text by Brandon Parker

★⋆☆☆

“STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT.”

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

text by tim rogers

★★★☆

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by Matthew Sakey

★⋆☆☆

“A LOW-MEGATON YIELD.”

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



“What’s not to get?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then you wait.

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

So you wait.

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

And you wait.

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

And you wait.

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

Someone just blinked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by Brendan Lee

★⋆☆☆

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

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

Hey, Lakitu!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by Alex Felix

★★☆☆

“TETHERED TO THE WALL OVER YOUR TOILET.”

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

text by Ario Barzan

★★★★

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then you leave the town.

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

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

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

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

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

. . . Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, well.

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

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

text by tim rogers

★★★☆

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

text by David Cabrera

★★★☆

“INACCESSIBLE.”

This story is a little far-fetched and you’re probably not going to believe me, but here it goes: a few months ago, when I was in line to play Arcana Heart at Chinatown Fair, a girl approached me. “Bullstuff!”, you tell me, and then you give me a variety of reasons:

“This isn’t a girl game!”, you tell me. Arcana Heart represents a fascinating genre paradox: it’s an all-girl arcade fighting game targeted very specifically to the only people left playing arcade fighting games. The traditional genres have had to recapture this nearly exclusively male core audience by going after what they all left videogames for: moe crap. Moe is a Japanese term which approximately equates to “pink, covered in hearts”, “girls who act like children”, and “obsessively detailed fetishes”. Konami recently modernized Gradius by turning it into Otomedius: the Vic Viper turned from a claw-shaped spaceship into a doe-eyed girl with big tits.

Arcana Heart is a moe fighting game: that means that its crisp, high-resolution 2D sprites are all representative of some pink, heart-covered, childlike, obsessively-detailed fetish. I play Aino Heart (Heart of Love in English; eclipsing the entire Final Fantasy series for worst videogame name ever), whose powerful fetishes include a single hair which pops out from her head (the term is ahoge) in the shape of a heart, and a very specific ratio of exposed thigh between her stockings and skirt (the term is zettai ryouiki). She is the plain one. Other characters include ninja fox-girls in gym uniforms, the ubiquitous maid, and the grappler, a small girl half-suspended inside of a giant Dragon Quest slime.

What sane girl would even hecking want to be seen near this thing? is what you’re asking me, is what I, in my geek paranoia, was asking myself. I’d tell you to chill, man. Did you think she was even looking at the thing, dude? Did you think she cared that much? Come on. She just wants to ask a simple question: “Do you go to Hunter?” I tell her I do. So she just recognizes me from school. I don’t recognize her from school. I want to lie and tell her I do, but I don’t. I take it as a compliment.

She’s seen me around, she tells me, but the thing is, I’m inaccessible. It’s the look on my face, she says, and she pauses and emits a low, protracted “eeeueeeeuueeeeh”: the sound of ennui. She’s right. That’s exactly what the look on my face sounds like. I had no idea anybody was watching.

I try to explain myself: I just don’t smile easily–I’m lousy at taking pictures– but I’m actually pretty agreeable, and I totally warm up once I get to know people, but I’m seeing an airplane spiraling earthward in her facial expression. By the time I’ve told her to feel free to come over and say hi next time she sees me around, she’s got that “eeeueeeeuueeeeh” look going, and after a silence, she walks away. I haven’t seen her since. While I’m wondering to myself whether I’m really that bad, one of the guys I’m learning Arcana with turns to me with eyebrows raised and asks me if I knew the girl. “Same school,” I tell him. “Not too bad,” he appraises enthusiastically. Like we’re involved, or some stuff. Nevertheless, I’m glad somebody came out of that thinking I was cool.

Bear with me, here: this anecdote has something to do with a videogame. What my analogy is hamfistedly reaching for is that both I and this game are, to a point, inaccessible. This is why we get along so well.

Arcana is more inaccessible than I was to that poor girl: I’m a fairly old hand in the fighting game genre, but at first glance, this game was still completely incomprehensible to me. I didn’t understand how the more competent players were moving around, defending and attacking the way they did. I couldn’t so much fight as flop about like a fish, and was killed, torn apart and consumed as such. The game was so inaccessible, it turned out, that it and I made a fine match and got along very well together. The game opened up, and what was at first nonsensical now simply appeared liberated.

Freedom is a very sticky point in a fighting game, because fighting games are, by design, about the business of having or lacking strategic options. A nuts-and-bolts technical explanation is beyond the scope of this review, but ultimately fighting game players win by maximizing their own options while minimizing their opponents’. Arcana Heart uses two fresh new systems in particular– the Homing Cancel movement system and the mix-and-match Arcana special move system– to dramatically widen a player’s range of options. The Arcana is selected right after a character is chosen and acts as a support, giving the player additional special moves which often dramatically alter tactics from one Arcana to the next. Homing Cancels offer offensive options– particularly acting as the cornerstone of the game’s complex combo system– and defensive options that ensure that even in the midst of the worst beatdown, a player is never completely trapped.

The previous paragraph, jargony as it is, illustrates exactly what I mean when I call Arcana Heart inaccessible: beautiful high-resolution 2D aside, what makes this game special is exactly what makes it difficult to explain. What makes this game special is a string of little technicalities that form a backbone: plain and simple good game design. For the previously indoctrinated and well-versed fighting game player, even for the new player who puts some time into learning, fulfillment awaits. But this is a kind of player: this game has little to offer the player who cannot take enjoyment from simply learning the game, from the process of sorting the unintelligible into something that works. Most people aren’t. I can’t fully explain the joy I that personally take away from the genre: It’s a natural affinity, and if it’s not your thing, it’s not. Inaccessible videogames for inaccessible people, I say. Like attracts like.

text by Thomas Callahan

★★★☆

“A VILLAIN OF THE HIGHEST ORDER.”

Survival horror is the name of a genre, as befitted by obsessive-compulsive drones categorizing and ranking their favorite videogames to their heart’s content, and to every last decimal point. It certainly is a name that bears repeating. Survival horror. Wonderfully evocative, wonderfully specific.



I figure that yes, aside from the gloomy connotation it carries, apart from the notion of plodding, claustrophobic backtracking it implies, and despite having bogged down Shinji Mikami for almost a decade, survival horror remains a wonderful concept. In videogame terms it is long gone, sure, cast aside in favor of bigger, better things — namely, the functionally sublime run ‘n gun, Resident Evil 4. Whenever survival horror does resurface — that is, in Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami’s notorious collaboration, killer7 — it is only to be mocked and parodied. Yet I continue to gaze fondly in the genre’s effectively extinct direction, as its now-arcane devices and design philosophies were honed to perfection exactly twice. Survival horror served a purpose, is what I’m saying.

This game, a loving remake of the Resident Evil series debut, marks the second of two instances where survival horror jumped out of the mud long enough to spark something brilliant.

The original Resident Evil tried and largely failed to emulate the experience of watching a B-rate camp horror film. Ingredients were set in place; every last animal phobia was perpetuated, with a cast of giant snakes, giant sharks, giant spiders and . . . bees; porn actors were rented out to provide the now-internet-famously stilted voiceovers; and camera angles were fixed in place, lending an uneasy, half-obscured cinematic perspective to the schlock horror. Go back and play the original, however, and you’ll be stunned at how badly it has aged. That every hallway is fairly well-lit, often with comfortable fluorescent lighting, drains every last shred of suspense in one fell swoop. Navigating the mansion begins to feel like stumbling around the lobby of an only-slightly rundown nightclub at 3 pm in sunny California. There, that’s all. It didn’t work, it was hopelessly garish. The original failed simply because it was too bright.

In this Gamecube remake (neatly abbreviated REmake), the offending hallway lights are unplugged, smashed, and strewn across creaky wooden floors. I can now reevaluate the game, good as new. I am comfortable with calling it beautiful. Achingly beautiful, really; almost hallucinatory in its detail. As it represents a direct translation of Resident Evil series traditions onto more muscular hardware, however, a certain, peculiar graphical disconnect is amplified. Each camera angle is completely immobile, each area pre-rendered and static. The game, then, plays out as a series of photorealistic stills, each with the glistening fascination of moody nighttime photography, each completely non-interactive. Only the character models are animated: Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield and an assortment of T-Virus-infected monsters shuffle deliberately through this succession of elaborate photographs, this world around them, frozen in time. Shotgun pellets fired at glass windows go unnoticed, or what have you — nothing can be harmed. Unlike videogames that pride themselves on their fully destructible environments, REmake is intent on keeping its house of cards standing. By subscribing to popular suspense cinematography theory — most notably, the principle of One Correct Angle for each scene — REmake achieves a striking delicacy, one that gamers with energy to spare cannot disrupt.

Odder still are the controls. Detractors have long accused the Resident Evil series of suffering from “tank controls”. Here, in an earnest response to the user-generated catchphrase, a literal tank control setup is offered. Hold the “R” button like a pedal, and Jill accelerates forward. Spin the analog stick like a gearshift, and Jill lurches, rotating. This qualifies as bizarre novelty, though alternatives are equally if not more obtuse — in the default control arrangement, pushing the analog stick forward results in Jill, as seen from inconvenient and weirdly voyeuristic angles, moving forward from her point of view, rather than yours — continuing Shinji Mikami’s legacy of finely tuned, aggressively unintuitive control schemes. There’s something to be said for pointedly limited controls; REmake, which strips away our typical third-dimensional empowerment, and routinely sends us into bouts of fish-out-of-water panic, is living evidence.

And no less backhanded is the saving system, wherein “ink ribbons”, small black objects found in limited numbers within the mansion, are required to save game progress. Limited saves?! At some point it becomes clear that these snide little anti-features don’t really need to be redeemed. You’ll never die from careless use of stupid goddamn controls, you’ll never even begin running low on stupid hecking ribbons. These are malicious design decisions in theory — as such, the shuddering premise of them will keep any player alert, careful, and one step ahead of the game.

This is, by all means, a piece of entertainment pitted squarely against its audience. We are the protagonists, REmake is the antagonist. Escaping REmake‘s shocking obstacles is its own reward. And while this white-knuckle purity sounds exhausting, it’s enjoyable, honestly, to slip through REmake‘s cruel grasp. This is something compulsively replayable: a compact, intricate, high-stakes game of resource management. This is the survival horror genre, firing on all cylinders.

I used to carry a pistol along with my shotgun; I gave up this practice years ago. Keys and herbs would pile up, and soon enough I’d be right out of inventory space. I’m relegated to six item slots, yeah? So as I ramp up the difficulty level, space becomes a growing concern. Now I figure, hey, who needs a pistol? I don’t use it to shoot zombies — I never shoot zombies. Zombies take about ten wasteful bullets to kill. Then once they’re down, I’ve gotta pour lighter fluid over their rotting bodies and flick the match: if they aren’t reduced to a small pile of ashes, they’ll lurch back to life, grow 10-inch claws, and gain the terrifying ability to sprint. And I obviously don’t have enough room for lighter fluid and a match in my backpack, thank you very much.



No, smarter to bust moves around those zombies, avoiding their grasp. This works about 20% of the time. Sometimes the zombie in question will actually vomit from sheer confusion. Most times, though, it’ll grab me in a bloody embrace. Hopefully I’ve packed a knife to thwart its attack. If not, I withstand the pain for a few seconds before sprinting off, healing with a green herb, and hey, at least I free up some space by getting rid of that green herb.

And hey: when I kill and burn a zombie, it’s gone forever, though numerous other, angrier beasts soon take its spot. Everything is in decline, falling apart; the world becomes steadily harder to traverse. Halfway through the game, doors, previously a convenient artificial barrier to the undead, begin being punched aside by giant bloodthirsty bullfrogs. Backtracking becomes a harrowing task, and meticulous planning is required to avoid large-scale blows to my resources. Pivotal moments of the original are distorted, throwing me onto false trails. Audio cues manipulate me like a puppet: unhinged, screeching violins signal the entrance of a newfangled monster, or signal nothing at all. Enemy placement shifts, amidst repeated trips into the forest, or across the upstairs floors of the mansion, and oh . . . oh god. This is not intelligent horror by any means. It’s relentless, and not much else. Rising above it, however — plotting out paths, successfully micromanaging supplies — is genuinely gratifying. REmake is a rare breed, forcing players to adapt to, and overcome, its terrors. That, on top of an astonishing hyperrealist aesthetic, makes it a highly recommended purchase.

text by tim rogers

★★★☆

“TO DYNASTY WARRIORS AS SUPER MARIO BROS. IS TO THE SCORE DISPLAY IN PAC-MAN.”

Bladestorm is a new game — emphasis on the “game” — by Koei, who earned its earliest fans way back in the early 1980s by making computer software simulations of Chinese wars which were specific when it came to names and shimmeringly incomprehensible when it came to figuring if you were winning or losing, or why you were winning or losing. Koei decided much later that their cult fan base wasn’t enough, so they objectified ancient Chinese wars the way only an American man could objectify, say, a Korean woman: they rolled the bones, and out of the fireplace stepped one with the largest breasts, the smoothest skin, and the most vapid hack-and-slash action, one that constantly told you you were bigger and stronger than any other man on the battlefield. The game was Dynasty Warriors 2, sequel to a boring one-on-one fighting game. Dynasty Warriors was something like a big brother to many dozens of thousands of fully grown men who never got chances to ace their college entrance exams. Koei (and developer Omega Force) rode Dynasty Warriors like a wild young pony for six years that felt like a decade. The series has never, quite specifically, evolved past its PlayStation 2 iterations, which makes a whole lot of sense, because they haven’t made a “canonical” entry for the PlayStation 3 yet. Bladestorm is the first original PlayStation 3 game by Omega Force, and, quite frankly, it is to Dynasty Warriors what Super Mario Bros. was to the score display in Pac-Man. It takes the concept of running around a battlefield, and it turns it into a man.

The time setting for Bladestorm just so happens to be the Hundred Years War. Unlike the obsessively well-documented second-century Chinese civil wars on which Dynasty Warriors games are based, the Hundred Years War, despite having lasted a hundred years, is not quite the source of any literature outside the story of Joan of Arc, who, really, wasn’t a very big deal and couldn’t have possibly mattered much in the war if she got burned at the stake while she was still a teenager.

In other words, whereas button-bashing history buffs would march to Koei’s home office and crucify the receptionist if one pertinent person’s name failed to be present in a Dynasty Warriors title, with Bladestorm, they arrive at the proverbial table with plenty of room to heck around. The biggest, most amazing change, which on paper is enough to qualify Bladestorm as a hit of Dynasty Warriors proportions, is the fact that you can make your own character, and level him (or her) up. Choose from a variety of faces far less hideous than anything you could make in Oblivion, choose the color of your little tunic, and get out there and fight. (I named my Laurence-Fishburne-looking warrior “Jackamost”, by the way. It’s something of a one-up of “Lancelot”.) Not a second done being born, here your character is in a bar — hell of a place to be born — talking to an eyepatched bartender, who runs you through some easy-enough-to-understand training missions. When it’s time to do some actual missions, you realize that your character is just a mercenary. In some missions you fight the French as a member of the English army. In some missions, it’s the other way around. A cut-scene early in the game, in addition to featuring a slow scroll over a CG-rendered map while an announcer reads from a textbook, depicts two shoulders clashing swords in a great confusing battle charge. One soldier looks the other in the eye and says, “What are you doing fighting with the French? I thought you were with us?” “Times change!” says his old friend. So amusing was this that I was prompted to think of the language barrier an uneducated English grunt would have to overcome to fight on the side of the French. Then it dawned on me that everyone in the cut-scenes was speaking Japanese, anyway, which made perfect sense, seeing as all the Chinese people in Dynasty Warriors speak Japanese, as well. If it seems odd to you that the caucasians in Bladestorm all speak Japanese, that might make you something of a closet racist. In conclusion: you know why Final Fantasy VII‘s Wikipedia article is longer than Gandhi’s? No, it’s not because all internet users are game geeks — it’s because a high percentage of game geeks use the internet, while Gandhi geeks tend to sit around at home practicing peaceful contemplation.

The Hundred Years War setting is conceptually integral to Bladestorm, though when you realize, as many of us have, that Dynasty Warriors games manage to sell hundreds of thousands of copies despite the “history” portion being contained entirely in pre-battle talking-head screens with dialogue boxes beneath abstract maps marking enemy locations, it becomes clear: the history is more of an excuse than anything else. It’s not even the excuse to play the game — it’s excuse for the developers to make it, with all its clashing swords and whinnying horses. There are elements of the war-going experience that Omega Force has never bothered to touch upon — I’d appreciate trumpet-bearers and drummer-boys on the battlefield, or something similar — and it’s as easy to say that they’re saving these ideas for later as it is to say that it doesn’t matter: the die is cast, the game is made, and there’s more than enough bloom lighting reflecting off shiny armor textures to convince anyone with a pulse rate over 90 beats per minute that yes, this is a videogame.

And what a game it is! It’s actually not that bad at all. The lengthy tutorial is full of exclamation marks, imploring the player not to play this game like Dynasty Warriors, though not in those exact words. Though it’s obviously running the latest build of the Dynasty Warriors engine, they saw fit to actually make a game with that engine, which is just so nice of them. You’re a lone soldier, and you will die if you dash alone into a group of men with blades. So you find a small group of soldiers and take charge of them with a button-press — much easier than in real life. Where you go, they follow — if by “follow” you mean “lead the way”. (I’m suddenly reminded of how the CIA and other intelligence agencies teach field agents how to follow someone from the front.) Different button presses will change formations. When your group of guys runs into another group of guys, they start fighting, in dynamic 3D. It feels like Dragon Force, though without any screen transitions. And you can stand there watching, or issue commands to your own dude to start slashing some other dudes. You can control your dudes while they’re fighting, though only vaguely. Sometimes they won’t hear your commands to fight harder, or to retreat. Sometimes only one or two of them will. It’s seemingly random — random, like war itself. When the target group of bad guys dies, what’s left of your squad will regroup. Using your handy map screen, you can plot out a course. It’s remarkable and incredulous in Dynasty Warriors that the boss characters’ dots on the map will be larger than all the other dots — like the ancient Chinese possessed radar technology. In Bladestorm, the blinking dots of enemy-occupied castles makes a whole lot more sense, and you’ll be grateful to know where enemy generals are, so you can prepare yourself ahead of time. In other words, with a few elegant strokes, Bladestorm reveals that the dumbest design flaws of Dynasty Warriors only stand out because the game has no hecking challenge whatsoever outside of the fights with characters who actually have names. You will never be killed by a random soldier in Dynasty Warriors because that would be a disgusting distortion of history: no nameless soldier ever killed Lu Bu, because if he did, then people would know his name. Further analysis of this reveals deeper conceptual flaws in Dynasty Warriors: Liu Bei didn’t kill Lu Bu either, though in the game, he can. In Bladestorm, you yourself are a nameless soldier, meaning that death at the hands of a nameless soldier isn’t purely impossible.

Koei’s promotional push for the game involves near-limitless, unbelievably tacky use of the word “Soukaikan” (“Refreshing feeling”), which is then repeated ad nauseum in user reviews on Amazon.co.jp, by people who either have no minds of their own or think that if they constantly write like they’re PR representatives then maybe someday they’ll wake up and they’ll be a PR representative, which has to pay a lot more than their current profession of the Japanese equivalent of basement-dwelling aerosol-huffer. Dynasty Warriors games are “refreshing” because not everyone can be an astronaut: unfortunately for some people with big or even medium-sized dreams, there exists no “square button” in life which, when pounded repeatedly, causes your boss to stuff his pants, call you a genius, and then give you the keys to his Jaguar. For better — and not for worse — there is no such square button in Bladestorm, either. You actually need to possess some functional understanding of strategy to ensure you have enough troops left alive to take on the next challenge.

Prior to each battle, you choose your character’s deployment point on a massive battle map — at any given location on the map, blue squad icons are facing off against red squad icons. It doesn’t matter where you start — you’re in the middle of the fight. The epic charges of the cut-scenes are not to be found in the actual game, and it doesn’t matter. The battles play out with more of a fine quality than the general-hunting battlefield traipses in Dynasty Warriors; in Bladestorm it’s more about the minutiae, and, as you realize eventually — it’s more about playing your part in the battle. You’re not some super-warrior who, before sunset, is going to have killed every senior officer and sacked every fort in a six-mile radius — you’re just one good soldier of many. This lends the battles a more engrossing scale — they’re bigger, though at the same time exceptionally more focused. They’re easier to understand, though simultaneously more mysteriously convoluted. There’s a lot going on, though as you’ll ideally understand, you don’t need to involve yourself in all of it: by the end of the battle, you’ll have earned a lot of experience points (the in-game explanation of “witnesses to your great deeds”), and you’ll level up, earn money with which to buy bigger, shinier armor, and earn the ability to command more troops. After a couple hours, your little squad of twenty guys might soon number more than a hundred. It’s kind of a thrill, and “refreshing” in a totally different way than mowing a hundred guys with your own spear. In a way, it revokes repressed memories of Koei’s Famicom classics Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Bandit Kings of Ancient China, with their black backgrounds, randomized numerical calamities, and confounded, fascinated players. Or maybe it’s just reminding me of Kessen 3, the most action-oriented entry in the series — which began with Kessen on the PlayStation 2, a sheerly mopey map-wandering “strategy” game with automated 3D fights in which many men moved quickly and fiercely. The third game was meaty and crunchy, allowing you to take control of your general and pilot his horse around the battlefield, leading your eager acre of troops toward the field of battle, and other angry groups of men to battle. Kessen 3 was weirdly disconnected, like a real-time strategy game where you control just one unit. Bladestorm is Kessen 3 as seen from the ground. It’s reined in and, when it’s not being silly, it’s fascinating, though only if you’re in the mood.

Of course, spacious cut-scenes typical of the Dynasty Warriors games are present in huge numbers, though they always involve characters like Joan of Arc, commanding groups of seven or eight hundred thousand ant-like soldiers beneath a vomit-colored foggy sky, inter-cut with images of perfect tears falling from the eye of a pink-hair princess, images of the battlefield reflected in the globular liquid. The cut-scenes are so bland compared to the vibrant colors of the in-game graphics, though I suppose, at least, I can understand the poison: developers made CG way back when, and the computers have gotten better and better over the years, so there will always exist CG that looks better than in-game graphics, so the developers will always be bound by the corporate profile to use CG. It’s just that the disparity is more alive and hideous than ever in Bladestorm.

And then there’s the videogameliness, these little gopher heads popping up out of the ground at every opportunity and telling us “Yes, you’re playing a videogame, not watching the History Channel.” Here I will reference something I’ve referenced before: the president of Acclaim, months before the collapse of the company, showing a reporter for “60 Minutes” a beta build of some Major League Baseball game, explaining that “Our goal is to make games that people mistake for television broadcasts.” The semantics were amazing, no matter how you interpret that sentence. Koei must have had it written down in a file somewhere, stored away in the cabinet where they keep the food for the carp in the lobby pond, because there are a literally disgusting amount of big glossy numbers popping up all over the screen. There’s a chance that the “refreshing feeling” being touted by Koei’s genius marketers is supposed to have something to do with the numbers: watch your combo counter and hit counter climb — your soldiers’ hits and kills count toward your hits and kills, meaning the more guys you have, the bigger the numbers. Why not allow me to just take the battle in stride, and show me the stats at the end?

There are also little things like how you can be riding a horse one second, and then, when you get off the horse, it just vanishes into thin air, though that’s actually kind of hilarious, given the shine of the graphics. Previous hilarious Koei-isms involve soldiers in Dynasty Warriors running right up to your commander and then standing still, resulting in your commanders calling for your help to defeat said soldiers — oh Koei, you lovable scamps! Bladestorm, with its shiny graphics, is beyond such philosophical black holes with regards to strategy, though it’s by no means above a good disappearing horse trick.

Bladestorm isn’t perfect — a pseudo-menu-based-strategy-game interface overlapped with the hack-and-slash maybe isn’t the best way to make an action game (I prefer the rock-solid and rewarding parry systems of Drag-on Dragoon 2 or Sengoku Basara). Though hey, for what it’s worth, the game represents an effort to try harder, and it even has customizable characters, so what the hell — let’s give it three stars.

text by tim rogers

★★★☆

“A GOOD CONVERSATION, ABOUT OBSERVATION.”

The “training” game market has become something of a cluttered wasteland: pink flamingos standing at obscene angles in a sea of congealed clam chowder. Step into any Japanese electronics retailer and you’ll see literally hundreds of different titles, all of them with spookily similar packages. Primary colors, big text, and the either photographed, polygon-rendered, or hand-drawn face of some balding professor so superficially boring he probably couldn’t sell liquid nitrogen in hell. It’s gotten objectively offensive, really: one can imagine the boardrooms in all the office buildings in Japan, where wood-teethed old men swat a large table with a small financial newspaper and shout about how we need to make games the way Nintendo makes games, if we ever expect to retire. And then, instead of making games in the spirit of the Modern Nintendo — evergreen products with function and fun — they just go ahead and make another training game exactly like Nintendo’s training games, copying everything right down to the box. The average user, however, rejects these games like a bad kidney transplant: that is to say, for reasons they don’t entirely understand. I mean, a kidney’s a kidney. If we were to look at most of these training games with a magnifying glass — and a microphone — it would start to make sense: above all else, the sound design tends to be pretty terrible. Many of these games require the “player” to wear headphones and keep a close ear on voice samples: listen to a voice recording in a foreign language, test your comprehension by writing it down. This is why it’s unforgivable that many of these games feature pencil sound effects reminiscent of the sound of a butter knife scraping a chalkboard. When the back of the box only has to show sample questions and an unobtrusive screen layout, if the front of the box looks just like the front of every other box on the aisle-long shelf, it’s easy to hook rubes into the stufftiest edutainment. Loiter around the front counter of any Japanese electronics shop for more than ten minutes after seven PM on a weekday, and you’ll no doubt hear some fine young woman ask the cashier, “Which one of these English games for DS is . . . you know . . . the good one?” She might go on: her friend bought one the other day, and it wasn’t very good. If the store you’re at is kind of shady (like my favorite little store), you might hear the guy say “They’re all the same, really.” If the store is a mega-huge franchise, the guy will say “It is with great fear that I humbly intone to you, esteemed miss: they’re all the same, really.” Go to a tiny shop where the manager knows his stuff, and — well, they’re only stocking the Nintendo-brand training games. Huh. I wonder if Nintendo owns the patent on “minimalist handheld edutainment software where the sound effects and presentation don’t force the player to seriously contemplate stomping a hecking chihuahua flat to the ground”.

Either way, one thing’s for sure, and by for sure, I mean for real: Nintendo maybe kinda need to exercise a tiny bit of conscience about these things. Whatever happened to the heyday of the Nintendo Seal of Approval? They have to get a little more stingy about that stuff, I swear.

The situation is that sketchy publishers are flooding the market with me-too “training” games that will sell a half a million copies upon release, only to have sequels that sell less than five thousand. The publishers, out to make quick yen, realize that their games don’t have to actually be good, though they also underestimate the power of word-of-mouth — which, yes, is how Nintendo started selling all of these training games in the first place. It’s that word-of-mouth that could, quite possibly, be holding a pistol to Nintendo’s head right about now. While I’m optimistic that, maybe, Nintendo has some ace up its sleeve, that Brain Training was merely their way to make the public aware of games again, I have friends in the Japanese games industry who are quick to gravely intone: the DS bubble has already burst.

At any rate, Vision Training (or “Flash Focus“, or whatever they’re calling it in your country) represents a conscientious effort on Nintendo’s part to offer a non-stuffty alternative to some of the stuffty trainers already clogging the market. Or maybe Vision Training‘s gimpy conceptual predecessors (I think one of them was published by Kokuyo, a stationery company) were like “Deep Impact” to Nintendo’s “Armageddon” — you know, some documents somewhere were leaked, and people started rubbing their hands together at amazing speeds.

The bastard fathers of Vision Training were riding low on the speed-reading wave that’s repeatedly crashing against these island shores and getting back up again. There’s certainly been a mysterious atmosphere of self-improvement around here, even before Nintendo released Brain Training. That game was certainly a catalyst, though it was by no means the beginning: to wit, Professor Kawashima had originally released his brain-training method as a standalone portable device. Likewise, self-help books have swung all the way around the carousel we call “culture” and come back to the pop-arty side of things. Except people aren’t asking for help with problems or deficits so much as they want to obtain — and cheaply — lower-tier superhuman powers of vision, wine-tasting ability, common sense, or business manners. Last year’s wild gush of paperback books about speed-reading felt vaguely like a pyramid scheme in which everyone is selling pyramid scheme brochures. In a way, the whole climate is ripe for cute marketing: This is the Information Age! What Better Way to Process All This Information than to Obtain SPEEEEED REEEEEADING POWWWWWWERS! No one ever goes the “cute” route, though: it’s all stone-faced, testicles-on-table deadly seriousness.

When a couple of these book-publishers got the idea to jump on the gaming train, a few problems popped to the fore. Namely, the games sucked. All they could scrounge out of the pit of greed was the idea to make the “game” consist of long passages of text which appear on the screen for a limited amount of time, challenging — taunting, almost — the player to read as quickly as he or she could, before answering some comprehension questions. “Dick and Jane go for a walk in the park. Jane says ‘I hate you’. Dick says ‘Why don’t you–‘” “What did Dick ask Jane to do?”

Other wannabes tried pretty hard to bring some simple hand-eye based games into the mix, though how these make you better at speed-reading, who the heck knows. Said games mostly felt like some sub Wii Play stuff, only without the force feedback and/or 97% of the alleged fun. Follow the bouncing ball with the stylus, et cetera. Mostly, just stuff you could do with Ouendan, while also listening to terrible covers of questionable music. In other words, while the facade is lacking to the point of being absent (and therefore, um, not quite “grating”), a game pretty much needs a purpose or else we start to hunger for a facade.

Nintendo’s Vision Training, however, analyzes the core concepts of speed-reading, and presents a set of daily, toothbrushing, vitaminesque challenges that will wax players on and off until, theoretically, they can count toothpicks like Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man”.

It’s a leaner, cleaner, more, um, focused training game for Nintendo. They eschew the style they personally turned into a cookie-cutter, and present the consumer with a semi-hip modern-art-style eyeball logo instead of a photograph of some charcoal-stuffting old Japanese man. Challenges include speed-reading comprehension tests (sure to come in hand for purchasers of the recently-released Nintendo-brand DS Japanese literature primer (unfortunately, all of the novels are abridged)), variants on the shell-game theme (which become increasingly difficult as your day-to-day performance rises), and some super-clever Magic-Eye-like challenges: the magic eye is on the top screen, the multiple choices on the bottom. Like all of Nintendo’s self-improvement software, the true genius lies in the game’s attention to detail, keen memory, and persistent, flamboyant tracking of your performance. Triumphantly, where Vision Training succeeds as a “game”, it starts being a “software application”: the hardware, of course, is you. If Brain Training‘s hook was the iconic “Brain Age”, updated every day, based on your performance, then Vision Training‘s hook (ignoring that it actually does give your “eye age”) is the fact that it actually can make your eyes faster.

Recently, Japanese television networks have reported grave news: ratings this year are down by something like 75%. There could be any number of reasons for this, and most of those reasons might have something to do with Japanese actors being hired because their fathers are rich, or because the guys who host talk shows are chosen because they’ve been hosting talk shows for years, even though they’re now old enough to look like teenager-molesters, or maybe it’s because the network TV in Japan really does suck (the cable, however, is exceptional, though mostly because you get American channels plus the wacky Japanese stuff). I think maybe it’s all of the above, plus a little bit more. You see, even before reality TV took off in America, Japan has been enjoying (word used loosely) a prototypical form of reality television. Where the West would later invent “Survivor”, which takes normal people and puts them into the interesting situation of being trapped on a desert island with no food (and ubiquitous men with cameras, who make sure no one dies), the Japanese — well, we can’t say “invented”; it’s more like — developed “reality-esque” television programs in which interesting people are put through the paces of normal situations. Like, say, eating dinner at a moderately cheap restaurant, for example. This television trend has started to stew Japanese casual conversation in a marinade du bastard, however, and we will often see otherwise not-mentally-handicapped-looking Japanese children with silly hair standing up during a meal at a family restaurant to scream something “hilarious” at a classmate, because hey, the restaurant those two “famous” comedians were eating at on that mundanely fascinating television show last night couldn’t have been more expensive than this, and hey, we’re only in high school — we might as well be adults, already.

One reason Japanese television might be going down the crapper is the popularity of videogames. When a Japanese television executive was pressed for comment semi-recently, he replied that “Maybe everyone is busy playing their Wiis”. This quote got blown out of proportion — he was most likely in a joshing mood when he said that. Still — it might be right. Because, you see, Japanese proto-reality TV has always been less about any kind of “entertainment” status quo and more about providing background noise for people in informal situations. Some of these proto-reality TV shows will pit celebrities against one another in laid-back quizzes, where no one gets a prize in the end. It’s just filler sound for someone who spent all day at work, whether they’re eating dinner alone or with their husband. Whether they’re talking to their husband or just kind of reading a magazine.

The accidental glory of Nintendo’s training series is that they give us things to talk about with our friends; there is no prize for winning. There is only a feeling that comes in one of two flavors: warm, or lukewarm. (Usually, if you just keep getting worse for about ten days in a row, that’s when you give up.) And though Vision Training lacks the iconic conversation hook of “What’s your Brain Age, sweet thing?” there is a whole new plane of pickup lines etched beneath the surface, if you’re willing to look. Let me seduce you a little bit:

When I was four years old, I was in a car accident with my dad, on a snowy road, on the way to church. My right eye popped out of my head. They managed to stuff it back in there, though the muscles never quite grew back correctly. As a result, two dozen years later, I can see Magic Eye puzzles just by taking off my glasses and blinking. This talent for soft-focus has allowed me to build a pretty impressive speed-reading ability, though precision movement — as with shell games — is a little more taxing. However, whenever my cellular phone (eternally on silent mode) blinks with an incoming email, wherever it is in my apartment, I detect it, and I find it with my eyes before the blink has finished. The major drawbacks of my Weird Eyes are that I Can’t See Shit without my glasses, and that anything with multiple moving perspectives gives me an instant migraine — hence my being unable to ever play first-person shooters split-screen, ever. I got good enough at Gradius V to one-credit it all the way up to the stage with the asteroid field, though I could not proceed any further because of the terrifying headache caused by the multidirectional scrolling. I do not, however, get carsick while reading a book. The worst game-related headache I ever endured was in Sega’s game Dororo (Blood Will Tell), where the first stage is black and white, with the only color being the life meter, which was red and green. That actually shocked the hell out of me.

Do I feel like any videogames in the traditional sense have made my eyes worse? Not really. Though all this reminds me of something: there was this letter in Nintendo Power way back when, from the parent of a kid who was diagnosed as legally blind. The progressive-minded specialist recommended by their family doctor prescribed videogames, preferably ones with large characters moving at medium speeds. The kid got hooked on Double Dragon II, and after a few months of sitting very close to the television, was finally able to function sight-wise with a pair of thick glasses. “Look out, Howard [Lincoln, then-president of Nintendo of America] — some day a kid with thick glasses might show up in your office, after your job!” said the mother, in closing. I wonder what ever happened to that kid. For some reason, just thinking about Vision Training makes me curious. It makes me sincerely hope he got a good deal somewhere down the line. Who would have imagined — games making people do something sincerely.

text by Brandon Parker

★★☆☆

“LIKE PLAYING A VIDEOGAME ADAPTATION OF SOME BADASS FILM OF MYTH AND LEGEND; IT'S STILL LIKE PLAYING A LICENSED VIDEOGAME.”

My brother is something of a gun and warfare connoisseur, while historically, I’m the more medicated of the Parker Brothers. Much like Kane and Lynch, on their hell-bound quest of greed and vengeance, we too are on a hell-bound quest for a good cooperative game. And a game that already has us screaming at each other as part of the story to begin with, me shooting innocent bystanders while he tries to proceed tactically, well what could we do? We were helpless, it seemed, as if it were designed specifically for us and us alone.  Unfortunately I must report that Kane & Lynch is not the perfect game it should have been.



Everyone knows a videogame based on a movie is a stuffty thing. We learn this as children. They’ve got all the movie’s 1-2 minute realistic looking action scenes drawn out to ridiculous hour long John Woo-ish shootout levels, with the actual story edited down to some cheaply animated cutscene, or maybe just some text on a loading screen.Kane & Lynch is not based on a film, at least not one in particular or officially, but playing the thing you’d think you were playing a mediocre game adaptation of what must be the single most badass film ever. A film so badass anyone who watches it is rendered impotent or insane, the only way we could possible hope to experience it safely is through some stuffty game adaptation, acting as a sort of thick concrete barrier against such a radiation bath of pure awesomeness.

Looking at the concept art for the game, you can see all sorts of cool stuff going on. Kane grabbing Lynch in a bank lobby, screaming as bullets are flying past, while Lynch just gives him the ol’ “I didn’t mean to murder all the hostages” look. Or the two of them in a car together yelling at each other with some taped up terror-stricken tart in the back seat.

My friends, listen, we need that sort of stuff in the actual game. Don’t just draw that up then stick it in a drawer and forget about it. And if you do throw a driving part into the next game you don’t automatically have to make it into some getaway action scene with stuffty driving mechanics. Maybe they want to get some food at a drive-in restrurant and while they are sitting there enjoying their food, the nice weather, talking about the next big score, maybe then a patrol car spots them and then you can turn it into a mini-game with stuffty driving physics if you want.  I’m not asking for Metal Gear-esque hour long cutscenes in every game, unless you want to, if you want, that is, it’s up to you. Just something to liven up this nonstop shooting really. Let’s see Kane and Lynch doing something normal in between these levels or something.

At the beginning of one level Lynch mentions having taken the last of his pills on the plane ride. Well why not let us see that plane ride? What drove him to take his last pill? Some kid kicking his seat? Some annoying old lady trying to get chatty with him? Kane and Lynch’s airplane adventure, why not. Something to help the illusion that these a real people, not videogame characters who do nothing but constantly shoot stuff.

There is one part of the game where it skips in the story a little, suddenly showing the characters in a war torn country, in military garb and sporting beards. Now, that time it was awesome. So you have to figure this out Io, and know when to skip around and when to show us what these guys are doing in between the 3d shooting gallery parts, because I won’t always be there for you.



There’s a little trailer deal for the game out there. It’s just shows some closed elevator doors while you hear Kane and Lynch talk about Grand Theft Auto 4 being delayed. For some reason it’s just supposed to be some stupid “just for laughs” internet trailer, but that’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about here that needs to be in the actual game. That irks me to no end that they didn’t put that in the game, or that they just thought something like that was nothing more than a “joke” or whatever. To me, that’s the whole thing right there.



The biggest problem with the game though, is a music one.  That badass theme they play in all the trailers and on the website?  Where the hell was that during the game?  Nowhere.  Mostly it’s just some depressing Silent Hill sounding stuff.  I thought I’d be doing all sorts of heists and what have you to that music.  When I saw it listed in the credits as “trailer music,” I have to say, a part of me felt violated.  Conned at the least.

Io Interactive had a good idea, it was: “Flawed Mercenary and Medicated Psychopath pull heists and stuff, co-op!” They plastered it all over their press releases and the back of the damn box, they constantly pistol-whipped you with the idea the whole time they were hyping the game up and always with the same wording. They really wanted to emphasize how flawed Kane is, how medicated Lynch is, and boy what a ticking time bomb their relationship is. I’m sure if you looked it up, you’d see they’ve probably got a copyright on “mercenary who is not perfect and unstable man with a condition operating in conjunction,” or something. They really liked this idea, they just forgot to make the game as good as the idea, is what happened.

They were hoping that if their idea was good enough to get a movie deal and sequel before the first damn game is even finished, then maybe it was good enough to carry their generic shooting game all by itself. Maybe it would have if they didn’t leave all the good music out, I don’t know. But I won’t settle for secondhand awesome next time. I’d like to believe they love the idea behind their game, as I do, and I hope that next time they just show it the proper care and guidance it needs. Kane and Lynch just need love and attention, that’s all.

text by Bennett

★★☆☆

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by Andrew Toups

★☆☆☆

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

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

Shame that the rest of the game is such stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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