ACTIONBUTTONNET
2007
text by tim rogers
★⋆☆☆
“A PAINLESS, FORGETTABLE LITTLE EXERCISE IN POINT-MISSING.”
As human beings blessed with remarkable patience, we here at Action Button Dot Net didn’t immediately scream ourselves into comas when we heard that an American — that is, a non-Japanese — developer was being put in charge of Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS. With Zen-like resolve, we refrained from jamming out a pre-emptive review that centered on the fact that developer WayForward Technologies’ previous effort had, for the record, been Shrek the 3rd: Ogres and Donkeys (rated E for Everyone). For one thing, as a group of individuals so convinced that half of the people who do make blockbuster videogames should probably be imprisoned for petty theft, we’re all about handing out the benefit of the doubt to anyone who actually hasn’t had the opportunity to make a game that IGN is going to pretend to give a stuff about. Furthermore, while WayForward’s Sigma Star Saga was, in execution, a piece of greasy stuff, it was so full of out-of-left-field, balls-to-floor concepts (a role-playing game where the “battle system” involves “old-school shoot-em-upping” is welcome, by default, in a world where RPG “battle systems” are normally focused on selecting “fight” from a menu and then watching your dudes fight) that it gets a miraculous passing grade. If Contra 4 is these guys’ chance to work with a budget, more power to them. What’s next, Square-Enix putting a D-team of unknowns on Final Fantasy XIII? Go right ahead! Why not put the development team who brought us Marc Ecko’s Getting Up in charge of the next Silent Hill game, while you’re at it? (Being dead serious here.) Let’s put Darth Vader into Soul Calibur, too, while we’re at it. I mean, let’s face it, when it comes to Japanese videogames, “experience” usually means little more than “an octogenarian in charge”. Well, unless you’re talking about Contra‘s esteemed director / designer Nobuya Nakazato, still alive, still kicking, still brilliant, whose latest two Contra games for the PlayStation 2 were both amazing and written off by critics the Western world over as “not exactly the same thing as the original Contra“. That man — well, simply put, he’s a genius, and we’d like to marry him. Did you know he directed Vandal Hearts, the only strategy RPG you can play from start to finish without getting hit once? (The maps are small enough so that the enemies don’t possess “AI”, they just move in pre-programmed “patterns” to accommodate for the player’s actions.) Here’s Irem making R-Type Tactics, when Nakazato had already made Contra Tactics a decade ago.
Enough about awesome stuff, though, and on with the disappointment: it’s a shame that Contra 4 kind of misses the point all around. It’s got enough flow and enough snap, for one thing, though it really just doesn’t crunch enough. It mushes along. Whereas Neo Contra is the epitome of crunch, Contra 4 is too stop-starty for its own good. Review-writers whistling, yee-hawing, moosecalling, and hi-ho-ing about the game’s “extreme difficulty” need to dump a bottle of chill pills in their tomato soup tomorrow at lunch. What are these people doing, just holding right on the control pad, and tapping the Action Button with the stylus? Contra 4 is easily playable by anyone with a cool head (and, say, the ability to win Virtua Fighter 5 tournaments despite actually, methodically sucking at Guilty Gear) if you shift your damn paradigm for three seconds, stop in place, look at where the enemies are coming from, and rush the holes. Play it like a runningback, not a linebacker, for God’s sake. (Finally! A similie everyone in our readership will understand!) I hated the game, personally, for my first two clumsy attempts, and then went on to get all the way to stage five on my next credit, and lord knows I’m not a rocket scientist. When I got to the end, I was convinced that I’d had it all wrong when I said I hated this stupid game. In the end, it’s not worth hating. It’s just there.
Contra games have always been about sadistic locomotion. Hell, all classic Konami games are about locomotion. Observe how little this skilled player stops in his entire playthrough of the original Castlevania. Now check out Contra III. Or Contra. These are speed runs by highly skilled players, though really, it’s not impossible to think that these games can’t be cleared flawlessly on a first attempt by someone who’s just really good at videogames. It’s a tenuous point we’re trying to make here: Contra 4‘s idea of “insane difficulty” comes less from the actual heart of the Contra games and more from playground rumors — about this game called Contra that’s so hard because you die in one hit and there’s even a thirty lives code because it’s that hard. Contra 4 strives to make a difficult game by flooding every corner of every stage with endlessly spawning, somersaulting enemies and furious blinking bullets. The level designers tossed off each little monsterpiece probably without bothering to play-test them. Let’s see how the jerks like this! In the end, though, the game is missing the fleeting flow and motion that previous (ahem, Japanese-developed) Contra titles had all sharpened into perfection, maybe because the (Japanese) developers had originally conceived the games as arcade entertainment devices, or maybe because the (Japanese) developers just employed a lot of common sense. If breathing deeply and rushing the holes in the enemy lines (while never letting go of the fire button) is how the (American) developer wants us to play Contra 4, however, then we’ll have to call them more clever than we might have given credit for — and then scold them for making the game otherwise kind of flat and bland.
Review-writers all over the internet were able to excuse the so-called “insane difficulty” because the game has plenty of “old-school charm”. Huh. “Old-school charm” is a tough demon to quantify, though I’m pretty sure they’re all talking about the little quippy liner notes strewn all over the game. I’ve removed the game from my DS since playing it, and there’s a copy of Dragon Quest IV lodged in the cartridge slot right now and it will require surgery to be removed, so I can’t check and make sure, though I vaguely remember the “help” text on Contra 4‘s title menu proclaiming that “Arcade Mode” is “All about beefy dudes and spread gun. Just what the Contra ordered. Heck yeah!” (Warning: embellished.) The (black-and-white) instruction manual cringingly recalls fond memories of the over-the-top, rage-against-the-Reaganomics leveling-with-the-kids Konami instruction manuals of the 1980s. It’s like, man, when we were kids, this stuff was hilarious! Now, it’s kind of like your uncle flying three thousand miles to come to your wedding, and then dying on the plane (drug overdose) while wearing a Santa Claus suit.
That’s the way Konami classics were, way back when — stone-faced beef-dudes with spread guns raging against nameless alien threats while their instruction manuals ranged from cheeky to lippy to jerky. Now, the global climate has mutated; scientists and the police have determined that precisely half of the anonymous saps stepping forward to type “lol” at the latest regurgitation of the “eternal battle between pirates and ninjas” meme as reported by Kotaku.com either played high school football or tried out for it. We’re sixteen years away from a generation of Al Bundys who would rather play Guitar Hero than watch John Wayne as “Hondo”. John Wayne never needed a hecking spread gun.
We can’t really blame WayForward for pandering to these people, anyway: they’re where the money is at — all of the money. Still, once again, an innate quality of Contra is lost on these new Western overlords: though it’s exceedingly hard to tell from the first couple of installments, the entire Contra series — big dudes, big guns, big monsters — is a gradually accelerating elbow jab directed at the ribs of American pop culture. Exhibit A would be that your dual-rifle-wielding Schwarzenegger-like hero motherhecker, arms heavier than nuclear missiles, manages to somersault no less than nine times in the air every time he jumps. Contra Hard Corps, with its ladlefuls of bizarre, should have gotten the message across that the over-the-top violence in these games was clearly a gleeful pastiche. It seems that in America, a country where half the people can’t read, 75% of the people can’t locate the North American continent on a map, and 95% couldn’t succinctly explain the difference between Jerry Lewis and Alan Greenspan, it just didn’t get through. Kids genuinely thought that “beefy dude hanging onto soaring intercontinental ballistic missile with one arm while shooting a shotgun with an endless supply of ammunition with the other arm” was a worthy role model, like they were going to be able to pick up a brochure at the career fair. (In the case of Neo Contra, the brochure’s cover would read “Beefy dude who takes on an entire air-force-worth of planes with just a machinegun while running in place atop spinning helicopter blades”.) Years later, we had the “stylish hard action” of Devil May Cry, and years after that, we had Devil May Cry 3, which kids on the internet squealed about: the hero, Dante, is such a badass, like when he surfs on that missile and stuff, though what the heck is with the pizza in the first cut-scene man that stuff is so hecking gay. Lo and behold, Devil May Cry 4 casts a CG scientologist pederast in the role of Dante and a tight-faced emomaniac in the role of the main character, Nero.
Neo Contra, most poignantly, casts a katana-wielding black samurai as one of its beefy heroes. There’s a CG cut-scene (essential viewing) where said badass black samurai cuts a group of rushing soldiers in half with his katana — “Awesome!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a Hummer comes blasting at him full-speed — with a shoulder-thrust, he knocks the hecking thing over. “BADASS!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a group of a hundred men come charging at him — with one vicious slash, he turns them into a volcano of blood. “heck YEAH!!” shouts YouTube. Then a huge, monolithic threat shows itself, and our very black, very samurai hero summons power from the depths of his soul, and unleashes a slash that cuts the very planet earth in half. “TOO heckING RADICAL!!” ejaculates YouTube. The screen grows black. Ten seconds later, we see our two heroes swimming through space in their underwear. Like, somehow, the destruction of the planet earth had also stripped them of their clothes. Suddenly, the internet is afraid — deathly so — that mass media might, as their preacher insists, be intent on turning them into homosexuals:
“WTF??! That was great up to the point those two appearing swimming in space humming. Eww.”
“WTF!? is this the reward for getting overall S rank in the game… are you kidding me!!! I lost my respect for the S rank after seeing this -_-“
“2 gay guys swimming on space WTF!!!”
“It went from pretty cool to real gay”
(Ignore the comments that call the video brilliant. Those people are obviously from the UK.)
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Contra, in the words of its most treasured (and paying) fans, “went from pretty cool to real gay“. This is why an American team was called in to handle Contra 4 — to keep this eternally told tale of shirtless men with large machine rifles as heterosexual as possible. There is to be no hecking with the average gamer’s grip on sexuality.
We could say that, ever since Nobuya Nakazato breathed life into Contra, Japanese videogame designers’ respect for the medium in general has been dwindling into a razor-sharp point. Game characters’ hairstyles come to resemble behives on top of layer cakes; robots crafted by pedophile scientists to look like little girls and wear skirts short enough to show off their panties utter bone-dry dialogue as cogs in a rat-hecking nonsense-plot machine forged by a supercomputer bent on intergalactic terrorism. Contra was too subtle for the times it occupied, and Contra 4, as a bald-faced re-painting, sure as hell isn’t any less subtle. Mind you, there’s nothing terrible about it. It’s not worth a groan — just a little, high-pitched sigh. If anything, it’s nice enough anti-proof that if ever there was a time for literature in videogames, it might as well be right now.
Reading Contra 4‘s Wikipedia page is a headache and a half. Particularly the section about unlockable characters. Apparently, when the original Contra was released in the US, Konami of America, missing the point as they would many times again in the future, altered the game’s storyline so that it took place in modern times. When Contra 3 was released, with stages that were obviously set in some far-off future, Konami of America had no choice — they had to admit to the future setting, and rename the main characters so that they were “descendents” of the main characters from the original Contra. Now we have Contra 4, with its lovingly compiled unlockable encyclopedias on the history of the series, with two playable characters named “Mad Dog” and “Scorpion”, names that were originally used in the American versions of Contra and Super C as the code names for Bill and Lance. Contrary to the game’s supposed “respect” for the series “canon”, they are treated as “new characters”. Furthermore, Mad Dog is black, which is cool, though that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just a palette-swap of all the other characters, for stuff’s sake.
In short, the missteps of Contra 4, on its short trip from concept to videogame, or bill to law, or whatever, can be summarized by this paragraph from Wikipedia:
“The continuity of Contra 4 is based on the Japanese canon that was adapted into the English localization of series with the release of Contra: Shattered Soldier. However, the game’s producers took a few mild liberties with the established canon by integrating elements of the American localizations of the older games. The alien Black Viper was originally mentioned only in the American manual of Operation C, whereas the original plot of that game was about an unnamed superpower creating new weapons using an alien cell. In the timeline presented in the manual and official website, the events of Operation C are interpreted as a previous mission of Mad Dog and Scorpion (the new characters in the game) against Black Viper (whereas the original game was a solo mission of Bill Rizer).”
The inverse erection caused by reading that has officially punctured my bladder. I just did a test urination, and I predict I will be pissing blood for six weeks at the least.
WayForward Technologies said in interviews with “gaming blogs” all over the place that they were really glad they’d been offered the chance to make a Contra game, and they promised they wouldn’t mess it up. On the surface, they kept their promise. Though we kind of wish they would have tried to, you know, make up some actual compelling game concepts instead of gazing at their shoes the whole damned time, dead scared of pissing off people who know the difference between Red Falcon and Black Viper (people who probably can’t tie their shoes, don’t have jobs, and are playing your game via an emulator and a flash cartridge, anyway). Instead, all we get is this lame little tacked-on grappling hook, which the official site proclaims “allows for new combat situations and dramatic set pieces that underscore the game’s adrenaline-soaked pedigree”. Actually, it just lets you slurm up to the top screen whenever there’s a grabbable platform up there, and usually only at points where you absolutely have to go up there, anyway.
It’d be nice to say something, right here, about the two-player co-op, though the game requires multiple god damned cartridges, so there goes that.
Really. Is “it’s old-school” or “bound not to disappoint fans of the original Contra” the best praise WayForward could have hoped for? What kind of world are we living in? For Contra‘s 20th Anniversary, if you’re not going to put something new on the table, why not just release a cartridge with all the old Contra games on it? I’d take a compilation with flawless emulations of Contra III and Hard Corps both on it over Contra 4‘s vanilla remake of the original Contra any day. Thank god MegaDrive emulation on PSP is so perfect! Hard Corps and Ranger X are probably all a man needs, to be honest.
If you arrive at the end of this still looking for the evolution of Contra, look no further than Gears of War. Remember the last stage, on the deathtrain streaking under a blood-red, post-apocalyptic sky? There’s a cut-scene where a subhumanoid alien monster berserker freak charges through a stack of crates. The crates shatter and explode, and for an instant, their contents are revealed: boxes of cereal. With 98% of the world’s population wiped out, someone is still shipping cereal from one place to another. That’s a classy little jab right there. That Cliffy B guy gets it.
–tim rogers
paragraph i couldn’t fit anywhere else: Likewise, when From Software released Metal Wolf Chaos for the Xbox — a game in which the hotshot president of the United States sets off on a continent-spanning giant robot battle against a coup-staging vice president — the internet’s children didn’t go “heck yeah! Satire!” — they went “heck yeah! Awesome!”
★⋆☆☆
“A PAINLESS, FORGETTABLE LITTLE EXERCISE IN POINT-MISSING.”
As human beings blessed with remarkable patience, we here at Action Button Dot Net didn’t immediately scream ourselves into comas when we heard that an American — that is, a non-Japanese — developer was being put in charge of Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS. With Zen-like resolve, we refrained from jamming out a pre-emptive review that centered on the fact that developer WayForward Technologies’ previous effort had, for the record, been Shrek the 3rd: Ogres and Donkeys (rated E for Everyone). For one thing, as a group of individuals so convinced that half of the people who do make blockbuster videogames should probably be imprisoned for petty theft, we’re all about handing out the benefit of the doubt to anyone who actually hasn’t had the opportunity to make a game that IGN is going to pretend to give a stuff about. Furthermore, while WayForward’s Sigma Star Saga was, in execution, a piece of greasy stuff, it was so full of out-of-left-field, balls-to-floor concepts (a role-playing game where the “battle system” involves “old-school shoot-em-upping” is welcome, by default, in a world where RPG “battle systems” are normally focused on selecting “fight” from a menu and then watching your dudes fight) that it gets a miraculous passing grade. If Contra 4 is these guys’ chance to work with a budget, more power to them. What’s next, Square-Enix putting a D-team of unknowns on Final Fantasy XIII? Go right ahead! Why not put the development team who brought us Marc Ecko’s Getting Up in charge of the next Silent Hill game, while you’re at it? (Being dead serious here.) Let’s put Darth Vader into Soul Calibur, too, while we’re at it. I mean, let’s face it, when it comes to Japanese videogames, “experience” usually means little more than “an octogenarian in charge”. Well, unless you’re talking about Contra‘s esteemed director / designer Nobuya Nakazato, still alive, still kicking, still brilliant, whose latest two Contra games for the PlayStation 2 were both amazing and written off by critics the Western world over as “not exactly the same thing as the original Contra“. That man — well, simply put, he’s a genius, and we’d like to marry him. Did you know he directed Vandal Hearts, the only strategy RPG you can play from start to finish without getting hit once? (The maps are small enough so that the enemies don’t possess “AI”, they just move in pre-programmed “patterns” to accommodate for the player’s actions.) Here’s Irem making R-Type Tactics, when Nakazato had already made Contra Tactics a decade ago.
Enough about awesome stuff, though, and on with the disappointment: it’s a shame that Contra 4 kind of misses the point all around. It’s got enough flow and enough snap, for one thing, though it really just doesn’t crunch enough. It mushes along. Whereas Neo Contra is the epitome of crunch, Contra 4 is too stop-starty for its own good. Review-writers whistling, yee-hawing, moosecalling, and hi-ho-ing about the game’s “extreme difficulty” need to dump a bottle of chill pills in their tomato soup tomorrow at lunch. What are these people doing, just holding right on the control pad, and tapping the Action Button with the stylus? Contra 4 is easily playable by anyone with a cool head (and, say, the ability to win Virtua Fighter 5 tournaments despite actually, methodically sucking at Guilty Gear) if you shift your damn paradigm for three seconds, stop in place, look at where the enemies are coming from, and rush the holes. Play it like a runningback, not a linebacker, for God’s sake. (Finally! A similie everyone in our readership will understand!) I hated the game, personally, for my first two clumsy attempts, and then went on to get all the way to stage five on my next credit, and lord knows I’m not a rocket scientist. When I got to the end, I was convinced that I’d had it all wrong when I said I hated this stupid game. In the end, it’s not worth hating. It’s just there.
Contra games have always been about sadistic locomotion. Hell, all classic Konami games are about locomotion. Observe how little this skilled player stops in his entire playthrough of the original Castlevania. Now check out Contra III. Or Contra. These are speed runs by highly skilled players, though really, it’s not impossible to think that these games can’t be cleared flawlessly on a first attempt by someone who’s just really good at videogames. It’s a tenuous point we’re trying to make here: Contra 4‘s idea of “insane difficulty” comes less from the actual heart of the Contra games and more from playground rumors — about this game called Contra that’s so hard because you die in one hit and there’s even a thirty lives code because it’s that hard. Contra 4 strives to make a difficult game by flooding every corner of every stage with endlessly spawning, somersaulting enemies and furious blinking bullets. The level designers tossed off each little monsterpiece probably without bothering to play-test them. Let’s see how the jerks like this! In the end, though, the game is missing the fleeting flow and motion that previous (ahem, Japanese-developed) Contra titles had all sharpened into perfection, maybe because the (Japanese) developers had originally conceived the games as arcade entertainment devices, or maybe because the (Japanese) developers just employed a lot of common sense. If breathing deeply and rushing the holes in the enemy lines (while never letting go of the fire button) is how the (American) developer wants us to play Contra 4, however, then we’ll have to call them more clever than we might have given credit for — and then scold them for making the game otherwise kind of flat and bland.
Review-writers all over the internet were able to excuse the so-called “insane difficulty” because the game has plenty of “old-school charm”. Huh. “Old-school charm” is a tough demon to quantify, though I’m pretty sure they’re all talking about the little quippy liner notes strewn all over the game. I’ve removed the game from my DS since playing it, and there’s a copy of Dragon Quest IV lodged in the cartridge slot right now and it will require surgery to be removed, so I can’t check and make sure, though I vaguely remember the “help” text on Contra 4‘s title menu proclaiming that “Arcade Mode” is “All about beefy dudes and spread gun. Just what the Contra ordered. Heck yeah!” (Warning: embellished.) The (black-and-white) instruction manual cringingly recalls fond memories of the over-the-top, rage-against-the-Reaganomics leveling-with-the-kids Konami instruction manuals of the 1980s. It’s like, man, when we were kids, this stuff was hilarious! Now, it’s kind of like your uncle flying three thousand miles to come to your wedding, and then dying on the plane (drug overdose) while wearing a Santa Claus suit.
That’s the way Konami classics were, way back when — stone-faced beef-dudes with spread guns raging against nameless alien threats while their instruction manuals ranged from cheeky to lippy to jerky. Now, the global climate has mutated; scientists and the police have determined that precisely half of the anonymous saps stepping forward to type “lol” at the latest regurgitation of the “eternal battle between pirates and ninjas” meme as reported by Kotaku.com either played high school football or tried out for it. We’re sixteen years away from a generation of Al Bundys who would rather play Guitar Hero than watch John Wayne as “Hondo”. John Wayne never needed a hecking spread gun.
We can’t really blame WayForward for pandering to these people, anyway: they’re where the money is at — all of the money. Still, once again, an innate quality of Contra is lost on these new Western overlords: though it’s exceedingly hard to tell from the first couple of installments, the entire Contra series — big dudes, big guns, big monsters — is a gradually accelerating elbow jab directed at the ribs of American pop culture. Exhibit A would be that your dual-rifle-wielding Schwarzenegger-like hero motherhecker, arms heavier than nuclear missiles, manages to somersault no less than nine times in the air every time he jumps. Contra Hard Corps, with its ladlefuls of bizarre, should have gotten the message across that the over-the-top violence in these games was clearly a gleeful pastiche. It seems that in America, a country where half the people can’t read, 75% of the people can’t locate the North American continent on a map, and 95% couldn’t succinctly explain the difference between Jerry Lewis and Alan Greenspan, it just didn’t get through. Kids genuinely thought that “beefy dude hanging onto soaring intercontinental ballistic missile with one arm while shooting a shotgun with an endless supply of ammunition with the other arm” was a worthy role model, like they were going to be able to pick up a brochure at the career fair. (In the case of Neo Contra, the brochure’s cover would read “Beefy dude who takes on an entire air-force-worth of planes with just a machinegun while running in place atop spinning helicopter blades”.) Years later, we had the “stylish hard action” of Devil May Cry, and years after that, we had Devil May Cry 3, which kids on the internet squealed about: the hero, Dante, is such a badass, like when he surfs on that missile and stuff, though what the heck is with the pizza in the first cut-scene man that stuff is so hecking gay. Lo and behold, Devil May Cry 4 casts a CG scientologist pederast in the role of Dante and a tight-faced emomaniac in the role of the main character, Nero.
Neo Contra, most poignantly, casts a katana-wielding black samurai as one of its beefy heroes. There’s a CG cut-scene (essential viewing) where said badass black samurai cuts a group of rushing soldiers in half with his katana — “Awesome!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a Hummer comes blasting at him full-speed — with a shoulder-thrust, he knocks the hecking thing over. “BADASS!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a group of a hundred men come charging at him — with one vicious slash, he turns them into a volcano of blood. “heck YEAH!!” shouts YouTube. Then a huge, monolithic threat shows itself, and our very black, very samurai hero summons power from the depths of his soul, and unleashes a slash that cuts the very planet earth in half. “TOO heckING RADICAL!!” ejaculates YouTube. The screen grows black. Ten seconds later, we see our two heroes swimming through space in their underwear. Like, somehow, the destruction of the planet earth had also stripped them of their clothes. Suddenly, the internet is afraid — deathly so — that mass media might, as their preacher insists, be intent on turning them into homosexuals:
“WTF??! That was great up to the point those two appearing swimming in space humming. Eww.”
“WTF!? is this the reward for getting overall S rank in the game… are you kidding me!!! I lost my respect for the S rank after seeing this -_-“
“2 gay guys swimming on space WTF!!!”
“It went from pretty cool to real gay”
(Ignore the comments that call the video brilliant. Those people are obviously from the UK.)
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Contra, in the words of its most treasured (and paying) fans, “went from pretty cool to real gay“. This is why an American team was called in to handle Contra 4 — to keep this eternally told tale of shirtless men with large machine rifles as heterosexual as possible. There is to be no hecking with the average gamer’s grip on sexuality.
We could say that, ever since Nobuya Nakazato breathed life into Contra, Japanese videogame designers’ respect for the medium in general has been dwindling into a razor-sharp point. Game characters’ hairstyles come to resemble behives on top of layer cakes; robots crafted by pedophile scientists to look like little girls and wear skirts short enough to show off their panties utter bone-dry dialogue as cogs in a rat-hecking nonsense-plot machine forged by a supercomputer bent on intergalactic terrorism. Contra was too subtle for the times it occupied, and Contra 4, as a bald-faced re-painting, sure as hell isn’t any less subtle. Mind you, there’s nothing terrible about it. It’s not worth a groan — just a little, high-pitched sigh. If anything, it’s nice enough anti-proof that if ever there was a time for literature in videogames, it might as well be right now.
Reading Contra 4‘s Wikipedia page is a headache and a half. Particularly the section about unlockable characters. Apparently, when the original Contra was released in the US, Konami of America, missing the point as they would many times again in the future, altered the game’s storyline so that it took place in modern times. When Contra 3 was released, with stages that were obviously set in some far-off future, Konami of America had no choice — they had to admit to the future setting, and rename the main characters so that they were “descendents” of the main characters from the original Contra. Now we have Contra 4, with its lovingly compiled unlockable encyclopedias on the history of the series, with two playable characters named “Mad Dog” and “Scorpion”, names that were originally used in the American versions of Contra and Super C as the code names for Bill and Lance. Contrary to the game’s supposed “respect” for the series “canon”, they are treated as “new characters”. Furthermore, Mad Dog is black, which is cool, though that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just a palette-swap of all the other characters, for stuff’s sake.
In short, the missteps of Contra 4, on its short trip from concept to videogame, or bill to law, or whatever, can be summarized by this paragraph from Wikipedia:
“The continuity of Contra 4 is based on the Japanese canon that was adapted into the English localization of series with the release of Contra: Shattered Soldier. However, the game’s producers took a few mild liberties with the established canon by integrating elements of the American localizations of the older games. The alien Black Viper was originally mentioned only in the American manual of Operation C, whereas the original plot of that game was about an unnamed superpower creating new weapons using an alien cell. In the timeline presented in the manual and official website, the events of Operation C are interpreted as a previous mission of Mad Dog and Scorpion (the new characters in the game) against Black Viper (whereas the original game was a solo mission of Bill Rizer).”
The inverse erection caused by reading that has officially punctured my bladder. I just did a test urination, and I predict I will be pissing blood for six weeks at the least.
WayForward Technologies said in interviews with “gaming blogs” all over the place that they were really glad they’d been offered the chance to make a Contra game, and they promised they wouldn’t mess it up. On the surface, they kept their promise. Though we kind of wish they would have tried to, you know, make up some actual compelling game concepts instead of gazing at their shoes the whole damned time, dead scared of pissing off people who know the difference between Red Falcon and Black Viper (people who probably can’t tie their shoes, don’t have jobs, and are playing your game via an emulator and a flash cartridge, anyway). Instead, all we get is this lame little tacked-on grappling hook, which the official site proclaims “allows for new combat situations and dramatic set pieces that underscore the game’s adrenaline-soaked pedigree”. Actually, it just lets you slurm up to the top screen whenever there’s a grabbable platform up there, and usually only at points where you absolutely have to go up there, anyway.
It’d be nice to say something, right here, about the two-player co-op, though the game requires multiple god damned cartridges, so there goes that.
Really. Is “it’s old-school” or “bound not to disappoint fans of the original Contra” the best praise WayForward could have hoped for? What kind of world are we living in? For Contra‘s 20th Anniversary, if you’re not going to put something new on the table, why not just release a cartridge with all the old Contra games on it? I’d take a compilation with flawless emulations of Contra III and Hard Corps both on it over Contra 4‘s vanilla remake of the original Contra any day. Thank god MegaDrive emulation on PSP is so perfect! Hard Corps and Ranger X are probably all a man needs, to be honest.
If you arrive at the end of this still looking for the evolution of Contra, look no further than Gears of War. Remember the last stage, on the deathtrain streaking under a blood-red, post-apocalyptic sky? There’s a cut-scene where a subhumanoid alien monster berserker freak charges through a stack of crates. The crates shatter and explode, and for an instant, their contents are revealed: boxes of cereal. With 98% of the world’s population wiped out, someone is still shipping cereal from one place to another. That’s a classy little jab right there. That Cliffy B guy gets it.
–tim rogers
paragraph i couldn’t fit anywhere else: Likewise, when From Software released Metal Wolf Chaos for the Xbox — a game in which the hotshot president of the United States sets off on a continent-spanning giant robot battle against a coup-staging vice president — the internet’s children didn’t go “heck yeah! Satire!” — they went “heck yeah! Awesome!”
2007
text by Brendan Lee
★★☆☆
“ACTUALLY HECKING TRYING.”
Hotel Dusk is a lot like a mylar Happy Birthday balloon, half inflated, hovering at the foot of a dead child’s hospital bed. It was made with the best of intentions by talented individuals who knew exactly what they were doing; it was paid for by people who believed in what it meant; and it was delivered to an audience who was no doubt capable of receiving its simple but earnest message.
That it comes off looking somewhat at a loss for what to do with itself it largely a problem of a market still feeling the growing pains of 1) what a curious and versatile piece of hardware the Nintendo DS is; 2) how money can be softly kneaded into a product that looks like it’s on the cutting edge of the future, while actually kicking us back into nostalgia-scented King’s Quest territory; AND 3) the concept that a small developer can, with the right vision and sense of purpose and selection of hardware, compete in the innovative space as well or better than those with 4000-Gigawatt Money Cannons.
And so Hotel Dusk manages all these things. The art is . . . well, it’s truly masterful, when you get right down to it. All of the characters seem whispered to life on the edges of an enchanted sketch pad, and damned if it doesn’t translate extremely well to the (here vertically-oriented) DS screen. The use of the touch screen, though a trifle smug and gimmicky in parts, actually makes a kind of forehead-slapping sense in a lot of places (yes, you can take notes – – yes, you should – – yes, the novelty wears off – – yes, that’s okay, because people take notes all the time in life, and it’s actually far, far weirder that we should have been weaned on punching in encyclopedic nonsense codes in things like Monster Party, and then consider it a novelty when video games finally evolve to a more natural way of doing the very very simple).
The writing’s nice – – in the sense that you can actually notice the story and not be immediately alarmed or poked in the ribs by someone overwriting their way through a day job. The music’s nice – – a bit elevator at times, but just smoky jazz enough to evoke a whiff of gunpowder-scented gumshoe.
Did you take notes with the little notebook, there – – when you were wandering around the hotel, grilling the little charcoal-sketch strangers? If you didn’t, expect to be wandering those halls a lot, feeling like the wasted time is all your fault . . . which it kind of more or less is, in this case. There are little bonuses and clever bits – – just like in those trusty old Sierra adventures (LOOK UP THE LETTER ON THE THIRD CRAB FROM THE BOTTOM NEXT TO THE SEASHELL IN YOUR ‘SEAS AND SEAMEN’ BOOKLET AND TELL THE YEOMAN NOW), you get a little bit of electric juice for running your stylus over all of the little details that they threw in the hotel so you wouldn’t feel like you were just running your stylus over little details. Essentially: the picture is painted well enough that if you squint just right, and maybe if your eyes are a little dry, you might just think it was actually a photograph.
Hey, you know: Hotel Dusk is good.
So: why is it at a half-inflated loss? What keeps it from being so absolutely cheerful that the boy comes back from the dead, yells “I WANT CAKE” and wets his sheets all in one miraculous action?
More important than being good, Hotel Dusk is actually hecking trying. That is such a rare and wonderful thing in this industry, when it’s obvious that it’s kind of a failure way to go about things in the game industry – – at least, financially speaking. For the price of one or two conceptual artists you could partner up for a port, or a flavor-of-the-day license, or go out to a middle school and sell $5 maps to the Free Beer Party (Just for Kids!). Instead, it’s something big and ballsy and fresh – – back to the days of a couple guys green-screening up Myst or whatever. All the technology was already there, and the quirks of the system were just waiting for someone to give them a tickle in the right direction.
That the innovation ends up beating its fists somewhat against a saggy-eyed detective romp is kind of the fault of nobody, and everybody. There’s a crazy magician inside of those walls, sister . . . he’d murder for a pizza with cheese in the crust, and he just saw a tiny crack of light through the crumbling masonry.
Let’s hope his wand still has some juice left in it.
★★☆☆
“ACTUALLY HECKING TRYING.”
Hotel Dusk is a lot like a mylar Happy Birthday balloon, half inflated, hovering at the foot of a dead child’s hospital bed. It was made with the best of intentions by talented individuals who knew exactly what they were doing; it was paid for by people who believed in what it meant; and it was delivered to an audience who was no doubt capable of receiving its simple but earnest message.
That it comes off looking somewhat at a loss for what to do with itself it largely a problem of a market still feeling the growing pains of 1) what a curious and versatile piece of hardware the Nintendo DS is; 2) how money can be softly kneaded into a product that looks like it’s on the cutting edge of the future, while actually kicking us back into nostalgia-scented King’s Quest territory; AND 3) the concept that a small developer can, with the right vision and sense of purpose and selection of hardware, compete in the innovative space as well or better than those with 4000-Gigawatt Money Cannons.
And so Hotel Dusk manages all these things. The art is . . . well, it’s truly masterful, when you get right down to it. All of the characters seem whispered to life on the edges of an enchanted sketch pad, and damned if it doesn’t translate extremely well to the (here vertically-oriented) DS screen. The use of the touch screen, though a trifle smug and gimmicky in parts, actually makes a kind of forehead-slapping sense in a lot of places (yes, you can take notes – – yes, you should – – yes, the novelty wears off – – yes, that’s okay, because people take notes all the time in life, and it’s actually far, far weirder that we should have been weaned on punching in encyclopedic nonsense codes in things like Monster Party, and then consider it a novelty when video games finally evolve to a more natural way of doing the very very simple).
The writing’s nice – – in the sense that you can actually notice the story and not be immediately alarmed or poked in the ribs by someone overwriting their way through a day job. The music’s nice – – a bit elevator at times, but just smoky jazz enough to evoke a whiff of gunpowder-scented gumshoe.
Did you take notes with the little notebook, there – – when you were wandering around the hotel, grilling the little charcoal-sketch strangers? If you didn’t, expect to be wandering those halls a lot, feeling like the wasted time is all your fault . . . which it kind of more or less is, in this case. There are little bonuses and clever bits – – just like in those trusty old Sierra adventures (LOOK UP THE LETTER ON THE THIRD CRAB FROM THE BOTTOM NEXT TO THE SEASHELL IN YOUR ‘SEAS AND SEAMEN’ BOOKLET AND TELL THE YEOMAN NOW), you get a little bit of electric juice for running your stylus over all of the little details that they threw in the hotel so you wouldn’t feel like you were just running your stylus over little details. Essentially: the picture is painted well enough that if you squint just right, and maybe if your eyes are a little dry, you might just think it was actually a photograph.
Hey, you know: Hotel Dusk is good.
So: why is it at a half-inflated loss? What keeps it from being so absolutely cheerful that the boy comes back from the dead, yells “I WANT CAKE” and wets his sheets all in one miraculous action?
More important than being good, Hotel Dusk is actually hecking trying. That is such a rare and wonderful thing in this industry, when it’s obvious that it’s kind of a failure way to go about things in the game industry – – at least, financially speaking. For the price of one or two conceptual artists you could partner up for a port, or a flavor-of-the-day license, or go out to a middle school and sell $5 maps to the Free Beer Party (Just for Kids!). Instead, it’s something big and ballsy and fresh – – back to the days of a couple guys green-screening up Myst or whatever. All the technology was already there, and the quirks of the system were just waiting for someone to give them a tickle in the right direction.
That the innovation ends up beating its fists somewhat against a saggy-eyed detective romp is kind of the fault of nobody, and everybody. There’s a crazy magician inside of those walls, sister . . . he’d murder for a pizza with cheese in the crust, and he just saw a tiny crack of light through the crumbling masonry.
Let’s hope his wand still has some juice left in it.
2006
text by tim rogers
☆☆☆☆
“THE VIDEOGAME EQUIVALENT OF A HATE CRIME.”
Here’s a videogame made by a team of men whose strongest dream must be that someday a doctor will prescribe them bacon. Not everyone has the innate talent required to craft entertainment masterpieces, and Saints’ Row illustrates quite masterfully, in the form of many psychological accidents, that it is possible to assemble a room full of three hundred randomly selected human beings, each of them lacking in sense, artistic conscience, and competence at judging the value of entertainment.
The first clue in this who-shot-modern-society season cliffhanger comes in the form of the game’s title: according to the Volition Inc. website, the proper rendering is “Saints Row”. Now, “Row” seems to indicate we’re talking about a street of some sort, a thoroughfare if you will. So how many saints are there presiding over this thoroughfare? If it were one, the game would be “Saint’s Row”; two or more and it would be “Saints’ Row”. The developers at Volition must have left the naming conventions for last, thinking that they would decide how many saints we were dealing with toward the end of the “dev cycle”, and then hire someone to airbrush an apostrophe onto the package design. Maybe they’d even make it a graffitti-style apostrophe, for extra “street cred”.
Seeing as the game involves a gang called the “Saints”, I take it that the title is supposed to be rendered “Saints’ Row”, so I will call it thus in this review. Volition should pay me a proofreader’s fee. At New York rates, what I just did here, in the back of my head, is worth six dollars.
I’m not going to deride the developers’ choice to let players make their own characters. In the end, it doesn’t matter. My character is a vaguely Hispanic looking white man of imploding anorexia and soppy cornrows. His facial hair looks like someone applied it with Mario Paint. He looks like a wet rat at a job interview, minus a stack of A4-sized print-outs bearing the names and URLs of all the Wikipedia articles he’s contributed to. Hey, it was either this or make “‘Before’ Jared” from the Subway commercials, now African-American and with purple hair. (You know, I ate lunch with Jared in high school, a couple of times. He was my big brother’s best friend. He graduated two years ahead of me. My brother was into kung-fu. He once beat the stuff out of some kid who threw a rock at Jared after school. No kidding.)
The game lets you make your own character because it wants you to identify with the character. Right at the beginning, your creation is standing on a street corner in a magic city where everyone has access to violence, and he gets meaninglessly gunned down by thugs riding a gaudy automobile, probably because he looks like Boy George wearing FUBU by order of a witness protection program, and that stuff just don’t belong in our hood. Some other gangsters, in purple, show up and heck up the motherheckers who just tried to heck you the heck up. They blast those motherheckers. You’re rescued by a man in a backward hat, voiced by a black actor I think I’ve seen before in a movie that wasn’t very good. He helps you up and takes you in to his gang, the Saints, who are dedicated to cleaning up the streets by murdering anyone who even thinks once about murdering anyone else. They want to clean up the drugs, and the gangs, and the hookers — the cops in this town aren’t worth stuff, we’re told, and stuff, that means we can blow up a car and probably not be chased around like in Grand Theft Auto. Shit yeah!
Previous games have used perhaps-political authority figures as thug-blasters: Final Fight, for example, stars Mayor Mike Haggar, former pro-wrestler (in the 80s, it seemed like such casual, hilarious irreverence), who will kill any pixelated sons of bitches between him and his kidnapped daughter. Now that we’re putting this sort of thing into 3D, with realistic vehicle physics and “evolutionary” (their words) aiming controls for gun firing — now that there’s voice acting by the Hollywood B-Team, it feels kind of fake and breathtakingly insulting. There’s a tiny twinge of subtext that a fourteen-year-old boy could pick up on if he was lucky enough to not have a distracting erection during world history class yesterday — that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that this leader-guy might possess ulterior motives for wanting to kill the other gangs. Still, that’s neither here nor there — the gang underlings listen to this man like church attendees. They behold him as a walking religion.
So when I’m on a mission, and I feel like shooting an old woman in the head for no reason, and my partner — indicated in cut-scenes as the most devout follower of the gang — pulls out his gun and starts shooting the police instead of turning me in for being a raving psychopath, hundreds of red flags fly up in the back of my brain. I don’t even get a “Dude, that’s not cool!” out of the guy. I punch an innocent pedestrian on the street, and my man whips out his pistol when the pedestrian throws a single punch back. How hard is it to program these AI scripts? Why wouldn’t my guy, I don’t know, punch me, scream at me, pull out his gun and shoot me in the kneecaps, call the cops, or something?
The game is an acrobat when it comes to tripping over itself. On the one hand, the street-cleaning Saints are a gang of religious proportions; on the other hand, when the police are following you for doing something you shouldn’t do in real life, the way you clear your criminal rating is by driving your car through a drive-thru church. In Grand Theft Auto, you drive into a seedy auto shop and get your car painted a different color, and the license plates changed. Here, you ask forgiveness at a drive-thru church, and “donate” them some money. Get it? Ha ha! Religion is a commodity, get it? Get it? The game is just a skin for Grand Theft Auto, made by people who thought that putting an FPS-style right-analog-stick gun aiming system (very nice, actually) and some crunchier vehicle physics (again, pretty nice, good sense of weight) into it would suffice for “innovation”.
Yet it is the dynamic physics of the game that commit its greatest act of evil. When a realistic innocent human is murdered in cold blood in the street, his corpse disappears within one click of a watch’s second hand. However, when your character purchases a soft drink from a restaurant (absolutely unthinkingly named “Freckle Bitch’s” — yeah, profanity in the name of a fast-food restaurant! that’s right around the corner! let’s get in on that one on the ground floor!), and then drinks that soft drink, and then litters the empty cup on the ground, the cup rolls around for a full thirty seconds. That’s the developers saying, “Hey, we hired guys to work out that physics engine! We’re not going to waste that research!” If pressed in an interview, someone in charge of decision-making in this game could say that the corpses disappear so that players can’t be overly cruel by continuing to pop caps in the dead person’s head and/or ass and watching the corpse flinch realistically. A skilled interviewer would then ask them why they let you kill innocent people at all, and the interviewee would reply that they want the players to “have fun” and/or “enjoy themselves” and/or “express themselves” through the videogame, which is a hell of an audacious answer. I’d say, when there’s no better way to have fun or enjoy yourself or express yourself in a game than by destroying the people-shaped targets the game does not explicitly ask you to destroy, then maybe your game is just a big empty husk, as cheap and tacky as the Styrofoam sculpture of the history of hip-hop that makes up its soundtrack.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for one, stars a young man whose mother has been killed. When he starts getting revenge, he has a reason. All we know about him is that he left his hometown because he was tired of gang violence. He comes back when the violence claims his moms, and he wants to heck up the heckers that hecked his moms up. Good enough reason. If Carl “CJ” Johnson slays a hooker in his quest for revenge, it’s just something that happens. It’s a tendency within him as an angry, wronged young person; it’s your choice to bring it out in him, you sick heck, you. If you want to play San Andreas as a story of an honest man getting revenge for the death of his moms and subsequently getting caught neck-deep in some serious stuff, you can do that. You are playing a role. You are free to interpret it as you will. In Saints’ Row, you’re a blank slate who gets knocked on his ass in a drive-by. Maybe this blank slate is a raving psychotic motherhecker who had just never been privy to a stash of weaponry the likes of which the Saints’ gang possesses. That’s all well and good: that the characters in the game are not appropriately shocked and/or appalled when you do horrible things is something of a mortal sin.
I am a liberal enough person to admit that, if I had an identical twin sister and if she wasn’t actively repulsive I’d probably have had at least cooperative oral sex with her by now, so when I say that you have no idea quite how deeply your game offends me, you should know that you’re in deep stuff. How dare you put this presumptuous trash out on the market. Quit your jobs producing entertainment software, abandon the lucky break that scored you a “connection” to the “industry”, and take up a job at a Denny’s or a Starbucks, to see what real people look like and how they walk and how they gesture with their hands.
Or maybe the problem’s not you. Maybe it’s the whole hecking “industry”. Or maybe it’s not. Though Rockstar, who shat the gold brick called Grand Theft Auto, has begun to use their “sandbox” genre as a rough outline, a checklist of “things one can do, if so inclined, in 3D action videogames”, on which to base more dynamic levels of storytelling — as evidenced in 2006’s conceptually excellent Bully — the rest of the world seems to be turning the wrong way. Why, in Saints’ Row, there’s a mission early on where you have to kill “evil pimps” to steal their hos for another pimp, a good pimp, who also happens to be friends with your gang, which, yes, is a gang devoted to killing all of the other gangs as a means of “cleaning up the streets”. It’s obvious at this point that the “story” of Saints’ Row was shunted in at the latest possible moment, and that the ho-snatching mission was drafted during a meeting in which some coke-fiend producer jumped up and down on the boardroom table with his polka-dot necktie clipped uncomfortably to a wrinkle on his forehead: “GTA lets you pimp hos! We need to let you pimp hos! GTA lets you pimp hos! Let’s let players pimp some hos!”
Where Volition hangs its fuzzy hat, the gene pool is heated to the temperature of a cesspool. Within the marble halls of its psychological accident of game development, a man actually speaks the words “Complete missions to earn respect. Fill your respect meter to unlock more missions.” Yes, he actually uses the word “unlock” with regard to content existing in the game world he occupies. On another corner of this cube-shaped world called the videogame industry, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas opens with a difficulty selection screen: “Difficulty select: Select the difficulty level of the game: NORMAL / REALISTIC”. Witness this and feel years of current events rip from the top of your skull to the soles of your feet, like rollercoaster g-forces. The War in Iraq, the grin of the current mongrel president of America, the shootings in Columbine, foaming media feeding frenzies smothering out the sparks of introspection that might have had the chance to fan into a bonfire of renaissance, Jack Thompson. “REALITY IS NOT NORMAL”, games are saying, in a sideways subliminal way.
Could you imagine a dramatic television show about a rugged cop, a great man at heart, maybe one whose wife had been gunned down by thugs, who lives only to drink whiskey, eat at the same sad diner every golden sunlit morning, and keep the streets clean — who, for some reason, the sixth episode in, pulls out his gun, fires it out the window of his patrol car, and kills a young boy riding a bike, only to have his partner keep rattling on about the drug dealer they’re looking for, only to have the writers seem to forget such a thing happened and let the show go on through eight more Emmy-winning seasons? Of course you can’t. It’d be hecking &^#$#ed, disgusting. It’s not even the senseless violence that gets my goat: it’s the internal inconsistency. It’s the complete and utter lack of artistic conscience. At least, whether you can admit that “American Idol” is actually beneficial to society or not, you have to agree with me that the television and film industries currently possess many more individuals able to competently judge the worth content than the videogame industry has perhaps ever seen. You can spin it out all you want and say that videogames are a young industry, and that’s where I flip you off and tell you that yeah, they’re a young industry, though it’s a pretty mature hecking world we live in, and these people went to school, where they very well should have read books about the hecking world and learned just how mature it is.
(Oh for heck’s sake — according to GameStop.com, the PlayStation 3 version of this game is being released on the Fourth of July. Ain’t that America.)
We are all philosophically doomed as creatures that dream because we can’t physically handle being happy all the time; we have to be happy sometimes and sad sometimes; we believe shadow lends context to light, or whatever. I say yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. Though I’d also like to be the first to admit that, maybe, this is a fundamental problem in the world it may take us centuries to work out. In the Zen buddhist sense, which is convenient and kind of a cop-out because it’s pretty much every sense rolled into one, Saints’ Row just isn’t hecking helping, and the next patch released for it should do more than just cut down the lag in the online multiplayer — it should render the disc hecking unreadable by my Xbox 360.
☆☆☆☆
“THE VIDEOGAME EQUIVALENT OF A HATE CRIME.”
Here’s a videogame made by a team of men whose strongest dream must be that someday a doctor will prescribe them bacon. Not everyone has the innate talent required to craft entertainment masterpieces, and Saints’ Row illustrates quite masterfully, in the form of many psychological accidents, that it is possible to assemble a room full of three hundred randomly selected human beings, each of them lacking in sense, artistic conscience, and competence at judging the value of entertainment.
The first clue in this who-shot-modern-society season cliffhanger comes in the form of the game’s title: according to the Volition Inc. website, the proper rendering is “Saints Row”. Now, “Row” seems to indicate we’re talking about a street of some sort, a thoroughfare if you will. So how many saints are there presiding over this thoroughfare? If it were one, the game would be “Saint’s Row”; two or more and it would be “Saints’ Row”. The developers at Volition must have left the naming conventions for last, thinking that they would decide how many saints we were dealing with toward the end of the “dev cycle”, and then hire someone to airbrush an apostrophe onto the package design. Maybe they’d even make it a graffitti-style apostrophe, for extra “street cred”.
Seeing as the game involves a gang called the “Saints”, I take it that the title is supposed to be rendered “Saints’ Row”, so I will call it thus in this review. Volition should pay me a proofreader’s fee. At New York rates, what I just did here, in the back of my head, is worth six dollars.
I’m not going to deride the developers’ choice to let players make their own characters. In the end, it doesn’t matter. My character is a vaguely Hispanic looking white man of imploding anorexia and soppy cornrows. His facial hair looks like someone applied it with Mario Paint. He looks like a wet rat at a job interview, minus a stack of A4-sized print-outs bearing the names and URLs of all the Wikipedia articles he’s contributed to. Hey, it was either this or make “‘Before’ Jared” from the Subway commercials, now African-American and with purple hair. (You know, I ate lunch with Jared in high school, a couple of times. He was my big brother’s best friend. He graduated two years ahead of me. My brother was into kung-fu. He once beat the stuff out of some kid who threw a rock at Jared after school. No kidding.)
The game lets you make your own character because it wants you to identify with the character. Right at the beginning, your creation is standing on a street corner in a magic city where everyone has access to violence, and he gets meaninglessly gunned down by thugs riding a gaudy automobile, probably because he looks like Boy George wearing FUBU by order of a witness protection program, and that stuff just don’t belong in our hood. Some other gangsters, in purple, show up and heck up the motherheckers who just tried to heck you the heck up. They blast those motherheckers. You’re rescued by a man in a backward hat, voiced by a black actor I think I’ve seen before in a movie that wasn’t very good. He helps you up and takes you in to his gang, the Saints, who are dedicated to cleaning up the streets by murdering anyone who even thinks once about murdering anyone else. They want to clean up the drugs, and the gangs, and the hookers — the cops in this town aren’t worth stuff, we’re told, and stuff, that means we can blow up a car and probably not be chased around like in Grand Theft Auto. Shit yeah!
Previous games have used perhaps-political authority figures as thug-blasters: Final Fight, for example, stars Mayor Mike Haggar, former pro-wrestler (in the 80s, it seemed like such casual, hilarious irreverence), who will kill any pixelated sons of bitches between him and his kidnapped daughter. Now that we’re putting this sort of thing into 3D, with realistic vehicle physics and “evolutionary” (their words) aiming controls for gun firing — now that there’s voice acting by the Hollywood B-Team, it feels kind of fake and breathtakingly insulting. There’s a tiny twinge of subtext that a fourteen-year-old boy could pick up on if he was lucky enough to not have a distracting erection during world history class yesterday — that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that this leader-guy might possess ulterior motives for wanting to kill the other gangs. Still, that’s neither here nor there — the gang underlings listen to this man like church attendees. They behold him as a walking religion.
So when I’m on a mission, and I feel like shooting an old woman in the head for no reason, and my partner — indicated in cut-scenes as the most devout follower of the gang — pulls out his gun and starts shooting the police instead of turning me in for being a raving psychopath, hundreds of red flags fly up in the back of my brain. I don’t even get a “Dude, that’s not cool!” out of the guy. I punch an innocent pedestrian on the street, and my man whips out his pistol when the pedestrian throws a single punch back. How hard is it to program these AI scripts? Why wouldn’t my guy, I don’t know, punch me, scream at me, pull out his gun and shoot me in the kneecaps, call the cops, or something?
The game is an acrobat when it comes to tripping over itself. On the one hand, the street-cleaning Saints are a gang of religious proportions; on the other hand, when the police are following you for doing something you shouldn’t do in real life, the way you clear your criminal rating is by driving your car through a drive-thru church. In Grand Theft Auto, you drive into a seedy auto shop and get your car painted a different color, and the license plates changed. Here, you ask forgiveness at a drive-thru church, and “donate” them some money. Get it? Ha ha! Religion is a commodity, get it? Get it? The game is just a skin for Grand Theft Auto, made by people who thought that putting an FPS-style right-analog-stick gun aiming system (very nice, actually) and some crunchier vehicle physics (again, pretty nice, good sense of weight) into it would suffice for “innovation”.
Yet it is the dynamic physics of the game that commit its greatest act of evil. When a realistic innocent human is murdered in cold blood in the street, his corpse disappears within one click of a watch’s second hand. However, when your character purchases a soft drink from a restaurant (absolutely unthinkingly named “Freckle Bitch’s” — yeah, profanity in the name of a fast-food restaurant! that’s right around the corner! let’s get in on that one on the ground floor!), and then drinks that soft drink, and then litters the empty cup on the ground, the cup rolls around for a full thirty seconds. That’s the developers saying, “Hey, we hired guys to work out that physics engine! We’re not going to waste that research!” If pressed in an interview, someone in charge of decision-making in this game could say that the corpses disappear so that players can’t be overly cruel by continuing to pop caps in the dead person’s head and/or ass and watching the corpse flinch realistically. A skilled interviewer would then ask them why they let you kill innocent people at all, and the interviewee would reply that they want the players to “have fun” and/or “enjoy themselves” and/or “express themselves” through the videogame, which is a hell of an audacious answer. I’d say, when there’s no better way to have fun or enjoy yourself or express yourself in a game than by destroying the people-shaped targets the game does not explicitly ask you to destroy, then maybe your game is just a big empty husk, as cheap and tacky as the Styrofoam sculpture of the history of hip-hop that makes up its soundtrack.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for one, stars a young man whose mother has been killed. When he starts getting revenge, he has a reason. All we know about him is that he left his hometown because he was tired of gang violence. He comes back when the violence claims his moms, and he wants to heck up the heckers that hecked his moms up. Good enough reason. If Carl “CJ” Johnson slays a hooker in his quest for revenge, it’s just something that happens. It’s a tendency within him as an angry, wronged young person; it’s your choice to bring it out in him, you sick heck, you. If you want to play San Andreas as a story of an honest man getting revenge for the death of his moms and subsequently getting caught neck-deep in some serious stuff, you can do that. You are playing a role. You are free to interpret it as you will. In Saints’ Row, you’re a blank slate who gets knocked on his ass in a drive-by. Maybe this blank slate is a raving psychotic motherhecker who had just never been privy to a stash of weaponry the likes of which the Saints’ gang possesses. That’s all well and good: that the characters in the game are not appropriately shocked and/or appalled when you do horrible things is something of a mortal sin.
I am a liberal enough person to admit that, if I had an identical twin sister and if she wasn’t actively repulsive I’d probably have had at least cooperative oral sex with her by now, so when I say that you have no idea quite how deeply your game offends me, you should know that you’re in deep stuff. How dare you put this presumptuous trash out on the market. Quit your jobs producing entertainment software, abandon the lucky break that scored you a “connection” to the “industry”, and take up a job at a Denny’s or a Starbucks, to see what real people look like and how they walk and how they gesture with their hands.
Or maybe the problem’s not you. Maybe it’s the whole hecking “industry”. Or maybe it’s not. Though Rockstar, who shat the gold brick called Grand Theft Auto, has begun to use their “sandbox” genre as a rough outline, a checklist of “things one can do, if so inclined, in 3D action videogames”, on which to base more dynamic levels of storytelling — as evidenced in 2006’s conceptually excellent Bully — the rest of the world seems to be turning the wrong way. Why, in Saints’ Row, there’s a mission early on where you have to kill “evil pimps” to steal their hos for another pimp, a good pimp, who also happens to be friends with your gang, which, yes, is a gang devoted to killing all of the other gangs as a means of “cleaning up the streets”. It’s obvious at this point that the “story” of Saints’ Row was shunted in at the latest possible moment, and that the ho-snatching mission was drafted during a meeting in which some coke-fiend producer jumped up and down on the boardroom table with his polka-dot necktie clipped uncomfortably to a wrinkle on his forehead: “GTA lets you pimp hos! We need to let you pimp hos! GTA lets you pimp hos! Let’s let players pimp some hos!”
Where Volition hangs its fuzzy hat, the gene pool is heated to the temperature of a cesspool. Within the marble halls of its psychological accident of game development, a man actually speaks the words “Complete missions to earn respect. Fill your respect meter to unlock more missions.” Yes, he actually uses the word “unlock” with regard to content existing in the game world he occupies. On another corner of this cube-shaped world called the videogame industry, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas opens with a difficulty selection screen: “Difficulty select: Select the difficulty level of the game: NORMAL / REALISTIC”. Witness this and feel years of current events rip from the top of your skull to the soles of your feet, like rollercoaster g-forces. The War in Iraq, the grin of the current mongrel president of America, the shootings in Columbine, foaming media feeding frenzies smothering out the sparks of introspection that might have had the chance to fan into a bonfire of renaissance, Jack Thompson. “REALITY IS NOT NORMAL”, games are saying, in a sideways subliminal way.
Could you imagine a dramatic television show about a rugged cop, a great man at heart, maybe one whose wife had been gunned down by thugs, who lives only to drink whiskey, eat at the same sad diner every golden sunlit morning, and keep the streets clean — who, for some reason, the sixth episode in, pulls out his gun, fires it out the window of his patrol car, and kills a young boy riding a bike, only to have his partner keep rattling on about the drug dealer they’re looking for, only to have the writers seem to forget such a thing happened and let the show go on through eight more Emmy-winning seasons? Of course you can’t. It’d be hecking &^#$#ed, disgusting. It’s not even the senseless violence that gets my goat: it’s the internal inconsistency. It’s the complete and utter lack of artistic conscience. At least, whether you can admit that “American Idol” is actually beneficial to society or not, you have to agree with me that the television and film industries currently possess many more individuals able to competently judge the worth content than the videogame industry has perhaps ever seen. You can spin it out all you want and say that videogames are a young industry, and that’s where I flip you off and tell you that yeah, they’re a young industry, though it’s a pretty mature hecking world we live in, and these people went to school, where they very well should have read books about the hecking world and learned just how mature it is.
(Oh for heck’s sake — according to GameStop.com, the PlayStation 3 version of this game is being released on the Fourth of July. Ain’t that America.)
We are all philosophically doomed as creatures that dream because we can’t physically handle being happy all the time; we have to be happy sometimes and sad sometimes; we believe shadow lends context to light, or whatever. I say yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. Though I’d also like to be the first to admit that, maybe, this is a fundamental problem in the world it may take us centuries to work out. In the Zen buddhist sense, which is convenient and kind of a cop-out because it’s pretty much every sense rolled into one, Saints’ Row just isn’t hecking helping, and the next patch released for it should do more than just cut down the lag in the online multiplayer — it should render the disc hecking unreadable by my Xbox 360.
2006
text by tim rogers
★☆☆☆
“NOT A ROCK AND ROLL STAR OR AN ASTRONAUT DREAMING BIG DREAMS -- IT'S A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SUPERMARKET MANAGER GOING OVER HIS TAXES.”
I’ve checked my Wii Weather Channel twice today, and tomorrow’s forecast hasn’t changed: it’s going to be “Manic”, with a slight chance of scattered “Normal”; so while I’m still here sitting on “Depressive”, let’s do the unthinkable, and talk about how much I dislike — or even, possibly, hate — Wii Sports.
First, though, a disclaimer: do you realize how hecking long it took me to get my Wii online? If you said “almost six months” (or even “almost half a year”), then you’re absolutely right. Well, that’s not to say that I was trying for the whole time. Just that I bought the Wii, brought it home, groaned at the fact that it can’t display high-definition resolutions yet is compatible only to wireless internet connections — which seemed even more backward in reality than it did on paper — and then just let it sit there, unconnected to the rich, honey-dripping goodness of the internet, for nearly half a year. I checked the Virtual Console page on Nintendo’s website every couple weeks, wondering if anything was coming out that I wanted. And then, just two days ago, I got around to configuring my Macbook Pro to share my internet connection wirelessly, and after entering IP addresses and such into the Wii, it now triumphantly works online. There are still no Virtual Console games I would like to play that I don’t already own the original versions of.
I wonder if there’s some psychological equivalent of the IP address entry procedure that I need to complete before I can like Wii Sports. If anything, I’m confident that I don’t enjoy Wii Sports because it’s not for me — it’s for people who either haven’t ever played videogames or people who were old enough to purchase marijuana back when Pong was brand-spanking new, people who gave up on the videogame fad back when no top analyst was capable of believably making the prediction that someday game characters would start to look less like solid white lines and more like people. In Wii Sports, players frantically wave a Wii remote around in order to make their on-screen avatar, a puppet-like human being who may or may not resemble the player or one of the player’s loved (or hated) ones, perform various sports-like tasks. The game opens with three or four steel-handed disclaimers: secure the Wii remote strap tightly around your wrist, be careful not to hit anyone as you swing your arms, don’t wake the neighbors with your triumphant cries of “heck yeah”, et cetera. Though in this reviewer’s humble opinion, most of it isn’t really necessary. You don’t even need to stand up and look like a jerk-ass, like the people on the back of the box, to play this game. You can just sit on the sofa twiddling your wrists. If you don’t believe me, check The Internet. I do believe this phenomenon has been reported in other places.
Here at Action Button Dot Net, we play-test all games we review using a large enough high-definition television situated in the cockpit of a grounded F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and even within these cramped confines we were able to bowl strikes in Wii Sports Bowling, or punch out our molasses-slow would-be adversaries in Wii Sports Boxing. We were even able to hit a homerun in Wii Sports Baseball. It’s really not that difficult to play and succeed at this game without growing a horrifying hairstyle and/or hiding under the sofa and/or flashing a smile so artificially white as to blind the Wii sensor bar atop your television.
When the Wii’s dynamic and interesting remote control was introduced to the public, some keen observers were quick to note that tilt sensitivity had been something that people wanted, perhaps subconsciously: remember your little sister playing Super Mario Bros. forever ago, yanking the controller up above shoulder level every time Mario jumped. You thought nothing of it, back then, and neither did she. And perhaps Nintendo themselves were thinking nothing of it when they created the Wii remote — from the start, their only intent had been to make a “new” controller, for “new” playing “experiences”, and the final design was probably just about as good as they were going to get. I mean, one of the other prototypes showed a “Hungry Hungry Hippos”-looking plastic toy platform with one giant button in the middle, for Peach’s sake.
Sure, tilt sensitivity is pretty awesome. I’ve played a couple demos of Wii games that felt tight and polished and sublimely enjoyable — Dragon Quest Swords, for example — though Wii Sports just, quite frankly, ain’t the future. It’s cheap and tiny; it’s not a rock star dreaming big dreams, it’s the manager of a twenty-four hour supermarket. It’s sold nearly 2 million copies in Japan to date, and it wasn’t released in America for more than two weeks before somebody wrote a letter to Kotaku about how the game had helped them lose something like fourteen pounds, and how they think they could be a spokesperson for Nintendo, the way Jared was for Subway sandwiches. Wii Sports is the weirdest kind of euphoria-exploitation, and it kind of chills me. It’s a little cheap parlor trick, a toy. I went into my Large Japanese Videogame Corporation after the New Years’ holiday had ended, and just about threw up in my mouth when a person I really respected beamed about how much they’d enjoyed playing Wii Sports with their family every night for literally eight days in a row. I asked this person if they’d not found the game kind of cheap and dull, and they replied, “Well, yeah. It was nice to see everyone else in my family having fun, though.”
Tilt sensitivity is a pretty awesome thing, as I’ve said in the above paragraph. I still think that. And I’m pretty dead convinced that Wii Sports doesn’t use it very well. The game that blew the doors off the DS, for example, was Nintendo’s Brain Age — a game about answering simple mathematical problems as per an actual doctor’s recommendation, in the interest of staving off Alzheimer’s disease. Compare this to the over-eager Nintendo DS playable demos shown behind closed doors at that year’s E3: Sega had shown a Sonic the Hedgehog demo with blocky 32-bit polygon graphics and no gameplay aside from the ability to make Sonic run faster and faster by scraping the bottom screen with the stylus. Wii Sports is to that Sonic demo as Dragon Quest Swords is to Brain Training, if you ask me. However, Dragon Quest Swords most likely does not present the “evergreen” quality to sell nearly as many copies to nearly as many consumers of nearly as many age groups as Brain Training.
This review then serves two purposes: Firstly, I’m being optimistic that, despite its great sales numbers, Wii Sports has not blown the doors off the Nintendo Wii. No, the door-blower-offer is still hidden somewhere shadowy, and it’s not Super Mario Galaxy, tear-jerkingly amazing as that game will likely be.
Secondly, I’m going to be pessimistic, though more about myself than about videogames: I’m just a guy writing a review on the internet, and not one of Nintendo’s marketing geniuses, so I can’t fathom what game will ultimately redeem the Nintendo Wii. If I worked for Nintendo, I’d probably make sure that their consoles had LAN ports, because even some people who own HDTVs don’t have wireless routers (ahem!), or else I’d insist on a minimum maximum resolution of 720p for all games, or maybe I’d bring a riding crop to board meetings and slap bald heads en masse until they agreed that rechargeable battery packs and a controller charging cradle were pack-in necessities for their system. (Seriously, I’ve changed the batteries in my Wii remotes like six times now, and I’ve barely played anything on it.) Though you know what? Einstein apparently failed basic math in high school, and needed to ask his friend to do his income taxes for him; piano virtuosos throughout the centuries have tripped on their untied shoelaces while shuffling out for an encore time and time again. As Nintendo is currently the golden boy of pioneering game innovation, we, the loving parents of adorable little Miis and proud owners of Nintendo Wiis and sweat-proof rubber Wiimote covers, might behold Nintendo’s little missteps — the vapidity of Wii Sports, the bleating shamelessness of Nintendo of America’s neanderthal president (seriously, this is business, not wrestling; or: seriously, the guy used to work at Pizza Hut; or: seriously, “Blue Ocean” means you’re not “fighting” anyone; “doing our own thing” means you don’t have to worry about laying “smack-downs” on your rivals — because you should be busy doing your “own thing”) — as dribbles of spittle coagulating at the corner of an idiot savant’s mouth. One day before he masturbates himself to death at the mercy of an issue of Dog Fancy, this unkempt little bastard is going to invent the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, which will prevent cavities and kill plaque and tartar in all peace-loving people after just one dose.
We here at Action Button Dot Net have been under fire, recently — before the official launch of our website, in fact — for writing reviews that accentuate the negative things in videogames, while applauding none of their strengths. A comment on one review bemoaned it for being “off-topic” and “rambling”; I think I replied to that comment personally, with a link to IGN and a well-wishing: “Have fun dying alone!” To wit: I’m sure that kid didn’t give a heck about the game I was reviewing, and neither did I. The goal of this website, as it were, is not to be the “Best source for reviews, previews, screenshots, and news regarding [GAME TITLE]” — it is to use reviews as tools for provoking discussion on videogames. That is to say, if you want a “review” of Wii Sports that tells you everything you need to know about the game, look somewhere else. I merely felt compelled to write something about the game, and didn’t arrive at any other conclusion than this sad realization: “This game is not for me. It’s not for me because I’ve played too many videogames, and seen what they can do.” If the game were a gateway drug pointing the way to a lifetime of substance abuse, it’d probably be Pixy Stix.
Let’s get critical for just a moment, though: the graphics kind of do suck. I’m not saying that I hate the way the Mii characters look, because hey, artistic expression and whatnot. Instead, I’ll say that the colors are washed out and acutely drab. The music is bouncy samba-pop trash. And, to reiterate, the gameplay is vapid and weirdly self-important. For example, in Wii Sports Tennis, where your onscreen avatar moves entirely on his or her own, all you can control is the swinging of the racket — of course, done by shaking the remote. You can do backhands or forehands, apparently, and you can (kind of) control the strength of your swing. I’ve pored over it for over five hours, however, and still don’t quite find the execution delicate enough to laud as triumphant. I can play the game seated on my sofa with a hand on my crotch, and still not lose. So why does the game split the screen when you’re playing with two or more players? The immediate answer is “So each player can see the game from his own perspective, and choose between backhand and forehand effectively.” I get really touchy when games split the screen, especially when they don’t have to. To test myself, I watched my avatar only as represented at the top of my friend’s side of the screen. I had no problem whatsoever differentiating between backhand and forehand. Do normal people not possess the spatial perception to backhand effectively without the screen being split? “No, they don’t,” quipped my friend. How about you? I asked him. I told him to look at my screen instead of his. He won the point. “I guess I can, though.” To be as blunt as possible, I feel a greater sense of intricate challenge when I grab the world globe on my Wii News Channel, and spin it with all my might, and try to grab and stop it on the exact point where I started. (In all honesty, that’s become a great and precious hobby these past twenty-four hours.)
In a way, Wii Sports makes me feel awesome for being able to do something Nintendo’s play-testers apparently thought most people can’t do. In another way, it makes me kind of cringe, because it’s so cheap and tacky that it’s not entirely adorable. Tennis is always doubles, which is kind of hokey, even if you’re just playing two players. When I swing my remote, both players on my team swing their rackets in unison, which is even hokier. It’s enough to make me imagine, for a second, a world where Konami ditches the excellent Winning Eleven series to instead focus on foosball table simulators; where games like Bandai-Namco’s Magic Taizen card-trick-trainer for Nintendo DS are actually popular — that hecking game includes a deck of cards in its box, so you can test the card tricks out on your friends. I say, don’t ask videogames to do what other things can do for you — if you want to learn card tricks, read a book about card tricks. If you want to play foosball, buy a foosball table. Certainly, Wii Sports stands head and shoulders above these two examples, though mostly only because it managed to fulfill its promise without even, you know, making a promise to begin with: it got people together, it got grandma to peel her eyes off her handheld Casio TV and the soap operas within, it got the goth sons and vegan daughters to come out of the basements and garages and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner like they’ll probably never enjoy Thanksgiving dinner again. Each sale of the game represents a flash-in-the-pan holiday for one someone somewhere; it is with sadness that I say that my first experience with the game was not such a monumental occasion, and therefore I can score it no higher than one star. If you disagree with this review, congratulations: you’re far more likely to marry your high school sweetheart than I. I didn’t even have a high school sweetheart, come to think of it — I was a borderline sociopath who spent six hours a night writing letters under dozens of pseudonyms to DIE HARD GAME FAN instead of sleeping, for God’s sake.
And . . . now I’ve said a bit too much.
★☆☆☆
“NOT A ROCK AND ROLL STAR OR AN ASTRONAUT DREAMING BIG DREAMS -- IT'S A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SUPERMARKET MANAGER GOING OVER HIS TAXES.”
I’ve checked my Wii Weather Channel twice today, and tomorrow’s forecast hasn’t changed: it’s going to be “Manic”, with a slight chance of scattered “Normal”; so while I’m still here sitting on “Depressive”, let’s do the unthinkable, and talk about how much I dislike — or even, possibly, hate — Wii Sports.
First, though, a disclaimer: do you realize how hecking long it took me to get my Wii online? If you said “almost six months” (or even “almost half a year”), then you’re absolutely right. Well, that’s not to say that I was trying for the whole time. Just that I bought the Wii, brought it home, groaned at the fact that it can’t display high-definition resolutions yet is compatible only to wireless internet connections — which seemed even more backward in reality than it did on paper — and then just let it sit there, unconnected to the rich, honey-dripping goodness of the internet, for nearly half a year. I checked the Virtual Console page on Nintendo’s website every couple weeks, wondering if anything was coming out that I wanted. And then, just two days ago, I got around to configuring my Macbook Pro to share my internet connection wirelessly, and after entering IP addresses and such into the Wii, it now triumphantly works online. There are still no Virtual Console games I would like to play that I don’t already own the original versions of.
I wonder if there’s some psychological equivalent of the IP address entry procedure that I need to complete before I can like Wii Sports. If anything, I’m confident that I don’t enjoy Wii Sports because it’s not for me — it’s for people who either haven’t ever played videogames or people who were old enough to purchase marijuana back when Pong was brand-spanking new, people who gave up on the videogame fad back when no top analyst was capable of believably making the prediction that someday game characters would start to look less like solid white lines and more like people. In Wii Sports, players frantically wave a Wii remote around in order to make their on-screen avatar, a puppet-like human being who may or may not resemble the player or one of the player’s loved (or hated) ones, perform various sports-like tasks. The game opens with three or four steel-handed disclaimers: secure the Wii remote strap tightly around your wrist, be careful not to hit anyone as you swing your arms, don’t wake the neighbors with your triumphant cries of “heck yeah”, et cetera. Though in this reviewer’s humble opinion, most of it isn’t really necessary. You don’t even need to stand up and look like a jerk-ass, like the people on the back of the box, to play this game. You can just sit on the sofa twiddling your wrists. If you don’t believe me, check The Internet. I do believe this phenomenon has been reported in other places.
Here at Action Button Dot Net, we play-test all games we review using a large enough high-definition television situated in the cockpit of a grounded F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and even within these cramped confines we were able to bowl strikes in Wii Sports Bowling, or punch out our molasses-slow would-be adversaries in Wii Sports Boxing. We were even able to hit a homerun in Wii Sports Baseball. It’s really not that difficult to play and succeed at this game without growing a horrifying hairstyle and/or hiding under the sofa and/or flashing a smile so artificially white as to blind the Wii sensor bar atop your television.
When the Wii’s dynamic and interesting remote control was introduced to the public, some keen observers were quick to note that tilt sensitivity had been something that people wanted, perhaps subconsciously: remember your little sister playing Super Mario Bros. forever ago, yanking the controller up above shoulder level every time Mario jumped. You thought nothing of it, back then, and neither did she. And perhaps Nintendo themselves were thinking nothing of it when they created the Wii remote — from the start, their only intent had been to make a “new” controller, for “new” playing “experiences”, and the final design was probably just about as good as they were going to get. I mean, one of the other prototypes showed a “Hungry Hungry Hippos”-looking plastic toy platform with one giant button in the middle, for Peach’s sake.
Sure, tilt sensitivity is pretty awesome. I’ve played a couple demos of Wii games that felt tight and polished and sublimely enjoyable — Dragon Quest Swords, for example — though Wii Sports just, quite frankly, ain’t the future. It’s cheap and tiny; it’s not a rock star dreaming big dreams, it’s the manager of a twenty-four hour supermarket. It’s sold nearly 2 million copies in Japan to date, and it wasn’t released in America for more than two weeks before somebody wrote a letter to Kotaku about how the game had helped them lose something like fourteen pounds, and how they think they could be a spokesperson for Nintendo, the way Jared was for Subway sandwiches. Wii Sports is the weirdest kind of euphoria-exploitation, and it kind of chills me. It’s a little cheap parlor trick, a toy. I went into my Large Japanese Videogame Corporation after the New Years’ holiday had ended, and just about threw up in my mouth when a person I really respected beamed about how much they’d enjoyed playing Wii Sports with their family every night for literally eight days in a row. I asked this person if they’d not found the game kind of cheap and dull, and they replied, “Well, yeah. It was nice to see everyone else in my family having fun, though.”
Tilt sensitivity is a pretty awesome thing, as I’ve said in the above paragraph. I still think that. And I’m pretty dead convinced that Wii Sports doesn’t use it very well. The game that blew the doors off the DS, for example, was Nintendo’s Brain Age — a game about answering simple mathematical problems as per an actual doctor’s recommendation, in the interest of staving off Alzheimer’s disease. Compare this to the over-eager Nintendo DS playable demos shown behind closed doors at that year’s E3: Sega had shown a Sonic the Hedgehog demo with blocky 32-bit polygon graphics and no gameplay aside from the ability to make Sonic run faster and faster by scraping the bottom screen with the stylus. Wii Sports is to that Sonic demo as Dragon Quest Swords is to Brain Training, if you ask me. However, Dragon Quest Swords most likely does not present the “evergreen” quality to sell nearly as many copies to nearly as many consumers of nearly as many age groups as Brain Training.
This review then serves two purposes: Firstly, I’m being optimistic that, despite its great sales numbers, Wii Sports has not blown the doors off the Nintendo Wii. No, the door-blower-offer is still hidden somewhere shadowy, and it’s not Super Mario Galaxy, tear-jerkingly amazing as that game will likely be.
Secondly, I’m going to be pessimistic, though more about myself than about videogames: I’m just a guy writing a review on the internet, and not one of Nintendo’s marketing geniuses, so I can’t fathom what game will ultimately redeem the Nintendo Wii. If I worked for Nintendo, I’d probably make sure that their consoles had LAN ports, because even some people who own HDTVs don’t have wireless routers (ahem!), or else I’d insist on a minimum maximum resolution of 720p for all games, or maybe I’d bring a riding crop to board meetings and slap bald heads en masse until they agreed that rechargeable battery packs and a controller charging cradle were pack-in necessities for their system. (Seriously, I’ve changed the batteries in my Wii remotes like six times now, and I’ve barely played anything on it.) Though you know what? Einstein apparently failed basic math in high school, and needed to ask his friend to do his income taxes for him; piano virtuosos throughout the centuries have tripped on their untied shoelaces while shuffling out for an encore time and time again. As Nintendo is currently the golden boy of pioneering game innovation, we, the loving parents of adorable little Miis and proud owners of Nintendo Wiis and sweat-proof rubber Wiimote covers, might behold Nintendo’s little missteps — the vapidity of Wii Sports, the bleating shamelessness of Nintendo of America’s neanderthal president (seriously, this is business, not wrestling; or: seriously, the guy used to work at Pizza Hut; or: seriously, “Blue Ocean” means you’re not “fighting” anyone; “doing our own thing” means you don’t have to worry about laying “smack-downs” on your rivals — because you should be busy doing your “own thing”) — as dribbles of spittle coagulating at the corner of an idiot savant’s mouth. One day before he masturbates himself to death at the mercy of an issue of Dog Fancy, this unkempt little bastard is going to invent the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, which will prevent cavities and kill plaque and tartar in all peace-loving people after just one dose.
We here at Action Button Dot Net have been under fire, recently — before the official launch of our website, in fact — for writing reviews that accentuate the negative things in videogames, while applauding none of their strengths. A comment on one review bemoaned it for being “off-topic” and “rambling”; I think I replied to that comment personally, with a link to IGN and a well-wishing: “Have fun dying alone!” To wit: I’m sure that kid didn’t give a heck about the game I was reviewing, and neither did I. The goal of this website, as it were, is not to be the “Best source for reviews, previews, screenshots, and news regarding [GAME TITLE]” — it is to use reviews as tools for provoking discussion on videogames. That is to say, if you want a “review” of Wii Sports that tells you everything you need to know about the game, look somewhere else. I merely felt compelled to write something about the game, and didn’t arrive at any other conclusion than this sad realization: “This game is not for me. It’s not for me because I’ve played too many videogames, and seen what they can do.” If the game were a gateway drug pointing the way to a lifetime of substance abuse, it’d probably be Pixy Stix.
Let’s get critical for just a moment, though: the graphics kind of do suck. I’m not saying that I hate the way the Mii characters look, because hey, artistic expression and whatnot. Instead, I’ll say that the colors are washed out and acutely drab. The music is bouncy samba-pop trash. And, to reiterate, the gameplay is vapid and weirdly self-important. For example, in Wii Sports Tennis, where your onscreen avatar moves entirely on his or her own, all you can control is the swinging of the racket — of course, done by shaking the remote. You can do backhands or forehands, apparently, and you can (kind of) control the strength of your swing. I’ve pored over it for over five hours, however, and still don’t quite find the execution delicate enough to laud as triumphant. I can play the game seated on my sofa with a hand on my crotch, and still not lose. So why does the game split the screen when you’re playing with two or more players? The immediate answer is “So each player can see the game from his own perspective, and choose between backhand and forehand effectively.” I get really touchy when games split the screen, especially when they don’t have to. To test myself, I watched my avatar only as represented at the top of my friend’s side of the screen. I had no problem whatsoever differentiating between backhand and forehand. Do normal people not possess the spatial perception to backhand effectively without the screen being split? “No, they don’t,” quipped my friend. How about you? I asked him. I told him to look at my screen instead of his. He won the point. “I guess I can, though.” To be as blunt as possible, I feel a greater sense of intricate challenge when I grab the world globe on my Wii News Channel, and spin it with all my might, and try to grab and stop it on the exact point where I started. (In all honesty, that’s become a great and precious hobby these past twenty-four hours.)
In a way, Wii Sports makes me feel awesome for being able to do something Nintendo’s play-testers apparently thought most people can’t do. In another way, it makes me kind of cringe, because it’s so cheap and tacky that it’s not entirely adorable. Tennis is always doubles, which is kind of hokey, even if you’re just playing two players. When I swing my remote, both players on my team swing their rackets in unison, which is even hokier. It’s enough to make me imagine, for a second, a world where Konami ditches the excellent Winning Eleven series to instead focus on foosball table simulators; where games like Bandai-Namco’s Magic Taizen card-trick-trainer for Nintendo DS are actually popular — that hecking game includes a deck of cards in its box, so you can test the card tricks out on your friends. I say, don’t ask videogames to do what other things can do for you — if you want to learn card tricks, read a book about card tricks. If you want to play foosball, buy a foosball table. Certainly, Wii Sports stands head and shoulders above these two examples, though mostly only because it managed to fulfill its promise without even, you know, making a promise to begin with: it got people together, it got grandma to peel her eyes off her handheld Casio TV and the soap operas within, it got the goth sons and vegan daughters to come out of the basements and garages and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner like they’ll probably never enjoy Thanksgiving dinner again. Each sale of the game represents a flash-in-the-pan holiday for one someone somewhere; it is with sadness that I say that my first experience with the game was not such a monumental occasion, and therefore I can score it no higher than one star. If you disagree with this review, congratulations: you’re far more likely to marry your high school sweetheart than I. I didn’t even have a high school sweetheart, come to think of it — I was a borderline sociopath who spent six hours a night writing letters under dozens of pseudonyms to DIE HARD GAME FAN instead of sleeping, for God’s sake.
And . . . now I’ve said a bit too much.
text by Andrew Toups
★★★☆
“A HELL OF A LOT BETTER THAN I REMEMBER.”
Well, let me clarify. Like every tucked-in-Aerosmith-t-shirt-wearing youth in the US in 1991, I owned a Super NES, and I begged my parents to buy me the new Zelda game, which I consumed like an 8-year-old consumes Pixy Stix (which is to say: effortlessly, joyously, in a single moment and without a second thought). I completed the game countless times, memorized all the puzzles, and even recorded the ending theme on a tape recorder for part of an imaginary videogame music radio show I made with some of my friends (Jake Millet, if you’re out there reading this: hi! I hope you’re a successful comic book illustrator by now!) From those days, I still remember the game as being great.
But soon after that, the N64 appeared, and a new Zelda with it, which I endured like a 15-year-old endures watching scrambled late-night cable porn (which is to say: eagerly, with great frustration, and with a nagging sense of guilt, ultimately culminating with disappointment). Following this, I largely lost interest in videogames, as the only games which could satisfy my then pulsing adolescent urges (read: Final Fantasy vii/viii) were exclusive to another console which my parents could not be convinced to purchase. In this time I did not play many videogames, but when I did, I was reliving the great games of my youth: Final Fantasy II (as I knew it back then), Chrono Trigger, Soul Blazer, and, of course, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. And it was at this period in my life when I realized that many of these games were meant to be consumed like an ear of corn: the first time around it’s delicious; the second time around, you’re just scraping for those last few kernels.
A Link to the Past is considerably more contrived than either of its predecessors. The original Legend of Zelda (still one of my all-time favorites) was ultimately about exploration and survival. Yes, you could buy items, upgrade abilities, and occasionally you were asked to solve rudimentary puzzles to proceed. Yet even in the dungeons, the challenge was not so much figuring how to get out of the room you were stuck in (hi Twilight Princess!), but merely making sense of where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there, and then actually doing it without dying. The overworld was laid out to encourage an order of playing the dungeons without forcing one. The idea of gaining new abilities which then “unlocked” other areas of the gameworld did not exist so concretely in the minds of game developers in that era.
The Legend of Zelda, like many early NES games, is not very fair. You are often thrown into situations that, thanks to unpolished controls, would inevitably rob you of a few hearts, regardless of your valiance. And so it is: once you know the route, you must buckle down, maybe buy a potion, and hope to survive the gauntlet between you and that precious, glowing triangle hiding in the dungeon’s bowels. Those desperate moments, lost deep within the maze, with nothing but your sword, boomerang, and wits, down to your last heart, are still among the most cathartic found in any videogame made since.
Link to the Past is a game of revision. Unlike Zelda II, it largely retains the framework of first game. It polishes what needs polishing, and expands upon what needs expanding upon. The controls are smooth and the combat is fair. Instead of Zelda‘s barren, abandoned overworld, the Hyrule of Link to the Past is a place where people live and things happen. There is a village, and there are country homes, and occasional scenes of dialogue. In the place of Zelda‘s winding, war-of-attrition dungeons are dungeons which are self-consciously puzzles. There is a much wider variety of switches, keys, and trap doors; often the layout of the dungeon is itself a puzzle.
These are the things that I pondered when other people my age were busy experimenting with booze and loose women. The problem was, my 17 year old self reasoned, once you knew how to kill each enemy, and once you know the secret to each dungeon, there’s no thrill left. If the first playthrough is rote memorization, subsequent ones are rote repetition. Why bother?
I decided to start a band, myself.
Well, now, fifteen years after the game’s release, seven after the birth of my ill-fated music career, and (perhaps more importantly), three major Zelda installments later, I play the game with a bit more perspective. My 17-year-old self’s criticisms are perfectly valid, but they overlook some important virtues.
For one, this is a dramatic game. While The Legend of Zelda begins with a man warning you to use a sword or face your death, Link to the Past opens with a lengthy, atmospheric sequence in which you hear a captured princess speak to you in your dreams, witness the death your uncle, and sneak your way into a well-guarded castle as rain falls from the midnight sky; by the time this sequence is over, you will have valiantly fought through those guards, rescued the princess, and led to her to safety, only to find yourself faced with the task of clearing your name for being her kidnapper. Thanks, however, to Dark Forces At Work, this can never be, and only by unraveling and fulfilling a Great Legend can things be set right.
On the one hand, yes this is obnoxious. Shouldn’t playing the game be motivation unto itself? After all, unless you actually had the patience to wait for the less-than-inspirational introductory scrolling text on the title screen, the original Zelda doesn’t even tell you where you are or what you are doing, and yet we still found it within ourselves to face that game’s challenges. On the other hand, though, the way Link to the Past drops you in the middle of a compelling dramatic situation is infinitely preferable to the way the subsequent games have started. Following the mysterious telepathic commands of a damsel in distress is indescribably more compelling than farting around a village for two hours wondering whose arbitrary whims you’ll have to satisfy just to progress the plot. That Link to the Past manages to maintain this kind of motivation throughout the game is simply because its inhabitants rarely, if ever, assume you have nothing better to do than perform an inane favor for them. Yes, heart containers are broken into pieces here, but at least they are tucked away in caved-in caverns and forgotten forest groves, where they belong.
While the game is indeed easy, it’s not that easy. There’s a lot of nuance and trickiness to killing the enemies. This is important: if you stop paying close attention, you will die. Thanks to fairies, bottles, and a bug catching net, you are granted a bit more leeway. But successful combat is thankfully not solely a matter of holding Z and bashing A. In the game’s lengthier, more convoluted dungeons, those few slip ups you occasionally make start to add up.
Here’s another hidden virtue cast into sharp relief by the Church of Latter Day Zelda: the game’s overworld design is really, really great. I understand, of course, that Ocarina of Time‘s wide open fields are perhaps closer to Miyamoto’s original vision than the screen-by-screen setpieces of the original games. But honestly: once you get past the “whoa” factor of seeing Hyrule Field for the first time, what, really, do you have? A big empty space that’s confusing to navigate without giving you anything to sink your teeth into in the meantime. The screen by screen layout of the first game is more mechanical, yet it’s also more memorable; and then Link to the Past outdoes even it by not only having screens which are, in fact, larger than the screen, but by having two alternate versions of the overworld with subtle (but often crucial) differences.
The layout of Link to the Past‘s Hyrule is open yet populated with enough landscape and locales to keep things interesting. Between any two points you have a variety of routes, divided by river, lake, forest, and rock structures; as you gain equipment, it generally only means new paths are opened up instead of new areas. Exploring the world, then, is not determined by how much the designer wants to you see at that given time, but instead by how motivated you are to find it. As you progress, new abilities subtly redefine the layout. The light/dark world mechanic, in addition to injecting the game with some much-needed atmosphere (as well as a heckin’ badass musical theme), deepens your methods of exploration. It’s possible to switch from dark world to light at will, and if you’re observant enough, you’ll take advantage of that trick to find even more shortcuts and hidden places.
All the little things this game does well make it seem so elegant compared to the beast the series has become since then. While it’s more talkative and assertive than the original classic, it’s ultimately an understated game. What’s more, the basic compelling elements are still intact: you’ve still got those white-knuckle moments when you’re down to your last few hits, and every encounter is a matter of life and death, and if only you could survive a few more screens you might find a fairy or at least a few hearts; they just come a little later in the game. You’ve still got that sense of wonder and exploration, and the satisfying feeling of finding a new shortcut or realizing the ways different areas connect; they’re just stretched over a greater period of time. What the game loses in intensity it gains in subtlety, all while maintaining the essential flavor of the original. While Link to the Past is still low on my own personal ranked list of Zelda games (I still prefer the rawness of the NES original, the gloomy atmosphere of the sequel, and the dreamlike goofiness of the Gameboy iteration), it succeeds in being epic in scope without ever ceasing to be compelling moment-to-moment. In light of where the series has gone since, this achievement is more praise-worthy than ever.
★★★☆
“A HELL OF A LOT BETTER THAN I REMEMBER.”
Well, let me clarify. Like every tucked-in-Aerosmith-t-shirt-wearing youth in the US in 1991, I owned a Super NES, and I begged my parents to buy me the new Zelda game, which I consumed like an 8-year-old consumes Pixy Stix (which is to say: effortlessly, joyously, in a single moment and without a second thought). I completed the game countless times, memorized all the puzzles, and even recorded the ending theme on a tape recorder for part of an imaginary videogame music radio show I made with some of my friends (Jake Millet, if you’re out there reading this: hi! I hope you’re a successful comic book illustrator by now!) From those days, I still remember the game as being great.
But soon after that, the N64 appeared, and a new Zelda with it, which I endured like a 15-year-old endures watching scrambled late-night cable porn (which is to say: eagerly, with great frustration, and with a nagging sense of guilt, ultimately culminating with disappointment). Following this, I largely lost interest in videogames, as the only games which could satisfy my then pulsing adolescent urges (read: Final Fantasy vii/viii) were exclusive to another console which my parents could not be convinced to purchase. In this time I did not play many videogames, but when I did, I was reliving the great games of my youth: Final Fantasy II (as I knew it back then), Chrono Trigger, Soul Blazer, and, of course, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. And it was at this period in my life when I realized that many of these games were meant to be consumed like an ear of corn: the first time around it’s delicious; the second time around, you’re just scraping for those last few kernels.
A Link to the Past is considerably more contrived than either of its predecessors. The original Legend of Zelda (still one of my all-time favorites) was ultimately about exploration and survival. Yes, you could buy items, upgrade abilities, and occasionally you were asked to solve rudimentary puzzles to proceed. Yet even in the dungeons, the challenge was not so much figuring how to get out of the room you were stuck in (hi Twilight Princess!), but merely making sense of where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there, and then actually doing it without dying. The overworld was laid out to encourage an order of playing the dungeons without forcing one. The idea of gaining new abilities which then “unlocked” other areas of the gameworld did not exist so concretely in the minds of game developers in that era.
The Legend of Zelda, like many early NES games, is not very fair. You are often thrown into situations that, thanks to unpolished controls, would inevitably rob you of a few hearts, regardless of your valiance. And so it is: once you know the route, you must buckle down, maybe buy a potion, and hope to survive the gauntlet between you and that precious, glowing triangle hiding in the dungeon’s bowels. Those desperate moments, lost deep within the maze, with nothing but your sword, boomerang, and wits, down to your last heart, are still among the most cathartic found in any videogame made since.
Link to the Past is a game of revision. Unlike Zelda II, it largely retains the framework of first game. It polishes what needs polishing, and expands upon what needs expanding upon. The controls are smooth and the combat is fair. Instead of Zelda‘s barren, abandoned overworld, the Hyrule of Link to the Past is a place where people live and things happen. There is a village, and there are country homes, and occasional scenes of dialogue. In the place of Zelda‘s winding, war-of-attrition dungeons are dungeons which are self-consciously puzzles. There is a much wider variety of switches, keys, and trap doors; often the layout of the dungeon is itself a puzzle.
These are the things that I pondered when other people my age were busy experimenting with booze and loose women. The problem was, my 17 year old self reasoned, once you knew how to kill each enemy, and once you know the secret to each dungeon, there’s no thrill left. If the first playthrough is rote memorization, subsequent ones are rote repetition. Why bother?
I decided to start a band, myself.
Well, now, fifteen years after the game’s release, seven after the birth of my ill-fated music career, and (perhaps more importantly), three major Zelda installments later, I play the game with a bit more perspective. My 17-year-old self’s criticisms are perfectly valid, but they overlook some important virtues.
For one, this is a dramatic game. While The Legend of Zelda begins with a man warning you to use a sword or face your death, Link to the Past opens with a lengthy, atmospheric sequence in which you hear a captured princess speak to you in your dreams, witness the death your uncle, and sneak your way into a well-guarded castle as rain falls from the midnight sky; by the time this sequence is over, you will have valiantly fought through those guards, rescued the princess, and led to her to safety, only to find yourself faced with the task of clearing your name for being her kidnapper. Thanks, however, to Dark Forces At Work, this can never be, and only by unraveling and fulfilling a Great Legend can things be set right.
On the one hand, yes this is obnoxious. Shouldn’t playing the game be motivation unto itself? After all, unless you actually had the patience to wait for the less-than-inspirational introductory scrolling text on the title screen, the original Zelda doesn’t even tell you where you are or what you are doing, and yet we still found it within ourselves to face that game’s challenges. On the other hand, though, the way Link to the Past drops you in the middle of a compelling dramatic situation is infinitely preferable to the way the subsequent games have started. Following the mysterious telepathic commands of a damsel in distress is indescribably more compelling than farting around a village for two hours wondering whose arbitrary whims you’ll have to satisfy just to progress the plot. That Link to the Past manages to maintain this kind of motivation throughout the game is simply because its inhabitants rarely, if ever, assume you have nothing better to do than perform an inane favor for them. Yes, heart containers are broken into pieces here, but at least they are tucked away in caved-in caverns and forgotten forest groves, where they belong.
While the game is indeed easy, it’s not that easy. There’s a lot of nuance and trickiness to killing the enemies. This is important: if you stop paying close attention, you will die. Thanks to fairies, bottles, and a bug catching net, you are granted a bit more leeway. But successful combat is thankfully not solely a matter of holding Z and bashing A. In the game’s lengthier, more convoluted dungeons, those few slip ups you occasionally make start to add up.
Here’s another hidden virtue cast into sharp relief by the Church of Latter Day Zelda: the game’s overworld design is really, really great. I understand, of course, that Ocarina of Time‘s wide open fields are perhaps closer to Miyamoto’s original vision than the screen-by-screen setpieces of the original games. But honestly: once you get past the “whoa” factor of seeing Hyrule Field for the first time, what, really, do you have? A big empty space that’s confusing to navigate without giving you anything to sink your teeth into in the meantime. The screen by screen layout of the first game is more mechanical, yet it’s also more memorable; and then Link to the Past outdoes even it by not only having screens which are, in fact, larger than the screen, but by having two alternate versions of the overworld with subtle (but often crucial) differences.
The layout of Link to the Past‘s Hyrule is open yet populated with enough landscape and locales to keep things interesting. Between any two points you have a variety of routes, divided by river, lake, forest, and rock structures; as you gain equipment, it generally only means new paths are opened up instead of new areas. Exploring the world, then, is not determined by how much the designer wants to you see at that given time, but instead by how motivated you are to find it. As you progress, new abilities subtly redefine the layout. The light/dark world mechanic, in addition to injecting the game with some much-needed atmosphere (as well as a heckin’ badass musical theme), deepens your methods of exploration. It’s possible to switch from dark world to light at will, and if you’re observant enough, you’ll take advantage of that trick to find even more shortcuts and hidden places.
All the little things this game does well make it seem so elegant compared to the beast the series has become since then. While it’s more talkative and assertive than the original classic, it’s ultimately an understated game. What’s more, the basic compelling elements are still intact: you’ve still got those white-knuckle moments when you’re down to your last few hits, and every encounter is a matter of life and death, and if only you could survive a few more screens you might find a fairy or at least a few hearts; they just come a little later in the game. You’ve still got that sense of wonder and exploration, and the satisfying feeling of finding a new shortcut or realizing the ways different areas connect; they’re just stretched over a greater period of time. What the game loses in intensity it gains in subtlety, all while maintaining the essential flavor of the original. While Link to the Past is still low on my own personal ranked list of Zelda games (I still prefer the rawness of the NES original, the gloomy atmosphere of the sequel, and the dreamlike goofiness of the Gameboy iteration), it succeeds in being epic in scope without ever ceasing to be compelling moment-to-moment. In light of where the series has gone since, this achievement is more praise-worthy than ever.
2007
text by Bennett
★★★☆
“NOT A DRIVING GAME. THANK GOD.”
Genre is a tricky thing. In videogames, genre has a status which is unmatched in any other creative form. Every game review site divides the games by console and then by genre. We know that an RPG will sell best in Japan, and an FPS will do better in North America. Games are pitched and funded according to genre, and when the market is flush with games of a particular genre, it is perceived that there is a problem. When a console launches, it needs one game from each major genre.
The problem is that in videogames, genre is bullstuff. It can stop a good game from getting good reviews. It can even stop you from enjoying a good game. Burnout: Dominator is a game which suffers from the industry’s obsession with genre.
A number of people, including me, were disappointed when they played their second Zelda game. Imagine you played Ocarina of Time and then Twilight Princess. You would be thinking to yourself, ‘Wait, the plot is exactly the same. The moves are exactly the same. The equipment and locations are the same. This is the same game.’ A person who thinks this is a person who mistakes Zelda for an action adventure game. But Zelda is a puzzle game, and the puzzles do change from one Zelda game to the next – at least as much as they did between Bomberman and Bomberman II. The sword, the shield, the evil wizard and princess all make Zelda seem like it is related to Dragon Quest, but they are all completely irrelevant to the design, and to your enjoyment of the game.
Just like Zelda is filed under ‘Action Adventure’ at Gamespot, Burnout: Dominator is filed in the ‘Driving’ or ‘Racing’ section of every magazine, every website and every game store. It has cars, it has tracks, it has races, and it should be pretty obvious to everyone that it is a racing game. Only it isn’t.
Dominator lets you know that it isn’t a racing game in subtle ways. For example, in Dominator, as in every other Burnout game, if you are holding the d-pad towards the right when you slam into the outside edge of a right turn, you don’t crash and explode. Instead, your car slows down and gently bumps towards the correct direction. So long as you know whether the road is heading left or right, you are not penalized for missing the corners. Of course, you lose some time when this happens. But as in other Burnout games, the dramatic rubber-banding AI means that a loss of time is not actually a penalty. Very few of the events even record your time.
There is only one penalty for missing a turn. The penalty is this: your turbo-boost meter turns from blue to orange. As long as the meter stays blue, you can chain an unlimited number of boosts together. Drift uninterrupted around a corner, and the meter will stay blue. The second time you do this, you start to accrue double points. Then triple, then quadruple. The moment you screw up a corner, you lose your combo multiplier. This may sound familiar to you if you play games of a certain genre, though I’d guess that most buyers of Dominator have never done so.
The biggest hint as to what kind of game Dominator is comes from the titular gameplay mode. The ‘Dominator’ mode awards a score based mainly on how many turbo boosts you can chain together. The final, game-ending mission is itself a Dominator event which requires you to boost continuously for three laps to rack up the required score. If you break your boost chain even once during the three laps, you lose.
This is where Dominator differs from previous Burnout games. To win a race, no matter which track you are on and no matter which car you are driving, you must chain one boost into another. As long as you corner well and drive on the wrong side of the road, you can boost forever and your score multiplier will increase. Dominator has three separate mission types which essentially measure your ability to generate boost combos. It has two race modes where you always win if you continuously chain boosts. It has a single timed mode which requires you to score a number of boost combos, and finally it retains the ‘Road Rage’ mode which asks you to smash opposing cars. This last mode is the one aberration in a game which is otherwise a completely pure rhythm game.
Like Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Or like Dance Dance Revolution. The circuits are songs, and the corners are beats or notes in the melody. To fully appreciate this metaphor, of course, you will need to switch off the terrible ‘EA Traxx’ music while you play.
The genre trappings of Dominator sometimes detract from its rhythm-game purity. It offers a large number of cars, which handle slightly differently but ultimately turbo boost in the same exact way. I cleared every event but I can’t tell you what even one of the tracks was like. On the plus side, the PSP is a much better platform for a rhythm game than it is for a driving game. I played it from start to finish using the d-pad to steer, which worked beautifully since it didn’t matter if I got the correct racing line or not. The PSP is incapable of the motion blur effects which helped popularize the series on consoles, but that would only matter if it was a driving game.
Unfortunately, whenever Dominator is mistaken for a driving game, its strengths and its weaknesses are totally overlooked. Burnout: Dominator is a horrible driving game. Your racing line is irrelevant, you can’t lose the races and the cars and tracks are all identical. As a rhythm game, it is great, but the genre trappings often interfere with the design. If the next Burnout game ditches the cars, the tracks and the enemy cars, I’ll give it full marks.
As it is, it gets three quarters. In my book, that makes it by far the best game for the PSP.
★★★☆
“NOT A DRIVING GAME. THANK GOD.”
Genre is a tricky thing. In videogames, genre has a status which is unmatched in any other creative form. Every game review site divides the games by console and then by genre. We know that an RPG will sell best in Japan, and an FPS will do better in North America. Games are pitched and funded according to genre, and when the market is flush with games of a particular genre, it is perceived that there is a problem. When a console launches, it needs one game from each major genre.
The problem is that in videogames, genre is bullstuff. It can stop a good game from getting good reviews. It can even stop you from enjoying a good game. Burnout: Dominator is a game which suffers from the industry’s obsession with genre.
A number of people, including me, were disappointed when they played their second Zelda game. Imagine you played Ocarina of Time and then Twilight Princess. You would be thinking to yourself, ‘Wait, the plot is exactly the same. The moves are exactly the same. The equipment and locations are the same. This is the same game.’ A person who thinks this is a person who mistakes Zelda for an action adventure game. But Zelda is a puzzle game, and the puzzles do change from one Zelda game to the next – at least as much as they did between Bomberman and Bomberman II. The sword, the shield, the evil wizard and princess all make Zelda seem like it is related to Dragon Quest, but they are all completely irrelevant to the design, and to your enjoyment of the game.
Just like Zelda is filed under ‘Action Adventure’ at Gamespot, Burnout: Dominator is filed in the ‘Driving’ or ‘Racing’ section of every magazine, every website and every game store. It has cars, it has tracks, it has races, and it should be pretty obvious to everyone that it is a racing game. Only it isn’t.
Dominator lets you know that it isn’t a racing game in subtle ways. For example, in Dominator, as in every other Burnout game, if you are holding the d-pad towards the right when you slam into the outside edge of a right turn, you don’t crash and explode. Instead, your car slows down and gently bumps towards the correct direction. So long as you know whether the road is heading left or right, you are not penalized for missing the corners. Of course, you lose some time when this happens. But as in other Burnout games, the dramatic rubber-banding AI means that a loss of time is not actually a penalty. Very few of the events even record your time.
There is only one penalty for missing a turn. The penalty is this: your turbo-boost meter turns from blue to orange. As long as the meter stays blue, you can chain an unlimited number of boosts together. Drift uninterrupted around a corner, and the meter will stay blue. The second time you do this, you start to accrue double points. Then triple, then quadruple. The moment you screw up a corner, you lose your combo multiplier. This may sound familiar to you if you play games of a certain genre, though I’d guess that most buyers of Dominator have never done so.
The biggest hint as to what kind of game Dominator is comes from the titular gameplay mode. The ‘Dominator’ mode awards a score based mainly on how many turbo boosts you can chain together. The final, game-ending mission is itself a Dominator event which requires you to boost continuously for three laps to rack up the required score. If you break your boost chain even once during the three laps, you lose.
This is where Dominator differs from previous Burnout games. To win a race, no matter which track you are on and no matter which car you are driving, you must chain one boost into another. As long as you corner well and drive on the wrong side of the road, you can boost forever and your score multiplier will increase. Dominator has three separate mission types which essentially measure your ability to generate boost combos. It has two race modes where you always win if you continuously chain boosts. It has a single timed mode which requires you to score a number of boost combos, and finally it retains the ‘Road Rage’ mode which asks you to smash opposing cars. This last mode is the one aberration in a game which is otherwise a completely pure rhythm game.
Like Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Or like Dance Dance Revolution. The circuits are songs, and the corners are beats or notes in the melody. To fully appreciate this metaphor, of course, you will need to switch off the terrible ‘EA Traxx’ music while you play.
The genre trappings of Dominator sometimes detract from its rhythm-game purity. It offers a large number of cars, which handle slightly differently but ultimately turbo boost in the same exact way. I cleared every event but I can’t tell you what even one of the tracks was like. On the plus side, the PSP is a much better platform for a rhythm game than it is for a driving game. I played it from start to finish using the d-pad to steer, which worked beautifully since it didn’t matter if I got the correct racing line or not. The PSP is incapable of the motion blur effects which helped popularize the series on consoles, but that would only matter if it was a driving game.
Unfortunately, whenever Dominator is mistaken for a driving game, its strengths and its weaknesses are totally overlooked. Burnout: Dominator is a horrible driving game. Your racing line is irrelevant, you can’t lose the races and the cars and tracks are all identical. As a rhythm game, it is great, but the genre trappings often interfere with the design. If the next Burnout game ditches the cars, the tracks and the enemy cars, I’ll give it full marks.
As it is, it gets three quarters. In my book, that makes it by far the best game for the PSP.
2006
text by David Cabrera
★★★☆
“LIKE GOING TO HIGH SCHOOL IN THE SENSE THAT DAYTONA USA IS LIKE DRIVING A CAR.”
I spent my high school life in a basement obsessively playing Japanese RPGs. Realizing that my education was soon coming to an end, and suddenly nostalgic for miserable old times, I spent the last week of my last summer vacation from college obsessively playing a high school simulator which happens to contain a Japanese RPG as a minigame.
Playing Persona 3 is like going to high school in the sense that playing Daytona USA is like driving a car: the reality of the situation has been eradicated, and in its place stands a wonderful dream reality, familiar yet wholly alien, in which everything feels just right. Such is the charmed life of Cross Docking (this is what I named him: it is who he is), leading man of Gekkoukan High’s Class 2-F. The hardest thing in his life is how he can warp from his classroom to Naganaki Shrine, but, when he is done making his daily brain-enhancing offering to the gods, he has to take the train back.
Everything the protagonist gets to do in this game is either extremely special or painlessly simple: sometimes both. The game’s fast and breezy flow skips the mundane and puts you through all the parts of high school that make you look cool. Even the teen angst is glamorous: in this game, you summon your Personas– spirit beings that act like summoned monsters in a typical RPG or, more accurately, like Stands in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure— to attack by shooting yourself in the head. This is, after all, a Japanese RPG. But let’s get back to high school!
Cross Docking is, by default, the most extraordinary and superior human being in existence: this is regularly confirmed in dialogue by everybody around you. Join a sports team: you’ll take it over at the second practice. Girls fall all over you: one girl thinks it’s a medical condition, and even the robot girl was apparently programmed with the hots for you. You get the idea. The school day is played in fast-forward, slowing down only for highlights like answering a question for your buddy. After school, you have free reign to run around town doing whatever you like, ranging from no-committment extracurricular activities to eating food to raise your stats. How videogamey! How charming! You’ve got to manage your free time, though, because you will be tested: midterms, finals, and of course, a monthly boss fight. And of course there’s a dungeon to explore!
That part comes in by night: you see, your high school was built on an ancient Indian burial ground– it’s okay that I revealed this plot detail because it is false– and it happens to transform into a randomly-generated dungeon of obscene height and questionable foundations. Up in Tartarus, you run up stairs and kill things and pick things up until you get tired and have to go to sleep. Exploring Tartarus is ostensibly the game’s long-term goal, and the game explains outright that even your social interactions are in service of strengthening your summoned Personas for use in battle. However, in terms of actual player experience, the dungeon RPG is in service of the high school sim: whether you like it or not, you will spend far more time with the latter than the former. As such, I will not recommend this game if you simply want to run up stairs, (you can’t even run down stairs because when you run up stairs, they cease to exist) kill things, and pick things up. The way the system works, you can’t ignore high school in favor of the dungeon, nor can you ignore the dungeon in favor of high school. There are plenty of dungeon RPGs on the market, and none of them are secondary to an emo-haired Tokimeki Memorial. Of course, if you’re like me, an emo-haired Tokimeki Memorial is exactly the hecking videogame you want to play.
Yes, Tokimeki Memorial. I mentioned briefly that the player’s summoned Personas are strengthened by his level of social interaction. All of your important acquaintances correspond to a Tarot card, and the Tarot cards all correspond to Personas. If you hang out with a classmate (or date, in the girls’ cases), Personas of that type will become far stronger than they would have through simple leveling. Needless to say, your social life becomes extremely important. You can only hang out with certain people at certain times, and since everybody wants to hang out with Cross Docking, you’ve got to let people down easy sometimes too. Other people won’t hang out with you if you’re not smart enough or cool enough or ballsy enough, so you’ve got to steadily work on improving yourself when you’re not hanging out with somebody. Not to mention keeping your Sundays free for home shopping and MMORPGs: your plate is overflowing with meaty, delicious gameplay chunks, and you have to juggle them all into your mouth.
Your social life becomes a goal and a motivation unto itself: if you play your cards right you can be best friends with everybody in the world and serial-date every chick in school. The dungeon RPG is quite a complete and well-made game in and of itself– this is Megami Tensei, after all– but it always feels like a hell of a lot more is going on outside of it. It helps, of course, that the school-sim formula is a lot fresher than the dungeon RPG formula.
The game feels lopsided at first, especially the long, linear exposition section at the beginning, but the flow soon establishes itself, and both the game and the player quickly settle into a groove. Once you’re in that groove, the game’s really got you: I haven’t been hooked on any game lately, short of Picross on the subway, the way I’ve been hooked on this game. God help me, I’m playing a game that advertises itself as 70+ hours long and I am loving it: not only am I loving it, I want Atlus to translate the currently Japan-only expansion pack. I want more of this. I only play arcade games anymore, man. This is a feat.
★★★☆
“LIKE GOING TO HIGH SCHOOL IN THE SENSE THAT DAYTONA USA IS LIKE DRIVING A CAR.”
I spent my high school life in a basement obsessively playing Japanese RPGs. Realizing that my education was soon coming to an end, and suddenly nostalgic for miserable old times, I spent the last week of my last summer vacation from college obsessively playing a high school simulator which happens to contain a Japanese RPG as a minigame.
Playing Persona 3 is like going to high school in the sense that playing Daytona USA is like driving a car: the reality of the situation has been eradicated, and in its place stands a wonderful dream reality, familiar yet wholly alien, in which everything feels just right. Such is the charmed life of Cross Docking (this is what I named him: it is who he is), leading man of Gekkoukan High’s Class 2-F. The hardest thing in his life is how he can warp from his classroom to Naganaki Shrine, but, when he is done making his daily brain-enhancing offering to the gods, he has to take the train back.
Everything the protagonist gets to do in this game is either extremely special or painlessly simple: sometimes both. The game’s fast and breezy flow skips the mundane and puts you through all the parts of high school that make you look cool. Even the teen angst is glamorous: in this game, you summon your Personas– spirit beings that act like summoned monsters in a typical RPG or, more accurately, like Stands in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure— to attack by shooting yourself in the head. This is, after all, a Japanese RPG. But let’s get back to high school!
Cross Docking is, by default, the most extraordinary and superior human being in existence: this is regularly confirmed in dialogue by everybody around you. Join a sports team: you’ll take it over at the second practice. Girls fall all over you: one girl thinks it’s a medical condition, and even the robot girl was apparently programmed with the hots for you. You get the idea. The school day is played in fast-forward, slowing down only for highlights like answering a question for your buddy. After school, you have free reign to run around town doing whatever you like, ranging from no-committment extracurricular activities to eating food to raise your stats. How videogamey! How charming! You’ve got to manage your free time, though, because you will be tested: midterms, finals, and of course, a monthly boss fight. And of course there’s a dungeon to explore!
That part comes in by night: you see, your high school was built on an ancient Indian burial ground– it’s okay that I revealed this plot detail because it is false– and it happens to transform into a randomly-generated dungeon of obscene height and questionable foundations. Up in Tartarus, you run up stairs and kill things and pick things up until you get tired and have to go to sleep. Exploring Tartarus is ostensibly the game’s long-term goal, and the game explains outright that even your social interactions are in service of strengthening your summoned Personas for use in battle. However, in terms of actual player experience, the dungeon RPG is in service of the high school sim: whether you like it or not, you will spend far more time with the latter than the former. As such, I will not recommend this game if you simply want to run up stairs, (you can’t even run down stairs because when you run up stairs, they cease to exist) kill things, and pick things up. The way the system works, you can’t ignore high school in favor of the dungeon, nor can you ignore the dungeon in favor of high school. There are plenty of dungeon RPGs on the market, and none of them are secondary to an emo-haired Tokimeki Memorial. Of course, if you’re like me, an emo-haired Tokimeki Memorial is exactly the hecking videogame you want to play.
Yes, Tokimeki Memorial. I mentioned briefly that the player’s summoned Personas are strengthened by his level of social interaction. All of your important acquaintances correspond to a Tarot card, and the Tarot cards all correspond to Personas. If you hang out with a classmate (or date, in the girls’ cases), Personas of that type will become far stronger than they would have through simple leveling. Needless to say, your social life becomes extremely important. You can only hang out with certain people at certain times, and since everybody wants to hang out with Cross Docking, you’ve got to let people down easy sometimes too. Other people won’t hang out with you if you’re not smart enough or cool enough or ballsy enough, so you’ve got to steadily work on improving yourself when you’re not hanging out with somebody. Not to mention keeping your Sundays free for home shopping and MMORPGs: your plate is overflowing with meaty, delicious gameplay chunks, and you have to juggle them all into your mouth.
Your social life becomes a goal and a motivation unto itself: if you play your cards right you can be best friends with everybody in the world and serial-date every chick in school. The dungeon RPG is quite a complete and well-made game in and of itself– this is Megami Tensei, after all– but it always feels like a hell of a lot more is going on outside of it. It helps, of course, that the school-sim formula is a lot fresher than the dungeon RPG formula.
The game feels lopsided at first, especially the long, linear exposition section at the beginning, but the flow soon establishes itself, and both the game and the player quickly settle into a groove. Once you’re in that groove, the game’s really got you: I haven’t been hooked on any game lately, short of Picross on the subway, the way I’ve been hooked on this game. God help me, I’m playing a game that advertises itself as 70+ hours long and I am loving it: not only am I loving it, I want Atlus to translate the currently Japan-only expansion pack. I want more of this. I only play arcade games anymore, man. This is a feat.
2007
text by tim rogers
⋆☆☆☆
“APPARENTLY DESIGNED BY MEN WHO TOOK SIX YEARS TO OBTAIN BACHELORS' DEGREES IN POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONOLOGY.”
Musou Orochi is the latest in Koei’s line of sleazy hit games with the word “Musou” in the title. Every time one of these games is released it spikes to the top of the sales charts for a week and then disappears. This game did exactly the same thing. It may just be the same half a million people playing these games over and over again; Koei plays its audience the way a young Korean girl plays the violin, or perhaps the way you play that one friend who bought you six consecutive dinners in a row and genuinely didn’t notice.
Koei floundered for years as a company that just wanted to make games about actual historical events when everyone else was Scotch-taping adjectives over side-scrolling platform game design documents. As a game designer, Koei was always quite unique — one might even say that their works from the pre-Famicom era right up to the release of the PlayStation 2 were exceptionally focused on getting non-gamers to pick up a controller. Over a decade before Gran Turismo would sweep in and prove it was possible to get automobile junkies to buy a videogame console if you showed them enough numerical details, the progressive, hungry Koei was making the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. These games were positioned on pedestals worldwide for their devotion to actual names, places, and approximated numbers, even if the critics weren’t familiar with the historical events being portrayed. For early players of Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga’s Ambition, or (my favorite) Bandit Kings of Ancient China, three games that are more or less alike, the basic requirement for enjoying the game was that you’d read more than two books about each of the names floating up on the screen at any given time. Test your knowledge of a particular historical battle by employing similar tactics (via menu selections), win, and feel really smart. It was a weird rush — different from Civilization or Sim City as Dragon Quest was different from Ultima. For the painstaking sensations they evoked, Koei’s efforts went on to find a niche even in countries where no one know who Liu Bei or Cao Cao were. Soon, Koei was making games about World War II — like the excellent P.T.O. II — and were even experimenting with making backgrounds that weren’t completely black. They were on something of a roll.
Blame Final Fantasy VII if you want; around 1997, all of Japan breathed in the same bus fumes and got to feeling loopy: something shat in the pool and told them that they could, if they wanted, enjoy more success than the niches they’d settled into. Perhaps this accounts for the first Dynasty Warriors game on the original PlayStation, or perhaps it doesn’t: it was a one-on-one fighting game in which historical figures from the Chinese civil war of the second century punched or kicked each other slowly over techno music that occasionally featured pan flutes. The game was high-budget enough to open with a computer-animated scene of such ferocious blockiness it could constipate the viewer for weeks or even months. The wasn’t much of a financial or even critical success. The same team was asked to make another game in a different style, using more or less the same characters, for the upcoming PlayStation 2. Rather than simply call the game Sangoku Musou 2, they decided to call it Shin Sangoku Musou — “REAL Dynasty Warriors”. When it was released outside Japan, the game was still called Dynasty Warriors 2, and this fact is kind of crucial.
The game was something of a lukewarm miracle. One might even say it changed the face of gaming. Imagine that — the first “Musou” had been a one-on-one fighting game just because one-on-one fighting in 3D was all the rage. The second game created a new genre — that of the 3D battlefield brawler. As far as new genres go, though, it wasn’t much. Essentially, it was just a thematic license to make a platform game in 3D, with no platform jumping. The “genre” that issued from Dynasty Warriors 2 is probably the same genre that the makers of the midget-punching Total Recall game for the NES would have made if they’d had better hardware: wide, empty spaces, characters who look like people you recognize if you’ve read the right book or seen the right movie, tons of faceless, motiveless enemies rushing at you and then stopping dead and waiting for you to hit them, et cetera. The posters could read: YOU play the part of the HERO! OBLITERATE the stuntmen!
“Musou” is a Japanese word meaning “peerless” or “matchless”. A “Musou” warrior is one whose name is whispered among grunt soldiers everywhere. They’re known for having killed a hundred opponents without flinching, or whatever. How can we dare say that such men did not exist? Novels like Three Kingdoms are able to list the names of every warrior that died at every battle in the war; the Chinese have always had an ear for history and an eye for detail. Names like Lu Bu surf atop the tides of generations, centuries, and millennia as the names of men who were essentially invincible in combat; they were detached from their own mortality in such a way that they could not fear death, or something. Combat, like any sport, is mostly mental, anyway. Think about all those characters in horror movies that viewers always yell at: “Don’t go that way! Shoot him!” Those characters are based on real-life personalities as well — they are the types of people who would not last on a battlefield. Certainly, there’s a little psyching up that happens prior to donning the armor and shaking a spear in the face of danger, though it was seldom ever enough for a farm boy to take down a legend. (See David and Goliath for an example of a farm boy who became a legend by taking down a legend.)
Any review — whether it’s a blurb in Weekly Famitsu or an Amazon.co.jp staff review, or even an Amazon.co.jp reader review — of a Musou game will mention the word “Soukaikan” — “Refreshing feeling” — in the first sentence. This may be a clue that someone in the PR industry is first-degreeing the murder of good natural human conversation, and at that we can only groan: Japanese people using a buzzword in their user reviews is nothing terrible, compared to, say, global warming. Examining the term closely sure makes me feel kind of lonely, though. They say they feel “refreshed” when they play a Musou game, and it scares me that I can recognize why. A Musou game puts you in the buckled boots of a peerless warrior — the man on the battlefield who gets things done. This appeals to so many tens of thousands of Japanese casual gamers simply because to some people games are not life; they are escapism; and the majority of the human population are or were not the type of twenty-two-year-old Ivy League college graduates to walk into his first day at work at a large multinational corporation in a leather jacket and ripped jeans and perfect hair, ignoring the dress code (tie, suit, bald), and flip off the boss and say “You old codgers need to change your game” and end up the CEO and the proud owner of a yacht within six months. We can’t all be rock stars; we can’t all be legendary warriors; we can’t all be Bill Gates; Musou games let us experience a world with the invincibility code turned on, where enemies stop and sputter before us, technomental canaries flying against the glass walls of an AI script that says “Even on hard difficulty, give him four or five seconds before attacking him”. This sort of medulla oblangata massage wouldn’t have worked on Super Famicom, because the graphics weren’t real enough. (Pseudo-ironically, the Gameboy Advance Musou is probably the best one in the series, because it uses Super Famicom-style graphics.)
I mentioned that Musou games sell about a quarter of a million to a half a million copies and then vanish from the sales charts. This could be because the majority of copies are sold back within a week of release; this isn’t because the games shock and repulse players with their shoddy shallowness — it’s because the players are not necessarily gamers or game collectors. They don’t let the games stock up on their shelves, they don’t show them off to friends. They play them the way a moviegoer watches a DVD: clear it once, check out all the special features, put it back in the case, tell the wife to return it, get yelled at and called lazy, take it back themselves. It’s not ironic, or hardly even funny, at all, that Koei has decided to start their own game rental service — called RentaNet, which is a (***)Â name — to rent out any games by any publishers who sign on the dotted line. Game rentals have been illegal in Japan ever since Nintendo whined up the government’s leg back in 1984. Keep in mind, this is also a country where CD rentals have been legal forever — for about two US dollars, you can rent a CD, rip all of the tracks into iTunes, and take it back the same day. Because the value of owning a CD started to descend through the floor, Japanese record labels began to offer special premiums — stickers, posters, big shiny boxes to contain the CD case. No special premiums, however, were premium enough to defeat the idea of CD rental and an MD player (and eventually iPod). This is why the price of a CD in Japan rose slowly to an average of around thirty US dollars. And thirty US dollars, I swear, is a big price to pay for much of the bullstuff they call music over here. Record shops started importing foreign CDs from their countries of origin, to save themselves and the customers money, much to the anger of the local Japanese label that would be releasing said CDs for a higher price in Japan, hence foreign artists always being encouraged to include a bonus track on the Japanese release of an album. New tracks means more complicated rights, means higher prices. Around and around it goes.
Why is Koei trying to bring back game rental in Japan? The simplest answer is because used game sales, which account for most game sales in Japan (if you’ve spent two minutes in a used Japanese game shop, you cannot doubt this), never count toward official sales rankings. The CD analogy continues further: in order to encourage players to buy new, Koei has been releasing “Treasure Box” versions of every Musou game since the bigwigs became confident that the series was a qualified hit. These boxes are full of the most carnival-prize-esque trinkets — mouse pads, et cetera. The games themselves are soaked in enough tacky “extras” — unlockable art galleries and/or voice clip playback devices — for a shadowy reason: keep the players playing more than a week, long enough for the used shop buyback rates to go down. That first weekend is a big’un — if a hopeful buyer can’t find the game used because someone who bought it new is still unlocking costume colors, that’s another new copy sold — that’s another tick-mark on the Famitsu ranking! If the roots of Koei’s rental service were to plant themselves fully into the earth, that would make a new ranking chart for Famitsu to report every week: the rental chart. A-ha.
The more complicated answer would be “Because of Musou Orochi“. It’s precisely the kind of thing no corporation, even one with a tacky goldfish pond in their headquarters’ lobby, one with a little wooden bridge to walk over and everything (yes, I’ve been there), could possibly muster up the anti-conscience to only sell to people, unless they’d been ordered to do so by Satan himself.
Over the years, Koei has been called masters of “historical detail”: in the Gundam Musou expose in Weekly Famitsu earlier this year, the press-release-language said that Koei had been drafted to apply their expertise with regard to historical detail to the entire “Gundam” story, in order to make the most accurate “Gundam” videogame to date. This was a hell of a polite nod to series fans — Omega Force and Koei would be giving the “Gundam” story the same historical treatment that they’d given the great real-life battles of the Chinese Three Kingdoms period and the Japanese Warring States period.
That treatment includes setting each battle up with a map screen and a talking-head dialogue sequence that goes on a minute too long, before plopping the player, boots and all, into the ping-pong-ball-on-mouse-traps of a lively battlefield. Back two decades and an aeon ago, the history lessons had been the thing; now, our fingers have evolved, and we are no longer apes: we are chimps, and we are chumps, and we have transcended pushing buttons to stay alive — we are pushing buttons to kill. In short, it’s nonsense. The violin has been purloined, and replaced with a kid in a purple sweat suit, with eraserhead hair and tinted glasses, banging out a math-rock solo on a Casio keyboard.
It used to be that anyone and everyone could shrug and exhale and let these games exist because hey, at least the history spoken in slow words at the start of the battle is based on real events. Yeah, and the same people could debunk the game design worth of more exhilarating and crunchy games like Onimusha because they portrayed real-life fifteenth-century warlord Oda Nobunaga as a crazed, frothing, rabid old madman who commanded a legion of zombie samurai against Jean Reno.
Musou Orochi files this justification under the heading “bullstuff”; just as Omega Force got hungry for fighting-game fame with the first Dynasty Warriors, they jump straight into the Kingdom Hearts pool with Orochi — its story centers on a evil, demonic warlord named Orochi, who creates a rift in space-time and sucks the warriors from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war (Dynasty Warriors) and the warriors from the 15th-century Japanese civil war (Samurai Warriors) into the same grey-area time period, where they . . . do what, exactly? Battle against one another? Do the bad guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war team up with the bad guys of the 15th-century Japanese civil war, despite the obvious language barrier and disagreement on fashion or fighting techniques? What about ideals? Might it not be possible that the good guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war might agree with the bad guys from the 15th-centry Japanese civil war? And who says any of these people are “bad” anyway? “History is written by the winners” is a Western proverb, after all; centuries later, the Japanese were and are able to see the good points of the ambitious men who lost to more or less ambitious men in their own national history. We’ve seen plenty of videogames heroizing Toyotomi Hideyoshi, for example, and that man might have been hecking looney tunes.
No, though, in Orochi (to be titled Orochi Warriors for Western release, although “Orochi” isn’t an adjective, though I guess we can pretend: it sounds like something you’d call a hobo), the warriors form quick and dirty alliances in favor nothing in particular, and continue their internal conflicts while being confused about their surroundings. Orochi himself steps in to a couple of battles, and the audience members so inclined will clap their hands to see that new, large, red blip appear on their radar: a boss approaches! A boss approaches!
Dynasty Warriors 2 was interesting because it let you ride a horse and traverse battlefields, whilst killing — among the only other games available for the PlayStation 2 at the time was SSX, which was about snowboards: where’s the killing in that? Every once in a while, a large red blip appeared, and by that blip, a name — the name of someone you’ve read about in a book. It might be Lu Bu, even. You’d chase him down on your horse, and have a back-and-forth throttle-around with the only other guy on the battlefield who seems to know how to press the square button. This mechanic was enough to keep the game interesting for many players because these minibosses were always people you knew about outside the game world. In Gundam Musou, it works better, because the boss characters are not just approximations cobbled together from history books — they are based on a television show, so they look exactly like every fan knows they look. There’s no internet arguments about beard length or color of cape. In Orochi, the celebrity factor doesn’t work nearly as well; it feels made of cardboard. When you throw historical figures through a time rift and onto the same battlefield, you cheapen the idea of historical accuracy; you hover a magnifying glass over the flimsy paper plate onto which you’ve dropped this wedding-cake-chunk of a game, and the frosting starts to smolder.
Perhaps fearing that their fan-savants would some day begin to complain that these games were getting too boring and/or easy, Koei started to shoehorn “strategy” into the battles — every once in a while, one of your fellow Important Characters would get into a rough spot, and you’d have to fly across the battlefield to rescue them. I’m not sure if this is or is not a blatant insistence on Koei’s part that Chinese warlords had ready access to wireless radio communication, or psychic powers, or what. Either way, in Gundam Musou it works best, probably because giant robots have computers on board — boost-run across that epic battlefield, maybe crushing a few skulls on the way, and there’s your ally, rendered in high-definition glory, surrounded by ten to twenty enemies who are mostly just standing there, not attacking. If you had stayed where you were, on the other side of the battlefield, your ally’s life bar would deplete until he died. Saving his life takes about a quarter of a second, and makes you wonder if he was drunk or something. If you let him die — aw, stuff, Jack, you’re going to get a lower ranking at the end of the battle.
Thanks to this mechanic, Musou games of late have often required players to play each battle enough times to know where each Important Character will be when he needs saving, and at exactly which point in the battle this will happen. I might have been inclined to call this a reasonable facsimile of strategy if there was any topography to speak of: the battlefields are still flat and spare. The very sight of a wall is a blessing. Or if the act of running from one side of a battlefield to another wasn’t boring or tedious. If there was any joy in your character’s plodding movement, yeah, this might be a strategy. Instead, as what it is, it’s like a chocolate bar made of stuff instead of of chocolate; it doesn’t encourage rock-solid nerves-of-steel gamer skills like, say Ninja Gaiden, or even stat-mongering devotion like Dragon Quest. It’s just a weird kind of fetishism, and the setups are too ridiculous too often.
Atop this pile of a half-baked game concept, Orochi throws the spear that breaks the aircraft carrier’s back: multiple characters. Using the L2 and R2 buttons, you can now switch between characters! Take three characters into each battle — when you’re not controlling a character, the computer controls him for you! Maybe he’ll get in trouble, so if he does, you can switch to him and let him take care of himself. This is sham-fisted game design as plotted by wrongheaded focus testing and/or men who took six years to obtain their bachelors’ degrees in “PowerPoint Presentationology”. They graduated with 2.5 GPAs and their fathers probably consistently score at least ten strokes above par on whole games of golf (front nine holes, two-hour cigarette break, back nine holes). The short of this is: you can write this stuff in a design document, and you can program it into a videogame, though ultimately you’re only going to end up with pink vomit and/or a Jagermeister logo on your T-shirt, and if you can’t tell, on paper, why this game concept is flawed, then some part of your house might actually have been on fire for perhaps several years.
Games like Sengoku Basara (“Devil Kings”) or Drag-on Dragoon 2 were able to take the should-be-gleeful Musou formula and split its atom over and over again, simply by introducing little quirks like “imaginative scenarios”, “actual dynamic storytelling” (as opposed to talking heads in front of a map), a flying dragon to ride and scorch foes, a “block/parry/evade” system that lends fierce crunch and snap into each of the hundreds of encounters in every battle, and — get this! — enemies that actually attack you. And the king of this genre that would be Jesus, Spartan: Total Warrior, grinds many of Musou‘s concepts down to a razor edge, all while throwing out the unnecessary things. You will never find a sharper game than Spartan: Total Warrior, unless you’re slitting your wrist with a DVD shard.
I can buy the explanation that Koei makes its Musou games with a purpose — to entertain the refugees from life that find invincibility codes “refreshing”, the kind of souls who can’t quite put their finger on the fact that they possess the personalities of machines at a cardboard box factory and that this is what bothers them at all times, even while using the toilet. Musou is a sweet palliative for people who can’t be bothered to press a block button; it’s Campbell’s Chunky vegetable soup for the soul, for people who don’t have enough teeth to eat a steak. I’m not about to suggest that they make the games tongue-bitingly hard; I’m just saying they should at least conscientiously add some snap, and/or quit lying to themselves and us. These games are big soggy bowls of schlock and have been for years; the more they try to complicate them, the more ass-faced they look. Please Koei, give up the ghost. Cut these games back to their essence. Stop tacking on meaningless extras and/or art galleries and touting such flimsy bullstuff on the back of the box — we’ve seen Cao Cao before, man!
If the Musou games are truly the Madden of Japan, then “harder hits” and/or “more brutal tackles”, at least, are in order. Under the present game design circumstances, should any publication respectable enough to feature advertisements for videogames in addition to reviews of said videogames ever score a Musou game (Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, et al) higher than a four out of ten ever again, they will be placed on the Action Button Dot Net Sworn Enemies List, and we will proceed to find their staff members’ Xbox Live usernames and leave them all belligerent, unintelligible voice messages with diarrhea frequency from tomorrow until eternity.
⋆☆☆☆
“APPARENTLY DESIGNED BY MEN WHO TOOK SIX YEARS TO OBTAIN BACHELORS' DEGREES IN POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONOLOGY.”
Musou Orochi is the latest in Koei’s line of sleazy hit games with the word “Musou” in the title. Every time one of these games is released it spikes to the top of the sales charts for a week and then disappears. This game did exactly the same thing. It may just be the same half a million people playing these games over and over again; Koei plays its audience the way a young Korean girl plays the violin, or perhaps the way you play that one friend who bought you six consecutive dinners in a row and genuinely didn’t notice.
Koei floundered for years as a company that just wanted to make games about actual historical events when everyone else was Scotch-taping adjectives over side-scrolling platform game design documents. As a game designer, Koei was always quite unique — one might even say that their works from the pre-Famicom era right up to the release of the PlayStation 2 were exceptionally focused on getting non-gamers to pick up a controller. Over a decade before Gran Turismo would sweep in and prove it was possible to get automobile junkies to buy a videogame console if you showed them enough numerical details, the progressive, hungry Koei was making the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. These games were positioned on pedestals worldwide for their devotion to actual names, places, and approximated numbers, even if the critics weren’t familiar with the historical events being portrayed. For early players of Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga’s Ambition, or (my favorite) Bandit Kings of Ancient China, three games that are more or less alike, the basic requirement for enjoying the game was that you’d read more than two books about each of the names floating up on the screen at any given time. Test your knowledge of a particular historical battle by employing similar tactics (via menu selections), win, and feel really smart. It was a weird rush — different from Civilization or Sim City as Dragon Quest was different from Ultima. For the painstaking sensations they evoked, Koei’s efforts went on to find a niche even in countries where no one know who Liu Bei or Cao Cao were. Soon, Koei was making games about World War II — like the excellent P.T.O. II — and were even experimenting with making backgrounds that weren’t completely black. They were on something of a roll.
Blame Final Fantasy VII if you want; around 1997, all of Japan breathed in the same bus fumes and got to feeling loopy: something shat in the pool and told them that they could, if they wanted, enjoy more success than the niches they’d settled into. Perhaps this accounts for the first Dynasty Warriors game on the original PlayStation, or perhaps it doesn’t: it was a one-on-one fighting game in which historical figures from the Chinese civil war of the second century punched or kicked each other slowly over techno music that occasionally featured pan flutes. The game was high-budget enough to open with a computer-animated scene of such ferocious blockiness it could constipate the viewer for weeks or even months. The wasn’t much of a financial or even critical success. The same team was asked to make another game in a different style, using more or less the same characters, for the upcoming PlayStation 2. Rather than simply call the game Sangoku Musou 2, they decided to call it Shin Sangoku Musou — “REAL Dynasty Warriors”. When it was released outside Japan, the game was still called Dynasty Warriors 2, and this fact is kind of crucial.
The game was something of a lukewarm miracle. One might even say it changed the face of gaming. Imagine that — the first “Musou” had been a one-on-one fighting game just because one-on-one fighting in 3D was all the rage. The second game created a new genre — that of the 3D battlefield brawler. As far as new genres go, though, it wasn’t much. Essentially, it was just a thematic license to make a platform game in 3D, with no platform jumping. The “genre” that issued from Dynasty Warriors 2 is probably the same genre that the makers of the midget-punching Total Recall game for the NES would have made if they’d had better hardware: wide, empty spaces, characters who look like people you recognize if you’ve read the right book or seen the right movie, tons of faceless, motiveless enemies rushing at you and then stopping dead and waiting for you to hit them, et cetera. The posters could read: YOU play the part of the HERO! OBLITERATE the stuntmen!
“Musou” is a Japanese word meaning “peerless” or “matchless”. A “Musou” warrior is one whose name is whispered among grunt soldiers everywhere. They’re known for having killed a hundred opponents without flinching, or whatever. How can we dare say that such men did not exist? Novels like Three Kingdoms are able to list the names of every warrior that died at every battle in the war; the Chinese have always had an ear for history and an eye for detail. Names like Lu Bu surf atop the tides of generations, centuries, and millennia as the names of men who were essentially invincible in combat; they were detached from their own mortality in such a way that they could not fear death, or something. Combat, like any sport, is mostly mental, anyway. Think about all those characters in horror movies that viewers always yell at: “Don’t go that way! Shoot him!” Those characters are based on real-life personalities as well — they are the types of people who would not last on a battlefield. Certainly, there’s a little psyching up that happens prior to donning the armor and shaking a spear in the face of danger, though it was seldom ever enough for a farm boy to take down a legend. (See David and Goliath for an example of a farm boy who became a legend by taking down a legend.)
Any review — whether it’s a blurb in Weekly Famitsu or an Amazon.co.jp staff review, or even an Amazon.co.jp reader review — of a Musou game will mention the word “Soukaikan” — “Refreshing feeling” — in the first sentence. This may be a clue that someone in the PR industry is first-degreeing the murder of good natural human conversation, and at that we can only groan: Japanese people using a buzzword in their user reviews is nothing terrible, compared to, say, global warming. Examining the term closely sure makes me feel kind of lonely, though. They say they feel “refreshed” when they play a Musou game, and it scares me that I can recognize why. A Musou game puts you in the buckled boots of a peerless warrior — the man on the battlefield who gets things done. This appeals to so many tens of thousands of Japanese casual gamers simply because to some people games are not life; they are escapism; and the majority of the human population are or were not the type of twenty-two-year-old Ivy League college graduates to walk into his first day at work at a large multinational corporation in a leather jacket and ripped jeans and perfect hair, ignoring the dress code (tie, suit, bald), and flip off the boss and say “You old codgers need to change your game” and end up the CEO and the proud owner of a yacht within six months. We can’t all be rock stars; we can’t all be legendary warriors; we can’t all be Bill Gates; Musou games let us experience a world with the invincibility code turned on, where enemies stop and sputter before us, technomental canaries flying against the glass walls of an AI script that says “Even on hard difficulty, give him four or five seconds before attacking him”. This sort of medulla oblangata massage wouldn’t have worked on Super Famicom, because the graphics weren’t real enough. (Pseudo-ironically, the Gameboy Advance Musou is probably the best one in the series, because it uses Super Famicom-style graphics.)
I mentioned that Musou games sell about a quarter of a million to a half a million copies and then vanish from the sales charts. This could be because the majority of copies are sold back within a week of release; this isn’t because the games shock and repulse players with their shoddy shallowness — it’s because the players are not necessarily gamers or game collectors. They don’t let the games stock up on their shelves, they don’t show them off to friends. They play them the way a moviegoer watches a DVD: clear it once, check out all the special features, put it back in the case, tell the wife to return it, get yelled at and called lazy, take it back themselves. It’s not ironic, or hardly even funny, at all, that Koei has decided to start their own game rental service — called RentaNet, which is a (***)Â name — to rent out any games by any publishers who sign on the dotted line. Game rentals have been illegal in Japan ever since Nintendo whined up the government’s leg back in 1984. Keep in mind, this is also a country where CD rentals have been legal forever — for about two US dollars, you can rent a CD, rip all of the tracks into iTunes, and take it back the same day. Because the value of owning a CD started to descend through the floor, Japanese record labels began to offer special premiums — stickers, posters, big shiny boxes to contain the CD case. No special premiums, however, were premium enough to defeat the idea of CD rental and an MD player (and eventually iPod). This is why the price of a CD in Japan rose slowly to an average of around thirty US dollars. And thirty US dollars, I swear, is a big price to pay for much of the bullstuff they call music over here. Record shops started importing foreign CDs from their countries of origin, to save themselves and the customers money, much to the anger of the local Japanese label that would be releasing said CDs for a higher price in Japan, hence foreign artists always being encouraged to include a bonus track on the Japanese release of an album. New tracks means more complicated rights, means higher prices. Around and around it goes.
Why is Koei trying to bring back game rental in Japan? The simplest answer is because used game sales, which account for most game sales in Japan (if you’ve spent two minutes in a used Japanese game shop, you cannot doubt this), never count toward official sales rankings. The CD analogy continues further: in order to encourage players to buy new, Koei has been releasing “Treasure Box” versions of every Musou game since the bigwigs became confident that the series was a qualified hit. These boxes are full of the most carnival-prize-esque trinkets — mouse pads, et cetera. The games themselves are soaked in enough tacky “extras” — unlockable art galleries and/or voice clip playback devices — for a shadowy reason: keep the players playing more than a week, long enough for the used shop buyback rates to go down. That first weekend is a big’un — if a hopeful buyer can’t find the game used because someone who bought it new is still unlocking costume colors, that’s another new copy sold — that’s another tick-mark on the Famitsu ranking! If the roots of Koei’s rental service were to plant themselves fully into the earth, that would make a new ranking chart for Famitsu to report every week: the rental chart. A-ha.
The more complicated answer would be “Because of Musou Orochi“. It’s precisely the kind of thing no corporation, even one with a tacky goldfish pond in their headquarters’ lobby, one with a little wooden bridge to walk over and everything (yes, I’ve been there), could possibly muster up the anti-conscience to only sell to people, unless they’d been ordered to do so by Satan himself.
Over the years, Koei has been called masters of “historical detail”: in the Gundam Musou expose in Weekly Famitsu earlier this year, the press-release-language said that Koei had been drafted to apply their expertise with regard to historical detail to the entire “Gundam” story, in order to make the most accurate “Gundam” videogame to date. This was a hell of a polite nod to series fans — Omega Force and Koei would be giving the “Gundam” story the same historical treatment that they’d given the great real-life battles of the Chinese Three Kingdoms period and the Japanese Warring States period.
That treatment includes setting each battle up with a map screen and a talking-head dialogue sequence that goes on a minute too long, before plopping the player, boots and all, into the ping-pong-ball-on-mouse-traps of a lively battlefield. Back two decades and an aeon ago, the history lessons had been the thing; now, our fingers have evolved, and we are no longer apes: we are chimps, and we are chumps, and we have transcended pushing buttons to stay alive — we are pushing buttons to kill. In short, it’s nonsense. The violin has been purloined, and replaced with a kid in a purple sweat suit, with eraserhead hair and tinted glasses, banging out a math-rock solo on a Casio keyboard.
It used to be that anyone and everyone could shrug and exhale and let these games exist because hey, at least the history spoken in slow words at the start of the battle is based on real events. Yeah, and the same people could debunk the game design worth of more exhilarating and crunchy games like Onimusha because they portrayed real-life fifteenth-century warlord Oda Nobunaga as a crazed, frothing, rabid old madman who commanded a legion of zombie samurai against Jean Reno.
Musou Orochi files this justification under the heading “bullstuff”; just as Omega Force got hungry for fighting-game fame with the first Dynasty Warriors, they jump straight into the Kingdom Hearts pool with Orochi — its story centers on a evil, demonic warlord named Orochi, who creates a rift in space-time and sucks the warriors from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war (Dynasty Warriors) and the warriors from the 15th-century Japanese civil war (Samurai Warriors) into the same grey-area time period, where they . . . do what, exactly? Battle against one another? Do the bad guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war team up with the bad guys of the 15th-century Japanese civil war, despite the obvious language barrier and disagreement on fashion or fighting techniques? What about ideals? Might it not be possible that the good guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war might agree with the bad guys from the 15th-centry Japanese civil war? And who says any of these people are “bad” anyway? “History is written by the winners” is a Western proverb, after all; centuries later, the Japanese were and are able to see the good points of the ambitious men who lost to more or less ambitious men in their own national history. We’ve seen plenty of videogames heroizing Toyotomi Hideyoshi, for example, and that man might have been hecking looney tunes.
No, though, in Orochi (to be titled Orochi Warriors for Western release, although “Orochi” isn’t an adjective, though I guess we can pretend: it sounds like something you’d call a hobo), the warriors form quick and dirty alliances in favor nothing in particular, and continue their internal conflicts while being confused about their surroundings. Orochi himself steps in to a couple of battles, and the audience members so inclined will clap their hands to see that new, large, red blip appear on their radar: a boss approaches! A boss approaches!
Dynasty Warriors 2 was interesting because it let you ride a horse and traverse battlefields, whilst killing — among the only other games available for the PlayStation 2 at the time was SSX, which was about snowboards: where’s the killing in that? Every once in a while, a large red blip appeared, and by that blip, a name — the name of someone you’ve read about in a book. It might be Lu Bu, even. You’d chase him down on your horse, and have a back-and-forth throttle-around with the only other guy on the battlefield who seems to know how to press the square button. This mechanic was enough to keep the game interesting for many players because these minibosses were always people you knew about outside the game world. In Gundam Musou, it works better, because the boss characters are not just approximations cobbled together from history books — they are based on a television show, so they look exactly like every fan knows they look. There’s no internet arguments about beard length or color of cape. In Orochi, the celebrity factor doesn’t work nearly as well; it feels made of cardboard. When you throw historical figures through a time rift and onto the same battlefield, you cheapen the idea of historical accuracy; you hover a magnifying glass over the flimsy paper plate onto which you’ve dropped this wedding-cake-chunk of a game, and the frosting starts to smolder.
Perhaps fearing that their fan-savants would some day begin to complain that these games were getting too boring and/or easy, Koei started to shoehorn “strategy” into the battles — every once in a while, one of your fellow Important Characters would get into a rough spot, and you’d have to fly across the battlefield to rescue them. I’m not sure if this is or is not a blatant insistence on Koei’s part that Chinese warlords had ready access to wireless radio communication, or psychic powers, or what. Either way, in Gundam Musou it works best, probably because giant robots have computers on board — boost-run across that epic battlefield, maybe crushing a few skulls on the way, and there’s your ally, rendered in high-definition glory, surrounded by ten to twenty enemies who are mostly just standing there, not attacking. If you had stayed where you were, on the other side of the battlefield, your ally’s life bar would deplete until he died. Saving his life takes about a quarter of a second, and makes you wonder if he was drunk or something. If you let him die — aw, stuff, Jack, you’re going to get a lower ranking at the end of the battle.
Thanks to this mechanic, Musou games of late have often required players to play each battle enough times to know where each Important Character will be when he needs saving, and at exactly which point in the battle this will happen. I might have been inclined to call this a reasonable facsimile of strategy if there was any topography to speak of: the battlefields are still flat and spare. The very sight of a wall is a blessing. Or if the act of running from one side of a battlefield to another wasn’t boring or tedious. If there was any joy in your character’s plodding movement, yeah, this might be a strategy. Instead, as what it is, it’s like a chocolate bar made of stuff instead of of chocolate; it doesn’t encourage rock-solid nerves-of-steel gamer skills like, say Ninja Gaiden, or even stat-mongering devotion like Dragon Quest. It’s just a weird kind of fetishism, and the setups are too ridiculous too often.
Atop this pile of a half-baked game concept, Orochi throws the spear that breaks the aircraft carrier’s back: multiple characters. Using the L2 and R2 buttons, you can now switch between characters! Take three characters into each battle — when you’re not controlling a character, the computer controls him for you! Maybe he’ll get in trouble, so if he does, you can switch to him and let him take care of himself. This is sham-fisted game design as plotted by wrongheaded focus testing and/or men who took six years to obtain their bachelors’ degrees in “PowerPoint Presentationology”. They graduated with 2.5 GPAs and their fathers probably consistently score at least ten strokes above par on whole games of golf (front nine holes, two-hour cigarette break, back nine holes). The short of this is: you can write this stuff in a design document, and you can program it into a videogame, though ultimately you’re only going to end up with pink vomit and/or a Jagermeister logo on your T-shirt, and if you can’t tell, on paper, why this game concept is flawed, then some part of your house might actually have been on fire for perhaps several years.
Games like Sengoku Basara (“Devil Kings”) or Drag-on Dragoon 2 were able to take the should-be-gleeful Musou formula and split its atom over and over again, simply by introducing little quirks like “imaginative scenarios”, “actual dynamic storytelling” (as opposed to talking heads in front of a map), a flying dragon to ride and scorch foes, a “block/parry/evade” system that lends fierce crunch and snap into each of the hundreds of encounters in every battle, and — get this! — enemies that actually attack you. And the king of this genre that would be Jesus, Spartan: Total Warrior, grinds many of Musou‘s concepts down to a razor edge, all while throwing out the unnecessary things. You will never find a sharper game than Spartan: Total Warrior, unless you’re slitting your wrist with a DVD shard.
I can buy the explanation that Koei makes its Musou games with a purpose — to entertain the refugees from life that find invincibility codes “refreshing”, the kind of souls who can’t quite put their finger on the fact that they possess the personalities of machines at a cardboard box factory and that this is what bothers them at all times, even while using the toilet. Musou is a sweet palliative for people who can’t be bothered to press a block button; it’s Campbell’s Chunky vegetable soup for the soul, for people who don’t have enough teeth to eat a steak. I’m not about to suggest that they make the games tongue-bitingly hard; I’m just saying they should at least conscientiously add some snap, and/or quit lying to themselves and us. These games are big soggy bowls of schlock and have been for years; the more they try to complicate them, the more ass-faced they look. Please Koei, give up the ghost. Cut these games back to their essence. Stop tacking on meaningless extras and/or art galleries and touting such flimsy bullstuff on the back of the box — we’ve seen Cao Cao before, man!
If the Musou games are truly the Madden of Japan, then “harder hits” and/or “more brutal tackles”, at least, are in order. Under the present game design circumstances, should any publication respectable enough to feature advertisements for videogames in addition to reviews of said videogames ever score a Musou game (Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, et al) higher than a four out of ten ever again, they will be placed on the Action Button Dot Net Sworn Enemies List, and we will proceed to find their staff members’ Xbox Live usernames and leave them all belligerent, unintelligible voice messages with diarrhea frequency from tomorrow until eternity.
text by David Cabrera
★⋆☆☆
“GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Kong Man Center is my other Chinatown arcade. At first glance yet another of the CD/DVD/VCD shops that lines the street, Kong Man, when one presses into the back of the store, houses a secret compartment of delights which I have affectionately dubbed the “closet arcade”. The closet arcade is just that; a dark, enclosed back room which only has room for five arcade cabinets and–barely– their players. The owner is clearly an SNK fan; when I first came here, to play King of Fighters 2003 before most people would play it, I found myself surrounded by not just the 2003 version of KoF, but every King of Fighters game: even the surreal, recolored bootleg Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2003. Some time later, when Neo Geo Battle Coliseum was released, word got out that, again, Kong Man had it before anybody else. There ended up being an unintentional gathering. These things tend to happen when there is only one place, anywhere, to play a certain videogame right now. The same people tend to come out.
So, as expected, the lot of us crowded around a strange new game which we could see being played before us, but could not yet understand. There was only one guy who knew what the hell he was doing; this is another common circumstance at these things. One guy has always prepared: he’s studied match videos, he’s read Arcadia, something. This guy’s efforts are rewarded by his only having to pay fifty cents all night. Meanwhile the rest of us, the huddled masses, bear the burden of feeding the machine, only to have our sore pixelated asses– retouched 90’s relics, they clash with the beautiful high-resolution backgrounds– dragon-punched into the air over and over again by his Kyo. All I can say for these fights is that NGBC‘s pleasantly quick pace makes these beatdowns mercifully brief, at least. It’s neither much fun for the audience nor for the players to fight such one-sided battles, but this was the only machine we had.
A huge man, the hero of our story, walks into the closet and pushes the human mass, already straining for space, further back, closer, as though a group of three had just entered. After watching a few of the beatings, he loudly proclaims– in this tiny room his yell bounces off the walls, enters and exits our poor, overworked and suffering ears– that our champion is, in fact, a tier-whoring scrub. “Kyo is hecking brooo-ken!” he howl-whines: Kyo is, in layman’s terms, too strong, too unfair to be inflicted upon others. A tier-whoring scrub only uses the strongest characters, because his abilities are themselves insufficient to win fairly. If it wasn’t for Kyo, and that dragon punch bullstuff, he continues, would beat his ass. With Marco.
Kyo Kusanagi feels more or less the same way he feels in latter-day King of Fighters, but as with every incremental upgrade, Kyo has little tricks that need to be learned. In this game, during a juggle combo, the trick is that Kyo can use his dragon punch equivalent three times in a row. He kicks you up into the air; you wait, you fall. He does the dragon punch: you wait, you fall. And then again, and again. It’s not a glitch or an exploit; it’s there because the designers wanted it to be. It’s not overly damaging, not unfair- but it’s terribly frustrating.
It was really pissing this guy off, and he wasn’t even the one losing to it. He was way down on the quarter line; the only way he could think to kill time was to continue to complain to the room. Nobody really wanted to hear it, especially not for the thirty minutes it took him to get to the front of the line. Finally, he moved some people over, stepped up to the machine, picked Marco, and began to fight.
Marco is in fact the Marco you may know from the Metal Slug series: he’s also one of the bigger oddballs in a very unusual cast assembled from all over SNK’s gameography, from Fatal Fury to Aggressors of Dark Kombat. Being a character ripped out of another genre entirely, Marco does not play very conventionally: if you don’t already know what you’re doing, you’re dead. In other words, our hero has made a promise he cannot keep. Marco flops around like a dying fish, his tag teammate who I don’t remember doesn’t fare any better, and Kyo dragon punches them both to his heart’s content. It’s over quickly.
Our defeated protagonist lumbers away from the machine, seething, mumbling to himself. He shuts up for about half a minute. Then, without warning, it is back to the song and dance from before, but louder, with more righteous indignation. Our hero is spiraling into barely coherent rage. He suggests, tentatively, that the champion, a much smaller, fitter guy, come out and have a fight with him, a real one, conducted via bare fists, to prove who is truly the superior joystick-and-buttons fighter. Nobody pays this any mind– we can’t even visualize these two fighting– until he repeats himself a few more times, demands our attention more and more insistently.
“YOU AND ME! WE’RE GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Did I even hear that stuff, in the middle of the closet arcade at Kong Man Center? Did I really hear something so ridiculous? Was it just something I read on a Shoryuken.com thread? Didn’t I hear it at both places? Who knows anymore. The point is that the man wanted to take it outside over a videogame, and that furthermore, he is only able to understand this hypothetical confrontation in terms of another goddamn videogame. Standing out there on the sidewalk, he would see gauges and lifebars in the corners of his mind’s eye.
The owner pops the closet door open after this loudest declaration: he doesn’t know or care what the hell anybody is talking about in here, but he wants us to keep it down, for Christ’s sake. As the owner stares our hero in the face, he casts his eyes down like a child avoiding blame. The volume of his ranting fades, subsides into murmuring. Eventually our hero storms out, our champion leaves with his girlfriend, and I finally get some quality time in with the game: time with people I have a chance of beating.
On even competitive ground, this is SNK’s best in years; a thought-out, solid, unique fighting system coupled with a nearly dangerous overload of SNK’s trademark self-referential fanservice. The latter is SNK’s main export and you can get it packed in with anything they sell nowadays. Pleasant, but not special. The former is rare and precious, and the only reason I ever really loved to play SNK’s games. It was this core that got the twenty-some people to huddle up in the closet-arcade, and later put up with the sound, the smell of our hero; it was also what drove him into a raving videogame tantrum. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, a good videogame is still that strong.
★⋆☆☆
“GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Kong Man Center is my other Chinatown arcade. At first glance yet another of the CD/DVD/VCD shops that lines the street, Kong Man, when one presses into the back of the store, houses a secret compartment of delights which I have affectionately dubbed the “closet arcade”. The closet arcade is just that; a dark, enclosed back room which only has room for five arcade cabinets and–barely– their players. The owner is clearly an SNK fan; when I first came here, to play King of Fighters 2003 before most people would play it, I found myself surrounded by not just the 2003 version of KoF, but every King of Fighters game: even the surreal, recolored bootleg Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2003. Some time later, when Neo Geo Battle Coliseum was released, word got out that, again, Kong Man had it before anybody else. There ended up being an unintentional gathering. These things tend to happen when there is only one place, anywhere, to play a certain videogame right now. The same people tend to come out.
So, as expected, the lot of us crowded around a strange new game which we could see being played before us, but could not yet understand. There was only one guy who knew what the hell he was doing; this is another common circumstance at these things. One guy has always prepared: he’s studied match videos, he’s read Arcadia, something. This guy’s efforts are rewarded by his only having to pay fifty cents all night. Meanwhile the rest of us, the huddled masses, bear the burden of feeding the machine, only to have our sore pixelated asses– retouched 90’s relics, they clash with the beautiful high-resolution backgrounds– dragon-punched into the air over and over again by his Kyo. All I can say for these fights is that NGBC‘s pleasantly quick pace makes these beatdowns mercifully brief, at least. It’s neither much fun for the audience nor for the players to fight such one-sided battles, but this was the only machine we had.
A huge man, the hero of our story, walks into the closet and pushes the human mass, already straining for space, further back, closer, as though a group of three had just entered. After watching a few of the beatings, he loudly proclaims– in this tiny room his yell bounces off the walls, enters and exits our poor, overworked and suffering ears– that our champion is, in fact, a tier-whoring scrub. “Kyo is hecking brooo-ken!” he howl-whines: Kyo is, in layman’s terms, too strong, too unfair to be inflicted upon others. A tier-whoring scrub only uses the strongest characters, because his abilities are themselves insufficient to win fairly. If it wasn’t for Kyo, and that dragon punch bullstuff, he continues, would beat his ass. With Marco.
Kyo Kusanagi feels more or less the same way he feels in latter-day King of Fighters, but as with every incremental upgrade, Kyo has little tricks that need to be learned. In this game, during a juggle combo, the trick is that Kyo can use his dragon punch equivalent three times in a row. He kicks you up into the air; you wait, you fall. He does the dragon punch: you wait, you fall. And then again, and again. It’s not a glitch or an exploit; it’s there because the designers wanted it to be. It’s not overly damaging, not unfair- but it’s terribly frustrating.
It was really pissing this guy off, and he wasn’t even the one losing to it. He was way down on the quarter line; the only way he could think to kill time was to continue to complain to the room. Nobody really wanted to hear it, especially not for the thirty minutes it took him to get to the front of the line. Finally, he moved some people over, stepped up to the machine, picked Marco, and began to fight.
Marco is in fact the Marco you may know from the Metal Slug series: he’s also one of the bigger oddballs in a very unusual cast assembled from all over SNK’s gameography, from Fatal Fury to Aggressors of Dark Kombat. Being a character ripped out of another genre entirely, Marco does not play very conventionally: if you don’t already know what you’re doing, you’re dead. In other words, our hero has made a promise he cannot keep. Marco flops around like a dying fish, his tag teammate who I don’t remember doesn’t fare any better, and Kyo dragon punches them both to his heart’s content. It’s over quickly.
Our defeated protagonist lumbers away from the machine, seething, mumbling to himself. He shuts up for about half a minute. Then, without warning, it is back to the song and dance from before, but louder, with more righteous indignation. Our hero is spiraling into barely coherent rage. He suggests, tentatively, that the champion, a much smaller, fitter guy, come out and have a fight with him, a real one, conducted via bare fists, to prove who is truly the superior joystick-and-buttons fighter. Nobody pays this any mind– we can’t even visualize these two fighting– until he repeats himself a few more times, demands our attention more and more insistently.
“YOU AND ME! WE’RE GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Did I even hear that stuff, in the middle of the closet arcade at Kong Man Center? Did I really hear something so ridiculous? Was it just something I read on a Shoryuken.com thread? Didn’t I hear it at both places? Who knows anymore. The point is that the man wanted to take it outside over a videogame, and that furthermore, he is only able to understand this hypothetical confrontation in terms of another goddamn videogame. Standing out there on the sidewalk, he would see gauges and lifebars in the corners of his mind’s eye.
The owner pops the closet door open after this loudest declaration: he doesn’t know or care what the hell anybody is talking about in here, but he wants us to keep it down, for Christ’s sake. As the owner stares our hero in the face, he casts his eyes down like a child avoiding blame. The volume of his ranting fades, subsides into murmuring. Eventually our hero storms out, our champion leaves with his girlfriend, and I finally get some quality time in with the game: time with people I have a chance of beating.
On even competitive ground, this is SNK’s best in years; a thought-out, solid, unique fighting system coupled with a nearly dangerous overload of SNK’s trademark self-referential fanservice. The latter is SNK’s main export and you can get it packed in with anything they sell nowadays. Pleasant, but not special. The former is rare and precious, and the only reason I ever really loved to play SNK’s games. It was this core that got the twenty-some people to huddle up in the closet-arcade, and later put up with the sound, the smell of our hero; it was also what drove him into a raving videogame tantrum. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, a good videogame is still that strong.
text by Ario Barzan
★★★☆
“BLACK AND WHITE AND SORT OF GREAT ALL OVER.”
We’ve seen it before: someone is checking out of the supermarket, and the conveyor belt is chaotically loaded with Pop Tarts, Frosted Flakes, everything. Look a little farther, and notice a plastic bar is placed behind it all, allowing a little room for a person in back of them. And there is a person who has taken advantage of that bit as best as they can, neatly organized the stuff from their basket into the compact space according to how that box fits next to that package.
Handhelds sometimes have a way of doing this to developers – of making them squeeze as much tight, consistently flowing set-pieces into each space as possible. The result: better craftsmanship than a lot of products freed from sticky-note sized screens. It’s kind of a funny situation when reflected upon: these are things being made for easy consumption, for “on the go†entertainment, and yet they’re dancing around their brethren fluff.
Link’s Awakening does this. Where A Link to the Past’s overworld was good, but not great, LA is simply more of a videogame. It feels more architectural, more purposeful and crunchy. Subjectively, yes, I prefer ALttP, mostly due to atmospheric reasons and its lack of &^#$#ed dialogue, but ask me objectively which is the better man in terms of gameplay, and I’ll poke LA’s suit (jerkin?), say, “He’s the gentleman you’re looking for.†Mind you, this isn’t the fault of ALttP’s designers. It just came out earlier, was the thing that got the ball rolling by designating a return to the original setup.
And, so, we come to Belmont’s Revenge, a humble blip that beats the tar out of the oft-mentioned Dracula’s Curse, a stretched-out big bang running on the fumes of our frothing reactions when we thought “tubular†was an awesome word. You are Christopher Belmont, underappreciated member of a cursed bloodline, and protagonist of prequel Castlevania Adventure. Knowing this, comparisons are inevitable. And…Adventure was not so hot. Line the two up, though, and you start to see Belmont’s Revenge ironing out its parent’s niggling smudges.
There’s just a crisper reaction to Christopher’s movements, how he attacks with the Vampire Killer whip with proper judicious vengeance, how there’s no dumb stutter after landing from a jump. If you want to descend a rope – the replacement from stairs, in case you didn’t know – inching your way down it isn’t the only option. Simply hold the D-pad down and the A button, and he’ll slide like a fireman on a pole. And, hey, the dude’s grown a big enough pair to whip while climbing. There are these improved, and greatly needed, nuances all over.
Viewed in relative terms, the game is really one of the few Castlevanias to hold itself to the first’s flow of clever setpieces: the action that quickly satisfied and had you going on because, hey, there was more where that came from, right? Instead of providing meandering size, Belmont’s Revenge‘s situations are in the moment: rooms click into one another with a crisp progression, and the action feels hands-on and husky. It’s especially impressive, considering how few enemy types there are. All that stupidly pixel-perfect platforming hassling its ancestor has been toned the hell down, too. With each tick of the clock, you feel active. In a good way. During one stage, huge, rolling eyeballs are coming at you on a bridge. Do you attack and make them explode, leaving holes in the bridge? Do you risk a hit and leap over them? In another, spiders descend from a ceiling. You must kill them, and then use their strings of silk to jump across gaps.
By the time Castlevania is breached (four elemental castles need to be cleared before it rises – whatever that means), environments have turned bitchingly challenging. Take heart: it’s not Dracula X, which was the equivalent of hitting your head against a steel wall. And it’s not Castlevania 3, whose levels were so long, staircases so tortuously populated, all endurance was drained. The rooms and learning process are short, and sharp. You learn a way to do things, a peculiar rhythm, and it all fall into place like Tetris. Graciously, that horrid icon password system has been shortened, making going on all the more accessible.
Like most things on this planet, bumps emerge here and there. One involves a couple rooms which lighten and darken. Your only clue as to where you’re going in the utter blackness is paying attention to where these luminescent worms are. Neat in concept, sure, but the light-to-dark switcheroo’s arbitrariness can lead to deaths that have you flinging a hand out demandingly. A couple bosses are oddities, too – the Rock Castle’s can be taken down to half its health without hitting you once, yet its second form can kill Mr. Belmont in a matter of seconds. Walking and jumping are still oddly stunted, like Adventure. Now, the game does work in light of the heavier atmosphere (outside of the occasional goddamn crow), and Christopher is a bit faster, though you have to wonder: was this necessary? It’s…kind of transparent – the whole “SLOWER MOTION for LONGER PLAYTIME!!” reasoning. Unfortunately, all of us sharp, gorgeous, self-respecting people want our action completely honest and fitting.
I’ve gone this far without mentioning the aesthetics. They are rather lovely. Visually, everything is laid out in a frozen state, sometimes flickering like a classic movie. The designers didn’t pound away until the presentation was detailed but dead. Rather, they took that sort of block-by-block simplicity of the NES trilogy and transferred it over to the Gameboy, lending it an appealing, modern sheen. And, of course, the music, which is dreamy, and kind of jagged, and kind of really good. Think one-hit wonder Soshiro Hokkai’s work for Harmony of Dissonance, though…more spacious and melodic. Hearing a tiny thing bursting with such power is startling. There’s even a crazy rendition of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue for the fight with Christopher’s possessed son, Soleiyu.
Speaking of battles, the last ones are…well. I can clear Devil May Cry 3 on Dante Must Die, and it’s impossible for me to defeat Soleiyu without using an emulator and save states. I still haven’t killed Dracula. Heaven’s grace shines upon you, spirited adventurers, who have found a way.
The journey is challenging – too challenging at the very end, I’m afraid – but eminently playable. Yes, the the control department needs more confidence; really, just the first installment’s physics. Yes, it can be a screw-up. Still, behind this, behind the unassuming status, something works pretty darn well, and it comes down to definition in design. The series itself is an oddity in various ways, and one of them is how the treasures tend to be obscured by the coins. As Rondo of Blood is cornered by devotees who are drooling a bit too much, I’m holding a conversation with its monochrome relative. Pop the cartridge in, and see how it conducts you along with bright, interconnected constructs; how if there is a moment of nothing, you can probably whip a chunk of stone off to reveal a 1UP or meat. How one inch picture frames form a stimulating canvas. Experience the quaint air of mystery from its artistic side. Yeah, there is something here, and it has a heart beat.
★★★☆
“BLACK AND WHITE AND SORT OF GREAT ALL OVER.”
We’ve seen it before: someone is checking out of the supermarket, and the conveyor belt is chaotically loaded with Pop Tarts, Frosted Flakes, everything. Look a little farther, and notice a plastic bar is placed behind it all, allowing a little room for a person in back of them. And there is a person who has taken advantage of that bit as best as they can, neatly organized the stuff from their basket into the compact space according to how that box fits next to that package.
Handhelds sometimes have a way of doing this to developers – of making them squeeze as much tight, consistently flowing set-pieces into each space as possible. The result: better craftsmanship than a lot of products freed from sticky-note sized screens. It’s kind of a funny situation when reflected upon: these are things being made for easy consumption, for “on the go†entertainment, and yet they’re dancing around their brethren fluff.
Link’s Awakening does this. Where A Link to the Past’s overworld was good, but not great, LA is simply more of a videogame. It feels more architectural, more purposeful and crunchy. Subjectively, yes, I prefer ALttP, mostly due to atmospheric reasons and its lack of &^#$#ed dialogue, but ask me objectively which is the better man in terms of gameplay, and I’ll poke LA’s suit (jerkin?), say, “He’s the gentleman you’re looking for.†Mind you, this isn’t the fault of ALttP’s designers. It just came out earlier, was the thing that got the ball rolling by designating a return to the original setup.
And, so, we come to Belmont’s Revenge, a humble blip that beats the tar out of the oft-mentioned Dracula’s Curse, a stretched-out big bang running on the fumes of our frothing reactions when we thought “tubular†was an awesome word. You are Christopher Belmont, underappreciated member of a cursed bloodline, and protagonist of prequel Castlevania Adventure. Knowing this, comparisons are inevitable. And…Adventure was not so hot. Line the two up, though, and you start to see Belmont’s Revenge ironing out its parent’s niggling smudges.
There’s just a crisper reaction to Christopher’s movements, how he attacks with the Vampire Killer whip with proper judicious vengeance, how there’s no dumb stutter after landing from a jump. If you want to descend a rope – the replacement from stairs, in case you didn’t know – inching your way down it isn’t the only option. Simply hold the D-pad down and the A button, and he’ll slide like a fireman on a pole. And, hey, the dude’s grown a big enough pair to whip while climbing. There are these improved, and greatly needed, nuances all over.
Viewed in relative terms, the game is really one of the few Castlevanias to hold itself to the first’s flow of clever setpieces: the action that quickly satisfied and had you going on because, hey, there was more where that came from, right? Instead of providing meandering size, Belmont’s Revenge‘s situations are in the moment: rooms click into one another with a crisp progression, and the action feels hands-on and husky. It’s especially impressive, considering how few enemy types there are. All that stupidly pixel-perfect platforming hassling its ancestor has been toned the hell down, too. With each tick of the clock, you feel active. In a good way. During one stage, huge, rolling eyeballs are coming at you on a bridge. Do you attack and make them explode, leaving holes in the bridge? Do you risk a hit and leap over them? In another, spiders descend from a ceiling. You must kill them, and then use their strings of silk to jump across gaps.
By the time Castlevania is breached (four elemental castles need to be cleared before it rises – whatever that means), environments have turned bitchingly challenging. Take heart: it’s not Dracula X, which was the equivalent of hitting your head against a steel wall. And it’s not Castlevania 3, whose levels were so long, staircases so tortuously populated, all endurance was drained. The rooms and learning process are short, and sharp. You learn a way to do things, a peculiar rhythm, and it all fall into place like Tetris. Graciously, that horrid icon password system has been shortened, making going on all the more accessible.
Like most things on this planet, bumps emerge here and there. One involves a couple rooms which lighten and darken. Your only clue as to where you’re going in the utter blackness is paying attention to where these luminescent worms are. Neat in concept, sure, but the light-to-dark switcheroo’s arbitrariness can lead to deaths that have you flinging a hand out demandingly. A couple bosses are oddities, too – the Rock Castle’s can be taken down to half its health without hitting you once, yet its second form can kill Mr. Belmont in a matter of seconds. Walking and jumping are still oddly stunted, like Adventure. Now, the game does work in light of the heavier atmosphere (outside of the occasional goddamn crow), and Christopher is a bit faster, though you have to wonder: was this necessary? It’s…kind of transparent – the whole “SLOWER MOTION for LONGER PLAYTIME!!” reasoning. Unfortunately, all of us sharp, gorgeous, self-respecting people want our action completely honest and fitting.
I’ve gone this far without mentioning the aesthetics. They are rather lovely. Visually, everything is laid out in a frozen state, sometimes flickering like a classic movie. The designers didn’t pound away until the presentation was detailed but dead. Rather, they took that sort of block-by-block simplicity of the NES trilogy and transferred it over to the Gameboy, lending it an appealing, modern sheen. And, of course, the music, which is dreamy, and kind of jagged, and kind of really good. Think one-hit wonder Soshiro Hokkai’s work for Harmony of Dissonance, though…more spacious and melodic. Hearing a tiny thing bursting with such power is startling. There’s even a crazy rendition of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue for the fight with Christopher’s possessed son, Soleiyu.
Speaking of battles, the last ones are…well. I can clear Devil May Cry 3 on Dante Must Die, and it’s impossible for me to defeat Soleiyu without using an emulator and save states. I still haven’t killed Dracula. Heaven’s grace shines upon you, spirited adventurers, who have found a way.
The journey is challenging – too challenging at the very end, I’m afraid – but eminently playable. Yes, the the control department needs more confidence; really, just the first installment’s physics. Yes, it can be a screw-up. Still, behind this, behind the unassuming status, something works pretty darn well, and it comes down to definition in design. The series itself is an oddity in various ways, and one of them is how the treasures tend to be obscured by the coins. As Rondo of Blood is cornered by devotees who are drooling a bit too much, I’m holding a conversation with its monochrome relative. Pop the cartridge in, and see how it conducts you along with bright, interconnected constructs; how if there is a moment of nothing, you can probably whip a chunk of stone off to reveal a 1UP or meat. How one inch picture frames form a stimulating canvas. Experience the quaint air of mystery from its artistic side. Yeah, there is something here, and it has a heart beat.
1983
text by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
★☆☆☆
“AS MUCH FUN AND ABOUT AS WHOLESOME AS LIGHTING A BIRTHDAY CANDLE ON YOUR CHEST AND COVERING IT WITH A JAM JAR.”
It’s been said that each of us only has one tune to play; all we ever do is change the way we play it. It’s also been said that Donkey Kong and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s tune originates in his personal hobbies, filtered through a love of Japanese and Western fairy tales. The Legend of Zelda has its roots in the fields and caves behind Miyamoto’s childhood home. Pikmin comes from Miyamoto’s garden. And Donkey Kong 3 is based on the premise that it is fun to spray DDT up a gorilla’s asshole. While being attacked by bees.
Miyamoto sure must love his spray gun, since there’s little else to do in the game. The first level consists of three horizontal platforms, arranged in a trapezoid formation. Pressing up or down causes Stanley, gawk-jawed cousin to Mario, never seen again outside the trophy case to Super Smash Bros. Melee, to hop up or down a level to avoid the raging insects. All the while, his nozzle is aimed skyward, at the looming gorilla sphincter above.
Let Donkey Kong slide all the way down, and you lose. If he climbs high enough, he’ll knock down a super spray can that, if fired up his ass, causes him to climb even higher. The occasional worm may crawl off a leaf, to slide across one of the three floor levels. You can’t kill the worm; only stun him, and that only lasts a second. Along the bottom are flowers, that you’re meant to guard against bees. The only penalty to losing flowers is that your score bonus will be lower at the end of the level.
The second and third levels are exactly the same, except the floor is arranged in slightly different patterns, a new insect or two is eventually added, and the super spray can is absent. The actual play mechanics and goal remain the same: avoid getting stung, maybe guard the flowers if you feel like it, and pump the gorilla’s ass as hard and as fast as you can.
Donkey Kong 3 is, like its contemporaries, a game of attrition. As you play, the game is meant to get harder and harder, until you can no longer keep up with the demands put before you. The problem is that the game starts off more confusing than difficult and never really gets harder. When you die, it will either be because you have yet to figure out that there is no point to doing anything other than shoot the gorilla in the ass or because, once you have mastered this trick, there is nothing further to keep you alert.
There is no strategy to play, except perhaps when you realize that jumping toward Donkey Kong can increase your rate of spray. As in Space Invaders — from which this game borrows more than it does Donkey Kong 1 or 2 — only one “shot” can persist on the screen at any moment, so the sooner a shot is absorbed the sooner you can fire again.
Donkey Kong 3 is the “lost” Donkey Kong game — the game that Nintendo and everyone else keeps forgetting. You never see it re-released, you never see it referenced, you never hear anyone talk about it. The reason is that it’s as much fun and about as wholesome as lighting a birthday candle on your chest and covering it with a jam jar.
The Donkey Kong series of videogames has played out kind of like the Jaws film series. The first game, with its high concept and story-based design, inspired twenty-five years of game development — much as Jaws did to Hollywood. The second game involves the revenge of the first game’s villain, by way of a relative; it wasn’t as good, yet it introduced a few new ideas. The third game is a flimsy B-level production, later written out of continuity, in which the villain now takes revenge on a distant relative of the original hero.
When I read that that Jaws 4 (The Re-Re-Revenge?) is supposed to be the worst action movie ever made, I’m a little disappointed that Miyamoto dropped the monkey at this point. The worst action game ever has to be a hell of a lot more entertaining than this. Donkey Kong 3 is just tedious. Tedious and weird. It’s not even worth the curiosity. Go play Donkey Kong 64, and consider yourself lucky.
★☆☆☆
“AS MUCH FUN AND ABOUT AS WHOLESOME AS LIGHTING A BIRTHDAY CANDLE ON YOUR CHEST AND COVERING IT WITH A JAM JAR.”
It’s been said that each of us only has one tune to play; all we ever do is change the way we play it. It’s also been said that Donkey Kong and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s tune originates in his personal hobbies, filtered through a love of Japanese and Western fairy tales. The Legend of Zelda has its roots in the fields and caves behind Miyamoto’s childhood home. Pikmin comes from Miyamoto’s garden. And Donkey Kong 3 is based on the premise that it is fun to spray DDT up a gorilla’s asshole. While being attacked by bees.
Miyamoto sure must love his spray gun, since there’s little else to do in the game. The first level consists of three horizontal platforms, arranged in a trapezoid formation. Pressing up or down causes Stanley, gawk-jawed cousin to Mario, never seen again outside the trophy case to Super Smash Bros. Melee, to hop up or down a level to avoid the raging insects. All the while, his nozzle is aimed skyward, at the looming gorilla sphincter above.
Let Donkey Kong slide all the way down, and you lose. If he climbs high enough, he’ll knock down a super spray can that, if fired up his ass, causes him to climb even higher. The occasional worm may crawl off a leaf, to slide across one of the three floor levels. You can’t kill the worm; only stun him, and that only lasts a second. Along the bottom are flowers, that you’re meant to guard against bees. The only penalty to losing flowers is that your score bonus will be lower at the end of the level.
The second and third levels are exactly the same, except the floor is arranged in slightly different patterns, a new insect or two is eventually added, and the super spray can is absent. The actual play mechanics and goal remain the same: avoid getting stung, maybe guard the flowers if you feel like it, and pump the gorilla’s ass as hard and as fast as you can.
Donkey Kong 3 is, like its contemporaries, a game of attrition. As you play, the game is meant to get harder and harder, until you can no longer keep up with the demands put before you. The problem is that the game starts off more confusing than difficult and never really gets harder. When you die, it will either be because you have yet to figure out that there is no point to doing anything other than shoot the gorilla in the ass or because, once you have mastered this trick, there is nothing further to keep you alert.
There is no strategy to play, except perhaps when you realize that jumping toward Donkey Kong can increase your rate of spray. As in Space Invaders — from which this game borrows more than it does Donkey Kong 1 or 2 — only one “shot” can persist on the screen at any moment, so the sooner a shot is absorbed the sooner you can fire again.
Donkey Kong 3 is the “lost” Donkey Kong game — the game that Nintendo and everyone else keeps forgetting. You never see it re-released, you never see it referenced, you never hear anyone talk about it. The reason is that it’s as much fun and about as wholesome as lighting a birthday candle on your chest and covering it with a jam jar.
The Donkey Kong series of videogames has played out kind of like the Jaws film series. The first game, with its high concept and story-based design, inspired twenty-five years of game development — much as Jaws did to Hollywood. The second game involves the revenge of the first game’s villain, by way of a relative; it wasn’t as good, yet it introduced a few new ideas. The third game is a flimsy B-level production, later written out of continuity, in which the villain now takes revenge on a distant relative of the original hero.
When I read that that Jaws 4 (The Re-Re-Revenge?) is supposed to be the worst action movie ever made, I’m a little disappointed that Miyamoto dropped the monkey at this point. The worst action game ever has to be a hell of a lot more entertaining than this. Donkey Kong 3 is just tedious. Tedious and weird. It’s not even worth the curiosity. Go play Donkey Kong 64, and consider yourself lucky.
text by Brandon Parker
★☆☆☆
“AN ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY JASON HALL AND NATHAN HENDRICKSON.”
If you take every serial killer movie cliché and let them sit under a swinging light bulb in a dark, blood-stained, dilapidated room for a few hours, you’ll eventually wind up with Condemned: Criminal Origins. The opening credits mention something about an original concept being somewhere in here. At first I just thought they meant the concept where law enforcement officials in the future have the right to kill anyone who looks vaguely homeless or might possibly become dangerous someday. Which is really not so original, the idea could have come from any number of newspapers. But it’s handy, since the game is swarming with 2×4 wielding vagrants that you kill brutally without a word when they get upset once you intrude upon their makeshift homes. Injure them enough and instead of, say, arresting them, the game offers you a few different options of breaking their necks or bashing their heads in or what have you while they’re laying helpless. So it’s really just an attempt to try and fit the circle-shape called a police procedural into the square-hole called the first-person-shooter genre.
This Original Concept by Jason Hall and Nathan Hendrickson begins with an investigation at a crime scene in a typical horror movie what-a-stuffhole type building. Don’t worry though; the investigating is made easy by magic automatic clue detecting cameras and flashlights. Wait… my god. It’s the same M.O. as the others. We got a serial killer at work here! Suddenly you hear movement upstairs. The officers on the scene throw a stuff fit and scream for backup while crying, “The killer’s still here!!” The lights flicker and shut off, “That sick bastard, he’s playing with us!”You’d think their first thought would have been, “Oh it’s just some transients hecking around upstairs,” especially if you lived in the bloodthirsty raging hobo filled world that Condemned takes place in, instead of, “Good god, the killer left the body here, waited for an officer to wander into this labyrinthine stuffhole, find the body, radio it in, waited for his backup to arrive, then waited for the FBI to show up, then flipped the light switch off, just to mess with our heads! We’re dealing with a brilliant madman obviously.â€
The crime scene itself has a dead girl posed with a mannequin that has a scarred face. That’s it, that’s the M.O.. Seems pretty ridiculous, taking the time to get mannequins and pose them like that. That’s the bottom of the serial killer shtick barrel, if you ask me. He puts more time into the mannequin than killing the girl. It’s like the girl is just some after thought, maybe they just keep catching him robbing the department store of its mannequins so he has to get rid of them like that, all he wants is a mannequin without getting caught.
Being an Original Concept, of course it has some Original Loading Screens. They consist of important looking classified-type FBI documents which try to help explain some of the finer plot points, like the endless waves of homicidal bums being simply due to an “increase in crime and drug use,” and offer helpful tips like “use block to your advantage” (so you don’t get mixed up and try to give yourself a disadvantage). There’s also, of course, a wide variety of bullets randomly strewn about on top of the document. Somebody who shoots stuff owns that document, you see, so take it seriously. I bet it was Mr. Hendrickson who thought up the bullets bit, or maybe it was a joint effort, I wish I knew the creative process of the minds at work here.
Each level consists of room after room of the same thing, yet they all don’t really look like any one thing in particular. I can’t ever really tell what the hell kind of building I’m supposed to be in. They all just look like the basement of somewhere. Room after room of some place’s basement, and it’s hard to tell where you’ve been and where you’re going.
In Condemned: Criminal Origins, slow and unresponsive combat is a feature, not poor design. Firearms are rare, so it’s mostly swinging slow pipes and hammers and things. Why make a game half-police investigation and half-first person shooter if you’re just going to dumb down the investigative parts and eliminate firearms yet still fill the game with hordes of enemies whose presence never really has a good explanation? I don’t know!
The story in the game is probably where most of the original in the Original Concept originally originated from. They took a dream-like approach to the narrative and-ah, who am I kidding. None of this makes any sense. I have a feeling the people who made this video game watched and enjoyed a few movies before, and maybe even a particular David Fincher one, but if this game was a movie they wouldn’t be able to get away with half the stuff here. One minute you’re thrown out of a window and land on a car after a guy shoots some policemen with your gun. In the next scene your waking up in your apartment and an old man is sitting there just watching you. A complete stranger, he says, “Oh me? I was a friend of your fathers.” And we’re just supposed to take all this nonsense in stride because it’s a video game and the main character has a special jawbone or something. How do you argue with a special jawbone? You just don’t.
Strangely enough, there are one or more individuals out there that think this series would make a good movie, or make good money as a movie, so that’s what they’re doing. Although it’s not going to be a direct adaptation, just set in the same “universe” as the game. I assume hordes of dirty looking murderous vagrants are to be expected. Maybe they’ll make a game based off the movie and call it “Se7en.”
★☆☆☆
“AN ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY JASON HALL AND NATHAN HENDRICKSON.”
If you take every serial killer movie cliché and let them sit under a swinging light bulb in a dark, blood-stained, dilapidated room for a few hours, you’ll eventually wind up with Condemned: Criminal Origins. The opening credits mention something about an original concept being somewhere in here. At first I just thought they meant the concept where law enforcement officials in the future have the right to kill anyone who looks vaguely homeless or might possibly become dangerous someday. Which is really not so original, the idea could have come from any number of newspapers. But it’s handy, since the game is swarming with 2×4 wielding vagrants that you kill brutally without a word when they get upset once you intrude upon their makeshift homes. Injure them enough and instead of, say, arresting them, the game offers you a few different options of breaking their necks or bashing their heads in or what have you while they’re laying helpless. So it’s really just an attempt to try and fit the circle-shape called a police procedural into the square-hole called the first-person-shooter genre.
This Original Concept by Jason Hall and Nathan Hendrickson begins with an investigation at a crime scene in a typical horror movie what-a-stuffhole type building. Don’t worry though; the investigating is made easy by magic automatic clue detecting cameras and flashlights. Wait… my god. It’s the same M.O. as the others. We got a serial killer at work here! Suddenly you hear movement upstairs. The officers on the scene throw a stuff fit and scream for backup while crying, “The killer’s still here!!” The lights flicker and shut off, “That sick bastard, he’s playing with us!”You’d think their first thought would have been, “Oh it’s just some transients hecking around upstairs,” especially if you lived in the bloodthirsty raging hobo filled world that Condemned takes place in, instead of, “Good god, the killer left the body here, waited for an officer to wander into this labyrinthine stuffhole, find the body, radio it in, waited for his backup to arrive, then waited for the FBI to show up, then flipped the light switch off, just to mess with our heads! We’re dealing with a brilliant madman obviously.â€
The crime scene itself has a dead girl posed with a mannequin that has a scarred face. That’s it, that’s the M.O.. Seems pretty ridiculous, taking the time to get mannequins and pose them like that. That’s the bottom of the serial killer shtick barrel, if you ask me. He puts more time into the mannequin than killing the girl. It’s like the girl is just some after thought, maybe they just keep catching him robbing the department store of its mannequins so he has to get rid of them like that, all he wants is a mannequin without getting caught.
Being an Original Concept, of course it has some Original Loading Screens. They consist of important looking classified-type FBI documents which try to help explain some of the finer plot points, like the endless waves of homicidal bums being simply due to an “increase in crime and drug use,” and offer helpful tips like “use block to your advantage” (so you don’t get mixed up and try to give yourself a disadvantage). There’s also, of course, a wide variety of bullets randomly strewn about on top of the document. Somebody who shoots stuff owns that document, you see, so take it seriously. I bet it was Mr. Hendrickson who thought up the bullets bit, or maybe it was a joint effort, I wish I knew the creative process of the minds at work here.
Each level consists of room after room of the same thing, yet they all don’t really look like any one thing in particular. I can’t ever really tell what the hell kind of building I’m supposed to be in. They all just look like the basement of somewhere. Room after room of some place’s basement, and it’s hard to tell where you’ve been and where you’re going.
In Condemned: Criminal Origins, slow and unresponsive combat is a feature, not poor design. Firearms are rare, so it’s mostly swinging slow pipes and hammers and things. Why make a game half-police investigation and half-first person shooter if you’re just going to dumb down the investigative parts and eliminate firearms yet still fill the game with hordes of enemies whose presence never really has a good explanation? I don’t know!
The story in the game is probably where most of the original in the Original Concept originally originated from. They took a dream-like approach to the narrative and-ah, who am I kidding. None of this makes any sense. I have a feeling the people who made this video game watched and enjoyed a few movies before, and maybe even a particular David Fincher one, but if this game was a movie they wouldn’t be able to get away with half the stuff here. One minute you’re thrown out of a window and land on a car after a guy shoots some policemen with your gun. In the next scene your waking up in your apartment and an old man is sitting there just watching you. A complete stranger, he says, “Oh me? I was a friend of your fathers.” And we’re just supposed to take all this nonsense in stride because it’s a video game and the main character has a special jawbone or something. How do you argue with a special jawbone? You just don’t.
Strangely enough, there are one or more individuals out there that think this series would make a good movie, or make good money as a movie, so that’s what they’re doing. Although it’s not going to be a direct adaptation, just set in the same “universe” as the game. I assume hordes of dirty looking murderous vagrants are to be expected. Maybe they’ll make a game based off the movie and call it “Se7en.”
2003
text by Thomas Callahan
⋆☆☆☆
“DOOR-BASHING, WINDOW-SMASHING VANDALISM.”
As somebody who has played Halo 2 online, I can tell you that the Xbox Live Headset is usually pretty terrifying. Women are demeaned on a medieval level. Prepubescent boys bark military jargon with gut-wrenching enthusiasm. Dead players are angry and they will let you know; racism and inflammatory bullstuff accumulates. I feel sleazy by proxy just listening to it all. These people are in my living room. At some point I'm bound to claw off my headset, banishing them out the door. Inevitably I'Il let them back in — listening to their vapid bile is almost as morbidly amusing as reading YouTube comments.
In Manhunt, you play as James Cash, a gore-loving serial killer lining up in death row. You bastard! When you escape, to the delight of journalists, you begin murdering people again — only this time, murder is your full-time job. No, you're not a hitman, you're a film star. You're employed by "The Director" to kill men in sadistic, needlessly complicated fashion. Each kill is videotaped with a shaky handheld camera and broadcast through a grainy filter. The footage is then spliced and edited into a series of snuff films.
Manhunt uses the Xbox Live Headset outside of an online context, and the result is more outright terrifying than any testosterone-fuelled internet-deathmatch banter could hope to be. We hear narration, a device criminally underused in videogames, through the headset, while all other sounds are emitted from television speakers. This maneuver reinforces the narration as separate from the in-game action; less detached and expository, more akin to a DVD's audio commentary. As you butcher and maim enemies, "The Director" chortles with uninhibited glee into your headset. To him, these illegal-voyeur-reality-HOT! death videos are captivating pornography — he's getting off, and uncomfortably close to your inner ear.
What kind of sick freak would buy tapes of real murders? Is there really an existing audience, an actual market? Are there others just like The Director, giggling rapturously at these senseless snuff films? Man, that’s hardly even a question. Of course there's an audience. There will always be an audience for depraved violence. For starters: you, the player. You the player bought Manhunt, a game documenting depraved violence in vivid detail; a game by that depraved studio Rockstar Games; a game created for depraved gamers just like you.
This is a damning portrayal of the videogame industry, where developers endlessly one-up each other, piling on the shock value for consumers endlessly craving more. Blame falls equally on the entertainers and the entertained. James Cash provides inspired violence for the camera — he is Rockstar's loathsome self-portrait — and The Director is a pastiche of you, the grinning spectator clamoring for more. What a mess. Manhunt sends up everyone. It's not preachy satire: it presents no escape from the gory supply and gory demand. Perhaps it's nothing more than an expression of videogame industry turmoil circa 2000. Either way, the whole enterprise is thick with despair. When I suffocate a man with a plastic bag and The Director chortles in my headset, his cruel delight and my instinctive satisfaction mirror each other.
And I don't like it. In fact, I find the parallel pretty hecking nihilistic. Pretty hecking patronizing.
Rockstar Games created Grand Theft Auto with the most earnest of intentions. They aimed to accommodate as many stray ideas as possible, without care or precision, in order to provide templates for more polished games to come (such as Bully, Crackdown and Dead Rising). They succeeded; the series' reckless ambition was and continues to be infectious. Somewhat regrettably, its explicit subject matter spawned lawsuits, activists, and sensationalist press. But that was mere tabloid opportunism, wasn't it?
Here comes the nigh-unwatchable navet: this controversy is treated by Manhunt as another stray idea of Grand Theft Auto's to be polished, a template to build upon.
That's not only tactless, it's, uh. What the hell's the point?
Manhunt is a pointless act of destruction. It flaunts the sickness of an industry and continues the sickness with knowing symbolism, providing more blood and sex, you sickos, and don't worry, we're sickos too. The Director is a sadist for enjoying violence; you're a sadist for enjoying violence because ha! you're still playing our violent videogame. Serial killer James Cash is forced to pump out more violence by The Director; us Grand Theft Auto developers are forced to pump out more videogame violence by you. This is not an anguished protest. It's an opportunistic tantrum. If everyone is guilty and accused, even the victims of the snuff films — yeah, they're hecking neo-Nazis — then what's the intent beneath the bleak, all-encompassing cynicism? More spotlight, more sales. So what if Manhunt can draw clever parallels; it drags its players, its developers and the public image of videogames a little further into a vague sludgy pit. Consider the mission revolving around a 300-pound mentally &^#$#ed man wielding a chainsaw. Or the anemic stealth engine, where tossing decapitated heads into distracting corners is the end-all answer to everything. Was Rockstar inspired to create this game as one giant mischievous heck You to the likes of Jack Thompson? If so, they've simply handed their opponents more ammunition. Was Manhunt intended to provoke discussion about the pitfalls of the medium? If so, Rockstar have provoked discussion from me: this review, where I give their noisy pitfall of a game a resounding half star.
As sheer horrific provocation, Manhunt succeeds. Yet underneath is dreary, methodical stealth, and underneath that is door-bashing window-smashing vandalism. None of it has purpose. A tinge of self-parody is undeniable, but it's a baseless, rabble-rousing plea for attention all the same, and the attention it received — frenzied 11:00 breaking-news drama — has subtly pushed videogames further away from respectability, further into the publicly scorned fringes that comics, wrestling and pornography call home.
Further still, now: Manhunt 2 has been banned in the UK. Nintendo and Sony, in an attempt to save face, are refusing to publish the sequel without some hefty censorship. The situation is all kinds of ridiculous. It brings to mind countless independent films forever silenced by their NC-17 ratings. I'm too drained to line up in defense of Manhunt 2, though, because judging by the adulatory PR — featuring necrophilia and castration — I doubt it will amount to anything greater than Grisly Unfriendly Action Utilizing Wiimote Stabbing Motions. I conclude now, having finished Manhunt (it ends up ditching all symbolism and resorting to trite cops vs. robbers), that the good folks at Rockstar have been playing a bit too much Grand Theft Auto. Here they snag the attention of mass media the same way giddy "sandbox-gamers" snag the attention of cops: with desperate, drunken destruction demanding immediate response. Run over that pedestrian! Ah, a policeman: a dead policeman! Twenty innocent bystanders and five unsuspecting hookers later, C.J. is under fire from the US Army. And they're using hecking helicopters, dude! Slash them down! And now Manhunt is getting blamed for homicides, dude! And now the UK government is throwing us into the bonfire — we might have too many stars to wriggle out of this one, dude! Do it again! This has gotta be the biggest adrenaline rush we've had since we free-climbed the Mayan ruins!
⋆☆☆☆
“DOOR-BASHING, WINDOW-SMASHING VANDALISM.”
As somebody who has played Halo 2 online, I can tell you that the Xbox Live Headset is usually pretty terrifying. Women are demeaned on a medieval level. Prepubescent boys bark military jargon with gut-wrenching enthusiasm. Dead players are angry and they will let you know; racism and inflammatory bullstuff accumulates. I feel sleazy by proxy just listening to it all. These people are in my living room. At some point I'm bound to claw off my headset, banishing them out the door. Inevitably I'Il let them back in — listening to their vapid bile is almost as morbidly amusing as reading YouTube comments.
In Manhunt, you play as James Cash, a gore-loving serial killer lining up in death row. You bastard! When you escape, to the delight of journalists, you begin murdering people again — only this time, murder is your full-time job. No, you're not a hitman, you're a film star. You're employed by "The Director" to kill men in sadistic, needlessly complicated fashion. Each kill is videotaped with a shaky handheld camera and broadcast through a grainy filter. The footage is then spliced and edited into a series of snuff films.
Manhunt uses the Xbox Live Headset outside of an online context, and the result is more outright terrifying than any testosterone-fuelled internet-deathmatch banter could hope to be. We hear narration, a device criminally underused in videogames, through the headset, while all other sounds are emitted from television speakers. This maneuver reinforces the narration as separate from the in-game action; less detached and expository, more akin to a DVD's audio commentary. As you butcher and maim enemies, "The Director" chortles with uninhibited glee into your headset. To him, these illegal-voyeur-reality-HOT! death videos are captivating pornography — he's getting off, and uncomfortably close to your inner ear.
What kind of sick freak would buy tapes of real murders? Is there really an existing audience, an actual market? Are there others just like The Director, giggling rapturously at these senseless snuff films? Man, that’s hardly even a question. Of course there's an audience. There will always be an audience for depraved violence. For starters: you, the player. You the player bought Manhunt, a game documenting depraved violence in vivid detail; a game by that depraved studio Rockstar Games; a game created for depraved gamers just like you.
This is a damning portrayal of the videogame industry, where developers endlessly one-up each other, piling on the shock value for consumers endlessly craving more. Blame falls equally on the entertainers and the entertained. James Cash provides inspired violence for the camera — he is Rockstar's loathsome self-portrait — and The Director is a pastiche of you, the grinning spectator clamoring for more. What a mess. Manhunt sends up everyone. It's not preachy satire: it presents no escape from the gory supply and gory demand. Perhaps it's nothing more than an expression of videogame industry turmoil circa 2000. Either way, the whole enterprise is thick with despair. When I suffocate a man with a plastic bag and The Director chortles in my headset, his cruel delight and my instinctive satisfaction mirror each other.
And I don't like it. In fact, I find the parallel pretty hecking nihilistic. Pretty hecking patronizing.
Rockstar Games created Grand Theft Auto with the most earnest of intentions. They aimed to accommodate as many stray ideas as possible, without care or precision, in order to provide templates for more polished games to come (such as Bully, Crackdown and Dead Rising). They succeeded; the series' reckless ambition was and continues to be infectious. Somewhat regrettably, its explicit subject matter spawned lawsuits, activists, and sensationalist press. But that was mere tabloid opportunism, wasn't it?
Here comes the nigh-unwatchable navet: this controversy is treated by Manhunt as another stray idea of Grand Theft Auto's to be polished, a template to build upon.
That's not only tactless, it's, uh. What the hell's the point?
Manhunt is a pointless act of destruction. It flaunts the sickness of an industry and continues the sickness with knowing symbolism, providing more blood and sex, you sickos, and don't worry, we're sickos too. The Director is a sadist for enjoying violence; you're a sadist for enjoying violence because ha! you're still playing our violent videogame. Serial killer James Cash is forced to pump out more violence by The Director; us Grand Theft Auto developers are forced to pump out more videogame violence by you. This is not an anguished protest. It's an opportunistic tantrum. If everyone is guilty and accused, even the victims of the snuff films — yeah, they're hecking neo-Nazis — then what's the intent beneath the bleak, all-encompassing cynicism? More spotlight, more sales. So what if Manhunt can draw clever parallels; it drags its players, its developers and the public image of videogames a little further into a vague sludgy pit. Consider the mission revolving around a 300-pound mentally &^#$#ed man wielding a chainsaw. Or the anemic stealth engine, where tossing decapitated heads into distracting corners is the end-all answer to everything. Was Rockstar inspired to create this game as one giant mischievous heck You to the likes of Jack Thompson? If so, they've simply handed their opponents more ammunition. Was Manhunt intended to provoke discussion about the pitfalls of the medium? If so, Rockstar have provoked discussion from me: this review, where I give their noisy pitfall of a game a resounding half star.
As sheer horrific provocation, Manhunt succeeds. Yet underneath is dreary, methodical stealth, and underneath that is door-bashing window-smashing vandalism. None of it has purpose. A tinge of self-parody is undeniable, but it's a baseless, rabble-rousing plea for attention all the same, and the attention it received — frenzied 11:00 breaking-news drama — has subtly pushed videogames further away from respectability, further into the publicly scorned fringes that comics, wrestling and pornography call home.
Further still, now: Manhunt 2 has been banned in the UK. Nintendo and Sony, in an attempt to save face, are refusing to publish the sequel without some hefty censorship. The situation is all kinds of ridiculous. It brings to mind countless independent films forever silenced by their NC-17 ratings. I'm too drained to line up in defense of Manhunt 2, though, because judging by the adulatory PR — featuring necrophilia and castration — I doubt it will amount to anything greater than Grisly Unfriendly Action Utilizing Wiimote Stabbing Motions. I conclude now, having finished Manhunt (it ends up ditching all symbolism and resorting to trite cops vs. robbers), that the good folks at Rockstar have been playing a bit too much Grand Theft Auto. Here they snag the attention of mass media the same way giddy "sandbox-gamers" snag the attention of cops: with desperate, drunken destruction demanding immediate response. Run over that pedestrian! Ah, a policeman: a dead policeman! Twenty innocent bystanders and five unsuspecting hookers later, C.J. is under fire from the US Army. And they're using hecking helicopters, dude! Slash them down! And now Manhunt is getting blamed for homicides, dude! And now the UK government is throwing us into the bonfire — we might have too many stars to wriggle out of this one, dude! Do it again! This has gotta be the biggest adrenaline rush we've had since we free-climbed the Mayan ruins!
2007
text by tim rogers
★★★⋆
“SO SLIPPERY IT'S PSYCHOTIC.”
In addition to being mostly a great videogame, John Woo’s Stranglehold also proves why games are not art, especially when they’re not trying to be: Stranglehold is so sleek it’s slippery, and so slippery it’s psychotic, and when every tiny input on the controller seeks to tell the game to be a blockbuster, the facade falls away and idiocy seeps in the second you stop pressing buttons.
The main character, Inspector Tequila, played by Chow Yun-Fat’s polygonal twin, is hard-wired to slide over any surface he comes into contact with. It takes the majority of dyed-in-the-wool videogamers no more than ten seconds to realize how hilarious it is that he slides over countertops and tables with such ease. There, not ten seconds in, most sneering gamers will have broken Stranglehold over their knee. No
The thing some might shrug off, though, is that Stranglehold is trying, really, really hard. It’s trying to be an actual blockbuster, not just the “gaming equivalent”. (Yes, we pause to reflect how ironic it is that it bills itself as the “sequel” to the film “Hard Boiled”.) At its core are enough spiffy concepts and neat tricks to earn it four stars — though only if you’re willing to play along, to get into character.
Your character is a man who shoots lots of people, sometimes in slow-motion. He dives and slides a lot. Sometimes he shoots people in the face, other times in the chest, and sometimes — if he has enough power in his special meter — he can kill by shooting a man in the testicles. The story of the game has something to do with the main character’s wife and daughter being kidnapped, though the first stage puts to rest any doubts that we’re going to have to think: gangsters call the police, asking them to send one cop to a certain location, where they will tell him what happened to a cop who disappeared a few days earlier. The cop was killed, of course, and our hero can’t even make his way to the rendezvous point without being shot at literally a thousand times. The story isn’t trying to be a sweeping epic, it’s about giving our character somewhere to go, so that he can get shot at (and shoot people) along the way. There’s dialogue, and there are some dramatic sequences, and it’s kind of revealing that cheesy John Woo flick dialogue acted out by the same hammy voice actors used to actually dub John Woo flicks actually feels leagues closer to the Mona Lisa than any other dialogue in most other games. Though essentially, the joy of the game is in the shooting, and — most precisely — the way things are shot, the way objects explode. It’s violent, though it’s not depraved — it’s just idiotic.
Literally everything explodes in Stranglehold. Early on, there’s a gunfight in a marketplace where you can destroy everything — people, fruit, wooden crates, concrete pillars. Shoot “glints” to cause small-scale environmental disasters to crush the bad guys. The glints are actually more interesting than they seem at first: as you pan the camera around, objects glint for an instant and then return to normal. That’s how you know that object can be shot. Shoot a glinting sign and it might fall on a dude’s head. Repeat for air-conditioners, steel beams, bags of bricks, dinosaur bones, whatever.
Lately, there’s been this poisonous trend in videogame design: Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue termed it the “Quick-Timer Event”. In many “cinematic” games since Shenmue, occasionally you’ll see a button icon flash hugely on the screen. Press that button to perform a special “cinematic” action. In Shenmue II, there were plenty of extended sequences with branching paths and clever animations. Say, if you missed press the A button, your character might get punched by one guy, though that might give him an opportunity to spin around and punch the other guy instead. Shenmue II kind of lost its way in a Quick-Timer sequence in which your main character tried to keep his balance while walking across ten successive steel beams, though for the most part, it was cute, and it seldom felt cloying. Further games would expand and fetishize the idea of the Quick-Timer Event, and eventually, we’re playing God of War II, where pretty much everything is a Quick Timer Event, except there’s really only one button you ever have to press. Recently, Ninja Theory, the developers of Heavenly Sword, had to defend their game when Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Ninja Gaiden, jeered it for having relied on such epic Quick-Timer sequences as “pound the X button to run across this chain”. They said that the Quick-Timer sequences existed to allow players to experience a new level of cinematic interactivity, which they otherwise couldn’t experience through, you know, playing the game.
Well, Stranglehold, as a videogame and as a trip from many point As to many point Bs, manages to be both more challenging to play than Heavenly Sword‘s action sequences and more cinematically enthralling than Heavenly Sword‘s cut-scenes — not to mention quick-timer events. As in God of War II, every button press of Stranglehold is a quick-timer event; every button press is an action scene, a heavy metal guitar riff; every button press is The Biggest Motion Picture of the Summer. Except in Stranglehold, the player is always joyfully in control of the context. We’re shooting glinting air-conditioners or dinosaur bones to crush dudes we could otherwise be just shooting in the face. We’re winning “Stylish Kill” points for doing so, we’re using those “Stylish Kill” points to activate special abilities like Precision Shot (zoom in in ultra slo-mo to perform a one-hit kill on any one of twenty-something instant-kill zones on an opponent’s body (yes, testicles included)) or Barrage Mode (which gives you unlimited ammo for a few seconds — a crafty nod to the climactic scenes in John Woo films where the idea of clips dropping out of the guns in slow-motion as the hero reloads becomes too much of a cinematic burden, and he just shoots hundreds of bullets without flinching).
And every once in a while, there’s a standoff. Usually, the standoffs’ reasons for existing are not very clear, to say the least. In the first stage, there’s a standoff where one of the gangsters you’re here to meet tells you to go to a certain bar and ask the bartender a question. Then he and his four friends start shooting at you. Never mind the setup — it’s the execution that shines. The game just seamlessly slips into the setup sequence, and the camera pans around the armed men John Woo style. Keep your eyes on the screen and you just might catch sight of a few glints. When the standoff starts, in super-slo-mo, you’ll face the opponents one at a time. Dodge to one side and then the other to trick your opponents into shooting the wrong way. Shoot the glints to send exploding propane tanks careening into unfashionable mens’ bodies so hard that when they slam into a concrete wall, the wall cracks and buckles. Kill one guy, and the camera spins around to the next.
The setups and the locations of the glints get progressively more tricky, and it hardly ever stops being entertaining when you catch a gunman in the face with a flying gas tank. In something like God of War, when you press the X button at just the right time to send your hero jumping onto the shoulders of a mythical beast, where he proceeds to plunge his swords into the beast’s neck, producing a geyser of blood, it feels like all business — we’re not aiming the blade at the neck; in Stranglehold, it’s me aiming my gun at that gas tank. It’s me pulling the trigger. The game is only offering me a tiny hint — in the form of a glint — that something will happen if I shoot the gas tank. The glint might represent a spark in the hero’s imagination: he’s a chance-taking, risk-breaking man, and he didn’t survive so long on the police force in this alternate universe where everyone owns a gun without sometimes shooting at the most tangentially related stuff. It’s like, one day, he got shot in the arm, cursed a lot, and then resolved to stop trying to shoot guys in the face all the time and, wherever necessary, start shooting at random objects. It’s never done him wrong since.
Compare and contrast this, once again, to Shenmue‘s lame storytelling, where the hero has to actually ask people, in his hometown renowned as one of the largest ports in Asia, where he can find some sailors. Shenmue wanted, very hard, to be a gangster-schlock action epic, only it was apparently written and designed by a couple of guys who literally felt chills the first time they submitted a draft to their creative writing teacher in which one guy threatens to hit another guy if he doesn’t “shut up”; with Shenmue, in which the hero rides a motorcycle at one point and someone eventually gets punched, they must have thought they were writing actual literature. This mealy-mouthed-ness permeates into the deepest layers of the game design, and to many other deep layers of many other games’ design. Who would have ever guessed that some actual John Woo was exactly what the game industry needed? Compare the barroom brawl early in Shenmue — press the A button to pick up that pool cue — to a scene exceedingly early in Stranglehold, in which our hardened cop runs along a railing down a staircase, and the game kicks into slow motion, and dudes start shooting at us, and we can either shoot them or stylishly pick off the glints, fatally crushing them with air-conditioners and neon signs, all in real-time, all under our control.
Some would say that Max Payne pioneered many of the concepts employed in Stranglehold — such as bullet-time — though it’s safe to say that Max Payne was only ever drawing its inspiration from John Woo’s movies, anyway. Besides, Max Payne is too cheeky: there’s really only one impression of it you’re allowed to get. Stranglehold is dead serious, which means that if you want to find it hilarious, that’s your choice.
There are a few nagging issues, like the “health pack” dynamic — you can use Stylish Kill points to refill some of your health, if you so choose, which makes no sense in the context of a gun battle — and the overall exhaustion you might feel after trying to play the whole game at once. It’s kind of like Smash TV, in a way — as much as I consider it a masterpiece of simplicity and design, there’s really only so much of it I can take. The ultimate disappointment of Stranglehold — and it’s a small one — is that, well-sketched as the characters are, if you’ve never voted Republican in your life, there’s a huge chance you’re not going to care who the real bad guy is, nor will there be any actual suspense about whether the hero survives or not. The setup is a string of dumb red herrings and one-liners that stand no chance of being memorable thanks to the (admittedly awesome) way everything in game sounds like it was translated from Cantonese to English. Again we come back to four angry gunmen, having an incomprehensible conversation as the camera pans around and we count up the glints. In this way, the story comes to resemble the Swedish speed metal Picasso listens to while painting his next masterpiece: if there were no words, he’d stop painting and feel depressed. If the angry men weren’t talking, there’d be no reason to shoot them, et cetera. At least they understand the reasons they’re screaming. And when the game is off, no one needs to be angry anymore. It’s therapeutic, really. It’s extraordinary.
Top Line: Stranglehold is “one of the year’s best games, whether or not you play more than ten minutes of it. Steps in the right direction all around. When it comes to merging story and game, no one does it better.“
Games magazine-style quote: “First the exemplary Psi-Ops, and now this. Developer Tiger Hill Entertainment is one to watch.”
★★★⋆
“SO SLIPPERY IT'S PSYCHOTIC.”
In addition to being mostly a great videogame, John Woo’s Stranglehold also proves why games are not art, especially when they’re not trying to be: Stranglehold is so sleek it’s slippery, and so slippery it’s psychotic, and when every tiny input on the controller seeks to tell the game to be a blockbuster, the facade falls away and idiocy seeps in the second you stop pressing buttons.
The main character, Inspector Tequila, played by Chow Yun-Fat’s polygonal twin, is hard-wired to slide over any surface he comes into contact with. It takes the majority of dyed-in-the-wool videogamers no more than ten seconds to realize how hilarious it is that he slides over countertops and tables with such ease. There, not ten seconds in, most sneering gamers will have broken Stranglehold over their knee. No
The thing some might shrug off, though, is that Stranglehold is trying, really, really hard. It’s trying to be an actual blockbuster, not just the “gaming equivalent”. (Yes, we pause to reflect how ironic it is that it bills itself as the “sequel” to the film “Hard Boiled”.) At its core are enough spiffy concepts and neat tricks to earn it four stars — though only if you’re willing to play along, to get into character.
Your character is a man who shoots lots of people, sometimes in slow-motion. He dives and slides a lot. Sometimes he shoots people in the face, other times in the chest, and sometimes — if he has enough power in his special meter — he can kill by shooting a man in the testicles. The story of the game has something to do with the main character’s wife and daughter being kidnapped, though the first stage puts to rest any doubts that we’re going to have to think: gangsters call the police, asking them to send one cop to a certain location, where they will tell him what happened to a cop who disappeared a few days earlier. The cop was killed, of course, and our hero can’t even make his way to the rendezvous point without being shot at literally a thousand times. The story isn’t trying to be a sweeping epic, it’s about giving our character somewhere to go, so that he can get shot at (and shoot people) along the way. There’s dialogue, and there are some dramatic sequences, and it’s kind of revealing that cheesy John Woo flick dialogue acted out by the same hammy voice actors used to actually dub John Woo flicks actually feels leagues closer to the Mona Lisa than any other dialogue in most other games. Though essentially, the joy of the game is in the shooting, and — most precisely — the way things are shot, the way objects explode. It’s violent, though it’s not depraved — it’s just idiotic.
Literally everything explodes in Stranglehold. Early on, there’s a gunfight in a marketplace where you can destroy everything — people, fruit, wooden crates, concrete pillars. Shoot “glints” to cause small-scale environmental disasters to crush the bad guys. The glints are actually more interesting than they seem at first: as you pan the camera around, objects glint for an instant and then return to normal. That’s how you know that object can be shot. Shoot a glinting sign and it might fall on a dude’s head. Repeat for air-conditioners, steel beams, bags of bricks, dinosaur bones, whatever.
Lately, there’s been this poisonous trend in videogame design: Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue termed it the “Quick-Timer Event”. In many “cinematic” games since Shenmue, occasionally you’ll see a button icon flash hugely on the screen. Press that button to perform a special “cinematic” action. In Shenmue II, there were plenty of extended sequences with branching paths and clever animations. Say, if you missed press the A button, your character might get punched by one guy, though that might give him an opportunity to spin around and punch the other guy instead. Shenmue II kind of lost its way in a Quick-Timer sequence in which your main character tried to keep his balance while walking across ten successive steel beams, though for the most part, it was cute, and it seldom felt cloying. Further games would expand and fetishize the idea of the Quick-Timer Event, and eventually, we’re playing God of War II, where pretty much everything is a Quick Timer Event, except there’s really only one button you ever have to press. Recently, Ninja Theory, the developers of Heavenly Sword, had to defend their game when Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Ninja Gaiden, jeered it for having relied on such epic Quick-Timer sequences as “pound the X button to run across this chain”. They said that the Quick-Timer sequences existed to allow players to experience a new level of cinematic interactivity, which they otherwise couldn’t experience through, you know, playing the game.
Well, Stranglehold, as a videogame and as a trip from many point As to many point Bs, manages to be both more challenging to play than Heavenly Sword‘s action sequences and more cinematically enthralling than Heavenly Sword‘s cut-scenes — not to mention quick-timer events. As in God of War II, every button press of Stranglehold is a quick-timer event; every button press is an action scene, a heavy metal guitar riff; every button press is The Biggest Motion Picture of the Summer. Except in Stranglehold, the player is always joyfully in control of the context. We’re shooting glinting air-conditioners or dinosaur bones to crush dudes we could otherwise be just shooting in the face. We’re winning “Stylish Kill” points for doing so, we’re using those “Stylish Kill” points to activate special abilities like Precision Shot (zoom in in ultra slo-mo to perform a one-hit kill on any one of twenty-something instant-kill zones on an opponent’s body (yes, testicles included)) or Barrage Mode (which gives you unlimited ammo for a few seconds — a crafty nod to the climactic scenes in John Woo films where the idea of clips dropping out of the guns in slow-motion as the hero reloads becomes too much of a cinematic burden, and he just shoots hundreds of bullets without flinching).
And every once in a while, there’s a standoff. Usually, the standoffs’ reasons for existing are not very clear, to say the least. In the first stage, there’s a standoff where one of the gangsters you’re here to meet tells you to go to a certain bar and ask the bartender a question. Then he and his four friends start shooting at you. Never mind the setup — it’s the execution that shines. The game just seamlessly slips into the setup sequence, and the camera pans around the armed men John Woo style. Keep your eyes on the screen and you just might catch sight of a few glints. When the standoff starts, in super-slo-mo, you’ll face the opponents one at a time. Dodge to one side and then the other to trick your opponents into shooting the wrong way. Shoot the glints to send exploding propane tanks careening into unfashionable mens’ bodies so hard that when they slam into a concrete wall, the wall cracks and buckles. Kill one guy, and the camera spins around to the next.
The setups and the locations of the glints get progressively more tricky, and it hardly ever stops being entertaining when you catch a gunman in the face with a flying gas tank. In something like God of War, when you press the X button at just the right time to send your hero jumping onto the shoulders of a mythical beast, where he proceeds to plunge his swords into the beast’s neck, producing a geyser of blood, it feels like all business — we’re not aiming the blade at the neck; in Stranglehold, it’s me aiming my gun at that gas tank. It’s me pulling the trigger. The game is only offering me a tiny hint — in the form of a glint — that something will happen if I shoot the gas tank. The glint might represent a spark in the hero’s imagination: he’s a chance-taking, risk-breaking man, and he didn’t survive so long on the police force in this alternate universe where everyone owns a gun without sometimes shooting at the most tangentially related stuff. It’s like, one day, he got shot in the arm, cursed a lot, and then resolved to stop trying to shoot guys in the face all the time and, wherever necessary, start shooting at random objects. It’s never done him wrong since.
Compare and contrast this, once again, to Shenmue‘s lame storytelling, where the hero has to actually ask people, in his hometown renowned as one of the largest ports in Asia, where he can find some sailors. Shenmue wanted, very hard, to be a gangster-schlock action epic, only it was apparently written and designed by a couple of guys who literally felt chills the first time they submitted a draft to their creative writing teacher in which one guy threatens to hit another guy if he doesn’t “shut up”; with Shenmue, in which the hero rides a motorcycle at one point and someone eventually gets punched, they must have thought they were writing actual literature. This mealy-mouthed-ness permeates into the deepest layers of the game design, and to many other deep layers of many other games’ design. Who would have ever guessed that some actual John Woo was exactly what the game industry needed? Compare the barroom brawl early in Shenmue — press the A button to pick up that pool cue — to a scene exceedingly early in Stranglehold, in which our hardened cop runs along a railing down a staircase, and the game kicks into slow motion, and dudes start shooting at us, and we can either shoot them or stylishly pick off the glints, fatally crushing them with air-conditioners and neon signs, all in real-time, all under our control.
Some would say that Max Payne pioneered many of the concepts employed in Stranglehold — such as bullet-time — though it’s safe to say that Max Payne was only ever drawing its inspiration from John Woo’s movies, anyway. Besides, Max Payne is too cheeky: there’s really only one impression of it you’re allowed to get. Stranglehold is dead serious, which means that if you want to find it hilarious, that’s your choice.
There are a few nagging issues, like the “health pack” dynamic — you can use Stylish Kill points to refill some of your health, if you so choose, which makes no sense in the context of a gun battle — and the overall exhaustion you might feel after trying to play the whole game at once. It’s kind of like Smash TV, in a way — as much as I consider it a masterpiece of simplicity and design, there’s really only so much of it I can take. The ultimate disappointment of Stranglehold — and it’s a small one — is that, well-sketched as the characters are, if you’ve never voted Republican in your life, there’s a huge chance you’re not going to care who the real bad guy is, nor will there be any actual suspense about whether the hero survives or not. The setup is a string of dumb red herrings and one-liners that stand no chance of being memorable thanks to the (admittedly awesome) way everything in game sounds like it was translated from Cantonese to English. Again we come back to four angry gunmen, having an incomprehensible conversation as the camera pans around and we count up the glints. In this way, the story comes to resemble the Swedish speed metal Picasso listens to while painting his next masterpiece: if there were no words, he’d stop painting and feel depressed. If the angry men weren’t talking, there’d be no reason to shoot them, et cetera. At least they understand the reasons they’re screaming. And when the game is off, no one needs to be angry anymore. It’s therapeutic, really. It’s extraordinary.
Top Line: Stranglehold is “one of the year’s best games, whether or not you play more than ten minutes of it. Steps in the right direction all around. When it comes to merging story and game, no one does it better.“
Games magazine-style quote: “First the exemplary Psi-Ops, and now this. Developer Tiger Hill Entertainment is one to watch.”
2007
text by tim rogers
★⋆☆☆
“DEFINITELY NOT THE GAME ANYONE INVOLVED WANTED TO MAKE.”
In a riveting scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia”, William H. Macy’s character, teeth broken out of his skull, tells someone he just met, “I have so much love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Ignoring the fact that it makes you objectively gay to actually express sympathy for the man portrayed in said piece of cinema, we can move right along and say that each and every human being at Ninja Theory, developers of this videogame called Heavenly Sword, would probably say the same thing if they’d fallen off a metal ladder and had their teeth broken in. Heavenly Sword is a big, lush game, crafted with careful and deliberate attention to what’s popular in videogames these days, and it’s also just about jaw-droppingly boring.
I have wracked my brain, and the brains of many innocent and unwilling civilians, and pored over the cat-burglar-calling-card-like clues that plopped all around the PlayStation Store in the months leading up to the game’s release, and I have come to the Sherlock Holmesian conclusion that Heavenly Sword is in no way the videogame that anyone working on it actually wanted to make. You can tell by the way the nice-enough developers chat about the game in the making-of featurettes, you find scraps of evidence in the shiny two-minute “anime” episodes.
Exhibit A: the PlayStation Store description for the making-of featurettes touts the game as “with a budget rivaling a Hollywood blockbuster”. So games are at war with Hollywood now? And whoever spends the most money is the winner? That settles that debate.
Exhibit B: the anime episodes are actually called “anime” — they’re obviously trying to sell the game to the anime-liking crowd, via wholly optional episodes of “anime” that look good and go nowhere plot-wise, just like, hey, most actual anime.
Exhibit C: I see these anime episodes and think, “If the game actually looked like this, I’d probably buy it”, which is exactly what they want people to think. As far as the marketers are concerned, the next step from here is “Well, the game doesn’t actually look like this, though I guess I’ll buy it anyway.”
Exhibit D: a video I saw on YouTube around two months ago, comparing the way this game ended up looking on PlayStation 3 to the way it used to look when it was in development on Xbox. Back on Xbox, the main character was a large-headed China-dress-wearing kung-fuing she-freak. This must have been because the developers knew that another popular game on the Xbox was Dead or Alive, where characters looked just about exactly the same. Now that the game’s on PS3, the main character is something like the daughter of a supermodel and the hero from God of War. She has some kind of ambiguous friend, who’s about halfway mentally &^#$#ed, who wears a cat ear hood, because, as we’ve established, someone on the game’s staff both watches and likes anime. It’s safe to say that the oriental trappings were chosen because someone had a hunch that east Asia was marketable and no one could prove him wrong. And while the game isn’t nearly as offensive with its setting as Jade Empire, which painstakingly recreated a “mythical fantasy world” that looked a whole heck of a lot like Ancient China and then hired an actual linguist to create some hokey-as-stuff-sounding “Ching-chong ching-chong” Chinese apery and/or scrawl disgusting scribbles on scrolls in temples instead of just, you know, using actual Chinese and being done with it, it has these jarring, groan-worthy moments in which large Asian-looking men will scream at our red-haired femme fatale, “I’LL TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!!” I’m pretty sure that coloquialism didn’t exist in any one of the many imaginary Japanese historical periods. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t actually any Japanese girls named “Nariko”.
How is the game, then, you ask? Who gives a heck? Read IGN, for God’s sake.
Heavenly Sword screams focus-tested, market-safe, screenshot-approved. The graphics are nice enough, with more bloom than a rose garden. The music is brassy, boring Bruckheimer-film-score stuff. There are big, meaningless heaps of collapsing architecture and things that break just because something needs to break. There are enemies who block every attack you throw at them, because otherwise, you’d never press any different buttons. If you want to just keep pressing the same button, however, you can do that, and you might get away with it. It’s actually not that terrible to play, when you’re fighting things. You dial in combos and hit the right button when you see a flash on the screen, to perform a “spectacular” “finishing move”. After seeing these a hundred times or so, you won’t care less, though as a core game system, I guess it’s not too terrible. There are boss battles, and a story that I suppose is more interesting than taking a stuff without a magazine to read, and while it’s easier to follow than the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” film’s screenplay-by-the-numbers, it sure as hell isn’t Tolstoy. It’s just . . . there.
Should it be trying to be Tolstoy? There’s the rub. Games that, in the past, have tried to be Tolstoy have included Sin and Punishment, the pre-written English script of which scared so much stuff out of so many marketing directors that the game, spectacular as it was, never got released outside of Japan. Heavenly Sword is made by British people; Britian is a country that has produced many proud people who hecked the system and did whatever the hell they wanted in the name of rock and roll, though Ninja Theory is acting bizarrely Japanese, like one of those aching Japanese developers who avoids showing off by clinging to one tired license for twenty years. Except they don’t have a license. They just have Heavenly Sword. And after playing Heavenly Sword, I’m neither convinced nor not convinced that they could make a great game, that they could put all their love somewhere without frightening us or putting us to sleep. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it might be nice if they try, though I will be (slightly) unfair and insist that, with Heavenly Sword, they didn’t try, really. There’s the occasional scene where you control a semi-&^#$#ed girl whose method of “attacking” involves pressing the appropriate button to counter an enemy’s attack and swerve around them; I could try really hard to spin this out and call it a subversion the modern trend in “stealth” segments in videogames, though when I consider how heavily the game relies on quick-timer events (press X rapidly to run down a chain!), and how utterly bland the rest of the game is, I have to go ahead and consider the actual cool concept an accidental one-off.
Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, when asked what he thought about this game for some reason, said that the quick-timer events were boring, and that he would never make a game with such things in it. Itagaki is known for saying some jerkweed things with diarrhea frequency, though sometimes you really have to hand it to the guy. A spokesman for Ninja Theory, clearly on the defensive because he has Dead or Alive posters on his wall, was quick to say that they put these button-rapping events into the game because it allows players to experience an unparalleled level of cinematic excitement that they can’t experience merely through playing the game. I thought about this answer, knew deep in my heart that it was a cop-out, scoffed, and spoke to my computer monitor: “Maybe you just need to make some more interesting games!” There was no one around to high-five me, so I got a little depressed for a bit, and I got even more depressed when I realized that the Ninja Theory dude’s statement had been, essentially, a confession — he was apologizing for not being able to think of more interesting concepts for a game. All at once, it dawned: this is why Treasure bases their games on one tiny core concept, explored and mutated throughout the duration of the game; this is why Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden lets the player run up walls: without these little crunch-pockets, your videogame is not a videogame. Man, I don’t even like Ninja Gaiden, and here I am defending it. I guess that says about all there is to say about Heavenly Sword, then.
★⋆☆☆
“DEFINITELY NOT THE GAME ANYONE INVOLVED WANTED TO MAKE.”
In a riveting scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia”, William H. Macy’s character, teeth broken out of his skull, tells someone he just met, “I have so much love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Ignoring the fact that it makes you objectively gay to actually express sympathy for the man portrayed in said piece of cinema, we can move right along and say that each and every human being at Ninja Theory, developers of this videogame called Heavenly Sword, would probably say the same thing if they’d fallen off a metal ladder and had their teeth broken in. Heavenly Sword is a big, lush game, crafted with careful and deliberate attention to what’s popular in videogames these days, and it’s also just about jaw-droppingly boring.
I have wracked my brain, and the brains of many innocent and unwilling civilians, and pored over the cat-burglar-calling-card-like clues that plopped all around the PlayStation Store in the months leading up to the game’s release, and I have come to the Sherlock Holmesian conclusion that Heavenly Sword is in no way the videogame that anyone working on it actually wanted to make. You can tell by the way the nice-enough developers chat about the game in the making-of featurettes, you find scraps of evidence in the shiny two-minute “anime” episodes.
Exhibit A: the PlayStation Store description for the making-of featurettes touts the game as “with a budget rivaling a Hollywood blockbuster”. So games are at war with Hollywood now? And whoever spends the most money is the winner? That settles that debate.
Exhibit B: the anime episodes are actually called “anime” — they’re obviously trying to sell the game to the anime-liking crowd, via wholly optional episodes of “anime” that look good and go nowhere plot-wise, just like, hey, most actual anime.
Exhibit C: I see these anime episodes and think, “If the game actually looked like this, I’d probably buy it”, which is exactly what they want people to think. As far as the marketers are concerned, the next step from here is “Well, the game doesn’t actually look like this, though I guess I’ll buy it anyway.”
Exhibit D: a video I saw on YouTube around two months ago, comparing the way this game ended up looking on PlayStation 3 to the way it used to look when it was in development on Xbox. Back on Xbox, the main character was a large-headed China-dress-wearing kung-fuing she-freak. This must have been because the developers knew that another popular game on the Xbox was Dead or Alive, where characters looked just about exactly the same. Now that the game’s on PS3, the main character is something like the daughter of a supermodel and the hero from God of War. She has some kind of ambiguous friend, who’s about halfway mentally &^#$#ed, who wears a cat ear hood, because, as we’ve established, someone on the game’s staff both watches and likes anime. It’s safe to say that the oriental trappings were chosen because someone had a hunch that east Asia was marketable and no one could prove him wrong. And while the game isn’t nearly as offensive with its setting as Jade Empire, which painstakingly recreated a “mythical fantasy world” that looked a whole heck of a lot like Ancient China and then hired an actual linguist to create some hokey-as-stuff-sounding “Ching-chong ching-chong” Chinese apery and/or scrawl disgusting scribbles on scrolls in temples instead of just, you know, using actual Chinese and being done with it, it has these jarring, groan-worthy moments in which large Asian-looking men will scream at our red-haired femme fatale, “I’LL TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!!” I’m pretty sure that coloquialism didn’t exist in any one of the many imaginary Japanese historical periods. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t actually any Japanese girls named “Nariko”.
How is the game, then, you ask? Who gives a heck? Read IGN, for God’s sake.
Heavenly Sword screams focus-tested, market-safe, screenshot-approved. The graphics are nice enough, with more bloom than a rose garden. The music is brassy, boring Bruckheimer-film-score stuff. There are big, meaningless heaps of collapsing architecture and things that break just because something needs to break. There are enemies who block every attack you throw at them, because otherwise, you’d never press any different buttons. If you want to just keep pressing the same button, however, you can do that, and you might get away with it. It’s actually not that terrible to play, when you’re fighting things. You dial in combos and hit the right button when you see a flash on the screen, to perform a “spectacular” “finishing move”. After seeing these a hundred times or so, you won’t care less, though as a core game system, I guess it’s not too terrible. There are boss battles, and a story that I suppose is more interesting than taking a stuff without a magazine to read, and while it’s easier to follow than the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” film’s screenplay-by-the-numbers, it sure as hell isn’t Tolstoy. It’s just . . . there.
Should it be trying to be Tolstoy? There’s the rub. Games that, in the past, have tried to be Tolstoy have included Sin and Punishment, the pre-written English script of which scared so much stuff out of so many marketing directors that the game, spectacular as it was, never got released outside of Japan. Heavenly Sword is made by British people; Britian is a country that has produced many proud people who hecked the system and did whatever the hell they wanted in the name of rock and roll, though Ninja Theory is acting bizarrely Japanese, like one of those aching Japanese developers who avoids showing off by clinging to one tired license for twenty years. Except they don’t have a license. They just have Heavenly Sword. And after playing Heavenly Sword, I’m neither convinced nor not convinced that they could make a great game, that they could put all their love somewhere without frightening us or putting us to sleep. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it might be nice if they try, though I will be (slightly) unfair and insist that, with Heavenly Sword, they didn’t try, really. There’s the occasional scene where you control a semi-&^#$#ed girl whose method of “attacking” involves pressing the appropriate button to counter an enemy’s attack and swerve around them; I could try really hard to spin this out and call it a subversion the modern trend in “stealth” segments in videogames, though when I consider how heavily the game relies on quick-timer events (press X rapidly to run down a chain!), and how utterly bland the rest of the game is, I have to go ahead and consider the actual cool concept an accidental one-off.
Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, when asked what he thought about this game for some reason, said that the quick-timer events were boring, and that he would never make a game with such things in it. Itagaki is known for saying some jerkweed things with diarrhea frequency, though sometimes you really have to hand it to the guy. A spokesman for Ninja Theory, clearly on the defensive because he has Dead or Alive posters on his wall, was quick to say that they put these button-rapping events into the game because it allows players to experience an unparalleled level of cinematic excitement that they can’t experience merely through playing the game. I thought about this answer, knew deep in my heart that it was a cop-out, scoffed, and spoke to my computer monitor: “Maybe you just need to make some more interesting games!” There was no one around to high-five me, so I got a little depressed for a bit, and I got even more depressed when I realized that the Ninja Theory dude’s statement had been, essentially, a confession — he was apologizing for not being able to think of more interesting concepts for a game. All at once, it dawned: this is why Treasure bases their games on one tiny core concept, explored and mutated throughout the duration of the game; this is why Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden lets the player run up walls: without these little crunch-pockets, your videogame is not a videogame. Man, I don’t even like Ninja Gaiden, and here I am defending it. I guess that says about all there is to say about Heavenly Sword, then.