down in something that looks like the real world — only now, we’re allowed to kill and rape and plunder and maim? Violence is hilarious, no doubt — just ask George W. Bush — though really, even in this world where hip hop is the stuff, can’t we be a little more creative about destroying things? I beheld Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and immediately thought that it would be awesome if the next one was set in some kind of “Flash Gordon” future, full of reflective surfaces. Or maybe you could be a superhero, like Superman? The “sandbox” format (yes, format — we mustn’t call it a “genre”, or else it’ll be tied to cops’n’robbers forever) was frightfully versatile. It could be used for anything. Instead, we got an artist’s rendition of Los Angeles. It’s cool, though; I saw what they were doing. They were making a checklist of things developers can do in a large 3D environment. That’s good. After a while, though, as the clones started to roll out — True Crime and The Getaway and the god-awful Saints’ Row or what have you — I couldn’t help wondering: why doesn’t someone make a game where you play as a police officer, at least? Why do I have to always be some evil, bloodthirsty, butchering son of a bitch?

Well, Crackdown came along and granted many of my wishes. In this game, you’re a cop. Not just any cop — a cel-shaded kind of super-comic-booky cartoon cop — and one with superhuman strength. And the game is even set in a future distant enough to be science-fiction, and near enough to be recongnizable. So there you have it — before you’ve even played it Crackdown answers the call for a more conscientious Grand Theft Auto by allowing you to play as a police officer who is also kind of a superhero, in a setting that is almost wildly imaginative: a city overrun by criminals — meaning there are always people shooting at you, meaning that you always have the right of way to shoot someone else. No need to “take out” your “frustrations” on innocents when you can take them out on people who want you dead. How’s it feel, now?

Crackdown is a lovely, if flawed, first draft of a large-scale conscientious sandbox game. To wit: you can still mercilessly carjack civilians in order to get a new set of wheels. However: you are a police officer now, and you are legally allowed to comandeer vehicles. However: sometimes there might be a police car close by — maybe even your police car. Or maybe you won’t really need to commit violence against the people you’re trying to build a safer world for, because you don’t really have a pressing appointment with lawbreakers at this precise moment. However: the game is sure to keep its city packed with lawbreakers, and your agenda packed with appointments, so maybe your character could kinda sorta explain his reasons for jacking any given car at any given time. However: it would be nice if he didn’t drag the people out their windows and slam them to the pavement.

If you’ve never seen or heard of or played this game before now, you could possibly be imagining something of a Grand Theft Auto where you play as a cop instead of a robber. And that would be enough to sound pretty fun. Really, though, it’s better than that: you’re a cop who can jump tens of feet into the air, in a city with freaky-weird architecture and plenty of rooftops. In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas you could build up certain stats to a point where you could jump over a semi truck, avoiding a head-on collision, while pedaling a BMX bike down the wrong lane of a highway, and that was some real bong-passing stuff, right there. That was some real “Dude, do that stuff again” stuff. Crackdown doesn’t need that stuff. All it needs is its crazy weird jumping mechanics that will have you running, flying, hanging, and flailing all over town while chasing the bad guys. You can’t stand on a rooftop for more than ten seconds without some evil freak on another rooftop taking a shot at you. And you look out there, under that purple sky, and you think, could I make that jump? Yeah, maybe? And you set off flying, and you pull the left trigger, and you lock on to the guy, and you click the right analog stick upward to aim at his head, and you hold the right trigger down to let loose a spray of machinegun fire. He’s dead about a split second before your feet hit the ground and an impact crater ensues. No one in the room needs to say “Dude, do that stuff again” — because there’s already a guy on the next rooftop, and he’s asking for it, too. If you’re doing this online, with a friend, it’s an experience like no other: your friend lifts a car and jumps from a rooftop, you shoot the car as he throws it, it explodes, you yiff at each other for three uninterrupted minutes over your Xbox Live headsets — it’s like kicking a garbage can in River City Ransom as your friend stands on top of it, kicking enemies, pulsing and throbbing within the internet: this is why kids don’t play with Lego anymore, unless we’re talking about Lego videogames, or unless the kids aren’t allowed to play videogames. Crackdown is the ultimate G.I. Joe Cobra command compound inside your television. It’s a hell of a toy.

Jumping and bouncing and shooting. Oddly colored sky. Really weighty vehicle physics. Industrial, angry, mediocre soundtrack that, if little else, communicates the feeling of two or three pounds of cocaine sprinting through your futuristic bloodstream as you hurtle toward the next guy the boss says needs to stop living right now. The game’s got atmosphere, and it loves it.

In this expanding universe of too many me-toos, Crackdown has its own personality, and its own fresh little mechanics. Among the applause-worthy elements include the booming voice of the tutorial, who tells you, the first time you die, that “Death is not the end” — advanced cloning technology makes it possible for your current memories and skill levels to be downloaded by a waiting clone. In decades of videogame history, very few people have ever raised a solitary index finger at a game development panel and asked, “So, uh, why does Super Mario have three lives? What . . . happens after he dies?” Those people — those who would be laughed out of even a comic convention — are now getting into videogames, thanks to the communication revolutions of Xbox Live or the user-friendliness of the Nintendo DS. Crackdown doesn’t answer their questions, or even make the situation seem less silly, though hey, it manages to give answers with a kind of Neal Stephenson-esque technophile glibbery, and it’s effortless, and it’s great.



Crackdown deserves to be recognized for its deeply embedded lust to make things better, to push the envelope. It’s even excellent, if slightly loose, gameplay-wise. It feels kind of like Populus viewed from the ground, at times, and that’s mostly a compliment. I love the idea of the auto-aiming system, as well — hold the L trigger to lock on to a nearby enemy, and then flick the right analog stick to lock on to a region of his body: arms, legs, chest, head. Some regions are harder to hit than others –unless you build up your skills. You can lock on to regions of vehicles as well, and even take out drivers, or hit the gas tank. It’s an intuitive system, when it’s working. Auto-aiming isn’t the shameful thing Halo fans dismissed it as when, say, Metroid Prime was new. In fact, it’s much more realistic even than sliding a mouse around, trying to get the right angle. A real gun is fired by a person with a brain, and reflexes. Snap: the gun is aimed.

Crackdown tries to work kind of like this, though it just about sets my nerves on fire, sometimes, when my character targets a dead body, or a fellow police officer: sure, shooting dead bodies has been a pastime of console gamers since Goldeneye on N64, and shooting allies has been hilarious ever since games like Fallout totally gave you the freedom to do anything, even kill villagers and get away with it. Though yeah, it’s frustrating to be forced to aim at things that can’t possibly aim at me, and it has nothing to do with my morals — it’s just not practical. It doesn’t help me kill my oppressors. You could give me some bullstuff about how street warfare is some serious stuff, dogg, sometimes you can’t tell who’s who, though yeah, that’d just be the sound of you trying to justify: seriously, we’re talking about super-human cops here; they no doubt have fast eyes and faster reflexes. I’m not hating on the game. I like it a lot. I’m just saying that your dude shouldn’t ever lock on to his own dudes, nor to a dead body, when there are hostiles present and discharing their hecking firearms. If the player has some sick wish to shoot his backup in the head and giggle to himself, he can use the right analog stick and aim manually. If anything else, that little extra bit of effort could, I don’t know, represent the psychological friction that occurs as a man weighs the consequences of murder.

Man. I’m pretty good at this bullstuffting thing. I should make a videogame or something. Maybe a sandbox game set on a frozen planet overrun with zombies.

text by Bennett

★★☆☆

“PERFECT IN FORM AND FUNCTION; OTHERWISE, BAD.”

Final Fantasy XII is probably the deepest, lengthiest and most detailed game ever produced. When I finished it, the clock showed over a hundred hours of play, and I think I had plumbed no more than half of its optional sidequests and secret treasures. It has an epic plot, with hours of beautiful video and a richly-detailed script which is voiced perfectly. It has more beautiful art than I have ever seen on a single DVD.



When the credits rolled at the end, I thought to myself: “That’s it? That’s all there is?” I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Had I invested 100 hours in this game for this?

I had to wonder how it could be that I was feeling this way. I had never played a game with superior production values, nor with superior depth. I loved the characters, and the lush, expansive world they inhabited. But somehow, in this Final Fantasy, which had more substance than any of its ancestors, the core experience seemed to be absent. I had to wonder what secret spice was missing which would have recreated the elation I felt at the end of installments VII, VIII and X.

The biggest critical complaint about XII has been that its combat system produces the same kind of repetitive ‘grind’ that is present in an MMO. To my mind, this is an ignorant claim. The Final Fantasy series already had this classic MMO ‘problem’ in spades – indeed, it was Sakaguchi who invented it. By contrast, the new real-time model allows you to avoid random monsters and frees you from endlessly repeated button combinations. It allows you to focus directly on the story and quest mechanics. It lets you constantly interact. The new system is not the problem. So what is it that ruins the game?

There are some obvious suspects. The new summon system asks you to wait five minutes while the summoned creature, or ‘esper’, is introduced. The esper appears, forming a party of two with the summoner. All the nearby monsters wisely attack the summoner, leaving the impotent esper alone, because they know that the esper will disappear when the summoner is killed. The result? You will never call an esper more than once.

The experience system is utterly broken. This is the first Final Fantasy game which puts more weight on your character’s level than on his equipment or tactics. About halfway through the game, it became apparent: you can either buy the largest, most expensive sword, or you can run around in the fields killing monsters for half an hour. The effect is exactly the same. As a result, you are never excited to get treasure.

These problems are annoying because they would have been easy to fix, if an insightful producer had been at the helm. But they don’t stop you from enjoying the game. What stops you from enjoying the game is a much more fundamental problem.

This is what I have realised: When we say a game is a role-playing game, or that it has ‘RPG elements’, we mean that the game allows you to increase your character’s skills and powers over time. Sometimes this device exists only as a Pavlovian reward – a way to addict you to a repetitive process, like the one in Diablo. In good role-playing games, it is a quantified metaphor for the advancement and development of a heroic character.

The development of a character from zero to hero is a powerful and satisfying theme when it appears in books or films. Luke Skywalker, Musashi, Spiderman, Neo, and King Arthur all moved from humble beginnings to a glorious pinnacle. This is at the core of any heroic story, not by convention but by necessity, because it is that contrast in power which gives the story its gravity and its emotional power.

Final Fantasy games always force you to spend the bulk of your time with one central character. It is this character who you bond with – he is the protagonist who must undergo that heroic metamorphosis.

In VII, the protagonist is a Han Solo-esque mercenary whose heroic deeds ultimately win the admiration of his companions. By the end, none of them care that he is an impostor who stole the identity of his girlfriend’s next-door neighbour. Their respect is not misplaced – in a single blow, he defeats his old mentor, a deranged genius who was initially hundreds of times more powerful.

In X, your central character is a dream. By the end of the story, your friends want the dream to be true so badly that they spend a whole sequel scouring the earth for him. Or so I am led to believe – I’m not going to play a game where you change jobs by trying on a new dress.

In XII, the lead is Vaan, once more an androgynous teenaged misfit with a sword. He falls in with a bunch of adults – royalty and thieves. In the closing scenes, one character explicitly suggests that Vaan is the hero of the story. But he never does a single thing to earn this respect.

He’s present in every dramatic scene, and often yells out some defiant line, or words of encouragement to another character. But he never does anything. He has no special powers. He has no particular significant relationship with any of the antagonists. He doesn’t even teach anyone an important emotional lesson, like Naruto would.

He is, in other words, exactly like a sidekick. Vaan is more Pippin than Frodo, more Watson than Holmes. But nobody plays Danger Mouse to Vaan’s Penfold. It’s like a story about Robin, but Batman isn’t around. or It’s Chewbacca Gaiden. It’s Ron Weasley and the Failed Attempt to Protect the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s Luigi at Peach and Bowser’s Wedding.

In the end this opulent, ornate game is a bitter disappointment. Yes, your characters all become much stronger over time. But you get the sense that they would have overcome their challenges whether or not you had gained a single level. And they certainly could have done the whole thing without the help of Vaan.

After VII, VIII and X, I was hooked on a feeling. But you can’t get that feeling back by playing XII.

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“PRECISELY THE KIND OF TOSSED-OFF, DOWN-TO-EARTH POP-SONG VIDEOGAME THESE PEOPLE NEED TO BE MAKING A WHOLE LOT MORE OF.”

More shocking things have happened than Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings‘ not being a terrible videogame at all. What with all the breeding and inbreeding surrounding it, you’d think it would have no right to be anything other than complete trash. It’s a spinoff of a Final Fantasy game that “average gamers” hated despite its accidental brilliance; in the perfect world as represented by the Square-Enix corporate umbrella, the “niche gamers” that are able to find the genius in a game like Final Fantasy XII can go to hell and then die again. You’d think that if they were going to make a spinoff or a side-story, they’d also spray a thick layer of bullstuff all over it, to make it the same brand of zippers-and-pleather fetishism schlock that they make most of their money from these days. Not so — Square-Enix have decided to do the previously unthinkable, and respect their audience, though only in the most ham-handed way: they have graciously created the “Ivalice Alliance”, a brand name for videogames existing within the “Final Fantasy” brand name, which happen to take place in the mythical land of Ivalice, where lizard men and bunny girls politely obey the laws of combat and agility stat numbers as they fight for the future, where the music of Hitoshi Sakimoto, which is like a special kind of language developed to convey strategic thought, booms down from the sky at intense moments, or twitters in the background while generals are micromanaging troops. The “Ivalice Alliance” will no doubt eventually pop out an all-new Final Fantasy Tactics adventure; setting up a new brand name to house remakes and spinoffs is kind of &^#$#ed. At present, the brand is already off to a rolling start, with Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings and Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, already released, and Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and Final Fantasy XII: International + Zodiac Job System on the way. I don’t know about “Job System” being in a game title, especially preceded by a mathematic symbol. It leaves kind of a weird aftertaste. It also makes me kind of thirsty for the inevitable day that someone makes a game title that contains a balanced equation.

At any rate, Revenant Wings is a shockingly not terrible game, for what it’s worth. You think it would play something like Kingdom Hearts without the Disney or Sephiroth, though I guess the 160-year-old man who makes the important business decisions (strike down innovation in the name of paying as few full salaries as possible) was out attending his grandson’s funeral or something, because someone decided to roll with the crazy idea to try to make this actually a good game.

It’s a real-time strategy game, sort of, though less like StarCraft and more like Ogre Battle. Final Fantasy XII was something original because it played kind of like Ogre Battle without all of the fading to black and auto-fighting. FFXII was producer Yasumi Matsuno’s way of trying to come to grips with his dream to create a numberless, dynamic, evolving role-playing adventure game, though Square’s desire to repress his more interesting ideas apparently sent him running. Matsuno is one of the few people in game design we can probably call a “genius”; he was without a doubt the most creatively talented person getting a monthly direct bank deposit from the Square-Enix corporation, or perhaps any Japanese videogame corporation. As convinced as I and we are that Matsuno can make a hell of a videogame if only someone would give him enough money and trust, we’re not about to say that Revenant Wings was doomed to be a horrible game just because Matsuno wasn’t involved.

It’s still a shock that it wound up not being terrible.

Someone with a couple more-than-interesting ideas threw them together, and here you have it. It’s a real-time strategy game that flows kind of like Final Fantasy XII; most of the missions take place indoors, which is quaint. It feels at times almost like Baldur’s Gate, though at many moments the truth shines in: the people who made this game never played Baldur’s Gate, maybe because Baldur’s Gate was never released in the Japanese language. In many ways, the game is free to do whatever it wants because of this pseudo-fact — just as the terrifyingly bad third-person shooter Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII was free to do whatever it wanted because none of its designers had apparently ever played a good shooting game. Where Dirge took the path to the dark side, Revenant takes the path to the light side. It’s a cute, pleasant little game, like Baldur’s Gate meets the stage-by-stage action-adventure spirit of one of those above-average side-scrollers on the Super Famicom.

The game makes nice use of the Nintendo DS touch screen for controlling your units. The bottom screen is the field screen; the top screen is a map; press the L or R button to reverse the two screens; with the map on the bottom screen, touch a location to go there. It’s pretty tight and fast. Almost too fast at times — there’s no speed setting option, and there’s no way to pause the battle and issue commands, which, come to think of it, is kind of inexcusable.

There’s plenty of pleasant brain-clutter all over the place: summon gates allow you to summon monsters; choose the types of monsters you want to be able to summon before the battle by forging a “Summon Deck”; assign the monsters to specific “leader” characters, click the leader character’s portrait at the top of the field screen to select that leader and all of his or her monsters. Pay careful mind to the types of opponents you’re fighting, so you know whom to send after whom. Magic units beat flying units, close-range units beat magic units, close-range units beat flying units. Position your healing units in the right spot on the battlefield to keep your troops living.

The battles get pretty hectic, and sometimes it’s kind of impossible to know what the hell is going on. The graphics are nice enough when you’re not relying on them to do your laundry, I guess. The backgrounds are some Xenogears-esque polygonal 3D, though the screen doesn’t rotate — early Weekly Famitsu articles depicted a little icon in the corner of the screen that you could tap to drag-rotate the map, though that would probably be the lifeboat that broke the battleship’s back, and render the game an unwieldy mess. Speaking of messy, the character sprites are kind of hard to make out, most of the time. When the screen isn’t actively discombobulating in the name of bitching 3D, the sprites are so “Vintage Final Fantasy” that it might make a man serene inside. Once things start moving, it gets confusing. At least the music is nicer than nice; it’s kind of funny how much post-Final Fantasy Tactics Hitoshi Sakimoto’s stuff sounds like it’d fit into Chrono Trigger when it’s rendered with the DS sound chip. The save menu music, in particular, is pretty sublime. During battle, you can hear some choice cuts from Final Fantasy XII now played with warmer, happier, more lovably handheld-feeling synthesizers.

In short, this game is cute and small and kind of easy and mostly good. There’s no two-player wireless versus or co-op mode, which is just plain not cool, though the one-player quest is a breezy and poppy and breathless story about dumb little kids on a dumb air-pirate-battling adventure on a floating continent; it never stops or stoops to pander, which, in this day and age, is utterly remarkable. You can open the menu between battles to unlock new summon monsters using crystals earned in battle, or to put new swords or armor on your troops, which mostly feels like busywork because the swords or armor are just things you find in the natural course of the missions, anyway, though for the most part, it all flows very well. It’s Square’s second attempt at a real-time strategy for the Nintendo DS, after Heroes of Mana, which was so easy that it felt vaguely wrong, like breaking into someone’s kitchen to eat leftovers out of their refrigerator while they’re upstairs watching TV in bed.

Square has flip-flopped back and forth between utter conviction that the DS is a piece of stuff and yen-sign-irised hope that at least a million of those ten million units sold might have found the hands of die-hard Final Fantasy fans. To wit: they announced Dragon Quest IX for DS, and then scrapped the controversial action-RPG style of Dragon Quest IX because Children of Mana (an action-RPG) didn’t sell well enough. There’s going to come a time that Square-Enix has to untie the bundle of controller cords in their game shelf, to sort the pride from the common sense. If Heroes of Mana, Square’s obvious water-testing DS RTS, had sold a half a million copies (it didn’t), Revenant Wings, blest with a Final Fantasy brand name, would no doubt have received the smothering, triple-A, canon treatment, and the story would be bogged down with children whining about how they don’t want to grow up. Instead, we get pages torn out of the “Dragon Ball” rulebook; for example, we have a character who hates the good guys, yet is forced to fight on your side because of some dopey magic torture ring. The game flow follows suit in charming little lapses of game-design grammar, like how a “Gambit” is just the single action you configure a character to automatically use over and over again, not the complicated yet elegant (and kind of revolutionary) AI scripting the term represented in Final Fantasy XII. Et cetera. Though the final product is kind of gimped out of a multiplayer mode or very much real depth at all behind edge-of-the-moment strategic planning, this is seriously the kind of tossed-off, down-to-earth videogame these people need to be making a whole lot more of.

text by Brendan Lee

★⋆☆☆

“TOO GOOFILY HONEST TO REALLY SAP YOU OVER THE HEAD.”

New Super Mario Bros. was a retail explosion; it racked up the kinds of stratospheric sales numbers that keep the graying home-office octogenarians on Nintendo’s payroll simultaneously idle and employed. Mario was back. Not trying his hand baseball, or tennis, or basketball, or golf, or baccarat, no, but back and in his element: coins(!), Goombas(!!), tasty powerups(yes). And Lakitu!

Hey, Lakitu!

What’s more, Mario was doing it in style: while the Nintendo DS may groan under the weight of all but the most cleverly tooled 3D titles, here the polygons were used with a clear-headed attention to detail and the simple joy of primary colors. The music might have occasionally done that thing where you reheat the classic themes and stir in some Mario Paint-esque farts, and Mario’s constant observations that “ITSA SO NICE!” to clear a stage might have occasionally given you cause for both worry and shame, but all in all it felt like a Mario game: meaty physics that changed with each power-up; classic (yet lovingly reworked) enemies, and the nostalgic sense of gentle fun that made Nintendo an entertainment powerhouse in the first place.

Nintendo’s Japanese advertising angle said a lot about how the company was positioning the release: they chugged the advertisements along on a near-constant loop on the JR Yamanote line in Tokyo, showing a professionally lit thirtysomething playing a bit of DS between (apparently) difficult yoga bends. It wasn’t about the game, the ad – – it was about how much fun it could be, at thirtysomething, to enjoy one of those experiences you’d kind of kicked to the gutter as you got older. There was a brief clip of the game toward the very end, showing how INCREDIBLY LARGE MARIO COULD BE IN THIS ONE, totally BREAKING EVERYTHING THAT STOOD IN HIS WAY . . . but mostly it was about the woman, legs folded on her bed, brand-new (and just released) DS Lite in her soft, soft hands, remembering the splendid pigtailed afternoons of Super Mario Brothers back in the day. And, I suppose, pointing out how great it was to be able to sport Aphrodite’s midriff all the while. I’m pretty sure that much of the commercial was real, at least – – she wasn’t sucking her gut or anything. Big smiles.

It tickled most people in the same way it did Yoga Lady: the reactions to the game were largely positive, and even now it would be staggeringly disingenuous to saddle the game with accusations of soulless cash-in . . . if NSMB is indeed an exercise in calculating committee-belched cynicism, they were certainly able to Febreeze it enough during the QA process so that it doesn’t actually smell like one. Even if you’re having sinus trouble, any such accusations crumble for one simple fact:

The game just isn’t competently designed enough to warrant them.

More than one corner of the Internet has called it the highest-budget doujin game ever made, and it certainly plays like one in parts . . . for every section that sings like the glory days of Miyamoto, there are five others with spaghetti-at-the-wall enemy placement and goofy environmental fudges that are just zany for the sake of being zany. The new powerups are one hell of a mixed bag – – Very Tiny Mario has a fun correct-in-the-air floatiness to him that just kinda clicks in your hands, but things quickly go downhill from there: the Koopa shell is kind of a gas, I guess, but you’re never really given the level design you need to enjoy it. All you end up doing is empathizing with the Koopas themselves: good god, those creatures lead a doddering, pointless existence. It’s like driving the ZZ Top Eliminator past an H & R Block.

The Giant Really Big Mushroom is . . . well, it’s Saints Row right there in the middle of your Mario Brothers, and it’s as galling as it is exhilarating. Yeah, it’s great, the first time: there you are, smashing that hecking level to hecking bits. heck that level! You’re big (literally!) and important, and all of the rest of the level is a bunch of &^#$#ed kindergarten children, ha ha! As crunchy as it is to blast through the level like that, it really starts to strip the emperor: if all you needed was that big mushroom, well . . . what’s the point of the carefully-stacked bricks and lovingly-placed question blocks? Why couldn’t I have a rocket launcher and a hovercar as well? If your grandfather is beating you at poker, why not just knock over the card table and hide his walker on the fire escape?

Well, because the game should be fun to play, that’s why. Getting out of playing the game through a testosterone-and-Red-Bull Frat Boy Jam shouldn’t even be one of the options on the table. Don’t step on the sand castle – – make it compelling enough for everyone to play with.

In NSMB, you just won’t want to, after a point . . . and usually that point is around the time you save Peach from the harrowing clutches of an admittedly on-note final boss. There are other worlds to sneak your way into, but at this point they feel like pointless noodling. You could be feeling up Peach at the drive-in and getting some cheek-reddening nose kisses; instead you’re going through the motions and clearing squatters out of the unkempt corners of the game’s basement. Skipping bits of the game through clever gameplay has always been a staple of the Mario series, but here the options to do so are staring you right in the face, and the whole thing chugs along with mechanical ennui.

Gallingly, you start to ask if the entire thing was a waste of time – – because, you know, there really is no Peach, and she was never in trouble in the first place. Just as a novel is only as believable as you think it is, so too is a videogame: for you to get those little psychological sparks that keep you playing and buying, the games need you to be a sucker for a little while . . . and unfortunately for both itself and us, New Super Mario Brothers just ends up being too goofily honest to really sap you over the head.

It might, however, be a rather fine gift for an OCD-befuddled child who is constantly trying to pull shiny quarters from behind his own ears.

text by Matthew Sakey

★⋆☆☆

“A LOW-MEGATON YIELD.”

I was explaining Defcon to a friend, my arm-waving exposition rising in timbre as I spoke of the elegance, the simplicity, the awful beauty of this game of nuclear brinksmanship, a game where the whole point – where hours of play – really devolve into who’s the best loser.He didn’t get it.”I don’t get it,” said he.



“What’s not to get?”

“What about infantry? How do you place infantry?”

“You don’t. There is no infantry. It’s an abstraction; it brings grand scale murder into focus. It’s psychological.”

“Why can’t you see his silos? Where are your satellites? What about armor? NATO alliances?”

“There are no satellites. No armor. No NATO.”

He threw up his hands. “How is this a realistic war sim?”

“It’s not meant to be realistic, Kris.”

The look on his face told me that Kris understood the meaning of all those words. But to put them in that order and use them to describe a war game… well, it’d be like if someone said “And forgetting marsupial accessibility by variance” to you or me. The words make sense but not together. A strategy game that’s not realistic? Preposterous. Defcon is not meant for people who crave realism, but then, neither is chess.

Here’s how it works: up to six opponents each control a scoop of the world. At game start it’s Defense Condition Five – American military lingo for peace. It counts down relentlessly through Defcons until it reaches One – toe to toe nucl’r combat with the Rooskies, as it were. As the clock begins to tick, each side gets six missile silos to place in his territory, seven radars, four airbases and a whole flotilla of subs, destroyers and carriers.

Then you wait.

Everyone has nuclear weapons and the desire to use them, but ingenious balancing makes that a tricky challenge. Your ability to see into enemy nations – and thereby choose targets – is limited by your radar range and your willingness to sacrifice fighters on flybys. Moreover, the silos that launch your ICBMs are also your air defense systems (that voice you hear howling “silos aren’t anti-missile systems!” is my buddy Kris). They can only do one task at a time, so nuking your opponents means leaving your own territory partially undefended. It takes time to switch over and once you launch, the world can see your formerly-invisible silos.

So you wait.

At Defcon Three, surface navies pound at each other on the high seas while nations maneuver MRBM subs into position off enemy shorelines. Recon flights dodge SAM shells as they gingerly probe dark territory, looking for the vulnerable radar dishes that give precious advance warning of incoming warheads.

And you wait.

At Defcon Two, bombers start to fuel and players assess initial targets from spy intel. The delicious big cities are the principal victims, but clever opponents always defend them well. Your aircraft draw enemy attention with flyovers and feints designed to distract rather than damage. A sub surfaces off your coast to sniff the air, but it’s caught by shoreside radar and eats torpedo.

And you wait.

Throughout all this time the chat channels are raging. Alliances materialize and dissolve, secret promises are made and broken, everyone else waiting for just the right time to screw their friends and foes alike. Defcon One comes and goes, but no one launches. That’s bad strategy… it’s a waiting game. So you wait. But sooner or later, the inevitable howl of a klaxon, the warning: LAUNCH DETECTED.

Someone just blinked.

After that there’s little waiting. From the first siren it’s a race. The formerly quiet screen, displaying only the soft vector lines of a world map, is suddenly illuminated by dozens of arcing trajectories. Most warheads are shot down; full commitment is, again, bad strategy – better to leave some or most of your silos on air defense, wait for the other guy blow his wad. But sooner or later some warheads make it through, and casualty reports appear.

NEW YORK HIT 12.4 MILLION DEAD / PARIS HIT 8.3 MILLION DEAD / SAO PAOLO HIT 3.1 MILLION DEAD / TOKYO HIT 5.9 MILLION DEAD and on and on.

You see, in Defcon, everybody dies. It’s the subtitle. There are no winners, only those who lose the least.

That’s the secret, horrible beauty of Defcon. You’re safe in your bunker playing wargames, the deaths of millions blandly laid forth on your screen. No screams, no fires, just a soft flare and low rumble and that morbid text wipe counting the millions. Everybody dies.

It’s visually stunning. Introversion is self-funded and doesn’t have much money; they know they can’t compete with publisher budgets so they don’t try. The simple, luminous map, the softly glowing lines, it’s a study in minimalism. The audio is even better, like Clive Barker made into music. Nothing loud, no epic symphonies. The soundtrack is weeping mothers, distant coughing, lonely, forlorn tunes – Day After sounds. Score is kept. Your kills and survivors tallied against those of your enemies. It’s macabre and exhilarating.

Then there’s the strategy element. Each territory has geographic advantages and disadvantages; everyone starts with the same amount of equipment (“Africa gets nukes? Since when?” wails Kris) and the same amount of time to place it. Game speed is under player control. There’s even an Office Mode for work, where the game takes hours, so you can leave for a meeting or a nap without having to worry that London will be gone when you come back. For those who want things over faster, just speed up time and watch the world count down to annihilation. Mastering the speed game is an important part of Defcon strategy, since those who play regularly online know exactly what they’re doing. Which is what leads us to the game’s inevitable downfall.

If Defcon were a pony, it would know one trick. While in the short run it’s definitely awesome, it lacks any kind of true longevity. There are, it transpires, a limited number of optimal tactics. Each territory has prime setups that external forces cannot necessarily confound through strategem. In short, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The victor of a game of Defcon can usually be forecast from the instant that one person blinks, because once the launches start the game is, in many ways, over.

Defcon isn’t selling for fifty bucks or anything, but at $19 downloaded and $29 boxed it’s not cheap either. And the amount of actual play you’re going to get out of it is debatable. Sure, there are many gamers, myself included, who will spend lots of hours just killing millions for the perverse rush. Like a nuclear war, Defcon is a fun diversion, but it’s a sprint, not a marathon. (“Probably because it’s not realistic,” opines Kris, wrongly). No, it has nothing to do with the lack of realism. That’s actually part of the beauty. You can’t “simulate” real nuclear war and you probably wouldn’t want to. Introversion’s approach is necessary and welcome, it gives the game a cruel, detached flavor that is palpably effective. Everybody dies, baby. Everybody dies.

I’ve played a lot of Defcon, and I do enjoy it. But I also know how to play and win now. I don’t win all the time, but the fact is its avenues for victory are sharply limited. It’s not bad. It’s beautiful and challenging and quite unique. Depending on perspective, and the amount of pleasure derived from bombing the crap out of the rest of the world, many players could (and do) enjoy the game very much. But at the end of the day it’s not all it could be, at least not for the price. The patina of simplicity, of minimalism, actually winds up going too far.

“We like to push buttons” is the proud motto of this website, and the fact is we’re not too discriminating in which ones we wind up pushing. Our feeling is this: if there’s a button, push it. And if it causes the deaths of millions in the fiery maw of nuclear furnaces, that fact – though unfortunate – really isn’t sufficient impetus to turn us off our button-pushing crusade. After all, everybody dies. But this button, once pushed a few times, doesn’t really call out to be pushed again.

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“THE VIDEOGAME I'VE WANTED TO PLAY SINCE I WAS SIX YEARS OLD.”

I’ve wanted to play Dragon Quest Swords since I was six years old. Back then, of course, my parents and schoolteachers were confused as to whether I was Gifted and Talented or just mentally &^#$#ed, and in such a state of emotional probation, it would have been rare (and probably perverted) of anyone to give the time of day to a design document I’d banged out with a pair of purple crayons. I hardly even knew what Dragon Quest was, and all I could think about is how awesome it would be to swing a sword at a television. Well, I’ll tell you one thing I was for sure back then: I was unemployed. I certainly didn’t have enough money to buy a condo with my credit card, I’ll tell you that much. What I did have was a large forest near the house, and fields and rivers and creeks and hills to play in, me and my brother bleating and screaming at each other with toy guys. That was a hell of a something to do. Ultimately, it was probably better than playing videogames. Too bad we ended up in Tokyo, where environmentalists and educators united to declare in 1991 that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was more wholesome than the actual outdoors, what with all the rapists in panda costumes and abandoned amusement parks we seem to have growing like fungus in the back alleys around here.

Twenty-some years have passed, and any kid in his right mind would rather play Gears of War on his big brother’s Xbox 360 than with some broken GI Joes in the rumpus room. Action figures are, perhaps slowly, hurtling into obscurity — now almost exclusively the playthings of seriously adjusted adult collectors with full-time jobs — because videogames are able to reproduce at least the same thrills without requiring any of the imagination. Dragon Quest Swords is a mutant fried-chicken-wing of videogame design. It’s half action-figure, half videogame. It’s half a serenade to that little boy fallen headfirst into the well of our hearts, who used to heave a giant rubber Godzilla twenty feet across the living room, toward Cobra Commander’s giant purple plastic headquarters, filled to the gills with meticulously posed Star Wars figures at action stations, and it’s halfway just another Dragon Quest game. It’s halfway a joyful exploitation of the Nintendo Wii’s remote-control gimmick, and halfway a disappointing clash of cool concept versus watered-down execution.

A couple of years ago, Square-Enix released Kenshin Dragon Quest, which was, at the time, kind of a shameful thing, though also kind of hilarious, and also kind of awesome. Sporting a box large enough to contain delicious cereal and coated in original art by Akira Toriyama, Kenshin Dragon Quest was essentially a plastic sword that you plugged into the yellow and white jacks on your television. There was, somehow, a game inside that plastic casing. They showed this at Tokyo Game Show — the line to play it was bafflingly three hours long. I took a picture of a guy swinging the plastic sword at a television, and later loaded the photo onto a computer workstation, where I realized that the sword was glowing fiercely white, like a lightsaber. At first, I wondered if the sword had been, perhaps, possessed by the ghost of a vampire, though I soon realized: that’s how the TV knows where the sword is.

When released, the game had an odd amount of depth. There was walking, there was fighting, there was leveling-up, there was Dragoning, there was Questing. It was good enough, when one considered it was a plastic sword that you plug into your television. I first played it with a playground-like delight, then eventually felt a little stupid and guilty. To make a menu choice, you have to hold the sword up, and point it at the choice you want to make, and keep it held there for a couple of seconds. That feels kind of weird; it feels kind of like Sony’s EyeToy games for PlayStation 2 (while we’re at it: why does no one yell at Nintendo for “stealing” the DS’s touch-screen concept from the EyeToy? enough people yelled at Sony for “stealing” motion controls, hell). Though eventually, one remembers those “Captain Power” TV games from the early 1990s: you aim a plastic toy spaceship with a gun handle at a television playing a videotape of hokey animation full of epilepsy-inducing orange patterns that, when detected by your ship’s light sensor, cause you “damage”. If enough “damage” is scored, the action figure in the pilot’s seat is ejected. The thing is, “Captain Power” was only ever just a videotape; it couldn’t assess your performance any way other than negatively. It could only tell you “You Lose”, and never “You Win”. (If we wanted to keep beating off to this rhythm, we could mention Tetris, and how the only things you can see in Tetris are your mistakes, the blocks “left behind” after a successful line-clear. In Tetris, when you lose (and lose you must), you growl and start over. At least Tetris can tell you your score.) All “Captain Power” did, to the kids unfortunate enough to stumble across it at a yard sale in 1993 and beg their mothers to buy it, was instill a kind of gentle, furious justification for rule-breaking: if Captain Power gets ejected, you just put him right back in the hecking pilot’s seat like nothing happened, maybe yell at mom if those frozen pizzas are done yet.

A year after Kenshin Dragon Quest was released, Square-Enix released Dragon Quest VIII for the Sony PlayStation 2, and my, it was such a gorgeous little videogame. It was the biggest little videogame in the world. Like the original Dragon Quest many years before it, it wore its heart on its sleeve, only now its sleeve was so three-dimensional and lovable and touchable. The adventure was huge, the environments painstakingly rendered, and the insides of houses looked so lived-in. The color palettes were breathtaking. The battle system was the same as ever — the same as in all seven Dragon Quest games before it — and no one whose opinion is worth trusting really cared too much, because the heart of the game lies in the adventure, anyway, hence the word “Quest” in the title.

A year later, Nintendo announced the true shape and form of their Nintendo “Revolution” controller. A video presentation shown at the press conference contained footage of an interview with Yuji Horii, Dragon Quest series producer. He said he found the controller quite brilliant, and he looked forward to developing something for it. A year later, the name of the “Revolution” was revealed: it would be called the “Wii”. A game called Dragon Quest Swords would be a launch title. Japan halfway imploded, then halfway exploded. In other words, Japan ended up pretty much how they’d been to begin with, only after experiencing a little quick and drastic pressure change.

Dragon Quest Swords didn’t make the launch window. One thing that did make the Wii launch window, however, was the announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be an action game for the Nintendo DS. The collective gasp-scream sucked the air out of the island of Honshuu for a full three seconds.

Dragon Quest Swords would actually be released eight months after the release of the Wii, though before that, it was announced that Dragon Quest IX would not, as previously reported, be an action game. Rather, it would be a multiplayer menu-based RPG. Half the world hated this revelation; the game, nonetheless, still sits at the top of Weekly Famitsu‘s top-twenty “Most Wanted” games chart, leading Final Fantasy XIII for the PlayStation 3 by some 500 votes, at the time of this writing.

Why did they change Dragon Quest IX back to a menu-based battle system? Yuji Horii said, in an interview, that too many people were scared of it being an action game. Blame Famitsu, then, for running a four-page feature of reader moans and groans.

Playing Dragon Quest Swords, though, I’m not really sure if that was the case. It’s a subtle thing to put precisely into words. Let’s try:

Dragon Quest Swords kind of sucks. It also kind of doesn’t suck. It’s in the weirdest state of flux.

Let’s try to talk about the good stuff. First of all: it’s a Dragon Quest game. It has precisely one town, though that town is big and bright and beautifully rendered, like the towns in our darling Dragon Quest VIII. There’s curious, flames-of-fantasy-igniting architecture on display, like the giant stone staircase leading from the bottom of the town up to the castle. There are shops to buy items, weapons, armor. The characters in town all have friendly faces, and many of them speak in animated voices: this is the first Dragon Quest released in Japan to feature any voice acting, as such.

The story segments are lovingly presented, as well — about as lovingly as the segments in Dragon Quest VIII, plus voices, and delightful midi music by either the great Koichi Sugiyama or the kind-of-great Manami Matsumae, whose compositions are almost indistinguishable (she’s no doubt been astutely listening for years). The story itself is a little (or, well, a lot) thin: you play the part of a boy who’s just turned sixteen years of age, which means you’re old enough to be recognized as a man, though only if you complete the hero’s trial at the dungeon-like cave close to town. Complete the task, and the prince confides in you: his mother has been acting strange lately. She’s wearing a weird mask and seldom leaving her room. Go with the prince, now, on adventures to discover the nature of the mask. On your first hiking expedition together, you’ll meet a big-haired, rag-doll-like Gothic Lolita named Setia, who, should you select her as your questing partner instead of the prince, will incessantly tell you you’re cool and/or strong at precisely the exact same point during each loop of the battle music, in addition to casting a spell that makes your shield bigger. If only I could find a girlfriend with such attention to detail. The full title of the game is Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors, which makes it the first Dragon Quest adventure to name a dungeon in its title. I’ve already told you about the “Masked Queen”. You can probably guess the rest of the story, maybe with the assistance of some crayons. Just because you can approximate its narrative arc with crayons and construction paper, however, doesn’t mean that Dragon Quest Swords can’t end with a nice little splash of emotion. Though when it does, it kind of feels like Dragon Quest: The Spirits Within, taking all the feelings normally evoked in a Dragon Quest game and condensing them all into an easily digestible goo of entertainment. Too bad that the preceding 99% of the game has been pandering nonsense-bullstuff.

Yes: the biggest and blackest blotch on Dragon Quest Swords‘ report card would be that it took me four hours of casual, mostly-naked play to complete. Yes, four hours. I’m normally not one to complain about the lengths of games, seriously. My favorite game ever, Super Mario Bros. 3, can be bested in less than an hour. However, in the case of Dragon Quest Swords, which comes from a long line of excessively long-winded games, the shortness is a symptom of a minor-class disaster. There is love in its construction, though there’s hardly any empathy. It’s the first Japan-released Dragon Quest to feature voices, though it does so at the cost of featuring only a fraction of a story, a fragment of a “Quest”, a mere sliver of the attention granted to other games in the series — though not without half of a good reason.

Tragically, however, the game’s thinness is most startlingly revealed by just how thick and juicy the good parts are. I’m talking about the control scheme. It’s wonderful. At a Nintendo Wii event in Chiba in 2006, the game was playable, and it required both the nunchuk and the Wii-mote to play; soon after, the game missed its launch-window release date. By the time the Square-Enix Party event in early 2007 rolled around, the game only required the Wii-mote. Someone on the team had seen through the bullstuff. Why should you need the nunchuk? You can walk perfectly fine with the D-pad on the Wii-mote (though I’d still kind of wish it was just an analog stick). I mean, what else is it there for? Press up on the Wii-mote’s D-pad to walk forward, or just keep the B button trigger held, and use left and right on the pad to steer. Listen to the cute little footsteps coming out of the Wii-mote speaker! Press the B button and up on the pad at the same time to run. Listen to the cute running sound effect coming out of the Wii-mote speaker! (Oh, wait, it’s just the walking sound effect, sped up. And . . . glitching. It makes a little pop-squeak sound, now. I guess the cuteness is unintentional.) Using this control scheme, we can quite flawlessly navigate the town in first-person. If you see a suspicious barrel, hoist the Wii-mote up out of your crotch and point it at the TV. Click on the barrel, and its top flips off. You got an herb! Wow. It’s like one of those point-and-click adventures all over again. Yeah. You know what this game is? It’s the world’s first FPDQ.

Then you leave the town.

Click a location on the world map to enter a stage. Now, here you are. Out in the wilderness. The very first stage pits you against a bolt-straight path through a grassy field, headed for a cave in the side of a mountain. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to walk straight down that path, straight into that cave, and straight through to the boss. Beat the boss, and you’ll be shown a status report: how many enemies you killed, how many you let get away, how much damage you scored, et cetera.

The catch is, you can’t deviate from the path. All you can do is walk straight forward or slowly step backward. You can’t even turn around. All turning around would accomplish is to make you realize that you can’t fight any enemy party more than once. My first run-through of the game, I was so excited to be swinging a controller at my TV that I barely had time to notice this potential for joylessness. It was more like a creeping suspicion, that first time through. Either way, it spoiled my full enjoyment.

One could justify the game’s design choices, kind of. The dungeons aren’t “dungeons” so much as they’re DQ-flavored “action stages”. You walk from fight to fight. The fights are exhilarating. Sometimes you ace a battle, sometimes you make a couple mistakes. The aces make you feel awesome, the mistakes make you want to do better next time. Between run-throughs of stages, you can assess your performance, buy new weapons or armor, and head back and try it again. Never before has a Dragon Quest encouraged such nonchalant controller-passing, either: give the Wii-mote to a buddy and tell him to try an action stage. It’s a nice kind of a camaraderie, a good beverage-sipping game (just don’t sip beverage during a battle, when your arms are flailing). You won’t mind your friends playing your save file because, really, there’s nothing they can mess up. And therein, kind of, lies the flaw.

In a game with all the trappings of an epic adventure, it just never feels like your epic adventure. The most brilliant way to capsulate this vacant feeling is to merely describe what happens between battles in an action stage: absolutely nothing. You just keep walking. Straight down the path. You may not deviate. Win two battles in a row and then walk backward, all the way to the front of the stage, and you can enjoy a super-slow, merry stroll. You can stand still and drink your way through an entire six-pack of beer, and the white clouds wafting in the blue sky won’t know any better. The action stages, shockingly, are wallpaper. And even more shockingly still, it makes you realize that that’s typically all videogames are, is wallpaper. I could do without the existential dread, Square-Enix!

What a role-playing game (RPG) should do is tell me a story, make me forget it’s all just wallpaper. Japanese-style RPGs take a lot of guff in the game-critique community for being vapid and shallow button-mashers with sub-literary stories. Personally, I’ve always tried to give them more credit than they’re perhaps due, probably because game designers deserve encouragement too, yeah? In recent years, I’ve wondered why the battle systems in RPGs — the oft-criticised, oft-bemoaned battle systems — are always so drab and boring. Xenogears might have been recognized as brilliant, if the battle system hadn’t been plain as hell. What about all these Gundam games? Why can’t someone make an RPG with an action-packed, dynamic battle system? How about the plot, pacing, and love that a developer puts into an RPG, applied to one of those giant-robot action games, or even a Dynasty Warriors-like action schlock-fest? Would it be too much to budget? Game developers would rather divide up the talent: have team A make a slow-paced game with a great story that some people will like, and have team B make a fast-paced schlock-opera that some other people will like. Some people might like both — well, they can buy both. Maybe it’s naive to imply that someone should at least try to please everyone at once. Though really. Maybe if Xenosaga‘s battle system had at least matched the, um, ambition of its story, it wouldn’t be regarded as the most fantastic bullet-train-wreck in Japanese game design history.

. . . Right?

Or maybe it would have just revealed how pale the rest of the game is. Hmmm.

Dragon Quest Swords has a hell of a battle system. Enemies pop up on the screen. You slash at them. There’s more to it than that, though. Sometimes the enemies are far away. They might cast a spell — hold down the B-button to change your pointer to a shield! The spell’s target location shows as an orange dot on the screen. Hold the shield over the orange dot to block the spell. Sometimes enemies get really close. It’s hard to do damage when they’re too close, so use the shield to block their physical attacks. It can get pretty tricky: you have to be looking for actual visual cues. Some enemies will fly at you in formations. Press the A button to lock on to a specific point of the screen. Now swing the Wii-mote horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in order to hit all of the enemies at once. (Some people have complained about the screen-locking, though seriously, if I had to slash a precise vector every time I wanted to take out a line of enemies, I’d have probably not bothered to play through the game. Enix have studied the Wii-mote in all its glory, and made the right design choice.) Some enemies might prefer to stay back and shoot projectiles — like, say, arrows — at you. The arrows’ targets will be marked with little blue dots. Lock on to the blue dot, and then swing the Wii-mote with the correct level of fierceness, and in the right direction, to send the arrow back. The geometry gets even more interesting when two or three arrows are coming at you at once. Occasionally, you’ll meet an enemy that can only be slashed vertically, not horizontally, and sometimes, you’ll have to block an enemy’s attack in order to get him to fall back and open himself to your own attack, and sometimes, these enemies won’t attack you if you’re just standing there holding your shield up. Sometimes, you’ll need to “lunge” at enemies by locking on to their location and jabbing the Wii-mote at the screen.

These are the basic elements of the battle system, and it’s mildly fascinating to see how many permutations the designers can put them through without it ever feeling old. If you’re really good at it, or really bad at it, however, the weirdest little quirks become visible. Namely, it’s not much fun if you’re very good, and it’s too easy if you’re very bad. Let’s put it this way: most enemies’ middle-strength attacks will knock you back for a full five to ten (maddening) seconds if you’re hit, so you can assess the battle without danger of being hit by any of the other enemies. Get hit too much, and you’ve still no worries: you can open the menu at any time, which pauses the action, so you can heal yourself. Your partner will probably be healing you at all times anyway, though if he or she runs out of magic, you can use an herb on yourself. (As a side-note, the menus are great. Very Wii-mote-optimized. After surviving Resident Evil 4 for Wii’s menus, I’m tipping my hat at Dragon Quest Swords.) If you run out of herbs and magic, you can just head back to town by choosing “Head back to town” from the menu at any time, even during a battle. There, you can spend all your money on new armor or weapon upgrades.

The first armor upgrade boosts your “defense” stat from 3 to 7. The second upgrade boosts your “defense” from 7 to 22.

Math fans in the audience: you now have enough information to solve the mystery of “Who Killed Dragon Quest Swords?”

Exhibit B: the sound effect that plays when your sword is fully charged. The sound effect, a radiating “SHOOON”, is something like the mental reverberation that occurs when it’s time to stop delaying and put on the god damned condom — before it’s too late. When the sword is charged, you can pull off a deathblow attack, which is basically a super-strong attack that kills everything on the screen if it’s done correctly. Doing it correctly requires mild precision in a Wario Ware-like mini-challenge. Hit, and the sword depletes to 0%. If you miss, your sword is depleted to 90%, so that you’ll be back up to 100% in no time. Even from this, we can crayon-draw a loopy line straight to a red hand: the better you are at the deathblow attacks, the less frequently you’ll be asked to use them; the worse you are at the deathblow attacks, the more frequently you’ll be asked to attempt and then fail them. This isn’t even the clue, though: the clue is the sound effect. It’s loud and piercing. It cuts right through the heart of a battle, letting you know your sword is charged. In Final Fantasy VII, a character’s “FIGHT” command is highlighted in pink when their “LIMIT” gauge is full. If you don’t want to use that character’s Limit Break, you can just keep putting it off for several battles, until a boss battle, if needs be. In Dragon Quest Swords, it isn’t that simple. The sound persists. Even when the battle ends, the sound persists, even as you continue to walk slowly, stand still, or peruse the menu. It reminds me of this microwave I had once, which kept beeping every thirty seconds after the burrito was done cooking, to remind me, hey, jackass, you have a burrito in the microwave, and it’s getting cold.

Likewise, the game commits the 3D Zelda Sin, and sees fit to throw up a tutorial window in front of your face every single time you meet a new enemy whose projectiles can be slashed back at him with your sword. If only the first tutorial window had mentioned something about all attacks with blue target markers being returnable! Well, maybe it did, and maybe the designers just knew we weren’t going to read that tutorial window, anyway. Again, we recall the mad-scientist-like discovery of Team 3D Zelda: players absent-minded enough to forget that keys unlock doors have probably lost the box and the instruction manual, though miraculously not the game.

What this all indicates — well — I won’t dare put it into words, for fear of being flamed. All I can say is that, maybe, “Nothing in excess” isn’t the best rule for designing videogames. Maybe there always should be at least one thing in excess. Let’s leave it at that. There you go. I’m done.

Okay, maybe not: the simplest way to put it is that Dragon Quest Swords is a brilliant, shining shell. It has some ripe gameplay concepts that could, quite easily, be popped into place in a game of more integrity. It gives me a newfound appreciation for scenario in RPGs — why not just take the scenario of, say, Dragon Quest VI, render the game in first-person 3D, and replace all of the random, turn-based battles in the minutely-plotted dungeons with these clever action-based challenges? Because that would make the game too hard for some people, obviously, and this new age of videogames isn’t about that. We can’t render a huge quest in a game if we’re not certain that everyone will be able to get through it to the very end. Millions of people play these things; in Japan, if a Dragon Quest was too hard, people would give up, and then, when the next one came out, they’d think, “Well, I didn’t quite finish the last one, did I?” If nothing else, these games are balancing acts, and Yuji Horii is a veritable master of the tightrope, a king of the flying trapeze, able to smoke a cigarette and down a snifter of brandy even when upside-down. This kind of action-heavy play is a loose cannon, and it’s just exciting enough to tip the scales, to send Dragon Quest Swords down into the fiery hell of games that just weren’t made as well as they could have been. As-is, the game doesn’t take a moment to flirt with any dynamic possibilities, and just squanders every damned moment of its running time; it takes until 90% of the way through the game for the designers to realize that hey, they can have multiple paths through stages, which are activated by the players’ performance in battle, and then about two-percent more of game for them to drop it altogether in favor of keeping everyone — even Comatose Grandpa — from feeling inadequate. And then there are drop-dead-Square-like, physiologically appalling spots, like how the game doesn’t offer to buy back your old armor right away after you buy new armor, nor does it let you sell something that’s currently equipped (Dragon Quest VIII did, damn it), even if the shield you want to sell is worth just enough to bump your current supply of gold to the price of the new shield. The truth is clear as mud: the game doesn’t want you to be without a shield for even a second, because then you might forget to ever equip the shield again, and when one of the pop-up tutorial menus in the final stage mentions the B button and the shield and you press the B button and there’s no shield, your tiny head might explode. Either that, or because the coal-tar-stuffters at Square got the better of the production, and forced in as much menu-navigation as possible. They — the men who play PowerPoint like a piano — call that “replay value”.

I’m going to be as mean as possible in the next paragraph. Maybe it’ll be funny, though it probably won’t be.

Why it took them seven extra months of stalling, of inverse wheedling, to release this game, I have no clue. They could have thrown it on the hecking Wii Play disc and got it over with. I’d dare to say that it isn’t even a real hecking game. Sure, you can play the stages over again, though why would you bother? To get higher scores? To make money to buy more groovy items, so you can have one of every sword? Or you can be extra daring, and take the secret path hidden in each level. Yes, this would be the part of each level where, after a fork where you’re given a chance to go left or right, you end up walking five feet into a solid wall and then being told you have to turn around, and then returning to the fork. Once you beat the game, go back to those forks, and get your revenge on that wall to, eventually, find a hidden final boss. This kind of OCD just isn’t fun in Dragon Quest Swords, when the only action between battles is stoned walking, imprisoned between two invisible brick walls, unable even to rotate your character’s head left or right. Almost everything about this game, come to think of it, is an afterthought, the only fore-thought being “Let’s make a game about slashing with the Wiimote, and let’s make it straightforward enough for lobotomites to play”. They didn’t put in any, say, puzzles, I guess, because that would distract the team from the meat: the battle system. I guess, if you put it that way, it sounds noble. Though guess what, jackass? It’s not noble. It’s actually kind of pathetic! The developers knew they had a surefire hit on their hands — phenomenally selling console, casual fans popping out of the woodwork — and this whole cancer of an industry is too bone-headed to shake off the “only the first weeks of sales matters” mentality, so the game ends up, essentially, a shell — not even half a game, or a quarter of a game, or even an eighth of a game: it’s a sixteenth of a videogame. Square-Enix, whose last dozen or so “big” games have ended up on the bargain racks, needs to learn, like Nintendo has, to harness the power of the word-of-mouth sell. Because right now, the word-of-mouth on the street is that Dragon Quest Swords isn’t worth six thousand yen, and that word is right. It gets two stars for the gall and the balls possessed by its benefactors, who published a game with a design document apparently written by a six-year-old. (For comparison, Kingdom Hearts gets zero stars on account of the forty-year-old who wrote its design document’s being mentally handicapped.)

Oh, well.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the odd “I’d rather play my real guitar instead of Guitar Hero” argument doesn’t quite apply to Dragon Quest Swords; it’s with the weirdest sensation of guilt that I admit the reason I wouldn’t rather swing a real sword than play Dragon Quest Swords is because I would probably rather play a real Dragon Quest game. In that sense, Dragon Quest Swords is to Guitar Hero as a regular Dragon Quest game is to a real guitar. Puzzling times, indeed.

Another sign of puzzling times: Akira Toriyama’s character designs. Some of them, like the father — who used to be the greatest swordsman in the kingdom, until he lost a hand, which is now replaced with a robotic metal hand, which you would imagine might make him a better swordsman — are pretty inspired. The prince is unlike any nobleman Toriyama has designed before. The young girl character, however, a gothic lolita of the highest distinction, is already being moaned about on the internet: “why must Toriyama give in to the times and make a maid-like gothic lolita character? Has he no dignity!?” These same complainers might have said as recently as two weeks ago that all Toriyama ever does is draw the same three faces. Make up your minds, people! I find the character designs a remarkable gesture; as long as Toriyama’s willing to design characters, I’m willing to have him design characters. I’m not the biggest fan or anything, though hey, he’ll be missed when he retires. Distinctiveness is something games have all too little of and too much of at the same time. If the gothic lolita in Dragon Quest Swords is Toriyama’s way of imitating Kingdom Hearts‘ Tetsuya Nomura, then it’s even more classy than I thought. Nomura obviously got into videogame character design because he was a fan of Toriyama; he asked himself, one day, “What would [Dragon Ball Z’s] Son Goku look like, if he was real?” and then answered his own question, by drawing a cartoon character who would eventually be named Cloud. If art is self-expression and design is theft, then getting better with age requires a pinch of in-breeding. Mr. Toriyama, we look forward to Dragon Quest X, as long as it’s not for the Nintendo Wii. To everyone involved: thanks for the preview. It was kind of fun. You know my number; give me a ring the next time you decide to release a real game.