★★★★

“HOW AND WHY I NEVER FINISHED BECOMING A DETECTIVE”

by tim rogers
11 october 2019

Final Fantasy VI arrived in North American retail stores 25 years ago today, on October 11th, 1994. Back then it called itself Final Fantasy III. I remember this exact date because I remember everything because of a rare neurological condition I have suffered my whole life. I also remember this date because exactly fifty-nine days later an arsonist who would never be caught burned down my high school’s brand-new six-million-dollar gymnasium.

At 3:14pm on Tuesday, October 11th, 1994 I entered the side door of my parents’ house on the north side of Indianapolis, Indiana. I was wearing my gray sweatpants and my green flannel shirt, buttoned up all the way to the chin over my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt because I was morbidly obese and I hated being morbidly obese and buttoning my shirt all the way up to my chin made me feel thinner. My mom had her car keys in her hand.

“I’m taking your little brother to Wendy’s, get in the car.”

My mother has always had such an incorrect relationship with commas. I point this out the once because I want you to see her as she is. For the remainder of this piece I’ll embellish her toward semicolons.

My mom didn’t go through the drive-thru because they always got the order wrong. Since his infancy family legends told of my little brother vomiting at the sight of a photograph of salad. I remember differently, though it’s never been any use arguing with people who can’t remember literally anything as well as you remember literally everything.

My mom never went through the drive-thru because if her little sweet boy got one whiff of pickle, that’d be her upholstery.

“Look at this; look at that drive-thru line. Look at this; three in the afternoon on a Tuesdy! We’re goin’ inside so they don’t get you’s’s orders wrong.”

My little brother always ate one order of chicken nuggets, one order of fries, and two hamburgers with no ketchup, no mustard, no onions, and no pickles, just plain, that’s two of them, that’s both of them with no ketchup, that’s with no mustard, that’s with no onions, and that’s with no pickles, please and thank you.

My Wendy’s order was then as it is today, though today it’s only ever on the odd road trip: the biggest fries you got and the biggest Frosty you got.

My little brother was seven; I was fifteen and mute. Being mute is easy as a teenager because aren’t you supposed to never tell your parents anything, anyway, at that age? I left the Wendy’s with my hands in my pockets and wandered into the Video Vault, which as of 2018 is now a liquor store which is no longer called Video Vault.

Video Vault introduced me to anime, direct-to-video sequels to Jean-Claude Van Damme films, and many bad video games. Prior to our relocating from Fort Meade, Maryland to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1993, my mother had been in charge of game rentals. She applied shotgun logic to her rental choices. My math books would have described her mindframe as “selection with replacement.” She’d rent the same thing three or four times if my big brother didn’t say something. Even then she’d sometimes forget, and suddenly Archon for the NES was gonna sit on our bedroom floor for the weekend.

When we moved to Indianapolis, however, we had Video Vault right across the street and a block down from our house, sharing a parking lot with the Wendy’s. Video Vault was not the Army post supermarket of my mom’s poor decisions. No, Video Vault possessed a curated selection of games. Someone at the Vault was a connoisseur. And being that Wendy’s after school had quickly become a Friday Thing, I had been in charge of my own game-renting destiny for the past year. Usually I rented Final Fantasy II—that’s what we called Final Fantasy IV, back then (look, we didn’t have Wikipedia; we didn’t know)—and started a new save file and just blasted through the whole game over the weekend. It’s still my favorite Final Fantasy.

It was Tuesday, and we didn’t rent videos on Tuesday, even though Wendy’s after school had transitioned from a Friday Thing to a Whenever Baby’s Hungry Thing. You’d have thought renting video games would have become a Tuesday thing as well. Well, wrong: if you want your mom to never rent video games for you on a weekday in 1994, just don’t smile at the bus driver one day in 1992. Your mom always says hello to the bus driver, and he always says a lot more than hello back, because he deals with children all day and likes talking to adults.

I drifted mutely toward the games. A lightning bolt shocked the wind out of me.

Final Fantasy III was sitting there on the shelf, right next to Final Fantasy II, which was sitting to the right of EVO: The Search for Eden.

Final Fantasy II and EVO sat against plastic cases containing their respective cartridges and well-worn instruction manuals. Final Fantasy III sat fresh and clean against the shelf. It was not available. Someone had rented it. I didn’t care. Final Fantasy III was real, and I was about to touch its box.

I had never seen its box before. Back then, games didn’t always have release dates, much less press-released box art unveilings. All I’d ever seen was a cheeky two-page advertisement on the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly. This advertisement insinuated that the little cartoon Moogle, Mog, could turn a bunch of monsters into turds. The copy on page two of the ad nonchalantly informed readers that the game was coming “October 1994.” Which day in October was anyone’s guess, including mine, and that’s why I’d been stepping into Video Vault after school as frequently as my little brother wanted chicky nuggets.

I picked up its box with trembling hands.

Touching Final Fantasy III‘s box with my real hands had never occurred to me as potentially ever happening. I stared at the cute little moogle juxtaposed with the brooding deep purple background for several seconds, my eyes as big as tea saucers, before I remembered braver curiosity: I flipped the box over.

Boldly, the back of Final Fantasy III‘s box displayed only one screenshot. That screenshot showed a dark, red sky behind a gritty rust-colored metal fortress atop which stood two soldiers riding robot suits. Curiously, the screenshot was warped and bent a visibility-obfuscating angle.

I wasn’t disappointed at the lack of additional screenshots. I’d already seen screenshots of Final Fantasy III in Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Players. I didn’t need to see more screenshots.

Besides, it struck me as grown-up and bold that the box only showed one screenshot.

What I most wanted was to read the copy on the back of the box. It didn’t disappoint me: three terse paragraphs of clean, fantasy prose, calling the box-holder toward the action of wondering what wonders waited in this game. No bullet points; no numbers; no boasts of cartridge size. It only showed prose: with delicate brush strokes, it set the stage for what might have been a bigger story than the Bible.

I scanned back through issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly in my head. I recalled the October 1994 issue of Game Players’ review by Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan, who gave the game a 98%. I recalled screenshots embedded in that review, of a town with blue brick roads and snowy hilltops and Dickensian wooden houses and piping steam billowing on the wind. A brown-brick castle in beige sand; a clown laughing while that castle burned. I remembered Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan’s words.

“Deep inside me, there was a huge, empty hole. For years I tried to fill it with alcohol, dangerous sports, faster and faster cars, loud music, and countless women. Nothing could help me, until Final Fantasy III. Sell the house, sell the kids. Play the game!”

I measured Lundrigan’s words against all the screenshots in my memory, and then against the prose on the back of the box. So it came to pass that before ever touching a d-pad to move a character a single square, much less slot its cartridge into the Super Nintendo I shared with two brothers, I had decided that I held in my hand an empty box representing the best video game I had ever encountered in my life.

“Heh, yeah, dude, we just got that today.”

I dropped the box like it was someone else’s. I slid it so its back touched the shelf.

The Video Vault Guy Who Was Always Friendly To Me was chubby, tall, and he had a sort of a Jon Snow beard. He wore polo shirts and he probably lifted weights just because he had friends who did. He was much younger than I am now, though much older than I was then. West of the Rockies I take it he’d have had tattoos. Where he was he probably listened to metal while driving his mom’s old minivan despite never having been to a show.

“Looks like somebody already rented it.”

I nodded at him like he was the bus driver.

“Where by somebody I mean me,” he said.

I smiled at him with my huge gap teeth. I turned around and left. I ran into my mom on the way in.

“I knew you’d be in here. Son, you’re creepin’ these people out.”

We got home at shortly after 3:45pm. I put my Wendy’s french fries—circa 1994, the best fast-food french fries, hands down—into the refrigerator. I put my Frosty into the freezer. I went into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth. I went into my room. I took off my shoes. I put on the heavy wool socks I always wore to bed. I got in bed. I wrapped a T-shirt around my face. I fell asleep.

I woke up seven hours later. I crossed through the dark living room and into the dark kitchen. I microwaved a mixing bowl full of water. I made myself a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese. I microwaved the Wendy’s french fries. I mixed them into the macaroni and cheese. I took my Frosty out of the refrigerator. I squeezed that paper cup until its contents thawed into spoon-edibility. I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark. The shiny metallic blinds in my bedroom window reflected a glint of the little amber nightlight plugged into an outlet in the flower-wallpapered wall behind me. My room was always the coldest room in the house. It was cold that night. I’m thinking it was in the upper fifties. The sky had been gray over the Video Vault parking lot. My toes were cold inside my hiking boot socks. Smartphones hadn’t been invented yet and I’d never used the internet. A mixing bowl of macaroni and cheese heated my lap and a Frosty chilled my hand. Devoid of even Instagram, my life was no upbeat coming of age comedy. I was a fifteen-year-old obese mute self-taught vegetarian living on the night shift; I’d never talked to a girl, though I had held the shrink-wrapped, empty box of Final Fantasy III for thirty seconds at the local video store seven hours ago.

I studied Chinese until 6am. Then I did my homework until 7am. My mom entered my room and flipped the light switch on.

“You’re like a vampire in here, son; it’s time to get ready for school.”

Seventeen hours later I made another bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese and a Hot Pocket.

Eight hours after that, my mom told me I was a vampire and reminded me to smile at the bus driver. Black clouds swirled like barbecue smoke over the off-white sky outside as silent wind ripped through and bent deep green trees.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I ate lunch alone. Tuesdays and Thursdays my class schedule put me into another lunch period, so I sat with my big brother Roy. Roy’s named after our grandfather, by the way, who was named after his grandfather, so he technically predates the singing cowboy. Roy was seventeen years old and a senior. Roy was as tall and skinny then as I am now. He wasn’t old enough to have ever had sex, though he was old enough to talk about gross stuff constantly at lunch with the friends he had that I didn’t.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Roy would wait for me at the southwest entrance of our school’s vast, bright cafeteria. He’d greet me with monosyllables. I feel now like his “Hey. Yeah. Let’s go in.” reflected the real seventeen-year-old Roy Rogers The Third, and all the hot air and wiener jokes at lunch was a performance. There I go again, giving everyone too much credit.

Thursday, October 13th, 1994, Roy and his friend Jared were as excited about Pulp Fiction as I was about Final Fantasy III.

“It’s gonna be so fuckin’ bad ass,” Jared was saying. He’d said it thrice.

“Dude, I’m goin’ tomorrow,” Roy said. “I’m just goin.’ I’m walkin’ to Clearwater if I have to.”

“You gotta get your license!”

“Dude that movie looks gay as hell,” one of the other guys said. This guy only liked republicans and Michael Jordan. My brother’s friends were all so tall. I was Hobbit-high, yet so uncool I had never even read Lord of the Rings. They all looked like they were 35. I was 15 and I looked like I was in second grade.

“It won the prize at Cannes,” Jared said over a mouthful of something his mom had made. He pronounced it “Cans.” Jared was the fattest kid in our school by a half-marathon’s worth of miles, though somehow I was The Fat Kid at the table.

“Shit you don’t even know what Cannes is.”

“Nuh-uh, it’s in France.”

When the bell rang, my brother walked with me to the cafeteria exit. He had his hands in his pockets.

“You all right?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“Okay,” my brother said.

The next day, Friday, October 14th, 1994, Final Fantasy III was still rented out at Video Vault. My mom drove me to the Blockbuster two parking oceans over. They didn’t even have the game.

“He’s looking for a Final Fantasy Three,” my mom told the guy.

“That’s not out yet.”

“They’ve got it over at the Video Vault.”

“I’m tellin’ you it isn’t out yet.”

“That kid’s a damn liar,” my mom was saying in the car.

I sat on the living room sofa and ate my french fries and Frosty. My little brother, his burger and nuggets already vanished into him, was banging toys together in the middle of the living room floor.

I was re-reading Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan’s review of Final Fantasy III when my brother Roy entered the side door into the living room.

“Where were you?” my mom asked him. “I brought some Wendy’s.”

“Me and Jared are gonna go over to Subway.”

“Huh.”

“We’ll be back.”

I went to bed.

My mother slapped the light on at just after seven in the evening.

“Wake up. Don’t you wanna go to the movies with your brother and your dad?”

My brother rode in the passenger’s seat of my dad’s Dodge Ram conversion van.

“That John Travolta, I ain’t heard that name in forever. You know what he was in, don’t you?”

“Saturday Night Fever,” my brother said. His voice sounded like his arms were crossed.

“That’s right! How do you even know about that movie?”

“I’ve seen it. You made us watch it on TBS.”

“That came out—yeah, that came out the year you were born! You musta been maybe six months old. We were in Delaware. I went to see that by myself, yeah, you musta been maybe six months old because it must have been the week before Christmas. I left you home with your mom and your Aunt Cindy. Boy, he could dance. I tell you. That man could dance. It was so slick. I tell you, that man could dance.”

My brother didn’t say anything.

“You know they show him dancing on the commercial for this movie, yeah? I bet you—I bet you they got him to dance because they musta seen him in Saturday Night Fever.”

“Yeah, probably.”

We got out of the van at the General Cinema at Clearwater Crossing. It was cold. My face turned red. I was still wearing my gray sweatpants and green flannel shirt, buttoned all the way up to my chin.

My brother looked at me.

“Are you alright?”

I shrugged.

I lived two whole years of my life on the opposite of a normal schedule. Even on weekends I remained nocturnal. School always comprised the last half of my waking day. I suffered apocalyptic exhaustion from start to finish of our Friday night showing of Pulp Fiction.

That night, my dad apologized to my mom.

“There was some filthy, filthy language. Oh, boy, it was filthy. I think—I think Tim was a little spooked. Roy, he’s a grownass man now, I know he loved it, though Tim, boy, there was—there was a guy got shot in the face with a gun, oh man! It was disgusting, just disgusting, and, the movie just makes you—everyone in the theater I swear there were people standing in the theater, it was so full, everyone in there is just laughing and laughing and I’m gonna tell you: I don’t think I ever cracked up so hard in my life. It’s just awful, the movie makes you laugh at something like that. And your son Tim is just sitting there grinning like a criminal.”

My mom shook her head back, forth, back, and forth.

“That John Travolta in the commercials,” my mom said, “boy, he got fat.”

“I tell you what, though, that John Travolta, that man sure can dance. He’s still got it. Boy, that was slick.”

I sat on the edge of my bed, eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes. My stomach was full of a whole large bucket of popcorn, so I ate slowly. I’d just seen a movie consisting of three episodes, each of which focused on a different set of characters, telling one loose story out of chronological order. I’d seen so many rules broken. I’d listened to a vast room full of people cackle with disbelief at the realistic sight of a man decapitated by a pistol blast. My life was different. I re-read the first half of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and then slunk out to the kitchen. I made a bowl of Frosted Flakes and played Doom at about 12 frames per second on the old computer in the laundry room.

Even the guy among my brother’s lunch friends who’d doubted Pulp Fiction couldn’t stop talking about it. Once on Tuesday and twice on Thursday he wondered aloud, “I still don’t get what was supposed to be in the suitcase.”

“I’m goin’ again Friday night, you better believe it,” Jared said.

“You ain’t goin’ to homecoming?”

“Homecoming is gay,” someone said.

“Homecoming sucks,” my brother said.

I sat on the edge of my bed Friday afternoon with a mixing bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios on my lap and Final Fantasy III‘s instruction manual, already tattered and coverless after two weeks of maltreatment by ghostly renters, smoothed atop my right knee. I was wearing my brown flannel shirt, buttoned up to my chin over my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt. My wide eyes drank in the wispy watercolor portraits of the game’s twelve characters. (The game’s manual did not mention the two hidden characters.)

“Tell him we’re locked and loaded at 5!” my dad enthusiastically informed my mom.

“I told you, he’s got his little treasure in there; he ain’t gonna wanna go outside with yous.”

“These are supposed to be the best years of his life,” my dad said. I think his sliding scale was broken.

My dad knocked on my bedroom door. One-Mississippi, Two-Mississippi, Three-Mississippi, he opened it.

“Your brother Roy and I are gonna go to Hardees and then we’re gonna go to your high school homecoming football game. If you’re comin’ you better be in the van at 5. We’re locked and loaded at 5. I wanna get there early, get our seats. Or you can sit there and play your videogame.” He pronounced it as one word.

He closed the door. To this day, my dad still goes to all of my high school’s sporting events.

I didn’t put Final Fantasy III into my Super Nintendo until after my mom had left with my little brother to join my dad and big brother at the football game. Friday, October 21st, 1994, wearing my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt just after sundown, I clicked that big heavy button and turned on the finest video game I had yet played.

Ghostly, operatic organ music bellowed out of my 19-inch television’s single speaker as a camera descended down a gray, lightning-crackly abyss. With a crashing crescendo, the words “FINAL FANTASY III” yelled themselves into text. I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth.

I pressed the “A” button. Back then, games didn’t have loading times. The save file screen came up in the space between two teeth-heartbeats.

You could only save three files in Final Fantasy III for the Super Nintendo. When the save screen comes up, you immediately see the names of the lead character in each party. So it was that my first impression of the world beyond Final Fantasy III‘s title screen was three files, each with Terra, Locke, and Edgar in the party.

In the top file, the player had named Terra “BITCH.”

I chose to start a new game. I played until three in the morning. I’d met four main characters and learned of their troubles in the troubled world. An event transpired which split our heroes up onto three different paths toward the same objective.

Final Fantasy III graciously offered me the choice of which scenario to play first. I’d never played anything like it. I thought of Pulp Fiction.

By the time my mom told me it was time to sleep through church on Sunday, I’d played all three scenarios. Each of them had introduced new characters and new elements of the plot. I played Locke’s first, because I liked him the most. I played Terra’s second, because I was most curious about her story. Then I began Sabin’s scenario. Looking back on it now, I think Final Fantasy III wants you to choose Sabin’s scenario last. He’s the character least involved in the machinations of the plot. Everyone else—Terra, Locke, Edgar—has a horse in the race and skin in the game of the game world’s political climate. Sabin is just along for the ride. Yet in playing his increasingly complicated, wickedly long scenario, over the course of which he teams up with a full party of three characters, first-hand witnesses a war crime disaster, and meets actual ghosts on a train, we see Sabin earn his racehorse. We see him get involved.

When Sabin’s scenario ended I knew it: Final Fantasy III was as good, smart, and important as Pulp Fiction. My brother’s lunch friends would have a field day talking about it.

My brother stood in my bedroom doorway Sunday morning.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He looked at the television. He picked up the game case.

I was buttoning my flannel shirt up to my chin, over my Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt.

“They made a Final Fantasy Three, huh? Didn’t you and what’s-his-name used to play that Final Fantasy Two? That game was gay, dude.”

My brother had played Final Fantasy II from start to finish with my friend Carl and I in Fort Meade, Maryland three times during sleepovers between 1991 and 1992.

“Hey, let’s play some Mortal Kombat II.”

We played some Mortal Kombat II on the Super Nintendo. My brother lost three matches in a row. I did the same fatality every time—the one where Kung Lao splits his opponent down the middle with his bladed hat.

“God, that fatality’s so gay, dude.”

Friday, October 28th, 1994, Final Fantasy III was unavailable for rental at Video Vault. The Blockbuster nearby had acquired a copy, which was also rented out.

At roughly four PM on Sunday, October 30th, 1994, I stood in Electronics Boutique in Castleton Square Mall, reading and re-reading the prose on the back of Final Fantasy III‘s box. It was $79.99.

“Dude, we do trade-ins,” the store employee said to me. “Just bring a buncha NES games, man, that’s what I’d do.”

Friday, November 4th, 1994, I started Final Fantasy III afresh on Video Vault’s copy after my brothers and parents left for my high school’s football game at a high school across town. I had to save over a one-hour-progressed file in which Locke was named “COCK.” I remember thinking, at the very least the guy coulda put an “E” on the end of it.

Sunday, November 6th, 1994, I put down my controller in the middle of Sabin’s scenario. I grabbed a shoebox full of NES games and did my seatbelt in the back of my dad’s van.

“What is that he has back there; is that a box of gametapes? What is that; why’s he got those gametapes on him?”

“Electronics Boutique does trade-ins,” my big brother said.

“Your father and I paid for those,” my mom said. “You’re just gonna throw ’em away?”

Actually, mom, I paid for them all myself, with my grandmother’s birthday and Christmas money.

She was right about the throwing them away part, though. The guy at Electronics Boutique told me—well, first he told me “You don’t have to bring the box up here, dude”—Battletoads, Solar Jetman, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll, Final Fantasy, Double Dragon, River City Ransom, and Double Dragon II would net me $22 in store credit. I only had $36 in cash. If you factored in Indiana’s 5% sales tax, I was light by an Andrew Jackson and a half.

I stood in front of Sears in my black sweatpants and Payless Velcro strap sneakers for ninety minutes with my shoebox of game tapes. I had never wanted to leave a place so badly in my life. Everyone was loud. I wanted a slice of food court pizza though I needed to save my money if I was going to ever purchase Final Fantasy III. I was hot with weird fear about the extra-large Donkey Kong Country pre-order T-shirt clinging dearly to the bodyfat beneath my flannel shirt. I felt like the biggest trash monster in the city or the world, to have let my mom put ten dollars down on that game, and agree to buy it for me as an early Christmas present on its release day. Why did Donkey Kong Country even have a release day? Why couldn’t Final Fantasy III have had a release day? If I’d have known, I would have made it my Christmas present.

I was a fifteen-year-old five-foot-tall morbidly obese mute self-taught vegetarian who had never talked to a girl, though I’d seen Pulp Fiction and I had played the same ten hours of Final Fantasy III twice. Yet somehow, the prospect of having a job and earning an hourly wage felt sound years away.

I just wanted to go home and get farther into Final Fantasy III than I’d gotten the first time. My blood began to boil. Why did my dad always give everyone two hours in the mall? Why couldn’t it be one hour? Why couldn’t it be thirty minutes? What could you do in the mall for two hours? They never bought anything. None of us ever bought anything.

My brother arrived at the rendezvous first. He had a half-empty Orange Julius cup in his hand. He gave it to me. I drank it. My dad showed up. My mom showed up last. She’d bought my little brother a Power Rangers toy on clearance. Its cardboard box rested as though animal-mangled inside a plastic bag in my mother’s hand. My brother was coddling the ranger like a puppy. He’d shatter it within a week.

Black clouds swirled like barbecue smoke in the off-white sky over the cracked beige asphalt of the half-empty mall parking lot.

When we got home, I locked myself in my room. I didn’t sleep or eat until Sunday evening. I’d just gotten past the epic strategy battle in Narshe and gotten absolutely destroyed by enemies in the liar’s town of Zozo. I hadn’t tried grinding yet in the game. Zozo’s aggressive monsters were beating me senseless. The game was trying to move on to its next chapter, and I’d hit a wall. The rainy drear of Zozo perfectly suited my mood that overcast Sunday evening when my mom opened my bedroom door without knocking, called me a vampire, turned the light on, and said, “Give me your Nintendo game; I gotta take it back. Do you want Wendy’s?”

I ate my fries in the dark. I fell asleep at seven PM and I woke up at four AM.

The next Friday, Video Vault’s copy of Final Fantasy III was gone. I rented Blockbuster’s copy. Someone had played the game for thirteen hours. The character Setzer was in the lead. I saved over the third file, in which Gau was leading a party with Sabin and Cyan. On Saturday, my brother went to see Pulp Fiction again.

The Friday after that, I went to Video Vault, then Blockbuster, then back to Video Vault. I rented Video Vault’s copy of Final Fantasy II. I played the game in its entirety over the weekend. One of the files had contained a level-99 Cecil named “Marduk.” That was cool.

The next Wednesay, the 23rd, was a half day. My mom took me to the mall to pick up my copy of Donkey Kong Country.

“This is your Christmas present,” she said.

We went to Wendy’s on the way home. I stopped at Video Vault. Final Fantasy III was in. I didn’t rent it. It felt awfully sad not to rent it.

Outside, dark clouds swirled like barbecue smoke in the gray sky over the parking lot.

I played through half of Donkey Kong Country that night. The next day was Thanksgiving. I sat at the table half asleep. Everyone was eating turkey. My family consists entirely of people who would need Doctor Oz to fit it into a soundbite that you can close your mouth when you chew. I ate Kraft macaroni and cheese, a grilled cheese sandwich, pickles, and a lot of cranberry sauce. My nose was all blocked up. I kept sniffing real loud. It must have sounded like I was snorting baseballs.

“It’s all that dairy!” my dad said.

“It ain’t no dairy,” my mom said. “He’s just bein’ an ass hole.”

They were each half right.

I finished Donkey Kong Country minutes before church on Sunday. The next Friday, I rented Final Fantasy III from Video Vault again. All three save files featured a Locke named “Fuck.” The timestamps indicated they’d all been saved within one minute of each other. I distinctly remember thinking, “He shoulda at least put an ‘E’ on the end.” Even back then, even as a friendless mute, I couldn’t resist a good joke callback, even if only a ghost existed to witness it.

I battled my way to Zozo again.

Sunday morning my mom told me it was time for church. My dad was drinking coffee in the kitchen. This was a couple years before he started wearing suits to church. He was only a couple years older than I am now. He was looking at the Indianapolis Star, asking nobody if they could believe the sports. I performed my weekly ritual of flipping open every full-color advertisement for a glimpse of video games amid mainstream products such as sweaters and electric razors. On a whim I visited the weekly circular for Kohl’s, a store whose Indianapolis locations sold ugly clothes that my mom bought for me, though no video games.

Between a golf bag and a set of flatware, as inexplicable as an alien invasion, sat the box of one solitary video game.

Final Fantasy III.

Next to it was the most curious price tag I have ever seen in my life: the game was on sale for $52.94.

To this day, I do not understand why or how that price happened.

So it was that on Sunday, December 4th, 1994, I traded in a box full of NES games for $22, added $34 of my own money, and purchased Final Fantasy III from the Electronics Boutique in Castleton Square Mall in Indianapolis, Indiana while a rented copy of the same game sat inside the Super Nintendo in my bedroom at home. I remember this date perfectly because I remember everything because of a neurological condition I have suffered my entire life. Also, I remember this date because four days later, an arsonist who would never be caught burned down my high school’s brand-new six-million-dollar gymnasium.

I put the rented Final Fantasy III back into its plastic case. I lovingly returned its tattered manual, now smoothed to toilet-paper softness by the hands of countless profane phantom renters. I closed the case. I put it on the dinner table in the kitchen so that my mom could return it.

I sat on the edge of my bed holding my very own copy of Final Fantasy III for many minutes. I measured its heft. I squeezed its bulk. I could feel that French-toast-thick instruction manual inside. The package felt so important compared to that of Donkey Kong Country. This was a video game my brother would like. This is a video game my dad would like. He likes John Travolta dancing in Pulp Fiction! Why wouldn’t he like this?

I removed the plastic hang tab from the box. I used it to slit open the shrink wrap. I peeled the shrink wrap open just enough to open the box.

My big brother came in.

“You got it, huh?”

He sat down on the bed next to me.

I put the cartridge into the Nintendo on the floor. I booted it up. The ominous title music played. My brother sat on the bed, his arms crossed. He’d walked in and out on the game before. The presence of a purchased copy must have inspired him to deeper attention. His arms folded, his brow furrowed. He’d even put his glasses on. He almost never wore them, back then.

His glasses were so much cooler than my glasses. I had a huge brown pair of American Optical Z-87 safety goggles. My brother had a fancy pair of wire rims. My parents had let him pick his glasses. He’d been in little league before he wore glasses.

I pressed the “A” button on the title screen.

“Dude, what the heck?”

There was already a save file in the game.

“Oh, shoot! Hey, mom, look at this!”

My mom came into the room with her hands on her hips.

“What am I lookin’ at?”

“There’s already a save file in the game! Somebody already played it! And look, they named the character ‘RETARD’!”

In hindsight, I can tell that the boy at Electronics Boutique to whom my mom gave a piece of her mind had, in fact, been the one to name Terra “RETARD.” Years later, I’d work in a Software, Etc at College Mall in Bloomington, Indiana. We checked games out all the time. We had a shrink-wrapper in the back room. We could make anything look like nobody’d played it before.

Castleton Mall closed at 5pm on Sundays. We left the mall just as someone started yelling over the loudspeaker for us to get out. Black clouds swirled like barbecue smoke in the charcoal sky. Indiana, back then, didn’t do Daylight Savings Time.

So it was that I returned a rented copy of Final Fantasy III to the dropbox slot of Video Vault in Indianapolis, Indiana while a brand-new, all-for-me copy sat in a bag in my mom’s 1984 Plymouth Horizon.

We went home. I went to bed. I woke up after midnight. With some microwaved Wendy’s french fries spilled on a paper plate in my lap, I played Final Fantasy III for two hours before turning it off and doing my homework.

At about two-forty PM on Thursday, December 8th, 1994, as the final bell loomed twenty too-long minutes in the distance past Mr. Gulde’s “Global Awareness” class, the fire alarm went off.

Mr. Gulde looked at his watch. “Everyone just take your bags with you.”

We all went outside. We stood on the lawn in front of the school. I looked at my big Casio watch. It was almost two-fifty. I thought about crossing the street and going home. Our house wasn’t even a block away. I wasn’t used to being outside at this time of day. Under those dark clouds and that dead sky I felt more tired than I did at church. I could barely keep my eyes open.

“Pranksters all, prankin’ and shit,” one of the students in Mr. Gulde’s tenth-period Global Awareness class said, milliseconds before the explosion. Everyone shut up. We looked toward the sound. Sheets of siding fell off the brand-new, six-million-dollar gymnasium—the best in the city; home of the North Central Panthers basketball team. Red and yellow flames burst out.

We stood in silence for several minutes.

A black pillar of smoke rose high, high up into the clouds.

I turned around and walked home.

My mom came into my room without knocking. I was putting my hiking boot socks on.

“You’re home early.”

Roy came in.

“Mom, turn on the news! Someone blew up the gym.”

The reporters said school was canceled the next day. My mom and brother sat and listened to the news in silence. Helicopter cameras showed the black pillar stomping down on the school like a finger from heaven.

I went outside. I stood in our lawn. The column of smoke would still be faintly visible on Sunday.

I played Final Fantasy III until 6am on Monday. I got through the Opera House. It was the greatest game I had ever played.

On Monday, the Indianapolis Police had set up checkpoints at every entrance of the school. Students were only allowed to use one entrance, which was equipped with a single metal detector. All three thousand students filed through that one metal detector.

At a special assembly that morning, the principal told us things had changed, effective immediately. Indianapolis Police offices would remain in the school indefinitely. We’d have more metal detectors in the coming days, to speed up student entry. Any students attempting to enter the school later than the pre-homeroom warning bell would be expelled.

Any students showing up late to class would be expelled.

Tuesday, there were cops in the lunchroom. Like, real cops, with guns. Roy and his friends weren’t as loud as usual. Nobody even said “nipple,” much less any of the worse stuff they usually talked about.

“I bet you it was the same kid from last year.”

In 1993, there had been a fire in the same area of the brand-new, six-million-dollar gymnasium, which had at that time just been unveiled. The fire barely covered a few square feet of floor. Investigators ruled it an arson.

The police arrested a student. They never revealed the student’s name. All anyone ever knew was that the student was allowed to return to the school.

“It wasn’t the kid they arrested last year because he didn’t even do it last year; that’s why they let him go!”

“We don’t even fuckin’ . . . know who he was.”

“It was Mr. Quandt’s son, you retard,” someone said. “He graduated.”

“It was not Mr. Quandt’s son,” Jared said.

“How do you know, Jared? Because it was you?”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Then how do you know it wasn’t him?”

“Mr. Quandt’s son graduated and they said this kid they arrested last year is back in school.”

“That’s what I’m saying; I’m saying it wasn’t Mr. Quandt’s son who got arrested last year, it was Mr. Quandt’s son who actually did it.”

“Well even if it was Mr. Quandt’s son last year it wasn’t Mr. Quandt’s son this year,” Roy said. “He graduated.”

“Unless he came back,” someone said.

“That’s retarded; you sayin’ he’d sneak in to the school just to start another fire?”

“He’s got unfinished business!”

“You fuckin’ moron.”

“The news said the kid who did it last year wasn’t even in the gym when the fire started this year.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it last year!”

“I think it was Jared last year, and it was Jared this year.”

“Why’d it be me?”

“Yeah, tell me how it’s gonna be Jared,” my brother said, “when they’re talkin’ about how you get expelled if you’re late to class. You know Round Boy here ain’t exactly on the cross-country team!”

“Haw, haw.”

They all laughed. None of them knew that Jared would later lose over 200 pounds by eating Subway sandwiches, become a millionaire, and then be arrested for child sex trafficking charges.

“Maybe it was your brother,” one of the guys said. “Didn’t he have Coach Mitchell for gym last year? That bastard’d make anybody wanna torch the gym.”

My brother looked at me.

“Nah, he’s alright.”

“You always gotta watch out for the quiet ones,” one of the guys said. I believe he owned a skateboard.

“It coulda been anybody,” my brother said. He was half right.

“Fuckin’ punk, burning down the gym.”

“They said it’s like a million dollars of damage.”

“Who said?”

“They said it in the paper.”

“You read the paper?”

“What kinda bitch move, burnin’ down the gym. You don’t go around hatin’ basketball here in Hoosier country, that’s for damn sure.”

“It probably didn’t have nothin’ to do with basketball.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know. It just probably didn’t.”

“God damn . . . bitch move either way.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

1993: ONE YEAR EARLIER
“Classic loser move,” My Only Friend had said, a year prior, of the first North Central High School gymnasium arson. “Shoulda torched the fuckin’ lunch room, am I right? Shoulda done it like a month earlier, too, am I right?”

The arsonist had waited until the end of the school year to attempt to burn down the gym.

“Should just fuckin’ . . . put a fuckin’ pipe bomb in the mother . . . fuckin’ . . . . . . lunch room while all those fuckin’ . . . chodes were eatin’ their fuckin’ lunches, dude. Just fuckin’ blow ’em all to shit! There’d’a been hair on them walls!”

It occurred to me several years later that My Only Friend had gotten the phrase “hair on them walls” from the novel In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, about which he’d once proudly given me an impromptu book report, once: “Some fag wrote it, though it’s got some good shit about shotguns in it.”

It was July 1993. The fire had been a month ago. This was not the first time My Only Friend had discussed what he perceived as a wasted opportunity to wallpaper the lunchroom with hair while his mother purchased lottery tickets at a gas station.

“I think we’re gonna fuckin’ go to Taco Bell. Fuckin’ . . . psyched? I am gonna fill my go kart up with diarrhea dude.”

My Only Friend’s mom, who was someone my mom knew, which is how I found myself turned in to a little friendship with My Only Friend, emerged from inside the gas station with a couple of lottery tickets, a bottle of Barq’s root beer for My Only Friend, and a bottle of Sprite for me. I drank Sprite because I didn’t drink caffeine. My Only Friend drank Barq’s root beer because A&W root beer was “for queers.”

As she approached the car, My Only Friend said, “Don’t snitch to mom about any of this shit, [his little brother’s first name].”

“I won’t!” his little brother said, invisibly, from inside the passenger’s seat.

“You boys ready to go?” My Only Friend’s Mom was from Texas by way of Minnesota.

“Yeah, mom.”

On the way to the Taco Bell nearest the Putt-Putt on the south side Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” came on the radio. My Only Friend’s Mom was listening to 97.1. That was the Best of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and Today. (Today was the first two and a half years of the 1990s.)

“Hey, mom, turn it up.”

“You got it, kid,” she said.

My Only Friend bobbed his head along to the song. I had been fourteen for just one month, though I had considered the song inane since I was eleven. At age thirty-two people would call me a poser for saying that I don’t like songs that have lyrics I can understand as much as I like songs with lyrics I don’t understand. I swear, at age forty I’ve got playlists of, like, traditional Inuit throat singing and I don’t share any of it with anyone. At age fourteen I never shared my music opinions with anyone, so I never had to argue with anyone about them. My Only Friend looked over at me and said, “This song is awesome. There’s this part. Ah, heck. Where is it?” I, mutely, possessed neither the wherewithal nor the means to tell my friend the song was hacky and inane and that I would not stoop to define cleverness as stringing together rhyming words that evoked memories of pop culture or historical tragedies to anybody who’d ever looked at the cover of any given book. It wasn’t a song: it was a list of stuff. I hated about that song everything a cynic today might hate about remakes and reboots and sequels to movies.

“Yeah, yeah, here it is!”

In tandem with Billy Joel, My Only Friend shouted, “J! F! K! Blown Away! What Else Do! I! Have! To! Say!”

He clapped his hands once.

“Just, awesome, man. JFK got so blown away, dude.”

He headbanged a bit as the song stepped into its final chorus.

“We didn’t start the fire! We didn’t start the, start the fire!” He tonelessly talk-sang.

He didn’t realize that, actually, it had always been burning since the world had been turning–an ancient machine deep dark in an inscrutable jungle switched on by hands divine in a time before time which we may never find though if any among us does and if we can reckon its power switch from all that mess of whatever meat composes it it is our human duty to smash it

At Putt-Putt, before go karts, we spectated Mortal Kombat II. Taller teenagers than ourselves crowded the machine.

My Only Friend had social skills. He talked up these kids who might as well have been an alien species to me.

“He says there’s a couple new fatalities,” My Only Friend told me. “Maybe we’ll get to see some. Ah, hell, Kung Lao’s gonna win this one. Oh, sh, look at that—cut him from crotch to cranium, dude!” Yes, he did speak like he was always writing MAD Magazine blurbs.

I wanted to play some Street Fighter II, so I did. I played as Ken against the CPU. I lost at Vega. I rejoined My Only Friend.

“I heard some jackass saying there’s ‘Friendships’ in Mortal Kombat II, like Johnny Cage can sign an autograph and hand it to a dude instead of finishing them. Fuckin’ liar. Let’s go ride those go karts.”

In addiiton to $5 for arcade games (NBA Jam), my mom had given me money specifically to ride the go karts. I was not allowed to use it on anything else. My mom didn’t want me not riding the go karts because My Only Friend was going to be riding the go karts, and My Only Friend’s parents were richer than my parents. We rode the go karts. It was too hot for a kid as fat as me. I filled my little go kart with my own gravy. My Only Friend crashed into other drivers so many times and too obviously on purpose that he got yelled at twice by a big teenager who had a whistle and knew how to blow it.

“I’ll shove that whistle so far up his ass he . . . pisses it out his DICK!” My Only Friend was saying as we walked back toward Mortal Kombat II. I had a dollar left over from the go karts and Street Fighter.

“Come on, play Mortal Kombat II against me. I wanna try a fatality.”

Inside, a teenager from earlier told My Only Friend, “Dude, you missed it, dude, that dude did Johnny Cage’s friendship.”

“You’re a fuckin’ liar.”

“Ah, fuck you I’m not.”

“Fuckin’ fuck you.”

We watched Mortal Kombat II for a half an hour. Neither of us got to play. My Only Friend’s mom and little brother came around with some tickets they’d won at skee ball.

“Maybe you boys wanna play minigolf next time?”

“Minigolf is for homos, mom.”

“Son! Watch your language.”

We went home. It was hot in the backseat of that car.

Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” came on the radio.

“Hey mom! Turn it up!”

“There’s this part in this song where this guy says people are puttin’ bread in a jar.”

One month later, it was My Only Friend’s birthday. He wanted to go to the Lone Star Steakhouse and then to the Block Party Arcade.

“This place rules,” he told me, of Lone Star Steakhouse. “They bring you a bucket of peanuts, and you just throw the shells on the floor!”

At the Block Party arcade, he wanted to play Dactyl Nightmare. I stood maybe thirty feet back and watched him flail as though underwater beneath the weight of ancient virtual reality paraphernalia.

“Dude, that was so awesome.”

We stopped at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the way out of the Clearwater Crossing mall.

“Let me show you something,” he was saying. He slid up a little stepladder. He grabbed an imported British video game magazine off the top shelf of the magazine rack. “See how big this fucker is?” he whispered. He shook it. It was inside a huge crinkly plastic bag, and maybe three inches taller than other magazines.

He looked left. He looked right. “Spot me.” He pulled on the plastic bag, yanking it open along the seam. “Seriously, spot me, dude.”

He slid the stepladder over to the left one rack. He stepped up, and then gingerly stepped down a moment later.

He led me around the corner. He indicated the plastic bag. I peered in. He fanned open the pages of the big, tall, British video game magazine.

Inside, he had deposited an issue of Hustler. I’d never seen pornography before. I mean, technically, it was just the cover, though I was in the AP classes, so trust me: I pretty easily intuited it was pornography.

“We got fuckin’ both feet in the jackpot, now.”

He purchased the magazine, deploying two timid, theatrical utterances of the word “sir.”

His mom’s car rolled up in front of the Barnes & Noble.

“You find what you want?”

“Yeah, mom.”

“You boys wanna go anywhere else?”

“Let’s go home and play some Sega CD.”

His house was bigger than mine. It was wider and darker. The kitchen had one of those countertops you could see over into a dining room and living room. Outside of that they had what I figured was a second, smaller living room, with windows behind a sofa, and no television. Down the hall from that was his room, with a 25-inch television and every game console.

“Dude, let’s play some Sega CD.”

He’d owned a Sega CD and all the games released so far, so somebody had to watch him play it. He put on Sewer Shark.

“Sewer Shark is so awesome, dude.”

The loading times were longer than anything I think the game was trying to do.

“I’m gonna take a piss,” he said. “Don’t fuckin’ touch anything, okay?”

I sat on the edge of one of the two large chairs in the middle of his bedroom floor. In the dark, I watched the Sega CD try to load Sewer Shark. It was like watching a turtle try to stand on its hind legs. It was still more entertaining than watching him actually play Sewer Shark.

My Only Friend reemerged into his dark bedroom.

“The fu is going on with this stupid bastard?”

The Sega CD still had not loaded the disc.

“Fuck. You didn’t fuckin’ touch it, did you?”

I shrugged.

“I fuckin’ swear if you fuckin’ touched this thing and it’s fuckin’ broken my fuckin’ mom is gonna fuckin’ kill you.”

He reset the machine.

“I swear Sewer Shark is so awesome, dude. Do you wanna play Streets of Rage 2?”

I watched him play Streets of Rage 2. He hadn’t offered me the other controller.

The last weekend of the summer, we went to the Putt Putt again.

“Why don’t you boys play the miniature golf?”

“I wanna ride the go karts, mom.”

After the go karts, we spectated Mortal Kombat II. Some big kid in a Thrasher shirt pulled off Johnny Cage’s Friendship: Johnny Cage signed an autograph and threw it at Scorpion.

The crowd hooted, hollered, and bellowed.

“Ohhhhhh shiiiittttt”

My Only Friend’s face twisted.

“Dude, that’s so fucking gay.”

He never looked at Mortal Kombat II again.

He did, however, look at Mortal Kombat One, when it released for the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo on September 13th, 1993. He cornered me at school and told me he was going to tell his mom to call my mom and invite me over to his house on Saturday. I complied. He handed me a controller. He told me to pick Sonya, the only female character in the game. We chose the stage “The Courtyard,” where, in front of a large audience of background dwellers, he practiced every character’s Fatalities on Sonya. If I won, he’d snatch the controller out of my hand and practice Sonya’s Fatalities. Maybe sixteen times during this funereally joyless multi-hour exercise he sat back at the conclusion of one fatality or another and proudly said, “Dude, the Super Nintendo version is so gay.” The Super Nintendo version had replaced blood with sweat and censored the Fatalities. Instead of ripping out an opponent’s heart, the character Kano reached forward and removed something gray from behind their silhouette. A scrap of clothing? What is this gray pseudosphere? I’m looking at it on YouTube. The boggledness of my mind yet today suffices for an equal shock to my age-fourteen eye-witnessing the heart-rip. Most nightmares in my experience, outside those by-Halloween-cartoon-educated children think of when they hear the word “nightmare,” concern more often amorphous gray masses produced from fourth-dimensional elsewhere than they star horror movie monsters.

The week after Christmas, 1993, he and his mom came to my house. Our school was on winter break. My little brother was sitting at the kitchen table, playing with Silly Putty. Silly Putty was my little brother’s favorite toy. He was six. He liked to put the Silly Putty onto the table and dagger-pound it with his fist-bottom. He also treated non-Silly-Putty toys like he treated Silly Putty.

My Only Friend sat at the dinner table while my mom talked to My Only Friend’s mom about something on the news.

“FU—I mean, heck,” he whispered. “Is that heckin’ . . . . . . red Silly Putty?” He got up. He hunched forward, hands on his thighs, and spoke to my little brother like my little brother was a cat or a baby. “Hey, buddy, can I see this here?”

My Only Friend picked up a Wolverine action figure. He laid Wolverine flat on his back on my family dinner table. He broke off tiny pieces of red Silly Putty. Between his fingers, he smeared them into little thin shrapnel-scraps.

“Do you have any toothpicks?”

I got him a toothpick from the kitchen.

In ten minutes, he’d made two dozen little skinny tendrils of red Silly Putty, and shaped them so they geysered up out of supine Wolverine’s abdomen. He took an egg of original-color Silly Putty and crafted fat, caucasian-flesh-colored snakey ropes. He balled them into a bundle. He gingerly set the bundle atop Wolverine’s abdomen.

“Hell yes. Bad ass. He’s disemboweled.”

One year earlier, the first time I ever went to his house, he asked me sweetly if I’d ever played Mario Paint.

“It’s got this mouse—don’t touch it. It’s got this mouse. Check this out.”

He loaded up his custom animation. He had painstakingly inserted a Sonic the Hedgehog sprite art into the game. He played a crude animation in which Sonic rolled into a ball and spin-dashed at a provided, authentic Mario sprite, which then exploded into an air-brushed puff of primary red.

“That’s how it would be. That’s what would happen if Mario and Sonic were in a fight, dude.”

Then he asked me if I’d ever seen the movie Akira. I shook my head. He put on a VHS tape and fast-forwarded it to the part where you can see a girl’s boobs if you pause it fast enough. Some punks were assaulting the girl in an alley. They ripped her shirt off.

“Dudes are fuckin’ like, ‘Show me those chesticles, bitch!'” I hear the phrase again today. Where did he learn to talk like this? Had someone snuck him in to witness an alcoholic divorced stand-up New England comedian’s final pre-suicide set?

The week after Christmas, 1993, we went to his house. I hoped he would show me Doom. He showed me Sonic CD.

“It’s got music by Tommy Tallarico, dude. It’s so good. Listen to it. Listen.”

He continued to exhibit the aftermath of his richboy Christmas. He loaded up Hook, based on the Steven Spielberg film in which Robin Williams plays Old Sad Peter Pan.

“Listen to this, dude.”

Maybe ten months later, the game had loaded. He ham-fisted and sausage-fingered his way around the first level, which I had already cleared a couple boredly times on the Super Nintendo version.

“The music sounds exactly like the movie.”

I wanted to tell him, “No, it doesn’t sound exactly like the movie. It sorta does, though it also sorta doesn’t. At any rate, I don’t want to be listening to this at all, much less right now.” I didn’t tell him this because I was mute, which didn’t matter to him, because he probably wouldn’t have listened anyway.

“Nintendo is pissin’ their pants listening to this.”

He then plugged in the 3DO he’d gotten for Christmas. He played Gex. While he played Gex, he told me three things: firstly, that Dana Gould could suck a shotgun barrel for all he cared, secondly, that they should have totally gotten Dennis Leary to voice Gex, and third, that—and I quote, “Doom is so gay, dude.” He’d also gotten DOOM, before Christmas, for the PC he also had in his bedroom alongside his 3DO, his Sega Genesis with Sega CD, and his Super Nintendo.

I hated him. I think his brother hated him.

1993 became 1994. Cold months happened. I missed Fort Meade, Maryland. I missed marathoning Final Fantasy II with Carl. I missed playing in the woods and talking about what kind of Zelda game Nintendo should make. I cruised through ninth grade. Teachers go easy on you when you’re a little bit weirder than the other kids. I started staying up later and later at night so I could watch David Letterman. He was from Indianapolis, Indiana. His mom lived right down the street from us. My dad reminded me of that every night. Eventually I was watching Conan O’Brien after David Letterman. I started writing essays and short stories on the electric typewriter my dad had found for me two years back. I listened to X103 on my old Walkman with headphones late at night. I listened to Nirvana. I laid on the blue shag carpet in my bedroom, staring at the flower wallpaper lit by that amber-colored nightlight that never went out, waiting for “All Apologies” to come on. I had received a cheap stereo with a CD player for Christmas 1993. I had In Utero and Nevermind and Bleach. I think that’s pretty good taste for a thirteen-year-old, okay? I looked over Electronic Gaming Monthly and my Chinese dictionary while listening to Nirvana with one headphone and David Letterman on the television. I ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and macaroni and cheese. Ever since My Only Friend’s birthday at Lone Star Steakhouse, I’d become a fan of Tabasco sauce. I kept a bottle in my bedroom. I was the only member of my family who enjoyed anything spicy. Lots of the other things they say about white people are this true as well. My mom found the bottle one day, and was worried about me for years. Well, once you start keeping food in your bedroom, normalcy doesn’t like you so much anymore. I slowly became more nocturnal than not. I was a fourteen-year-old mute, obese, self-taught vegetarian, and I had never talked to a girl, though one day I was going to touch a guitar, if I’d let myself give myself a chance. Kurt Cobain killed himself with a shotgun at age twenty-seven, which seemed old to me, on a day when I ate one more peanut butter and jelly sandwich than usual.

Saturday, April 9th, 1994, My Only Friend’s mom picked me up and took me to their house. She and her husband went to the movies. She left us alone in the house. Me, My Only Friend, and his little brother sat atop stools at the minibar-countertop thing in the house’s secondary living room. Video game magazines were splashed about the countertop. My Only Friend set down a third empty Barq’s root beer can. All outside that very grown-up furniture fixture was an ocean of blackness.

Copying from an image of Super Metroid‘s box art in an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, My Only Friend and his brother were drawing pictures of Samus Aran in their respective sketchpads. My Only Friend was fourteen years old; his twelve-year-old brother’s drawing was better. I had my hands on my knees. I stared at the wood paneled wall. I wasn’t in a mood to draw.

“Hey, [his little brother’s name], did you tell Tim about Cam’s Masturbation?”

He said it like his little brother was in charge of telling me things, and like Cam’s Masturbation was a thing everyone desperately needed to know about.

He gave the pair of words “Cam’s Masturbation” so much gravity I presumed for a moment it alluded to a philosophical corollary.

His brother shrugged and rolled his eyes.

“Fine, I’ll tell him. So.”

So.

“There’s this speddo who was in [my little brother]’s kindergarten class. They put him in special ed later. His name was Cameron. They called him Cam. He was a real sped! Tell him about what Cam did, [brother]?”

My Only Friend’s Brother shrugged. My Only Friend rolled his eyes. He continued.

“The teacher was asking all the kids, hey, what do you like to do when you’re at home? And kids were like I like painting or I like playing with blocks and they got to Cam. The teacher was like, Cam, what do you like doing when you’re at home? And Cam just reached right for his junk and started beating it, like this.”

Here my friend stood up and beat the dull side of his fist into the top of his jeans’ pubic region.

“Except he went under the pants, like, he actually grabbed onto his wiener. Can you believe that!”

I could believe anything.

An hour passed there, in the dark, a grandfather clock ticking in the other living room, somewhere around the bend of a hallway.

“Check this out.”

My Only Friend’s little brother looked up from coloring his Metroid drawing. He’s a professional comic book artist now, by the way. He scoffed at his brother’s drawing.

Crudely, in the style like a comic pamphlet about Jesus you’d find on a city bus and your mom would warn you about germs if you touched it, My Only Friend had drawn Kurt Cobain, a shotgun in his mouth, gore exploding outward in a shockwave halo around his head. On the wall behind him My Only Friend had scrawled “I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE.”

“You’re so sick,” his brother said.

“No! I’m not fuckin’ sick, you’re just a fuckin’retard!”

He spun the drawing around, though I’d already absorbed it upside down.

“What do you think? Faggot took the easy way out, huh? Went down like a shitbitch. fuckin’ trashcan pissdiaper”

I snatched the drawing up off the table, balled it up, and shoved it in my mouth.

“You fuckin’ mongoloid sped!”

I chewed it four times; I spit it onto the floor.

“Fuckin’ . . . . . . pick that up and flush it down the toilet before my mom gets home, you reebo.”

I picked it up and flushed it down the toilet before his mom got home.

“Do you guys wanna fuckin’ . . . play Doom?”

I watched him play Doom on his homework computer.

“Doom is so gay,” he said, a near-silent hour later.

His family moved. I never saw him again.

1995: EIGHT MONTHS LATER
We were reading The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy in our English literature class, like that was a normal, relatable work of written material for fifteen-year-olds to care about while the OJ Simpson trial was on television all day every day and I was still two years away from having my first long conversation with a black person my age (and her mom) about who The Cops actually are.

Simon raised his hand, because that’s what he did. I bet he’s on Facebook. I’m going to look him up on Facebook immediately after I finish typing this. I hope he’s a lawyer. I mean that in the nicest possible way.

“Yes, Simon?”

“You said we could talk about some real issues.”

“This isn’t about OJ again, is it?”

“N-no.”

“What is it?”

“I feel that some of the students—and myself—still have questions about the fire.”

Our teacher, who was, objectively remembering, not a good teacher, sat on the edge of her desk.

“Of course you do.”

“I just think a lot of us feel violated. We feel scared.” He stood up. He rotated in place. “We feel like there’s something they’re not telling us.”

“Well, I don’t know who’s not telling who what,” our teacher said.

A silence fell off the ceiling and evaporated on the floor.

“I just think we could use some answers.”

“Do you have questions?”

“How long are we going to keep having cops in the halls? Am I gonna have to go through a metal detector every day until I graduate? And who’s the student who got arrested last year? At least can’t we know if he did it or not?”

Our teacher stepped forward off the edge of her desk. She threw her hands up.

“I don’t know. You know what? I’d tell you if I could.”

When I say that she was not, objectively remembering, a good teacher, I mean, for example, that I feel like a good teacher would have left it at “I don’t know.”

After class Simon was talking in the halls with the girl who sat next to me in every class because our last names were adjacent in alphabetical order, and the new disciplinary rules required teachers to seat students in alphabetical order.

“We should organize a group to investigate,” he was saying. “I think if enough of us put our heads together, we can find out who did it.” The boy who would be the captain of the swim team next year stood nearby, nodding.

I lingered and listened. The eventual swim team captain looked at me. He made eye contact. He looked away. I walked away.

At home, late that night, by the light of a string of Christmas bulbs in the dining room, I scrounged through the basket of newspapers under the piano my dad never let any of us play. I clipped every article pertaining to the fire at my school. I put them all in a medium-sized Ziploc baggie. I put the baggie in my shoebox of video games. I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the box on the floor between my feet.

Over the next week I composed a letter to Jeff “Lucky” Lundrigan at Game Players, for his game tips column. The letter went through five drafts. I told him I was a big fan. I said that I had a hole inside me, too, though I was only fifteen years old so I could only legally fill it with macaroni and cheese and Sprite. I thought it was a good joke. It might have been. I told him I loved Final Fantasy III. I told him if you cast “Vanish” on an enemy it works 100% of the time, and then if you cast “X-Zone,” that enemy will die 100% of the time. I told him a couple other tips that weren’t in Nintendo Power‘s strategy guide. I closed the letter out by saying, “Hey, do you think Kefka is actually Shadow’s friend—the one you see in Shadow’s flashback dream scenes? His friend was captured by the Empire, and Kefka is the result of experiments, right? Shadow seems to have some personal business with Kefka.”

I never heard a response. They never printed my letter. I didn’t expect them to.

The Wednesday after I sent the letter, a kid spilled his own chocolate milk into my hair as he walked past my table.

I took my time in the bathroom. I wet my hands and ran them through the wig-like hair pile atop my huge head. For not the first and not the last time, I beheld the mess of myself in that window.

The halls were empty when I exited the bathroom. Students were afraid of being expelled for tardiness.

The future swim team captain was walking down the hall in my direction. His girlfriend was with him.

“Watch this,” he said.

He sprinted toward me.

“Bon appetit, faggot!” he yelled. He kicked me so hard in the testicles I threw up all over my sweatpants. His facial expression melted away.

“Oh my god honey what did you do that for?” his girlfriend asked him. The exact emphasis of her “what” still reverberates in my ears today when I think on it.

He didn’t answer. I feel like a decent person would have at least said “I don’t know.”

I drenched my sweatpants in bathroom sink water. I showed up at my next class stinking like evil orange juice. Teachers don’t give you a hard time when you’re slightly weirder than everyone else. I went home and threw my pants in the washer. I sat on the edge of my bed and didn’t cry.

Time flowed without speed or mercy. In June of 1995 I turned 16. That very day I got a job at Target. By August of 1995 I’d grown two inches taller and lost 40 pounds. On Friday, August 11th, 1995, ten months to the day after the release of Final Fantasy III, Chrono Trigger came out in North America. I had my own money. I bought it full-price on day one. I sat on the edge of my bed in my cargo shorts and hiking boots after my shift mutely pushing carts, measuring the heft of Chrono Trigger‘s turgid box. I’d bought it on faith alone. I tried to guess at how many pages its manual had. A confusion found me. It didn’t leave for a while. I think now that at last, with nonchalance, my hole had finally found me.

Six years later, I’d have all the ingredients of a normal adult life, which I continue to have in some form today. Though for a period of dark vampiring months in my fifteenth year of life normalcy felt colder than impossible. Deep within the jungle of the unknown unknown my normal life slept, coiled and exhausted. The possibility of being a person never occurred to me once. These days, surrounded by information and noise as I am and we are, occasionally that possibility blinks into invisibility for a moment or an hour, and for god’s sake I am terrified, and for all your sakes I am humiliated. For a while in my youth outside of calculating the trade-in value of a couple Nintendo games, I lost my concept of considering the future.

“I know an invisible machine,” Rosa Peel, also known as The Tennis Monster, says, in my novel Chronicle of a Tennis Monster.

“This ancient machine of garbage and meat, active before we ever breathe, yelling after my bones are gone.”

In other words, we didn’t start the fire.

“Cut me up and sell my bones to the trashcan factory when I die,” Rosa Peel also says, earlier in the story, though I’m not sure what that means.

“Promise me you’ll make sure I’m dead before you sell my bones to the trashcan factory,” Rosa says, later. Now I’m thinking of trashcan factories. I’m sorry that I don’t know why I person I built is trying to say whatever they’re trying to say. I tried to build someone worse than myself and I tried to dig for humanity there. Instead she just wants to keep talking about trashcan factories. Eventually she says something beautiful about rotten fruit which almost always still almost makes me cry even for example in airports, though much of the time I hate myself for hating her.

I will die possessing many frivolous yet beautiful memories of people and weather. For as long as I remember to remember, my mind makes no difference between darkness, medicine, and entertainment. Our lives are the longest trivia games in the world.

Two years after Chrono Trigger came out in North America, a game called Moon: Remix RPG Adventure released in Japan. One summer night in 2003 I played this game at the house of a friend who’d purchased it because a noise cellist she liked, Hiromichi Sakamoto, had contributed a song to its soundtrack. I played the game with my friend all night in the wooden darkness of a Tokyo living room. We played it again the next week, and the next week, until finally we’d finished it. We’d lost a mutual friend to suicide earlier that year. I haven’t ever cried with another person like that.

I sought out the director of the game, Yoshiro Kimura, in 2004. We became acquaintances, and then friends. For fourteen years I asked him to let me translate his game into English. He always gave the same reply: the game is too hard, and it’s not very good, so nobody would like it.

In 2018, he decided to release it again. He said he’d let me translate it.

A couple weeks ago, unspeakable treadmill lightyears removed from the macaroni silence of my adolescence, I went to Tokyo to see Yoshiro Kimura. We talked for many hours. We videotaped the conversation, so that I can edit it into a documentary at some point in the future. The documentary provided me a perfect excuse to ask him broader questions about Moon than casual circumstances had ever encouraged me to ask. He told me about his time working at Squaresoft, on Romancing SaGa 3 and Super Mario RPG. We talked about Final Fantasy III, IV, V, and VI. I told him I was very antisocial when I played Final Fantasy VI. He nodded.

I went on.

I told him, one day, halfway between sixteen and seventeen, I looked at myself in a mirror. I hated myself more than I felt anything about anything else. And I’ll never know why, though that day I realized it was terrible and useless to hate myself. I’d keep doing it, and I still do it every day of my adult life, though at least I know I’m doing it. I told him, I knew that day that I had wasted days. I had wasted thousands of opportunities to pay the world acts of goodness. Until maybe 2008 I went on living wastefully and terribly. Since then I’ve done good things whenever I can, even when it hurts me and ruins me. I keep them to myself. And one day—just the other day, in fact—I looked at myself in a mirror in Narita Airport in Tokyo, Japan, and I knew that I know something no one else knows; I knew that I knew something beautiful and wordless, and if I ever figure out how to say it, I’ll say it immediately. I promise I won’t keep it. If I die having never said it, that’s all right, because it wasn’t worth saying if I didn’t say it right. And if I figure out how to say it right, I’ll say it without hesitation, and someone will hear it, and they’ll someday fix a part of the world I don’t know how to see, and so on, until I’m far away and sorry.

I told him about the kid who made Sonic kill Mario in Mario Paint. I told him about my gymnasium fire. I told him that last Christmas, my mother had told me that that kid, now grown up and married with children, called my parents’ house in the middle of a November evening the week before Thanksgiving 2018 and asked if he could take them out to dinner. My mom said she told him she was already cooking dinner; he could come over, if he wanted. He said he’d come over. She said he was a perfect gentleman and didn’t ask about me once. I told my friend I stood in the bathroom and stared at my face and my eyebrows for five minutes after hearing that. I remember everything because I can’t forget anything, though every fresher cell of me differs many times over from those of those gone days. For several minutes I looked for someone else at myself.

He nodded. “I think I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I don’t know how I got here,” I said.

I got here the only way anyone gets anywhere.

I finished translating Moon immediately before beginning to write this. It was released on the Nintendo Switch eShop on 27 August 2020. If you play it, please try not to think of me.

text by tim rogers

★★★★

“THE BEST VIDEOGAME OF ALL-TIME.”

Another World (released as “Out of This World” in the US and “Outer World” in Japan) is, perhaps by default, the best game of all-time by our criteria: it was designed and programmed by virtually one man, it is not long, it features no heads-up display to clutter the screen, it features precisely one weapon which can be used for three purposes (regular attack, charge attack, shield) using only one button (we love games that let us hold down a button and then let go), it possesses unshakable confidence in the sharpness of its mechanic (conveyed in level design that prompts the player to use his multi-faceted gun in many creative ways), it features puzzles whose solutions require no more than common sense, it has amazing music, it is gorgeous to look at, and it tells a story while it moves, relentlessly, never stopping, never preaching, never speaking, from the frightening beginning right up to the heartbreaking conclusion.

Out of This World was ahead of its time in 1991, and it is still ahead of not-its time in 2008. One might call it an art film of a videogame. This wouldn’t be a wrong description so much as a lazy one. It’s more of a silent film of a videogame. Or, better than that, it is a videogame of a videogame.

Out of This World shows (not tells) us the story of Lester Knight Chaykin, a red-haired physicist working in some kind of laboratory. The introduction scene impresses us immediately with visions of the familiar: a car (headlights), a building, a thunderstorm. Lester — whose name we will only know if we’ve read it out of the instruction manual — descends into his laboratory and boots up a large computer. He leans back in his chair. He sips a can of what might be beer. It’ll be the last can of what might be beer that he’ll ever have. A lightning bolt strikes the building outside. We see Lester’s car again, for a split second. Something explodes and implodes simultaneously deep inside the lab. A spherical hole replaces Lester’s chair. The screen hangs there for a moment, perfect, weighty cinematography befitting . . . cinema. Then there’s a crash, and a splash. Lester materializes in a pool of water. Vine-like tentacles begin to reach toward the sunlight on the surface of the pool.

The game begins.

Out of This World, from this moment until its fascinating conclusion, represents an Actual Genius’s osmosed omniscience regarding game design: we can say that it is Super Mario Bros. turned on its ear. In Super Mario Bros., the player knows he has to go to the right because his recognizable-as-human avatar is facing to the right, and standing just left of the center of the screen. The reason for going to the right is explained only in the instruction manual: a dragon has kidnapped a princess, and Mario must get her back (our imaginations fill in the perhaps-promise of getting laid). Out of This World doesn’t need an instruction manual: here we have a hero who was in one place, and is now in another. Sinking in a pool of water is objectively worse (humans can’t breathe underwater) a situation than sitting in a desk chair drinking beer (what’s a few dead brain cells?). We must get out of here. To further impress the situation upon us, we have those growing, evil tentacles.

It is possible to die a grisly, uniquely animated death not one second into Out of This World. It’s likely that the designer, one Eric Chahi, intended for the player to die the first time the game began. This is how you die in the beginning of the game: you don’t press any buttons. You just stare at the beautiful and serene pool of water. This is, in fact, what most people would do, if they found themselves suddenly transported from a desk chair in a laboratory to a pool of water beneath a vaguely alien sun. That one second is long enough for Lester to sink just far enough for the evil tentacles to grab him. Now you’re being dragged underwater. The next thing you know, you’re dead.

All great art tends to originate from a somewhat shy little need. Most of the time, the “need” is only a placebo. The artist eventually realizes he didn’t need anything. Like The Stone Roses said, “You don’t have to wait to die / the kingdom’s all inside”. Or something. Eric Chahi’s production of Another World began when he saw the game Dragon’s Lair, found the animation fascinating, and dreamt up — probably in a split second, while standing dead still in the middle of an intersection with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand — a method to make similarly fluid animation using much less data storage space. He set to work immediately, having no clue what he was going to make — only a basic idea of how he was going to do it. It’s said he planned at first only to make a game like Karateka and Prince of Persia, only in a science-fiction setting. He spent half a year developing his excessively complicated though ultimately amazingly efficient animation technique. He developed it the only sane way: while using it to make a cinematic introduction for his game.

Now it was time to make a game. Eric Chahi presumably did not bother to jot his game design idea onto a bar napkin. The “game design” pre-production phase of Another World did not exist. Chahi had presumably had a simple idea brewing. When it came time to make a game, he figuratively snapped his fingers, and a genie exploded out of his ears.

Every third man who owns an electric guitar will claim to have met and hung out with the person who only they consider “the best unknown singer / songwriter alive today”. These singer / songwriter-warriors often impart the same advice regarding songwriting to every friend cool enough to drink a beer with them: if you want to write a song, man, just heckin’ write a song. Anything can be a song. A song can be anything. And If you have a song, sing it. This is not just the method for writing songs — you can replace these verbs and adjectives at random, and you’ll end up with a pretty fool-proof philosophy.

Another World is a song of a videogame. The dumbfounding simplicity of its core mechanics are such that they must have been set in stone from the very moment Chahi began level design. Chahi says, nowadays, that the level design was done completely at random, in a spur-of-the-moment sort of way, and this sticks: only when the game design is so thoroughly complete is the level design allowed to be spur-of-the-moment.

The basic gist of Another World is that you must not die. You play the part of a man in a world completely different from the home of cars and laboratories glimpsed in the introduction, and then never again. You escape from the tentacles in the pool to find yourself on a barren, rocky planet. You may walk either to the right or to the left. To the left is a cliff, and a vine. To the right are some slugs. If a slug bites your leg, you will see a pan-flash close-up animation of a silver stinger cutting through khaki. Then it’s back to the main screen. Lester falls over, dead. Your next attempt, you might try pressing a button. Press the Action Button, and Lester kicks. Kick the slugs to kill them. Press the Jump Button to hop over the slugs. Keep moving right, and you will come face-to-face with a beast. The beast is huge, and black. It is, in fact, the first thing you see upon exiting the pool at the beginning of the game: the beast is standing on a cliff in the distance. When you emerge from the water, he turns and gallops off-screen. You cannot kill the beast, and you will immediately know this because you know how Lester is hardly a match for a slug. Whether you walked left at the beginning of the game or not, whether you saw that vine and that cliff or not, you will be compelled to run back the way you came by virtue of the fact that the beast literally takes up most of the right side of the screen. You will run left, jumping over the slugs. The beast chases you. You run all the way off the edge of the cliff, grab the vine, and swing around as the beast rears up to avoid falling. Now you have to run again to the right, jumping over the slugs again. Make your way all the way back to the screen where you met the beast; when you run off the right side of the screen, the game suddenly betrays your just-founded expectations (that running off the edge of one screen takes you to a new screen) by having your character fall backward onto the rocky ground. Robe-shrouded, large humanoid forms walk into the frame. The beast comes gallopping into the screen. One of the robed men immediately shoots the beast with a concealed weapon. The beast crumples into a pile. Lester stands up, thanking his saviors. He is punched in the gut with a laserbeam, and the screen fades to black.

You wake up in a cage. It’s a brief cut-scene. You see an alien sitting across from you. This is very important: at the lower-right corner of the screen is one of the robed aliens. He immediately removes his robe. Underneath is a large, albino-gorilla-like muscular being wearing a skin-tight black shirt and briefs. This alien being is precisely identical to the alien beings mining in the background — and the alien sitting next to us in our cage. Why are we in the cage? As with most of the questions presented in Another World, this is a question we don’t need to ask. We can ask it — and then answer it — anyway: these aliens all look precisely the same. Lester doesn’t look anything like them. Lester is in the cage, perhaps, because he is an obviously intelligent being who looks nothing like the resident intelligent beings of this world. The narrative plays our brain on subconscious levels: if Lester is arrested for looking different, then these people might have some kind of racism in their hearts. That would make them inherently bad. We don’t hesitate to assume that the reason they locked up one of their own kind is because he is not bad. If the game’s first puzzle is getting out of the pool, and the second puzzle is escaping from the beast, the third is wondering why these terrible things keep happening to us. The solution to the puzzle involves a leap of conscience: escape from the cage. Escaping from the cage requires as much common sense as swimming out of the water. In the water, you pressed up. In the cage, you press right and left to make it swing. Make it swing once, and the guard in the lower-right shouts some unintelligible alien words at you. He fires his gun into the air. Guards appear in the background. Now you know you’re on the right track. Swing harder. The cage falls off its chain and crushes the guard dead. A quick cut-scene shows Lester’s hand approaching the floor, picking up a gun. The guards in the background panic.

The rest of the game begins.

The immediate, short-term, and long-term goals will, for the duration of the experience, be “move”, and “survive”. Moving will involve running and jumping; surviving will involve shooting and dodging.

Another World is a game centered on death. As we’ve established, Eric Chahi’s inspiration for creating it came from looking at Dragon’s Lair and wondering if he could create a similar graphical effect using much less storage space. There had to be a little more to the Dragon’s Lair inspiration than Eric Chahi has perhaps let on. Dragon’s Lair‘s initial appeal was its full-motion-video graphics. It was better than something that looked “like” a cartoon — it was a cartoon. That was enough, in Dragon’s Lair‘s day and age. People wouldn’t care about the control or depth of a game if it looked like absolutely nothing they’d ever seen before within the same medium. You play Dragon’s Lair by pressing the correct button as dictated by a glint on the screen. Press that button, and the hero will move, initiating a “successful” video segment. Don’t press that button, and the current segment of video will flow directly into the “failure” animation. Dragon’s Lair‘s conscience is a weird one to peg, however, because nearly as much attention is paid to “failure” as to “success”. Some would even argue that watching your hero die is more interesting than watching him succeed. If you have only successfully completed Dragon’s Lair without making any mistakes, then you haven’t seen the whole game. Another World is the same way, only — thanks to the beautiful animations taking up much less data storage space than full-motion video — there’s an actual game shoehorned into it.

Dragon’s Lair had been joyfully free of then-modern videogame genre restrictions: the action was shown from many bizarre, quasi-cinematic angles. Another World was intended from the outset to be an experiment in streamlining an artistic game experience. So it ended up as a side-scroller in the vein of Super Mario Bros. Chahi probably never had a doubt in his mind that many of the set-pieces in the game would rely on use of a context-sensitive Action Button. It’s the button you will immediately think to press when an alien grabs you buy the shoulders; press it in time and you kick him in the groin, and he drops you. No game has done Action Buttoning as well as Another World, try as games might. The simplicity of the situations — always one man, expressively and silently facing a faceless opponent in a unique struggle — and the honest, terse dread of every moment-to-moment conflict lend themselves well to a just-barely-subconscious instinct that knows to Press That One Button. The variety of set pieces exploits the Action Button’s function and timing in enough entertaining ways to qualify this game as a masterpiece, as the undisputed king of the “adventure” genre, far better than all those point-and-clickers with their byzantine puzzles with arcane solutions and tacked-on tacky humor. Then the game goes and takes one step closer to the edge of the Grand Canyon, when Lester picks up a gun; minutes later, we are playing The Greatest Videogame Ever.

Pick up the gun and proceed one screen to the right. You will see guards in the halls. The gun is the king in Another World: no living thing survives more than one shot. Landing that one shot is the trick. In your second fight, you will see a guard hold his gun out, and a ball of energy grow at the tip. Eventually, the ball of energy will become a shield roughlythe height of his body. He will then poke his arm out of the shield and fire at you. You can duck his shots. The game is telling you to hold your own Action Button down. Hold it down long enough, and you produce your own shield. Poke your arm out and shoot at his shield. Shoot his shield enough to break it. Or you can hold your trigger until the glowing ball appears, and then let go to fire a massive, shield-destroying shot. With the shield destroyed, fire another quick zap to disintegrate your enemy.

If Another World were made today, or one day later, or one day earlier, you maybe would have just had a gun that fired when you pressed the fire button. Maybe you would have gotten another gun, later, which fired really fast, and a third gun, which fired really big bullets. Another World‘s game design, however, was gracefully decided in what we’ve determined was the length of a snap of the creator’s fingers. A gorgeous one-off informed by all that was ever fun in videogames, and all that would ever come to be.

To recap, your gun can:

1. Fire enemy-killing lasers
2. Create a force shield capable of absorbing several shots
3. Fire a charged shot capable of destroying an enemy force shield in one burst

The level design escalates smoothly, then sharply. We learn how to shoot. We learn how to shield. We learn how to break shields. Then the game pushes us down an elevator shaft, the sink-or-swim approach. Soon, we’re making shields on staircases, or making two shields, or three. Soon, we have enemies attacking from two fronts. Eventually, we’re attacking enemies with craft. Each screen, each skirmish, becomes a little puzzle. Another World owes its elegance in no small part to its screen-by-screen nature. Like Pac-Man, like Donkey Kong, all action in the game takes place within one screen. What we can see right now is what matters. Maybe some literary theme is hiding behind the scenes of this, or maybe not. Either way, it works, because the creator only needed to think of every gunfight in the context of one screen.

Some will say that Another World‘s controls are hokey, or ropey. We say that they are exactly as they’re supposed to be. We’re not even going to cop-out and say that life is hokey and ropey, nor are we going to say that the characters in Gears of War move really slowly. We’re just going to say that everything bows to the game design. We believe that the highest compliment one can pay a single-player adventure game is that a two-player deathmatch mode, with each player controlling a clone of the main character, would be amazing. This is certainly the case in Another World: we can imagine a single-screen arena where players are free to set up shields, blast shields down, and take shots at one another. In that context, the controls would feel just right. It’d be at least as engaging as Pac-Man Vs., or as entertaining as four-player “Don’t Touch The Floor” in Bionic Commando: Rearmed.

The game flows along, through Action Button scenes, platform segments, environmental puzzles, split-second-long yet mesmerizing cut-scenes, and increasingly elaborate gunfights. Lester will eventually have to swim, solve a dastardly puzzle requiring him to flood a large cave, and pilot a tank in a death arena. All the while, you keep running, terrified. The story shows itself deliberately, with elaborate foreground and background animations. Eventually, there’s a “main bad guy”, who looks exactly like every other alien — including your buddy. The “final battle”, which you fight on your stomach, crawling at one-sixteenth your previous walking speed, involves a hysterically brilliant play on the physical appearance of the aliens, eliminating all doubt: no, Eric Chahi most definitely did not make all the aliens look the same because he was lazy. (Then again, to say he intended this conclusion all along would negate what he’d said about doing the level design randomly. In other words, Eric Chahi is even more of a genius for deciding to stage the final battle the way he did. Wow.)

The ending is beautiful, and you’ll never forget it.

Certain questions regarding Another World‘s continuity will only ever be asked by fourteen-year-old kids: at the beginning of the game, we see these aliens shooting a beast with a gun. If the only purpose of having a gun is to hunt for safety or for food, why is there a shield function? The answer to the question is, of course, another question: why are the aliens imprisoning one of their own, who happens to look exactly like they look? Eventually, if you want it, Another World becomes about more than survival. Eventually, a quite frankly spooky theme settles down gently over the experience: we are a man sprinting for freedom in an absolutely, mind-crushingly foreign universe. There it is: no matter how sharply the rules of life might suddenly change, any man will know from instinct alone what freedom is.

Right after the first gunfight, Lester and his Alien Buddy get on an elevator. You can go down — the right way — or you can go up. If you go up, you will find yourself in a small, dome-shaped room with a window. Walk over and look out the window. We see through Lester’s eyes. The first time you see it, you don’t know what to think.

It’s a view of the expanse of this terrifyingly foreign world. Immediately, you look at that, and you know you’re going to die. You know Lester is going to die, some day, even if — especially if — he survives this. All at once, the Looney Tunes nature of grisly death and oblivious rebirth subconsciously becomes an essential artistic element of Another World‘s design.

Playing Another World before age sixteen can, probably, make one a better human being in the end. It’s certainly more qualifiable as “art” than any Disney animation.

Aw, we shouldn’t have said that. That was kind of rude.

Another World is a lean game, designed through a series of what must have been excruciatingly difficult choices. Chahi chose not to incorporate every possible gun/shield-dynamic permutation into the game, because this isn’t a game “about” shooting. Overstaying his welcome was never Chahi’s intent. Chahi’s intent, presumably, was to make a game that begins, middles, and ends. He composed event sequences on the fly, maybe fiddled with the arrangement, and then set about removing what didn’t work perfectly well. This is something modern game designers don’t do, more often than not. Just ask the crew behind the Final Fantasy games: past a certain point in the development, if an idea is still sitting on the table, it will be in the game. It’s a terrifying staring contest. Luckily, one man can’t have a staring contest with himself, so Another World, with regard to flow, is absolutely perfect.

Modern game designers also toil over the question of how to balance story and action segments: if the game is too hard, the player won’t be able to witness the full extent of the story, which means we might as well not have a story. Attention, game developers: if you’re thinking this, maybe your game is, at its core, too long, too complicated, or just plain boring. Another World keeps the context front and center, and the most complicated it gets is offering us the opportunity to easily kill a near-invincible guard by climbing into the tunnel above his chamber and shooting a hanging green orb the instant we see his reflection pass under it. We’ve previously said that Lost Vikings and Portal are amazing games because the level designers stop at nothing to exploit every facet of their brilliant mechanics; now, we’re going to say that Another World is more brilliant because it possesses sparkling self-confidence, and uses its mechanics as a tool. It stays cool-headed, elegant, and noble until the end. It isn’t a “game” with an “engine”; it’s an experience, one big, elaborate “puzzle”. It’s a story. It just happens to contain the bones and sinews of an excellent game. As a “piece of art” where the focal theme is the utter dread of being a stranger in a strange land, both the very concept of dying and being reborn (offered the chance to try again) in a videogame and the Looney-Tunes-like snap-to presentation of the post-death rebirth lends itself perfectly to the theme. From the moment this man’s life is upset (again: transported from a laboratory to a bizarre alien world), we know deep down, instinctually, that he will die some day, and so will we. His multiple deaths in our effort to learn the ins and outs of the experience perfectly — and, (crucially,) accidentally — present us with a plausible “ending” at any and every deadly turn. No one can ever pronounce Another World‘s thoughtfulness “pretentious”, because it’s not. It’s unassuming, nonchalant, confident, and cool. In short: yes, it’s French.

Another World is just simply not a game in which to stand still. This is crucial: casual players the world over can aesthetically break any game in three to four seconds by standing still. During its conflict phases, Another World will not let you stand still. It works a miraculous magic on the player, compelling him to always be acting out his role.

The second fight we find ourselves in involves several guards coming from the left side of the screen. Our New Alien Friend pounds away at a computer panel. We immediately recognize our role, without some FPS-like commanding officer barking orders at us: keep the enemies back while our man opens the door. This is as fist-sized and logistical as the fights will get, or will ever need to get, for Another World to prove its point.

Other games saw fit to expand on Another World‘s spear-like, joyfully geometric mechanics in rudimentary, fundamental, or elaborate ways. Interplay’s Blackthorne is perhaps best described as Another World: The Videogame: the level designers picked up the slack and put Another World‘s crisp conflict model into a non-stop, overwhelmingly thorough puzzle-solving blast-a-thon. Years later, Oddworld Inhabitants, perhaps thinking they were being clever, unleashed Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, which they paraded as a brilliant, brand-new thing. Going by the way the developer hyped it to the media, they seriously believed it would be the Next Huge Thing, the next Super Mario. The game was essentially Another World, turned into a “videogame”, expanded, multiplied by eleven, and starring hideous character designs that not even a mother’s mother could love. (Thus we actually happen to like the game a lot.)

Modern games have inherited Another World‘s showmanship and close to none of its subtlety. BioShock pays fetishistic, loving attention to its own world, which it realizes with an awe-inspiring level of beauty: despite being very obviously a videogame, a “simulation”, its visual and sonic confidence exudes subconscious-like understanding of the greatness of Another World. Too bad the “game” part is convoluted and bogged down by a design document that no doubt contained an entire ream-long section labeled “Bullstuff”.

Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami has gone on record as considering Another World the absolute best game of all-time, and the primary influence on Resident Evil. Using Another World as a yardstick, we can say that Resident Evil is hilariously unsuccessful — it is laden with red keys, red doors, blue keys, blue doors, and an inventory management system that smacks of the developers being scared that the game wouldn’t have “enough stuff” in it. It goes without saying that Resident Evil possessed the opportunity to be as sophisticated and perfect as Another World; however, through the process of think-tanking and regularly scheduled Monday-morning hung-over brainstorms, through the absolute lack of “common sense” as a job requirement for the level designers (or: the absolute lack of the “level designer” in post-Famicom-era Japanese game development), the game became unnecessarily dirty. When it came time to “improve” the game in sequels, we ended up with only more bullstuff. Resident Evil 4, an amazing and beautiful game in its own right, saw Mikami getting conscientious, and leaning closer to the dream of Another World. The “horror movie” genre of videogame had perhaps been too ambitious, Mikami must have noticed. So they went about making an “action movie”. It worked tremendously well, and had it featured only one truly awesome gun and no speaking cut-scenes (seriously: heck that radio stuff), we’d probably love it a whole lot more than we already do.

Goichi Suda, CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture and director of games such as Killer 7, Flower, Sun, and Rain, The Silver Case, and No More Heroes, all titles so close to being masterpieces that they suck royally, is also a repeat professor of his love of Another World. Suda’s love of Another World stems from its absolute unwavering execution of atmospheric mood. You can see plenty of influence in Suda’s titles, if you squint hard enough. The confidence evident in the sound design and visual sense alone earn his games hall-of-fame status. However, the issue of game design has a problem — namely, that there isn’t any. We can certainly see what Suda is driving at with games like No More Heroes: he is imagining a concept and a world, and is keeping the game elements to a minimum so as to allow each boss encounter to be a game in and of itself. The problem is that he hasn’t hit on the right minimum yet.

Fumito Ueda would have to be the only Japanese game designer who “truly” “gets” the Another World aesthetic. He, too, praises Another World above all games. When we interviewed him on the subject of Shadow of the Colossus in 2004, we asked him some questions about Another World, and he replied by very frankly saying that it depresses him when he reads gushing reviews of ICO, which fail to note the copious Another World homages. Ueda is a game designer’s game designer, and he may or may not surpass Another World in the future. For now, however, his parents allow him the keys to the Ferrari, though not the Lamborghini: Ueda had apparently wanted Shadow of the Colossus to not feature any kind of HUD display at all, like Another World, only his higher-ups literally told him that having no HUD would result in the game being “looked-down upon” as “unsophisticated” by critics and players. What kind of hecked-up world do we live in, where (#1) people who have worked at a company for 30 years, being promoted only because they’re not doing anything worthy of being promoted (and laws of societal niceness dictate that we not tell a man implicitly that he’s “not making anything better”) are trusted over people with genuine creativity (#2) someone with a university degree can possibly think that a little icon showing a sword is absolutely necessary in a videogame where the main character stands in the center of the screen and one can clearly see, at all times, that he is holding a sword? It’s like face portraits by dialogue boxes in RPGs: these days, when the characters are so big and expressive, having a face portrait by the dialogue box is freaky and depressing. Either way, Shadow of the Colossus can’t be a perfect game, because there’s no explanation for why the bow has unlimited arrows. What a pity! We will gladly, turgidly anticipate his next works, however, because it’s clear he both loves Another World‘s vibe and appreciates Zelda‘s aims. A bullstuff-free, flowing game possessing Zelda‘s attention to detail could be amazing.

Of all the Japanese game designers claiming to love Another World more than any other game, ever, Hideo Kojima would have to be the most hilarious and ironic. He makes the longest, ugliest, most logically convoluted orchestrated fatuosities yet produced by modern man in the name of attempted entertainment; if he actually loves Another World, we have to say that his love has not inspired him, or, rather, his love has inspired him to run like the wind in the opposite direction. Furthermore, we would like to express our condolences to his wife.

Okay, maybe we’re being mean. Maybe, just maybe, we can see some Another World in the original Metal Gear Solid; some cinematics can be described as “virtuoso” (these tend to be the silent ones), and the setups for small-scale grunt conflicts express an eerie tightness which insinuates that Kojima, like Chahi, had allowed “play situations” to come along naturally. Likewise, we recall Fumito Ueda describing the production of Ico as “design by subtraction” — they designed puzzle-challenges one at a time, and then arranged them in the best logical order, eliminating the ones that were too easy, too hard, or redundant. Many confrontations in the Metal Gear Solid series feel the same way; it’s just that Kojima seems to adore the raw concept of the videogame on far too many levels. The fans have grown up alongside him, and they find the idea of Shakespeare in Japanese: Starring US Army Special Forces, Giant Robots, and Cyborg Ninjas to be as captivating as he must find it hilarious.

If anything, we arrive at the core of this analysis believing in the cold center of our hearts that the “design by subtraction” that Fumito Ueda speaks of is the only way to make an excellent videogame. We arrive at the conclusion of our list of the Best Games Ever awakened to the fact that Level Design is the most important part of any game, be it an epic cluster of entertainment purposely fashioned to be impenetrable to non-gamers or a sleek and simple rope-like experience. Game designers: think of a single, sharp, spear-like mechanic, stick with it, set it in stone, and then make awesome levels. If there’s a mood you want to go for, keep it in mind. In short: be cool, and you too can make a masterpiece. Even if your single mechanic is amazing, it doesn’t mean anything without great levels. However, even a bare-bones mechanic (like, say, “running and jumping”) can make for spectacular entertainment if the levels are great (Super Mario Bros. 3).

No one loves on Another World enough, these days. Five furious minutes of internet research have yielded us the information that no major gaming news / review site has ever put Another World on its list of the best games ever — not even at #100. These are lists that have hecking Hogan’s Alley or Kingdom Hearts on them, for God’s sake.

It’s safe to say that some of the right people like this game, however. We can’t exactly prove it, though when we played Call of Duty 4, there were times where we felt like everyone involved in that game must have instinctively gotten the point of Another World: for every moment of commanding officers shouting orders, there is a balancing poetic moment of fine level design; when the game twists the “conventions” of its “genre”, it does so matter-of-factly, without pretention, a post-Kojima kind of anti-bravado.

Gears of War‘s cover mechanic still feels to us more like something out of a 2D platform-action game — and a specific one, at that — than an FPS, which is probably why it works so well in 3D.

Half-Life 2‘s gravity gun is a whole game in and of itself, and the greater part of the game simply radiates with confidence and direction.

And then there’s the issue of Portal: like Another World, it begins disorientingly, and it ends apocalyptically. It tells a story with feet; it lets the player absorb the atmosphere and make of it what he or she will. It’s talky, though never annoying, because it’s also funny (at least to us). No one (even us) can accuse it of being “too linear”, because, like Another World — and unlike Half-Life 2 — your character literally is a prisoner in a restricted world.

Like Another World, Portal has often been criticized as being “too short”.

A game cannot be too short if it’s memorable. Portal‘s sterile atmosphere implants itself in our brains precisely because there exist moments of visual clash; the dialogue implants itself in our brains because it rides a change in theme. And the main reason the game works is because it has a brilliant mechanic: the Portal Gun. Another World is a better game than Portal, mostly, because we say so. Because it’s not glib, and offers no reason for no one not to like it. It is honest, humble, noble, and at the same time hugely artistic and expressive. It tells a story, it presents awesome, unforgettable gunfights, and it lingers in the back of the mind for an eternity. It is the closest videogames have yet come to a great film, and we probably shouldn’t ignore it anymore. Every element that causes critics to jump up and down with joy in modern games existed in a perfect, pure form in Another World. Everyone making games — or writing about them, or playing them — should either play it, play it again, or at least think about it. Because, seriously, though we can’t say with a straight face that we “need” more games like this, once we have a whole bunch more of them, we’ll definitely start wondering what we did without them.

–tim rogers

* Footnote: no, there is no particular reason we didn’t mention Flashback in this review. We thought about going back and adding it to the part re: Abe’s Oddysee, though we hesitated and now can’t remember the exact intended wording. Anyway, Flashback is a very nice game as well. It just tries a tiny bit too hard. We also almost mentioned Beyond Good and Evil because it too was envisioned by a French man, though we figured maybe we shouldn’t bother. That’d be like telling a Japanese person that you like Haruki Murakami and having them reply immediately with “I don’t know, man, I prefer Ryu Murakami.” Seriously, a man’s peers aren’t decided by his last name.

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“ABSOLUTELY NOT THE BEST VIDEOGAME OF ALL-TIME.”

Metal Gear Solid 4 is your birthday; on this most special birthday, your grandmother is miraculously still alive — and she remembers that you used to own a closet full of Pound Puppies.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is Kingdom Hearts minus the Disney and the Final Fantasy. It is an archaeological effort to unearth and lie face-up in the sun every ridiculous, ancient, and embarrassing truth regarding We the People Who Really Like Videogames.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is delicious, edible slander.

Life, and everything in it — The World — The Videogame Industry — is a battlefield. One day, sitting on a porch somewhere in Alabama, Metal Gear Solid 4 might have been our cousin; today, it is our enemy.

Remember when you were five years old, and you told your mother that you were never going to smoke a cigarette, and she blew smoke in your face and called you a “Stupid kid”, and, with that next puff of nicotine in her lungs, muttered “who does he think he is, a psychic?” She was trying to say that you can’t predict the future; maybe, long ago, she’d made the same promise to her mother, and look where it got her. Well, twenty-four years have passed and you’ve never touched a cigarette, possibly because your mother’s pathos, on that day, left a lasting impression. You might have started to think that you are and always will be invincible to the ebb and flow of taste: one opinion you held as a preschooler holds up even today; nothing will ever change, and regardless of whether or not you are, in fact, also stupid, you will die happy. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Tactical Espionage Action shows up ten years after you played Metal Gear Solid Tactical Espionage Action and knew with your entire body that it was great and amazing, amazing and great; by the end of its doily-fluffing twenty hours of cut scenes incomprehensible to non-kleptomaniacs, it has cast burning, ultraviolet light on its own history, and asked you “How Do You Like Me Now?” no less than a hundred and eight times. At one specific point very late in the game, director Hideo Kojima offers the player a sparkling opportunity to flip the screen a middle finger and declare “heck You, Solid Snake!” We here at Action Button Dot Net, deeply absorbed into the moment, playing this game with Sony-brand Dolby 7.1 headphones on a 40-inch Bravia in the cockpit of an abandoned fighter jet, seized this opportunity with great vigor. We went on to complete the game; three seconds after we were certain the credits had actually stopped rolling, we disembarked the jet, walked into the hangar, and checked the internet, where it became frightfully apparent that no one who gets paid to review videogames has anything resembling actual taste.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is Hideo Kojima’s “Springtime for Hitler”.

The previous sentence presumes Actual Intelligence exists inside Hideo Kojima’s brain. This is not meant as an insult. We’re certain the man is, at least, not mentally &^#$#ed. We’ve read interviews for years now in which he complains that Metal Gear Solid is a ball and chain. He wants to be free. He wants to make something else. We can’t blame him; no one wants to do the same thing forever. Scientists have proven it. Our girlfriends never believe us when we try to explain this, so of course the average videogamer isn’t going to explain it. The PR maelstrom surrounding Metal Gear Solid 4 devoted two years and literally thousands of human-hours of work into drilling holes in the craniums of every MGS-lover: 4 will be the end; 4 will tie up everything; 4 will be Kojima’s opus.

If it’s a fact that Metal Gear Solid 4 sucks on purpose, we can hardly blame Kojima for that, either. Given his previously well-documented disinterest in the series, its having been promoted as his “opus” must have turned his stomach. It’s clear that Kojima’s priority was the game’s plot, and making sure it “satisfied” fans: like the world’s fattest kid circa 1989 winning a Toys R Us shopping spree, Kojima struts zombie-like into the warehouse of his past work and proceeds to remove absolutely everything from the shelf, dropping one item at a time into his bottomless shopping cart. He eventually gets up to the cash register, leaves the cart unattended, pulls his smokes out of his jacket, and steps outside.

Tycho at Penny Arcade said that Metal Gear Solid 4 is better if you skip the cut-scenes. We’re pretty sure he’d played less than half of the game before writing that. We don’t blame him, nor do we hate him, for saying this. The truth is, if you’re playing Metal Gear Solid 4 as a game, the beginning is pretty compelling if you play it context-free. You’re an intruder on a battlefield being currently raped and pillaged by two opposing forces. One of the overarching themes of the story being “war is kinda not nice”, it’s actually somewhat accidentally poignant to experience the high-definition terrors of war from the perspective of an outsider just trying to get from point A to point B. It reminds us of our great idea to make a game where you play as a three-year-old boy in a Middle-Eastern warzone, too weak to pick up a gun, hiding and fleeing in terror from legions of unsympathetic troops. Of course, in Metal Gear Solid 4, you can shoot and kill dudes, so you can’t exactly play it as a statement. As a core mechanic and overarching theme, the “mind your own business here in the warzone” angle works. One of the two armies is grayly defined as the lesser of two kinda-not-nicenesses, so if you cap one of the other motherheckers while the slightly sympathetic dudes are watching, they might start to not immediately hate you. Its vaguely compelling, in an obsessive-compulsive way (which must be a real treat for MGS series fans), that in order to do something to prove you’re on these guys’ side, they have to see you doing it, though if they see you doing something that’s in the least bit suspicious, they will not hesitate to kill you. This turns the act of batlefield-navigation into a sort of seamless blend of Pac-Man and any given Japanese role-playing game of the 1990s: narrow roads cut city blocks into a rough labyrinth, though there’s really only ever one path you can possibly take, and it’s always obviously right there in front of you.

Soon enough, the falcon loses sight of the falconer, things fall apart, the story introduces a guy whose dominant character trait is acute diarrhea, et cetera. The game exploits the virtue of its own Fun Factor well into its second act, where the context rudely enters the equation and refuses to leave. We are no longer merely engaged in thrilling little meta-skirmishes where we must pick an alliance (help one side, kill both sides, help neither side, hurt neither side, little of column A little of column B et cetera): we are standing on top of a speeding Armored Patrol Carrier being piloted by Dennis Rodman and his soda-drinking pet monkey, being screamed at to shoot down oncoming enemy troops. The APC turns a corner and the screen goes black. “NOW LOADING”. Isn’t this supposed to be the Toughest Games Machine On Earth?

By act three, the game has abandoned its neat little idea in favor of a far neater one: we are now following a guy through a European city. Snake is wearing a trenchcoat, looking like Gillian Seed from Snatcher (the fans swoon), and it’s quaintly foggy. Ironically, this proved to be our Absolute Favorite Part of the Game. Since age nine, we have wanted to wander a European metropolis after curfew, letting a shady man obliviously lead us to his shady headquarters. This is the reason we studied Russian and Chinese in elementary school while everyone else was busy pretending they knew something about sex. We carried this dream in the palm of our hand until college, when it dawned upon us that we could Actually Die from doing Stuff Like This, so we started writing about videogames in the first-person plural instead. Metal Gear Solid 4 manages to get the mood and the pace of Euro-man-stalking just right. Our target is “Side A”, and the enemy troops enforcing the curfew are “Side B”. We are “Side C”. The level design in this part of the game is ferociously cute: both we and Side A are in violation of Side B’s rules; while avoiding Side A’s detection, we have to ensure that Side A avoids Side C’s detection. This ends up pretty fascinating, whether you have watched the opening cut scene or not. Eventually, you get to the goal, and suddenly you’re riding shotgun on a motorcycle in yet another ropey on-rails shooting sequence. It’s like waking up from a dream about the Bahamas to find out you’re actually in Bermuda. Instead of intimately sharing military secrets with a woman you picked up at a poker table, you’ve got your mother asking you to shoot a helicopter down.

Then there’s a boss sequence. It’s the second boss sequence of the game, actually. Like the one before it, it thrusts a character of considerable personality (compared to the typical drone, at least) into your face and asks you to kill them. You oblige, and then the boss reveals that it had, in fact, been a beautiful woman all along. Now the beautiful woman walks toward you, attempting to drain all of your life force with her mysteriously psychic embrace. There’s an in-game explanation for why her embrace can kill you, though as we’re ignoring the story for the time being, we’ll pretend to be confused. Let’s put this one on the table, then: the girls are all very hot. Why are they so hot? Huge amounts of money were likely spent making these boss-character-girls hot as fresh-baked lava rocks. Director Hideo Kojima (DHK) says that one of the “themes” of Metal Gear Solid 4 is “beauty and the beast”, though what does that mean, really? The bosses are “beasts” before their nasty mechanical suits are stripped from them; then they’re just helpless “beauties”. We could go on to suppose that Snake, a wrinkled old man with a Charles Bronson mustache, is the gray area between “beauty” and “beast”, though if we started saying things like that, Kojima would win, so nuh-uh.

The point is that, for a split-second at least, the game makes you care about the boss characters. If you’d been trying to ignore the story, you’ll be out of luck for that split-second. A split-second is all it takes for you to care about Metal Gear Solid 4 on a level that is not immediately superficial.

Then act four comes; the garbageman rings your doorbell and says that from this day forth, you don’t need to take the garbage out — he’s going to personally come into your home and do it for you. One dead-silent moment hours later, it becomes apparent that the garbageman was lying, and he just wanted to take a dump in your bathtub.

That is to say, it becomes presently obvious that you cannot ignore the story of Metal Gear Solid 4. The game absolutely, positively will not permit any ignorance re: its plot. It speaks, oddly politely, that if you’re not paying attention, you’re not doing it right.

We will disclaim, right here, that we have, for the past decade of jacked-into-the-netness, chuckled and rolled our eyes whenever anyone complained about the length of the cut-scenes in a Metal Gear Solid game. Some people said they just wanted to enjoy the “gameplay” (like that’s a real word); some people said they just wanted to enjoy the “atmosphere”. It puzzled us, to the point of rubbing our bellies in amusement, that someone would dare to want to play Metal Gear Solid with absolutely no invested interest in the characters. It’s not that the story and the characters are necessarily great literature so much as they’re insperable from the game’s progression and atmosphere. If you only like the game mechanics, you’d be better off playing Pac-Man — it’s basically the same thing. Conversely, if you only like the story, you’d be better off reading a book. (Crucial: notice how we recommended Pac-Man for players who only like Metal Gear Solid as a game, whereas we recommended any book in existence for those who enjoy it as a story.) If nothing else, the original Metal Gear Solid had a dignified flow to it: the characters were all rough sketches, all vaguely likable. Conceptual Bullstuff was kept to a minimum, and by minimum, we mean “Maximum, in Hindsight”. There was a hecking “boss” who you didn’t fight, who you instead met and talked to, and he died six hours before you even knew he was a boss. The game shows you this level of virtuosity for a while without once flexing its muscles in the mirror; at a certain point, it starts delivering soliloquies about love blooming on the battlefield; by this time, we are so into it that we can’t give up now. The game has worked its spell on us.

Metal Gear Solid 2 was a joke. We knew it was a joke; that’s why we wrote an article about how it was literature; that everyone thought that article was serious and in turn started to seriously assess Metal Gear Solid 2 as literature speaks volumes about how good a joke Metal Gear Solid 2 was. It’s rumored that Hideo Kojima had wanted to call Metal Gear Solid “Metal Gear 3”, though was advised not to, because “times had changed” and “the average gamer” would feel “dumb” jumping in on part three of a series. Maybe this was a good idea, maybe not. Either way, he wanted to call Metal Gear Solid 2 something else — maybe, just, replace the word “Solid” with another adjective, maybe “Moist”. The pseudo-hypocritical marketing department allegedly told him that he can’t change the name of the series now that it’s been established and made a big splash: they needed a numeral to ensure more sales. So Metal Gear Solid 2 was a massive joke, with the main character’s “death” partway through and the introduction of a man-pansy hero; it was Kojima ejecting bile for “the fans” of Solid Snake, by imprisoning them in the body of a character who could only ever see Solid Snake from a distance. The game was massively (mis)interepreted on various internet forums as some kind of artistic statement, something rich and deep in “literary themes” the likes of which can only be executed in games, where the player controls a character. Looking at it again, this far removed, we find it kind of precious: the player wanted to pretend to be this one guy, and then they end up having to pretend to be some other guy, and only watch the guy they wanted to pretend to be. If we were to write this out in mathematical symbols, insinuating that it didn’t even matter if guy A (the one we wanted to pretend to be) had been less manly or videogame-character-like than guy B (the guy we ended up having to pretend to be), some Wall-Street man’s monocle would pop out and he would tell us something about a “jolly good show”. The hypothesis would be that “fans will be fans”, and the conclusion would be a resounding “yes”.

Metal Gear Solid 3 was the “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” of the Metal Gear Solid series — stepping aside, showing us something different, indicating that the mythology surrounding its characters and plot

1. Was immortal, timeless, infinite, untellable in full no matter how many angles the storyteller showed us
2. Didn’t matter that much, in the grand scheme of everything

It was a videogame masterpiece. It was a sharp little spike-like game; its “big concepts” showed up like blood-stained stones on the side of the road. When, at the end, the main character pointed a gun at someone’s head and the camera panned out, it took us maybe thirty seconds to realize that we were supposed to press the “fire” button to pull the trigger. Our momentary ignorance — our failure to acknowledge that we were still in control was at once a statement on the subject of entertainment media, a statement on the subject of videogames, a commentary regarding criticism of the works of Hideo Kojima (“too many cut-scenes”, the people say), and an absolutely not-arrogant, in-character pseudo-inadvertent representation of the hesitation the main character feels at that very point in time. It was perfect. It was amazing. The full brunt of Hideo Kojima’s potential for future interactive entertainment masterpieces came within view. Kojima had said that Metal Gear Solid 3 was to be his last, and following its noble climax, we didn’t scorn him for wanting to move on to other things.

Of course, fans will be fans, and videogame companies will be deathly afraid of new things.

With Metal Gear Solid 4, Kojima came sprinting back. We can say with confidence that this move was perhaps conscientious. He might (or might not) have said in an interview that he came back to direct this game because “the fans wanted it”. “The fans wanted Kojima to direct” is industry-speak for “the fans didn’t want Kojima to not direct”. The reason for this is straightforward: the people associate the name “Hideo Kojima” with Metal Gear Solid. To have one without the other is to defy their blind love. It’d be like asking them to eat a cake that isn’t chocolate, or a chocolate that isn’t cake.

The truth is, we were younger when Metal Gear Solid first hit the scene. We were ten years younger. Though we were old enough to be proud of having kept our promise to our mothers re: never smoking a cigarette, we were perhaps not old enough to know exactly what art — or love — is. Hindsight will tell us that, in concept and execution and everything in between, Metal Gear Solid is better than Metal Gear Solid 4, though this hardly matters. What matters is that we have grown up, and Metal Gear Solid has grown down. Hands firmly planted on hips, we rotate slowly, low groan echoing from our throats, and survey the internet: everywhere, everywhere, we see that people still have not opened their eyes and ears to true love. They still are utterly up to the tops of their eyeballs in blind devotion to Metal Gear Solid. One key, stunning example of this blindness comes from people’s love of David Hayter, the voice of Solid Snake, whose idea of an “old” voice is to imagine he’s gargling asphalt. He sounds hecking ridiculous. Kotaku had a story about David Hayter once, and the comments section erupted into people badmouthing the Japanese Solid Snake, Akio Otsuka, because #1 he’s Japanese, and Snake is American and #2 he doesn’t even sound old. If you people had ever gone outside, you’d realize that old people only “sound old” in hecking cartoons. Akio Otsuka is an exceptionally talented dramatist (did you know he does the voices of Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, and Solidus?); David Hayter is just a name in the credits of something people know they like. Metal Gear Solid 4, in execution, in pathology, is more of a David Hayter than an Akio Otsuka.

We played Metal Gear Solid 4 from start to finish, watching all of the cut scenes, and then played it again, skipping all the cut-scenes, though remembering what happened in them whenever one scene cut sharply from one thing to something else. Then we “played” the game a third time, by watching a friend play, watching some cut-scenes and skipping others. This latter method proved the most ridiculous. Our friend had carved a direct path to the end of the game in less than three hours; he let each segment of the 90-minute ending play for around five minutes before skipping to the next one. While he was doing this, we flipped through a copy of Anna Karenina and read the sentence in the center of random even-numbered pages: Anna Karenina was winning.

The “problem” with Metal Gear Solid 4 is hardly the self-importance, or the stupidity of its narrative — it’s how damnedly “well” the narrative and the game are married. You just can’t have one without the other, try as you might. Many critics groaned at the length of the cut-scenes without addressing the simple fact that the cut-scenes are &^#$#ed. For the past few years, some critics have exhausted their lungs moaning about Quick Time Events (Action Button Events, they’re called in Japan): those little interjections where a button icon appears front and center on the screen, and you have to mash it quickly in order to make your character do something that no amount of regular controller input could produce under any other circumstances. Metal Gear Solid 4‘s most regularly occurring Quick Timer Events happen to involve pressing a button during a long, talky cut-scene in order to produce a momentary flash of a screen image or piece of concept art from another game in the series. Other critics have plunged stakes into the heart of the cut-scene itself, suggesting that games should tell stories in other ways — perhaps, as Gears of War or Half-Life 2 do, in three-second bursts while the game is actually happening. Few have squinted hard enough and complained about the moments where, as in Metal Gear Solid 4, cut-scenes become Quick Time Events where you’re not required to press buttons: the (seemingly) hour-long sequence in which Ninja Raiden Riverdance-Duels a gay vampire in order to buy Snake, Otacon, and their pet robot enough time to escape from the hell of South America via helicopter is a chief offender: look at those moves! The moment we, as a “player”, behold a scene in a “videogame” and think “Man, someone should make a videogame out of that”, the ghost is essentially given up.

Eventually, Metal Gear Solid 4, in all its attention to detail, all its wide-armed to-the-club welcoming, begins to frighten us. We remember that time we were walking back to our car with a girl, in university, and the Vietnam veteran in our advanced Chinese class — he’d waited literally twenty-some insane years before cashing in on the US government’s offer of a free education — drove up in his Pontiac, said hello, and began to tell us a story about his “bastard ex-wife”, which ended with him explaining how, if someone were to hold their right hand out all the way to one side, and you were to shoot the tip of their index finger with an M-60 from two hundred yards away, it’d not just blow the finger off — it’d tear their arm out of the socket. The blood would spurt so fast out of the severed arm socket that the victim would be unconscious before they hit the ground, and dead before they could get back up. Bizarre as this was, and freaked-out as the girl was, it’d perhaps facilitate our getting laid later, and it was kind of cool to hear someone who’d actually shot someone before talk about guns. At the end of the day, though, once you’ve killed one person, it goes from being “something you’ve never done” to being “something you do”, and once you’ve killed more than three people, it kind of becomes something you do “all the time”. Hearing a genuine Vietnam vet talk about shooting peoples’ arms off is really about as exciting as listening to your mom explain her meatloaf recipe over the phone to your aunt. When Kojima steps back into his fancy shoes and begins to work the orchestra of Metal Gear Solid 4 into a crescendo, we witness an amazing mix of the schlock-handed and the masterful. On the one hand, there’s a beautiful (“beautiful” is Japanese for “hilarious”) story reveal wherein Meryl finds herself engaged; on the other hand, if you haven’t purchased every game in the series and their accompanying glossy art books, you’re hardly going to give a stuff. The entire final mission feels like a meatloaf recipe: when you kill the last Girlboss — the Girlboss who had, in fact, been psychically controlling all of the other Girlbosses, and it’s revealed that this Girlboss was in fact only being mind-controlled by Psycho Mantis, a boss you killed in Metal Gear Solid, you may be tempted, as we were, to get on the internet and look at pornography instead. This scene is followed by abovementioned Meryl-gets-engaged cut-scene, and then by a virtuoso sequence in which the screen splits, the top half showing all the characters from the game living out what will be Their Final Moments If Snake Doesn’t Succeed, and the bottom half showing Snake as he worm-crawls through a microwave tunnel while the player slams the triangle button ferociously. On the one hand, this may be brilliant; on the other hand, it might be an accident. If it’s brilliant, it’s only brilliant because it’s a direct commentary on the nature of cut-scenes, player control, and the much-maligned Quick-Timer Events plaguing action game design today. On the one hand, if it’s a commentary on Quick-Timer Events and/or the Wiimote-masturbating nature of modern “cinematic” action games, effective as it may be, we’d probably rather have games that bother to have a story make that story comment on real issues (Shout out to Infinity Ward: Hello, Infinity Ward!), not videogame design. On the other one hand, it’s kind of an interesting cinematic presentation: the player literally gets tired of hammering that triangle button before the grueling sequence is over. However, on the other other hand, if the player had been skipping all of the cut-scenes up to this point, he’s just going to look at the top of the screen and wonder who the hell all of these people are. The pooch is essentially screwed at this point: you’re damned if you did, and damned if you didn’t: far worse than being merely damned no matter what you do, you are already damned by something you already did.

Despite Metal Gear Solid 4‘s not being a “great game”, it ends in the tradition of great games: by forcing the player to play something else. As Halo ends by turning into a Driving Game and Sin and Punishment ends by turning into Missile Command, as the kids in the movie “The Wizard” had to compete in the then-unreleased Super Mario Bros. 3 in order to prove who was better at Tetris, Metal Gear Solid 4 turns into a somewhat shockingly brilliant fighting game at the end. For a moment, right there, the exhausted and cautiously optimistic player might say that this is the perfect end to the entire franchise, not to mention this meandering, idiotic story: the hero and his opponent are both old men, older even than Danny Glover when he told Mel Gibson he was “too old for this stuff”. Perhaps the whole mumbo-jumboful story up to this point, with its self-defeating conclusion, had been for the purpose of establishing the out-of-placeness of these two old men, for the purpose of presenting the the mountain-size of the Can’t-Give-a-heckness. They brawl, fists blazing, refreshingly, deliciously, at a high speed. It doesn’t matter who wins. At this point in the game, our first time through, the area beneath our lungs began to vibrate with actual anticipation: might this be the Metal Gear Solid 3 “execution” moment, brought around into perfect form? Might it be so that if we lose right here, if Snake loses to Ocelot, that’s the end of the game? We got a game over; we got a second chance. We deflated a bit. We won, anticipating that maybe Kojima was going to kill off Snake in a different way: maybe Snake would just sit down, victorious, and die nonchalantly. That didn’t happen, either. Eventually, the snake starts to eat its own tail, and ninety minutes later, we have a look on our face like an ostrich with a dry lump of cotton candy kacked halfway down its ridiculously long throat (protip: birds don’t salivate). We’ve said before that, once you learn scales and all the barre chord shapes, learning to play the guitar is like a high-rise office building with a light switch in each room and a broken elevator: take the stairs up, open a door, enter the room, turn on the lights, exit the room, close the door, go to the next door, repeat until you feel safe becoming famous. Light switches in an office building is a compelling concept if you’re a man, and alone, with a thousand and one nights to spare before the showdown; watching someone else turn on the light switches for more than five minutes is terrifying. Have you ever had a neighbor with a seven-year-old just starting out on the violin? It’s like that. Metal Gear Solid 4, in its overwrought conclusion, stumbles, drunken, from room to room, flicking some light switches ruthlessly, and blinking others on and off for ten minutes before flipping off the ceiling and slamming the door.

Eventually, the game turned us off to the concept of entertainment in general. Eventually, the game makes us start drinking.

Upon completing Metal Gear Solid 4, we put a DVD of “The Graduate” in our PlayStation 3 and watched it, upscaled.

Yeah. That’s a pretty good movie.

Controversy erupted, on the internets, when someone close to a working copy of the retail version of Metal Gear Solid 4 let loose the claim that some of the cut-scenes approached ninety minutes in length. The ensuing groans could have sucked the air out of a baseball stadium. One prevailing sentiment among Metal Gear Solid 4 pledged pre-fans was that they would be worried about ninety-minute cut-scenes in any other game, though since it was Hideo Kojima, they wouldn’t mind. Konami’s cartilage-headed PR was quick to counter: the cut-scenes are so not ninety minutes long, and you can skip them, if you want. There we have it: a chill silence soaks the internet from head to toes. The makers of the games industry’s flagship champion for cut-scenes as a valid form of storytelling have just told us that the story segments are skippable. Also, saying that no cut-scenes approach ninety minutes in length is kind of a cop-out, because there are segments where one ten-minute cut-scene leads to three minutes of playing, then ten more minutes of cut-scene, then five minutes of play, repeat. This feels worse than a ninety-minute cut-scene. The term “blue-balling” is appropriate (make your own sentence here if you want).

No website or magazine seems to address this point, perhaps because they’d feel mean: the cut-scenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 are bad. They are bad because they are not good. The mission briefing sequences prior to each of the game’s major segments tend to be more than 40 minutes long. Some critics might have said “That’s about as long as an episode of a TV show!” That would be correct. Some apologists might have said “That’s only about as long as an episode of a TV show!” That would be correct, as well. However, the fact of the matter is that these mission briefing segments are not as entertaining as an episode of a TV show. They have no flow, no “beginning”, “middle”, and “end”. Watch any awful filler episode of “Lost” and you’ll see that there, at least, the writers understand how to structure a story. Here we could inject some meta-argument about how if you invented a remote-control that, when pointed at someone’s head, could make them forget The Holy Bible existed, and then you used said device on a Giant Publishing Company’s Elite Reader shortly before handing him a manuscript of the Bible, he’d frown and say the whole thing was too chaotic and not at all what the market was looking for. This argument would go on to go nowhere. Chances are — so say the bureaucrats in the “Industry” — if a person is playing a game, they don’t want literature. This, more often than not, gets misinterpreted as “games don’t want a coherent story, or even a well-told one”. Nonetheless, we can’t presume the average games industry executive to have any knowledge of narrative structure: the majority of them got their start managing Pizza Huts (Nintendo’s Reggie), not reading manuscripts. Not that reading a manuscript ever gets a man anything aside from the right to read better manuscripts. What we’re saying, right here, is that there existed a shimmering chance for Metal Gear Solid 4‘s story to be an excellent tale excellently told: we have played enough Metal Gear Solid 3 to know that Kojima has the tools, and the dedication. His men had the money, they had the technology, they had the willpower, they had a devoted development of Kojima-lovers working round the clock for several years to bring this mimeograph of an “artistic vision” to life.

We played Metal Gear Solid 4 expecting no more and no less than an answer to the question “Is Hideo Kojima actually a genius?” We got an answer, though we would have preferred the answer be a clear “Yes” or “No”. Instead, we got a “Maybe not”. We’re not ignoring the possibility that Kojima was trying to shoot his series in the head, because it’s obvious that he was — we’re just not going to rely on that as an explanation. What we’re saying is, he could have shot his series in the head so much more elegantly. As is, the pacing of this tale blesses the player of an ethereal understanding of why Kojima never actually got a novel published before he entered the games industry. As mentioned in the above paragraph, there’s a chance for art even (especially!) in the most meandering narrative. We’d go so far as to say that the world needs more stories told in the “Rio Bravo” tradition — you know, “hangout movie” style, where the characters kind of sit around talking about stuff until and even after Something Starts Happening. Metal Gear Solid 4‘s “Snake and The Gang In a Big Airplane” scenes possess wonderful potential — they are fiercely skippable, absolutely unnecessary, television-program-length episodes that allow us the opportunity to get to know our videogame characters better. The only reason we’d skip them is if we just wanted to play the game; if we’re not skipping them, we must want to get to know the characters better. It all makes so much sense. Unfortunately, Kojima betrays this wonderful opportunity by making his characters robotic drones instead of realistic people. On the one hand, we have big robots and Riverdancing ninjas; on the only other hand, it’s talking heads and sitting bodies.

To be blunt: our ability to enjoy (or at least not be repulsed by) Metal Gear Solid 4‘s characters is shot in the head due to how hecking easy we find it to fry a hecking egg in the real world.

One of the characters — Sunny, a little girl who dresses inexplicably in Harajuku fashion, in what might be a conscientious shout-out to the closeted pedophiles lurking in the Japanese shadows (conscientious because if these people had to go twenty hours without seeing a simulated little girl, they’d have to rape a real one) — tries her best to cook eggs for Snake and Otacon. She asks Snake, “Would you like some eggs?” And he says “Uhhh . . . no thanks”. She makes him eggs anyway. She brings the eggs downstairs and sets them in front of Snake. She takes a cigarette from his fingers just before he can put it in his lips. “No smoking in the plane!” she says. She goes back up into the kitchen. Snake looks at the eggs. “Otacon, can’t you teach her how to fry an egg?” Otacon shrugs. “Do I look like someone who knows how to fry an egg?”

Are you hecking serious? Neither Snake nor Otacon nor this little girl knows how to fry an egg? The only person who does know how to fry eggs is the genome-expert science-genius female? You’d think that the one person who would not know how to fry an egg would be the determined, professional, full-grown woman. Otacon is a lonely bachelor, and Snake — for heck’s sake — is a trained US Ranger, the most elite force in the goddamned world, called “Snake Eaters” because they’re capable of eating raw snakes if they have to. You figure, if Snake couldn’t make eggs for himself, he’d at least be able to stomach disgusting ones. More than this, what’s so disgusting about the eggs? Are they too runny? Are they burnt? Rocky, in the movie “Rocky”, drinks raw eggs for breakfast, so Snake should be able to handle runny eggs. And burnt ones? See the “Snake Eater” comment. Do they need salt? We realize that Sunny is a girl with a troubled past, a dead mother, and many rape innuendos, though how painful would it be, really, to explain to this girl — a computer genius, by the way — that some people like their eggs cooked differently than other people, that there exist a myriad of possible ways to cook eggs? The girl can likely multiply seventeen-digit numbers in her head with a snap of her fingers — she’d probably be open to the permutations of egg-cookery.

It’s apparent, here, that Hideo Kojima can cook eggs by himself. He’s probably been able to prepare eggs delicious enough for his own standards for several decades. He’s probably never given any thought to whether or not he ever found egg-cooking to be difficult. Chances are, he arrived at the blank pages preemptively marked “Mission Briefing Script” in need of a metaphor, and just plucked one out of thin air: “Lots of people probably find it hard to fry eggs!” It almost looks, at a point, like the egg metaphor had been constructed out of a hare-brained assumption that Kojima himself was a genius for being able to fry eggs so well without instruction. It’s conceivable, in the shadow of the moment, that Kojima saw himself as stepping down from a pedestal, getting real with his audience, and sympathizing with their inability to cook eggs. This is evidence that the fuel for Kojima’s fiction may not actually come from Experience in the Real World. Like, say you’re in line at the grocery store and you add up the total price of all your purchases while the old woman in front of you is fumbling with her checkbook, and you make sure to have the precise amount of post-tax cash ready: do you assume that this is something only you can do, simply because you’ve never seen someone else do it? Do you go ahead and make it the defining character trait of a character in a piece of fiction? For serious, one thing we’re taken to screaming at Videogame Industry Professionals, these days, when they say things like “being able to buy ammunition from the menu must be a good idea, because Metal Gear Solid 4 did it” is that they should probably quit their jobs making videogames and work in a hecking convenient store for a couple of years. You know, to study the looks on actual human faces when they buy beer, or potato chips, or Marlboros.

It’s also obvious that Kojima doesn’t smoke. If Kojima smoked, there’s no way Snake would let that little girl snatch his cigarette. He’d be all like, heck you, if I want to smoke, I’m going to smoke. The man has the energy to traipse through jungles and tundras with a machine gun; he’s Meters From Death. He has a right to not give a heck.

Much of Metal Gear Solid 4‘s surgically irremovable tumor of a plot indulges in fierce second-guessing of the player’s expectations and an even fiercer insecurity complex, where you feel the writer falter, assuming he’s not being clever enough. These complexes make for terrible fiction; we’ve already established that no high-ranking officials in the videogame industry are competent judges of narrative, so there you have it. Little, vaguely embarrassing moments pop up that make us consider the phrase “Kojima Done Right” — like when Drebin, our weapons specialist, radioes us after each boss fight to explain the gruesome past of that boss character, and why she ended up turned into such a monster. By the end of the game, we will realize that each girl’s story is essentially the same. In addition to making us recall Alfred Hitchcock’s opinion that an artist only ever tells the same story over and over again, it also seems perfectly in line with the conceptual core of videogames: we might as well make a series called In Which One Guy Shoots A Bunch Of Other Guys.

It’s ultimately painful, however, that every character has to have a “purpose”. Drebin, bringer of the post-boss monologues, can’t, in good conscience, be just the guy who gives us the post-boss monologues (the way every Dragon Quest town has the guy who exists just to tell you the name of the town). He has to have some other “purpose” in the story to explain his existence in the first place. Metal Gear Solid 4, being already a game that exists to tie up all loose ends left behind by its heritage, cannot, pathologically, introduce a character like Drebin without giving him a “purpose” (weapons guy), a secondary purpose (deliverer of post-boss monologues), and a place in the grand scheme of things (complete with spotlight time during the monster of an ending).

Do not confuse this sentence for a compliment: there has never been and there will never again be a game quite like Metal Gear Solid 4. During the mission briefing scenes, the screen cuts up into segments, including a window in which characters talk, a C-SPAN-like news ticker reporting your play statistics, and a mini-window in which a little girl toils in a kitchen. You might never realize that you can use one of the analog sticks to pilot a little camera-armed robot around, butting in and out of the main cut scene window. The game proper is studded with enough eerie little touches to choke a Kingdom Hearts fangirl: take, for instance, the part when the game ritualistically revists Shadow Moses Island, the setting of the first game, and you can just barely see power-ups spinning helplessly on the landings of the now-inaccesible communications tower in the distance. This brings back stinging memories of Metal Gear Solid 2‘s Big Shell, where you could see Shell B on the map, yet would never be able to go there. Quite frankly, it should fiercely creep out any fan to remember things like that in the context of things like this. Entire segments of the game’s story offer the player two sources for possible entertainment: the geopoliticalish conversation of an old soldier and his weapons supplier, or the antics of a soda-drinking monkey wearing boy’s briefs. That sentence makes it sound hilarious, and sure, it is. Though when you get right down to it, when you’re watching a monkey drinking soda and belching as two characters talk about weapons and war and death and the Purpose of the Mission, you start to want to quit your job and join a nudist colony. Think of the hundreds of human-hours of brain-numbing work that went into rendering that monkey and those underpants, into animating that pornographic soda-drinking. These people — these MGS-devotees, these nearsighted Kojima fans bluntly stepping up to the plate to bunt in the name of a career — could have spent that time in the Amazon, searching for the beetle whose blood is the cure for cancer. Or at least they could have stayed at home, with their families. How heavy is the conscience of the man who tells his grandson, on his deathbed, that, as the world turned, he spent six hundred hours of 2007 lovingly animating an underpants-wearing monkey drinking a can of Hebrew Coca-Cola for a videogame cut-scene that was, quite frankly, skippable anyway.

You will have to forgive us, for a moment, for knowing something about Japan: in Japanese, there exists a single umbrella-word for things like lovingly, fetishistically animated Hebrew-Coca-Cola-drinking underpants-wearing monkeys, for careful deluges of unforeseen details: that word is “kodawari“. The perfect “40” review of Metal Gear Solid 4 in Weekly Famitsu did not fail to mention this word three times. As far as Japan’s loose concept of a “critic” of “media” is concerned, the very existence of any kodawari at all should be taken as a sign that the creator of said kodawari would be deeply and irreparably offended if you were to insinuate that they were not a genius. It’s likely that Famitsu‘s reviewers only played ten minutes into Metal Gear Solid 4, witnessed the bravado of the cut-scenes, the movie-like camerawork, and the painstakingly pitch-perfect sound design before throwing their hands up in the air and deciding unanimously that they could not dare to not call this work perfect. Nearly every other critic in the world went on to praise this orchestral fatuosity on the virtue of its being a Metal Gear game, and having some kind of confidence in its style. We are not so easily impressed; in order to illustrate its shortcomings perfectly, we’d like to draw a parallel between Metal Gear Solid 4‘s plot and a certain classic Hollywood film, though we believe the film is very great, and we wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. (*Subtlety note: this is us insinuating that if you consider Metal Gear Solid 4 great entertainment, you probably haven’t ever seen any good films.)

What we end up with, in Metal Gear Solid 4, is a game that, when viewed from the perspective of other clusterhecks, is a masterpiece for countless horrifying reasons. The stone-cold fear and coddling of fans is so rich and absolute that, in some alternate universe, it is no doubt the highest form of human expression. However, right here, on earth, on this Macbook Pro, in this fighter-jet cockpit, Metal Gear Solid 4 is and always will be dreck.

It is no longer 1998. It is 2008. It is the future, and we are awake.

Director Hideo Kojima has recently expressed pangs of regret for having told the story entirely in cut-scenes, and he has invoked the dangerous name of Bioshock when asked to elaborate on a better way to tell a story. We are scared halfway out of our minds when he talks about his “future involvement” with the Metal Gear Solid series, likening himself to Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, who often comes out of retirement to direct one more (increasingly insane) film. It’s a scary remark for Kojima to make, and it’s an even scarier remark for people to shrug off, because Hayao Miyazaki’s movies are not always about the same exact character. Kojima speaks of wanting to be “free” of Metal Gear Solid, and we suspect that forming “Kojima Productions” and putting their logo front and center has been, from the start, a meta-clever attempt to synchronize public opinion of Metal Gear and of Kojima. We can’t say for sure whether or not it’s working; videogames are a young and weird medium, so when Kotaku reported that Kojima had literally gone on the record as saying he would like to do “something completely different and new” after Metal Gear Solid 4, the first hundred or so comments indicated that the average human-being-who-cares-enough-to-speak let these words fly in one ear and then promptly transform into “Zone of the Enders and Snatcher sequels confirmed”. People are scary; far scarier than people are Hideo Kojima fans. Kojima himself is scared of them. If Metal Gear Solid 4 was in fact intended as his “Springtime For Hitler” (and maybe it wasn’t, given its doily-fluffing mealy-mouthed cop-out asshole of an ending), then Kojima likely forgot to realize that, even in the realms of a satire author’s imagination, “Springtime For Hitler” doesn’t work: if nothing else, it is true that people love dreck even more than they love art. That’s why the world isn’t perfect. hecking duh, people. Well, for what it’s worth, Kojima, here’s a negative review. Do with it what you will (lol).

This brings us back to the subject of Metal Gear Solid 4 as a game: it’s not very good. It starts with nice concepts; by act four, it’s ditched the nice concepts. By act five, it’s Rambo On A Boat. Then it slowly jerks you off for an hour and a half. The game looks like a modern videogame; it has amazing sound design. It plays like Metal Gear. Some Metal Gear fans think it’s too tight, too much like an FPS. Some FPS fans think it’s too loose, too much like Metal Gear. We say that game graphics can only approach a certain level of realism before we expect headshots to kill someone, before we cannot forgive the game designers for allowing the main character to carry literally thousands of pounds’ worth of steel weaponry as he sneaks undetected through a battlefield. Metal Gear is very much a game about the logistics; like all the greats of the Famicom era, its initial game design was fashioned as something to work within the constraints of a medium. On the MSX, Kojima couldn’t have more than one enemy moving at a time, so he made avoiding the enemy the key to getting through any given challenge. That gave the game balls. Now, in the future, we can go anywhere or do anything. Rocket launchers are cool, and so is a controllable pet robot, so there you go, you got it. It’s just that when the game intends for the player to get as involved as he’s likely to get involved in the experience on plot- and play-related levels, it’s going to always seem fundamentally hecking Ridiculous that you can press the START button during a boss fight, access the ammunition store, and buy bullets for your empty gun. Know this: right now, today, right this minute, fledgling Japanese game designers are hip-deep in the belief that “buy ammo from the pause menu” is a “good idea” merely because it was in a Metal Gear Solid game. It’s an icky notion to consider; let it flow over you. It reminds us of that day we were confronted by a Scientologist on Hollywood Boulevard and handed a ticket to a free live hip-hop duel celebrating L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday (this actually happened).

We’d feel bad leaving this review on a scientology reference (fitting as it might actually be), so we’re going to try to discuss how to make Metal Gear Solid 4 better: don’t. Just don’t touch it. If you’re already touching it, stop touching it. hecking touch something else, already. Kojima, your talent comes from birthing quirks, not from digging them up and molesting them after they’re dead. The most immediately compelling and interesting part of Metal Gear Solid 4 is when Snake meets Meryl’s little troop of ragtag misfit soldiers, and one of them, sleeping with a mohawk, sits up suddenly, revealing that his hair actually forms the shape of an exclamation point on the back of his head. We need you to make a whole game out of that kind of nuance, Kojima. You’ve talked recently about how much you love the old classics like Out Of This World or Septentrion; you’ve mentioned Bioshock‘s straightforward storytelling approach, you’ve appreciated Gears of War, and yet you hint at having some brilliant “new idea” for how to tell a story in a future game. We (kind of) hope his solution isn’t to just remove all game elements and make another graphical adventure. (That would be hilarious, though.)

In closing, let us praise the one certifiably great thing about Metal Gear Solid 4, and the one shining beacon that fills us with faith in Kojima’s future productions: the flow of the dialogue. It’s occasionally hilarious how well Kojima is able to write rhythmic dialogue. It clips and breezes along; the most portentous sentences become urgent poetic moments that transcend the base stupidity of the plot. Of course, you’d never know this if you played the game in English — the script appears to have been translated by the Elephant Man banging his head on a keyboard. There’s a line where Naomi says “If you want to change your fate, you’ll have to meet your destiny”. What the stuff? In Japanese, she uses the same word for “fate” (unmei) twice, one instance of which being the first word of the sentence. This is to lend the sentence some kind of parallel structure. Even given the flipping idiocy of the moment, it makes for a neat little verbal-ironic turnaround: “The only way to change your fate is to go forth and meet it.” In other words, the only way Snake can possibly outlive his terrible fate (death) is by running straight at it, instead of letting it crash into him while he sits there doing nothing. This is a nice little sentence that no doubt has already inspired several dozen fanfiction-writing Japanese fourteen-year-olds. In English, it’s a dud; the translator must have majored in newspaper journalism, had a professor tell him to never use the same word — even (ESPECIALLY) “the” — twice in one sentence. However, this isn’t reporting — this isn’t regurgitation of earthquake statistics. It’s “art” (term used loosely). The moral of the story is that there’s no concept of the word “it” in Japanese, which is why so many sentences resort to (eventually poetic) repetition. We mustn’t forget this — this is perhaps one of the keys of Kojima’s artistic conscience, here, seriously (okay, not so seriously). Popping in needless synonyms is not what the games industry needs in order to gain artistic reputation — soon enough, everyone will be substituting 3s and 4s in their tax forms because they’re getting tired of writing 2s, and by then, we’re all literally and figuratively hecked, so help us Shigeru Miyamoto.

–tim rogers

Yes, we realize that this is like a big twist ending story where instead of ____ going “____”, it’s more like “lol”. If you’d like, you can pretend that we seriously do have a #1 “best game of all-time” that we’re going to reveal. If we did have such a game, we’d probbbbbably reveal it next Wednesday. Though who knows. By then, we might not even feel like it anymore. You are invited to stay tuned, in turgid hope, anyway.

text by Brendan Lee

★☆☆☆

“THE NINTH ONE OF THESE.”

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

There is a certain fun-ness about hitting things!

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

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

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

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

The ninth one of these, Namco.

Number nine.

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

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

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

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

text by tim rogers

★★★☆

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by Brendan Lee

★★☆☆

“ACTUALLY HECKING TRYING.”

Hotel Dusk is a lot like a mylar Happy Birthday balloon, half inflated, hovering at the foot of a dead child’s hospital bed. It was made with the best of intentions by talented individuals who knew exactly what they were doing; it was paid for by people who believed in what it meant; and it was delivered to an audience who was no doubt capable of receiving its simple but earnest message.

That it comes off looking somewhat at a loss for what to do with itself it largely a problem of a market still feeling the growing pains of 1) what a curious and versatile piece of hardware the Nintendo DS is; 2) how money can be softly kneaded into a product that looks like it’s on the cutting edge of the future, while actually kicking us back into nostalgia-scented King’s Quest territory; AND 3) the concept that a small developer can, with the right vision and sense of purpose and selection of hardware, compete in the innovative space as well or better than those with 4000-Gigawatt Money Cannons.

And so Hotel Dusk manages all these things. The art is . . . well, it’s truly masterful, when you get right down to it. All of the characters seem whispered to life on the edges of an enchanted sketch pad, and damned if it doesn’t translate extremely well to the (here vertically-oriented) DS screen. The use of the touch screen, though a trifle smug and gimmicky in parts, actually makes a kind of forehead-slapping sense in a lot of places (yes, you can take notes – – yes, you should – – yes, the novelty wears off – – yes, that’s okay, because people take notes all the time in life, and it’s actually far, far weirder that we should have been weaned on punching in encyclopedic nonsense codes in things like Monster Party, and then consider it a novelty when video games finally evolve to a more natural way of doing the very very simple).

The writing’s nice – – in the sense that you can actually notice the story and not be immediately alarmed or poked in the ribs by someone overwriting their way through a day job. The music’s nice – – a bit elevator at times, but just smoky jazz enough to evoke a whiff of gunpowder-scented gumshoe.

Did you take notes with the little notebook, there – – when you were wandering around the hotel, grilling the little charcoal-sketch strangers? If you didn’t, expect to be wandering those halls a lot, feeling like the wasted time is all your fault . . . which it kind of more or less is, in this case. There are little bonuses and clever bits – – just like in those trusty old Sierra adventures (LOOK UP THE LETTER ON THE THIRD CRAB FROM THE BOTTOM NEXT TO THE SEASHELL IN YOUR ‘SEAS AND SEAMEN’ BOOKLET AND TELL THE YEOMAN NOW), you get a little bit of electric juice for running your stylus over all of the little details that they threw in the hotel so you wouldn’t feel like you were just running your stylus over little details. Essentially: the picture is painted well enough that if you squint just right, and maybe if your eyes are a little dry, you might just think it was actually a photograph.

Hey, you know: Hotel Dusk is good.

So: why is it at a half-inflated loss? What keeps it from being so absolutely cheerful that the boy comes back from the dead, yells “I WANT CAKE” and wets his sheets all in one miraculous action?

More important than being good, Hotel Dusk is actually hecking trying. That is such a rare and wonderful thing in this industry, when it’s obvious that it’s kind of a failure way to go about things in the game industry – – at least, financially speaking. For the price of one or two conceptual artists you could partner up for a port, or a flavor-of-the-day license, or go out to a middle school and sell $5 maps to the Free Beer Party (Just for Kids!). Instead, it’s something big and ballsy and fresh – – back to the days of a couple guys green-screening up Myst or whatever. All the technology was already there, and the quirks of the system were just waiting for someone to give them a tickle in the right direction.

That the innovation ends up beating its fists somewhat against a saggy-eyed detective romp is kind of the fault of nobody, and everybody. There’s a crazy magician inside of those walls, sister . . . he’d murder for a pizza with cheese in the crust, and he just saw a tiny crack of light through the crumbling masonry.

Let’s hope his wand still has some juice left in it.

text by tim rogers

★⋆☆☆

“NOT THE HECKING HOLODECK ON 'STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION'.”

When The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was originally released on PC and Xbox 360 back in 2006, critics everywhere were rushing to let their wrists go limp, hold their hands at shoulder-height, and throw their voices into higher octaves in order to shout at what a gorgeous situation it was. Critics, in general, are like that. They get free videogames, usually before everyone else, and this sets off a kind of chemical reaction that leads people to call “Spider-Man 2” “The movie of the modern age. Hands. Down.” on an internet messageboard because they got tickets to a preview showing. When Oblivion showed up, it was after over a year of its being shown “behind closed doors” to journalists who were also given free muffins. Eyes peeking out from over the tops of those muffins, those priveleged few men saw a game that would have an expansive world where you were free to do whatever you wanted, even kill people. That the game was set in an actual fantasy world bellowed a verbose message down into the wells of these blogger hearts; the comic book geek in Coke-bottle glasses who tumbled down there during a kickball game decades ago stood up and jumped like he thought he could reach the moon. The idea of a new Elder Scrolls game spoke to people in this era of Grand Theft Auto, where the only games with “freedom” also happen to be set in worlds that resemble ours as closely as possible. It didn’t even matter that Oblivion was part four in this acclaimed series, nor did it matter that part three had been released for the Xbox and PC at a time when Grand Theft Auto had yet to find its feet on the PlayStation 2. Oblivion was here and now, it was big and large, it looked gorgeous and it probably played gorgeous, too.

I’m sorry, though. It’s not a good game. It won numerous accolades and “Game of the Year” awards from videogames media, probably because the editors-in-chief of such publications felt some sort of obligation — so long we’d sat in that cursed meeting room, so long wanting to get our hands on the precious controller and play precious the game — after having pumped it up for so long. It was a weird, hot fad, all of a sudden, even, for the jock-gamers who play Halo 2 on Xbox Live while seated firmly in a leg-press machine, lifting half-tons as the controller vibrates: heckin’ steoroid freaks were playing Oblivion; it was showing up on their gamer cards, they were recommending it to their friends. Why? God, why? I guess it’s because it was well “produced”. In this era where the “Lord of the Rings” movies were able to pop up in cinemas and make billions of dollars despite their being about elves and fairies, being three hours long, being three movies instead of one, and being directed by a fat man (whose appearance Hollywood had tried to hide like Area 51), fantasy and assorted fantasy memorabilia is almost right up there with NASCAR T-shirts on the list of things to buy your third husband Bobby for his first birthday since the quadruplets were born. Somehow, Bethesda knew where to put this game: stress that it gives you freedom, pump the gorgeous graphics, and put Patrick Stewart’s name on the back of the box.

A tangent: Patrick Stewart plays the part of the emperor, and you play the part of a prisoner. The emperor comes through your prison cell, being escorted through the catacombs and out of the city. He notices something in your eyes — minutes before this, you were hecking around with a character editor, seeing how obese and/or anorexic and/or bald and/or rat-nosed you could make you character before finally groaning for a half an hour trying to create someone that just looked like nothing at all — and realizes that you must have some sort of merit. He gives you a little Captain Picard speech. Anyway, he gets murdered a couple minutes later, and you never see him again. You have to find his son, who is a priest, who doesn’t know he’s Captain Picard’s son. His son is played by Sean Bean, easily one of the more talented character actors of our day. He was 006 in “Goldeneye”; he was Boromir in “Lord of the Rings”; he was Odysseus in “Troy”, which, yes, really sucked, though hell if that Sean Bean wasn’t great. Above all this, he is Sharpe. I daresay that he is a more talented man than Patrick Stewart, though maybe he doesn’t have the pedigree. Why not give him top billing, though? Put his name on the front of the box? Well, that would probably be because the story is brutally &^#$#ed — you blunder and guide his character around, stop in and out of these “Oblivion Gate” things, fight the same twenty or so monsters inside each one, “seal” the gate, and keep adventuring. All the game needs to sell itself to you is those first ten minutes — after your character is freshly made, and Patrick Stewart is dead on the ground. I bet there were some dudes who hoped and prayed he would come back in the end to wreak vengeance on the world, shouting “ENGAGE!” and shooting fireballs out of his fingertips. Sucks to be those people.

I’d love to interview Sean Bean about the relatively newish concept of using established dramatic talent in videogames. I’d open the interview by asking him how much they paid him, and he would probably laugh affably at the question. Then I’d say, seriously, though, what brand of cellular phone did you use? It sounds so clear. He’d probably laugh at that, too, and we’d be getting along supremely; he’d probably have invited me out for a drink after the interview, and everything; then we’d finally get into the details, and I’d ask him about the recording process. If he’d seen the full script, if they’d offered to show it to him, if he just recorded his lines cold, or whatever. Whatever he said wouldn’t matter because, hell, by this point, I’d already have his phone number, and he would have mine.

Friends of mine, mostly people on Xbox Live, got all guidance counselor-y and tried to tell me that the story is the last thing you want to appreciate about Oblivion. Said one guy, “Like, I played for like sixty hours before going into my first Oblivion gate, dude.” What do you do for sixty hours, apparently? You harvest berries, or mushrooms, grind elements with your Novice Mortar and Pestle so that they show up as fatigue-curing items in the tools tab of your inventory, or take side-quests, or join the Shadow Guild and make your pretend self become a pretend pretend assassin. This would be great, except: I don’t like playing Oblivion. It’s not fun. The collision and physics are sketchy as stuff. You get on your horse and ride, and it just feels like it’s hovering above the world. You can ride down a mountainside and it feels like you’re getting a bad blowjob from a weeping girl in broken braces on a bumpy escalator. There’s this weird, frigid disconnect between the player and the world and the controller. At least the 360 version has rumble, though you know what? It’s not timed right. The rumble should hit with the sound of the horse’s hooves hitting the ground. Instead, it’s just some even rhythm. It’s jarring and weird.

Add to this a combat engine that is not Halo, and you make me frown. Why should the combat engine be Halo, you ask? Well, because it’s a first-person game. Halo has magnificent, frightening amounts of crunch. You can aim your gun right under a little guy’s shield and sidestep around him and shoot him right in the foot, and then in the face. In Oblivion, you’re just playing with generalities. You aim and shoot. In Morrowind, you could smack a rat on the head with a club and hear a wet thud, only to see text pop up on the screen telling you you’d missed. That was kind of cute; that was like a Jorge Luis-Borges story, like “A Dialogue about Dialogue”. It was a weird little postmodern riddle, and we forgave it because the game wasn’t in 720p HD on a giant TV. We were playing it on something reasonable, maybe 25 inches, maybe in college. It was funny, is what I’m saying. Here in Oblivion, when there’s a weird little delay between your pressing of a button and your character’s swinging his sword, where in the end, you’re just bashing buttons and slamming your numbers against your opponent’s numbers, expecting ultimate victory, it just doesn’t feel fun. It doesn’t feel entertaining. I’m sure if you spend all of your time plotting which orcs to kill next in World of Warcraft with guild-mates as excited as you are about clicking that mouse, if the most exciting part of your evening tends to be when you ask this Night Elf who is actually a girl in New Hampshire who’s probably hot what she’s drinking tonight and she says “Peach Schnapps” and you feel a stir in your boxers like Hell yeah, she might be drunk soon, then maybe Oblivion seems like “Ben-Hur” must have seemed to the moviegoing kids of 1959 who’d spent their fall semesters reading books. The truth is, MMORPGs are like spreadsheets you share with other people via the magic of graphics, and Oblivion, a decidedly singleplayer game, lets you manage that spreadsheet without the hassle of having to constantly compare yourself to other people and feel inadequate because there’s always someone with higher numbers in something. This design decision turns out brilliant, in a way, because the game doesn’t owe courtesy to other players — there’s no waiting your turn when it comes to rolling the bones against that skeleton knight — and it can kind of have an action feel to it. Though man, hell if they didn’t blow it. Sure, it’s big, and it looks kind of real, though let’s face it: we’ve come a long way from entertaining ourselves with MSPaint doodles and spreadsheets measuring how many times we’ve masturbated in the past fiscal year; it’s about time someone starts building the Holodeck from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, or at least approximating it within my extremely expensive high-definition television.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is not the hecking holodeck on “Star Trek: the Next Generation”.

People disappear when they’re going in and out of doors. They don’t reach out and open the door. They just vanish. Sure, you can follow them outside and sure enough, there they are, walking down the street. I’m sure the developers showed this to journalists back during the “behind closed doors” phase, and one or two journalists might have felt like saying, yeah, people had schedules in Zelda: Majora’s Mask and/or Shenmue, as well — and then . . . “Would you like another muffin?” Dutifully, these sorts of things get pumped up: “TOWNSPEOPLE WITH ACTUAL SCHEDULES!” And then there’s all the weird little mini-game systems thrown in there. Like the persuasion game. “DYNAMIC CONVERSATION SYSTEM!” You can try to convince or coerce someone into giving you what you want by clicking choices on a rotating wheel. “NEW DEPTH IN FACIAL EXPRESSIONS!” Each time you highlight a choice, you can see the guy’s face change, to demonstrate how the selected choice would make him feel. Certain choices lock out other choices, meaning you’re going to have to disappoint the person one in four attempts — just like in a real conversation! You can joke, boast, coerce, or flatter. Some guys might laugh at a joke and then promise to murder your family when you try to flatter them. And then they’ll laugh at your next joke. What you have to do is boost-chain the joke-boast and . . . Huh? Forget that, though — you can just sit there for three minutes twiddling the d-pad around between the choices and watch the guy’s face permutate like a punctual epileptic. Please — don’t let me do stuff like this in the game. If it’s not finished, leave it the heck out. “HUGE GAME WORLD!” Yeah, too huge. So huge that right at the beginning, when you’re given your first destination, you can just open the map and fast-travel there. Hey, consider this, genius game developers: when your game world is so large that fast-traveling in towns is considered a necessary design element, maybe your slow travel sucks and your overworld carries the tone of a theme park after hours, with you playing the role of a widowed octogenarian with a broom and dustpan.

The game is not without its good moments. Being able to make my character look like a punk lesbian on a hunger strike, purple skinhead and clammy skin and all, is pretty hot. There was also this part where Unicorn’s song “REBEL” played on repeat for one hour while I talked to characters about crucial story elements and screamed “WHAT’S THAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU?” though I reckon that might have something to do with the whole Xbox 360 “custom soundtracks” thing. (Note to the future: custom soundtracks may seem like a good idea, though why not try to make games with music the player wouldn’t want to not hear? Eh? Good idea, huh?) The PS3 version doesn’t have the custom soundtracks. Hell. It’s right here on my desk. That alone qualifies me to review it. I’d play it, with arguably better graphics, I really would, if only I wouldn’t have to hear the mopey music and be constantly reminded that there really are only five voice actors in this whole game aside from Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart, and that one of those five seems to have done the voices of over a hundred characters.

Being as fair as I can — sure, Oblivion is a nice first step toward making a “Ben-Hur” of videogames. It just needs a plot — don’t listen to the fans who say that they love the random questing; they’d love an awesome plot even more! trust me! — and some direction, and some guts, and some crunch. It needs to be a little more like Zelda. I know some might say that being more like Zelda would make Oblivion less like an Elder Scrolls game, though come on; we’re all adults here. “Inspiration” doesn’t have to mean a pixel-for-pixel rip-off, for god’s sake. We’ve come a long way from Daggerfall, which was awesome because it was 3D and you could rob people who didn’t even have names. Now, though, the people have names, and castle guards will swarm at you in the street after you touch a loaf of bread in a house that isn’t yours, even if no one had witnessed your hunger. You can jump and then press the wait button, only to be greeted with a menu that says “You cannot wait while in the air.” with a single selectable choice beneath this: “OK”. Don’t even get me started on the god damned hideous faces on some of the “human” characters in the game. Just . . . nut up, people. Videogames are as much a hobby as a complimentary appendectomy. Thanks for pulling that giant Band-aid off, Mario. However, the real wound lies beneath another Band-aid: The graphics are too good. You have access to powerful hardware now. Have a little conscience. With great power comes great responsibility, et cetera. Godspeed you, fleet-footed warrior.

text by Andrew Toups

★☆☆☆

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

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

Shame that the rest of the game is such stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by Brendan Lee

★☆☆☆

“BENDING FROM THE WAIST.”

Final Fantasy III on the DS sees Square at its most sweaty and desperate . . . an oozing carnival barker, equal parts chin oil and elephant ear crumbs, swinging a sodden stub of Swisher Sweet toward a tattered Tent of Terrors.

You know, perhaps, exactly what you’re going to find; some pickled multi-necked cow fetus, horrifyingly illuminated by a guttering fluorescent bulb. You’ll stand there, you and your best pal, give the thing a tight-lipped once-over, thrill a bit, slap a few mosquito bites, and shuffle your way out.

Did you just get scammed by that guy?

Did you just flush an E ticket on an A-ticket attraction?

Well, that’s kind of up to you. Matrix has done a fair job of porting the NES classic to the DS – – it uses what 3D the DS has to good effect; the sound is more or less in order. Full-motion video inserts the pastel-colored natsukashiiiiiiiiii knife directly at the base of the spinal column and twists until the blade snaps. Weary of tiresome buttons? Whip out the stylus and castrate what few Pavlovian illusions tapping them still hold – – though not to a FFXII-Gambit level, I guess, which came as breathtakingly close to an Emperor-Sans-Clothes scenario as any in recent RPG memory.

That’s it! If you like this you like this, which means that you like it and you like it so you’ll like it again. In a certain sense, this continual retreading of musty IP is perfectly understandable, even divorced from Square/Enix’s conscienceless coffer-stuffing: it fleshes out all of the fiddly little gaps that previously had to be filled in by the player’s imagination . . . you’re waddling further and further toward making the Final Fantasy universe (gasp!) real. A few more generations, and maybe that’ll be me jumping in place to the victory music from the comfort of my gravy-stained sofa. You never can tell about the future: maybe some scraggle-bearded, wrap-around Oakley version of me will even put out the extra eighty bucks for the vibrating wireless scabbard.

Clips right there onto the sweatpants!

So! A port – – and a pretty darn competent one at that. Somewhere at the Cheeto-scented end of all of our chained realities there’s a version of actionbutton.net rendered largely in bright pink Macromedia Flash, and in that version this review’s lone star is a brilliant shade of gold. Sadly, we toil here at this end of reality, where good children sometimes go hungry and it rains on chocolate layer cakes and mastheads must be followed to the absolute immutable letter.

So! A well-carved statue to the past, placed on a carefully tended hill. You’ve got a backpack full of the very finest sandwiches. You glance at your wrist. Your watch has stopped. A cool breeze ruffles through your hair. What on earth could possibly be wrong with that?

It’s . . . well, it’s quite poignantly wrong. You’re really gnawing the hecking paint chips when you cave to idolatry like that. Think back: when Square killed Aeris . . . why was that the defining moment of Final Fantasy VII? Was Aeris this fascinating, multi-faceted corker of a gal symbolizing innocence and the purity of nature in a World Gone Mad? Or . . . was she kind of a glassy-eyed dud that said […] an awful lot?

Both, I suppose, depending on your views on pressurized cheese. Still, the reason that moment had actual emotional resonance was that she hecking well died. No materia could rescue those perfect brown locks; no amount of gil could rewind the sword out of her angelic vertebrae. Even the mighty Pro Action Replay could only dance her hollow ghost tantalizingly in front of you, like a Kit Kat wrapper caught in a persistent updraft. Sad!

In a medium that, almost by definition, always affords you One More Chance, it said a hell of a lot. There’s only so much that you can save. You’ve got a limited sphere of influence, and sooner or later you’ve got to grab your jacket and head for the exits. It was – – by video game design standards – – a gutsy move.

One that’s been torn from the playbook, sadly. Rather than leaving her in the box, the poor gal’s electrified corpse has been pimped again and again for a few coke-stained twenties per throw . . . and Final Fantasy III is right there beside her, bending from the waist, two black eyes and a run in her stocking.

Saying goodbye stings like battery acid, I guess, but at the end of the day it’s right, and it’s honest.

Give us some honesty.

If Square/Enix has even the faintest desire to avoid the continued strip-mine Disneyfication of its sagging intellectual property, this dry-hump farce-fest needs to end. Square should look the Past right in the eyes, whisper a dry-lipped adieu, and let the overdose of morphine do its hecking job.

text by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh

★☆☆☆

“AS MUCH FUN AND ABOUT AS WHOLESOME AS LIGHTING A BIRTHDAY CANDLE ON YOUR CHEST AND COVERING IT WITH A JAM JAR.”

It’s been said that each of us only has one tune to play; all we ever do is change the way we play it. It’s also been said that Donkey Kong and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s tune originates in his personal hobbies, filtered through a love of Japanese and Western fairy tales. The Legend of Zelda has its roots in the fields and caves behind Miyamoto’s childhood home. Pikmin comes from Miyamoto’s garden. And Donkey Kong 3 is based on the premise that it is fun to spray DDT up a gorilla’s asshole. While being attacked by bees.



Miyamoto sure must love his spray gun, since there’s little else to do in the game. The first level consists of three horizontal platforms, arranged in a trapezoid formation. Pressing up or down causes Stanley, gawk-jawed cousin to Mario, never seen again outside the trophy case to Super Smash Bros. Melee, to hop up or down a level to avoid the raging insects. All the while, his nozzle is aimed skyward, at the looming gorilla sphincter above.

Let Donkey Kong slide all the way down, and you lose. If he climbs high enough, he’ll knock down a super spray can that, if fired up his ass, causes him to climb even higher. The occasional worm may crawl off a leaf, to slide across one of the three floor levels. You can’t kill the worm; only stun him, and that only lasts a second. Along the bottom are flowers, that you’re meant to guard against bees. The only penalty to losing flowers is that your score bonus will be lower at the end of the level.

The second and third levels are exactly the same, except the floor is arranged in slightly different patterns, a new insect or two is eventually added, and the super spray can is absent. The actual play mechanics and goal remain the same: avoid getting stung, maybe guard the flowers if you feel like it, and pump the gorilla’s ass as hard and as fast as you can.

Donkey Kong 3 is, like its contemporaries, a game of attrition. As you play, the game is meant to get harder and harder, until you can no longer keep up with the demands put before you. The problem is that the game starts off more confusing than difficult and never really gets harder. When you die, it will either be because you have yet to figure out that there is no point to doing anything other than shoot the gorilla in the ass or because, once you have mastered this trick, there is nothing further to keep you alert.

There is no strategy to play, except perhaps when you realize that jumping toward Donkey Kong can increase your rate of spray. As in Space Invaders — from which this game borrows more than it does Donkey Kong 1 or 2 — only one “shot” can persist on the screen at any moment, so the sooner a shot is absorbed the sooner you can fire again.

Donkey Kong 3 is the “lost” Donkey Kong game — the game that Nintendo and everyone else keeps forgetting. You never see it re-released, you never see it referenced, you never hear anyone talk about it. The reason is that it’s as much fun and about as wholesome as lighting a birthday candle on your chest and covering it with a jam jar.



The Donkey Kong series of videogames has played out kind of like the Jaws film series. The first game, with its high concept and story-based design, inspired twenty-five years of game development — much as Jaws did to Hollywood. The second game involves the revenge of the first game’s villain, by way of a relative; it wasn’t as good, yet it introduced a few new ideas. The third game is a flimsy B-level production, later written out of continuity, in which the villain now takes revenge on a distant relative of the original hero.

When I read that that Jaws 4 (The Re-Re-Revenge?) is supposed to be the worst action movie ever made, I’m a little disappointed that Miyamoto dropped the monkey at this point. The worst action game ever has to be a hell of a lot more entertaining than this. Donkey Kong 3 is just tedious. Tedious and weird. It’s not even worth the curiosity. Go play Donkey Kong 64, and consider yourself lucky.

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 tim rogers

☆☆☆☆

“THE VIDEOGAME EQUIVALENT OF A HATE CRIME.”

Here’s a videogame made by a team of men whose strongest dream must be that someday a doctor will prescribe them bacon. Not everyone has the innate talent required to craft entertainment masterpieces, and Saints’ Row illustrates quite masterfully, in the form of many psychological accidents, that it is possible to assemble a room full of three hundred randomly selected human beings, each of them lacking in sense, artistic conscience, and competence at judging the value of entertainment.

The first clue in this who-shot-modern-society season cliffhanger comes in the form of the game’s title: according to the Volition Inc. website, the proper rendering is “Saints Row”. Now, “Row” seems to indicate we’re talking about a street of some sort, a thoroughfare if you will. So how many saints are there presiding over this thoroughfare? If it were one, the game would be “Saint’s Row”; two or more and it would be “Saints’ Row”. The developers at Volition must have left the naming conventions for last, thinking that they would decide how many saints we were dealing with toward the end of the “dev cycle”, and then hire someone to airbrush an apostrophe onto the package design. Maybe they’d even make it a graffitti-style apostrophe, for extra “street cred”.

Seeing as the game involves a gang called the “Saints”, I take it that the title is supposed to be rendered “Saints’ Row”, so I will call it thus in this review. Volition should pay me a proofreader’s fee. At New York rates, what I just did here, in the back of my head, is worth six dollars.

I’m not going to deride the developers’ choice to let players make their own characters. In the end, it doesn’t matter. My character is a vaguely Hispanic looking white man of imploding anorexia and soppy cornrows. His facial hair looks like someone applied it with Mario Paint. He looks like a wet rat at a job interview, minus a stack of A4-sized print-outs bearing the names and URLs of all the Wikipedia articles he’s contributed to. Hey, it was either this or make “‘Before’ Jared” from the Subway commercials, now African-American and with purple hair. (You know, I ate lunch with Jared in high school, a couple of times. He was my big brother’s best friend. He graduated two years ahead of me. My brother was into kung-fu. He once beat the stuff out of some kid who threw a rock at Jared after school. No kidding.)

The game lets you make your own character because it wants you to identify with the character. Right at the beginning, your creation is standing on a street corner in a magic city where everyone has access to violence, and he gets meaninglessly gunned down by thugs riding a gaudy automobile, probably because he looks like Boy George wearing FUBU by order of a witness protection program, and that stuff just don’t belong in our hood. Some other gangsters, in purple, show up and heck up the motherheckers who just tried to heck you the heck up. They blast those motherheckers. You’re rescued by a man in a backward hat, voiced by a black actor I think I’ve seen before in a movie that wasn’t very good. He helps you up and takes you in to his gang, the Saints, who are dedicated to cleaning up the streets by murdering anyone who even thinks once about murdering anyone else. They want to clean up the drugs, and the gangs, and the hookers — the cops in this town aren’t worth stuff, we’re told, and stuff, that means we can blow up a car and probably not be chased around like in Grand Theft Auto. Shit yeah!

Previous games have used perhaps-political authority figures as thug-blasters: Final Fight, for example, stars Mayor Mike Haggar, former pro-wrestler (in the 80s, it seemed like such casual, hilarious irreverence), who will kill any pixelated sons of bitches between him and his kidnapped daughter. Now that we’re putting this sort of thing into 3D, with realistic vehicle physics and “evolutionary” (their words) aiming controls for gun firing — now that there’s voice acting by the Hollywood B-Team, it feels kind of fake and breathtakingly insulting. There’s a tiny twinge of subtext that a fourteen-year-old boy could pick up on if he was lucky enough to not have a distracting erection during world history class yesterday — that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that this leader-guy might possess ulterior motives for wanting to kill the other gangs. Still, that’s neither here nor there — the gang underlings listen to this man like church attendees. They behold him as a walking religion.

So when I’m on a mission, and I feel like shooting an old woman in the head for no reason, and my partner — indicated in cut-scenes as the most devout follower of the gang — pulls out his gun and starts shooting the police instead of turning me in for being a raving psychopath, hundreds of red flags fly up in the back of my brain. I don’t even get a “Dude, that’s not cool!” out of the guy. I punch an innocent pedestrian on the street, and my man whips out his pistol when the pedestrian throws a single punch back. How hard is it to program these AI scripts? Why wouldn’t my guy, I don’t know, punch me, scream at me, pull out his gun and shoot me in the kneecaps, call the cops, or something?

The game is an acrobat when it comes to tripping over itself. On the one hand, the street-cleaning Saints are a gang of religious proportions; on the other hand, when the police are following you for doing something you shouldn’t do in real life, the way you clear your criminal rating is by driving your car through a drive-thru church. In Grand Theft Auto, you drive into a seedy auto shop and get your car painted a different color, and the license plates changed. Here, you ask forgiveness at a drive-thru church, and “donate” them some money. Get it? Ha ha! Religion is a commodity, get it? Get it? The game is just a skin for Grand Theft Auto, made by people who thought that putting an FPS-style right-analog-stick gun aiming system (very nice, actually) and some crunchier vehicle physics (again, pretty nice, good sense of weight) into it would suffice for “innovation”.

Yet it is the dynamic physics of the game that commit its greatest act of evil. When a realistic innocent human is murdered in cold blood in the street, his corpse disappears within one click of a watch’s second hand. However, when your character purchases a soft drink from a restaurant (absolutely unthinkingly named “Freckle Bitch’s” — yeah, profanity in the name of a fast-food restaurant! that’s right around the corner! let’s get in on that one on the ground floor!), and then drinks that soft drink, and then litters the empty cup on the ground, the cup rolls around for a full thirty seconds. That’s the developers saying, “Hey, we hired guys to work out that physics engine! We’re not going to waste that research!” If pressed in an interview, someone in charge of decision-making in this game could say that the corpses disappear so that players can’t be overly cruel by continuing to pop caps in the dead person’s head and/or ass and watching the corpse flinch realistically. A skilled interviewer would then ask them why they let you kill innocent people at all, and the interviewee would reply that they want the players to “have fun” and/or “enjoy themselves” and/or “express themselves” through the videogame, which is a hell of an audacious answer. I’d say, when there’s no better way to have fun or enjoy yourself or express yourself in a game than by destroying the people-shaped targets the game does not explicitly ask you to destroy, then maybe your game is just a big empty husk, as cheap and tacky as the Styrofoam sculpture of the history of hip-hop that makes up its soundtrack.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for one, stars a young man whose mother has been killed. When he starts getting revenge, he has a reason. All we know about him is that he left his hometown because he was tired of gang violence. He comes back when the violence claims his moms, and he wants to heck up the heckers that hecked his moms up. Good enough reason. If Carl “CJ” Johnson slays a hooker in his quest for revenge, it’s just something that happens. It’s a tendency within him as an angry, wronged young person; it’s your choice to bring it out in him, you sick heck, you. If you want to play San Andreas as a story of an honest man getting revenge for the death of his moms and subsequently getting caught neck-deep in some serious stuff, you can do that. You are playing a role. You are free to interpret it as you will. In Saints’ Row, you’re a blank slate who gets knocked on his ass in a drive-by. Maybe this blank slate is a raving psychotic motherhecker who had just never been privy to a stash of weaponry the likes of which the Saints’ gang possesses. That’s all well and good: that the characters in the game are not appropriately shocked and/or appalled when you do horrible things is something of a mortal sin.

I am a liberal enough person to admit that, if I had an identical twin sister and if she wasn’t actively repulsive I’d probably have had at least cooperative oral sex with her by now, so when I say that you have no idea quite how deeply your game offends me, you should know that you’re in deep stuff. How dare you put this presumptuous trash out on the market. Quit your jobs producing entertainment software, abandon the lucky break that scored you a “connection” to the “industry”, and take up a job at a Denny’s or a Starbucks, to see what real people look like and how they walk and how they gesture with their hands.

Or maybe the problem’s not you. Maybe it’s the whole hecking “industry”. Or maybe it’s not. Though Rockstar, who shat the gold brick called Grand Theft Auto, has begun to use their “sandbox” genre as a rough outline, a checklist of “things one can do, if so inclined, in 3D action videogames”, on which to base more dynamic levels of storytelling — as evidenced in 2006’s conceptually excellent Bully — the rest of the world seems to be turning the wrong way. Why, in Saints’ Row, there’s a mission early on where you have to kill “evil pimps” to steal their hos for another pimp, a good pimp, who also happens to be friends with your gang, which, yes, is a gang devoted to killing all of the other gangs as a means of “cleaning up the streets”. It’s obvious at this point that the “story” of Saints’ Row was shunted in at the latest possible moment, and that the ho-snatching mission was drafted during a meeting in which some coke-fiend producer jumped up and down on the boardroom table with his polka-dot necktie clipped uncomfortably to a wrinkle on his forehead: “GTA lets you pimp hos! We need to let you pimp hos! GTA lets you pimp hos! Let’s let players pimp some hos!”

Where Volition hangs its fuzzy hat, the gene pool is heated to the temperature of a cesspool. Within the marble halls of its psychological accident of game development, a man actually speaks the words “Complete missions to earn respect. Fill your respect meter to unlock more missions.” Yes, he actually uses the word “unlock” with regard to content existing in the game world he occupies. On another corner of this cube-shaped world called the videogame industry, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas opens with a difficulty selection screen: “Difficulty select: Select the difficulty level of the game: NORMAL / REALISTIC”. Witness this and feel years of current events rip from the top of your skull to the soles of your feet, like rollercoaster g-forces. The War in Iraq, the grin of the current mongrel president of America, the shootings in Columbine, foaming media feeding frenzies smothering out the sparks of introspection that might have had the chance to fan into a bonfire of renaissance, Jack Thompson. “REALITY IS NOT NORMAL”, games are saying, in a sideways subliminal way.

Could you imagine a dramatic television show about a rugged cop, a great man at heart, maybe one whose wife had been gunned down by thugs, who lives only to drink whiskey, eat at the same sad diner every golden sunlit morning, and keep the streets clean — who, for some reason, the sixth episode in, pulls out his gun, fires it out the window of his patrol car, and kills a young boy riding a bike, only to have his partner keep rattling on about the drug dealer they’re looking for, only to have the writers seem to forget such a thing happened and let the show go on through eight more Emmy-winning seasons? Of course you can’t. It’d be hecking &^#$#ed, disgusting. It’s not even the senseless violence that gets my goat: it’s the internal inconsistency. It’s the complete and utter lack of artistic conscience. At least, whether you can admit that “American Idol” is actually beneficial to society or not, you have to agree with me that the television and film industries currently possess many more individuals able to competently judge the worth content than the videogame industry has perhaps ever seen. You can spin it out all you want and say that videogames are a young industry, and that’s where I flip you off and tell you that yeah, they’re a young industry, though it’s a pretty mature hecking world we live in, and these people went to school, where they very well should have read books about the hecking world and learned just how mature it is.

(Oh for heck’s sake — according to GameStop.com, the PlayStation 3 version of this game is being released on the Fourth of July. Ain’t that America.)

We are all philosophically doomed as creatures that dream because we can’t physically handle being happy all the time; we have to be happy sometimes and sad sometimes; we believe shadow lends context to light, or whatever. I say yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. Though I’d also like to be the first to admit that, maybe, this is a fundamental problem in the world it may take us centuries to work out. In the Zen buddhist sense, which is convenient and kind of a cop-out because it’s pretty much every sense rolled into one, Saints’ Row just isn’t hecking helping, and the next patch released for it should do more than just cut down the lag in the online multiplayer — it should render the disc hecking unreadable by my Xbox 360.

text by tim rogers

★★★★

“BRILLIANT, SUBTLE, AND PRETTY LOW-KEY FOR A RUBE GOLDBERG DEVICE.”

Previous entries in the Wild Arms series of games have had problems, either political, corporate, or technical — one of them stars a silent protagonist (a staple of the Japanese RPG genre) who doesn’t know he’s actually a robot, though since he doesn’t talk, why would we be shocked. Another one actually dares to begin with a title card proclaiming “It was a dark and stormy night”, which breaks Elmore Leonard’s first rule of storytelling, which is that you never open a story with a description of the weather, and it goes on to break its own rules, too, because it’s later revealed that it never rains in the world the game takes place in. There’s even a boat that skims over sand. That same game, which opens with a brilliant protagonist-selection screen wherein the four main characters have just pointed guns at one another as they all stand around a treasure chest, advertises a nasty gimmick on the back of the box: it lets you ride horses. Players went nuts over that one — it’s an RPG that lets your ride horses on the world map! Final Fantasy had been letting you ride giant ostrich-like birds for over a decade at this point, and Final Fantasy II had even let you slide over glaciers in a little boat with a wheel on it.


The first Wild Arms game had been positioned as the first “good” RPG on the PlayStation, with gorgeous 2D graphics in the main maps (and a wonderful effect where the roofs of houses fade out when you enter) and blocky PlaySkool 3D battles. It was supposed to be the game to tide people over until Final Fantasy VII. I guess it kind of worked, and then it was forgotten. Wild Arms was a clash of different entertainment styles — classy animated intro with classy hi-fi western-flick music, classy attract mode with awesome game-like music, classy intro that has you playing four mini scenarios before seeing all of the characters meet up, weirdo battle graphics, mealy-mouthed story. Yet it yearned to be free. It yearned to be solid. Well, when Final Fantasy VII showed up with its hands on its hips and proclaimed to Japanese game developers that zippers, pleather, and extreme depression were the hot topics for kids with controllers in their hands, everything slipped out of focus. Wild Arms 2 piled on stuff, stuff painted the color of Velveeta cheese. Wild Arms 3 was actually applauded by one or two college drop-out critics who had never read a “book with chapters” to completion, because it mixed Norse mythology with the American wild west, and it let you ride horses. Wild Arms 4 went so far as to feature a scene where a character with super anime hair jumps out of an airplane and punches a missile headed for a village full of crying orphans, which then explodes, killing him. Where did things go wrong? you might ask, and that’s a horrible question, because things didn’t “go” wrong — things were wrong, plain and simple, from the start. The talented developers at Media.Vision sharpened their game over the years, and as their game got sharper, and as Final Fantasy spawned Kingdom Hearts — as spring turned to fall, so to speak — Media.Vision’s sponsors at Sony Computer Entertainment, who had perhaps been preparing from the start for the day when Squaresoft would leave them the way they left Nintendo, started petering away the budget for Wild Arms games. Wild Arms 4 is a mind-boggling mess; the scenario seems written by a man who might have occasionally Freudian-slipped to his friends and family that it was something he went to the office every day to “program”. It jumps all over the place, and so does the game’s presentation. There might be scenes with moving 3D backgrounds, and there might be scenes with static backgrounds. Maybe sometimes characters will talk to one another while a 3D camera moves; maybe sometimes it’ll be talking anime portraits and text boxes, with voiced or un-voiced dialogue. I can imagine the marks in the scenario script — the writer was probably using asterisks to mark which scenes should be voice and which should be just text. “*” would mean a strong recommendation for voice work, et cetera. That’s how they do things. The real tragedy is that Wild Arms 4 had many good things actually going for it — neat little timed platform segments in dungeons and a rough draft of what might have been the most brilliant battle system ever devised for a game like this.

“What we wanted all along, from the beginning of the series,” spoke the lead producer, whose name I can’t recall, “was a writer. We wanted a dedicated, talented, previously published author to write the story for us.” He announced this in an interview with Weekly Famitsu, after prefacing the comment heavily with a “We hope we don’t disappoint the die-hard series fans.” If it were me, I’d have said “We hope we don’t disappoint the ten thousand or so die-hard series fans in our attempt to make a story that is accessible to millions of nice people who deserve to be entertained just as much as people who claim one series of game is their favorite because too many people like all of the other games.” Maybe that’s why I’m not a game producer — I’m too spiteful.

Novelist Kaori Kurosaki, a female writer of pulp fantasy novels, was recruited to write the scenario. She insisted that the story would need to have multiple branches, because that was, quite frankly, the only way to make a story in a long role-playing game interesting. What’s more is that the branches would have to be subtle. They wouldn’t be red-hot pokers in the eye, title cards saying “WILL YOU FOLLOW THE GIRL? OR GO BACK TO THE VILLAGE TO SAVE YOUR DAD?!” It wouldn’t be like stealing a loaf of bread in Oblivion and going to prison, either. It would just be subtle-like.

Whether it was the influence of a dedicated writer that did it, or what, who knows. Who really knows. Wild Arms 4 had been released back when people were already talking about Xbox 360. Wild Arms 5 ended up released a month and a half after the PlayStation 3. It’ll be released in America over a year after the PlayStation 3’s release, which means it might go ignored, which is rather sad, because it really is something of a goofy masterpiece.

Everything goes right in Wild Arms 5 from the opening moments. There’s a quick run through an ancient ruins site, where you dig stuff up with a shovel and learn to push blocks, jump, and solve puzzles. You meet up with a female friend in the village, and tell her you want her to come to the local mountain with you. She asks why, and you don’t want to tell her. She comes with you anyway, and when you get to the designated spot, it’s revealed that this is the place where the two of you, as children, witnessed something that has tugged at your adventurestrings ever since. You have taken her up here because you want to tell her that you’re planning to leave your small town and head off in search of adventure.

In other words, the first dungeon of an RPG, using the tiny emotions of a character as motivation for reaching the goal. It may not seem like it, though that’s something of a revolution right there.

Not minutes after this, a giant robot fist clenching a cute, mute young girl falls from the sky, and the future becomes uncertain. The story begins. The chase is on, et cetera.

The dungeons have puzzles, occasionally as refreshing, logical, and interesting as the great challenges of Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals. And the Hex battle system, returning from Wild Arms 4, has been fine-tuned to a point of masterpieceliness. In Wild Arms 4, the Hex battle system had been pure potential, spoiled by bland boss battles and rather boring, easy normal fights. One might call Wild Arms 5‘s battle system a patch, in which “compatibility to challenge” has been updated.

For the unitiated billions of people who have not played Wild Arms 4, the Hex battle system is amazingly simple and formidably deep. It sets each battle — regular encounter or boss battle or what have you — in a field of seven hexagons. That is, six hexes on the outside, and one in the middle. The middle hex can attack all of the other hexes. However, it can also be attacked by all of the other hexes. Multiple enemies or allies can occupy one hex, though enemies and allies can never occupy the same hex. During a turn, you can move a character from one hex to another, though you cannot travel through a hex occupied by an enemy. Attack a hex containing multiple enemies, and score damage on all of the enemies. Cast a heal spell on a hex containing multiple allies, and heal all of the allies. Cast a “poison” spell on one hex, and set a “poison” effect on the hex. The effect will attach itself to any enemy or ally crossing through that hex. Turns are determined based on characters’ agility statistics and the action they performed in the previous turn. You can view the lineup of characters in the form of a horizontal bar running along the top of the screen.

That’s about all there is to it. In 4, the battle system was brilliant and totally underutilized. 5 sees Media.Vision’s battle programmers behaving like an idiot savant in a purple sweatsuit and “Eraserhead” hair who’s lived in a garage all his life and only now realized he can make a fascinating, noise-making, hydrogen-atom-fusing Rube Goldberg device out of all the junk in there. The frequently occuring battles become like a second heart to this game (the strong, focused story being the other), never frustrating or exasperating the player. They’re little, fast, breath-mint-like challenges. They’re freshmakers. Every once in a while, the game approaches a little Fire Emblem-like strategic peak, and you win the battle and scream “Yeah! I’m so good!” And it’s true — you are so good.

Why would a Japanese RPG, of all games, be the first game ever awarded a four-star rating from Action Button Dot Net? Because we’re really just a bunch of fanboy fairies at heart? For trivia purposes? A little bit of either, actually — and also because it represents a rather crunchy leap forward in a genre that has been boring as stuff for years (even though I personally can’t stop playing these things, whenever they land in my lap). Remember how frustrating it was when you realized you couldn’t directly move your characters around in towns or wherever in Final Fantasy Tactics? Okay, well, maybe that was just me. Xenogears lets you move around these dynamic, huge, sprawling, gorgeous cities, and then has drudgey dungeons and a button-tacking battle system that sometimes shows your characters in robots. Why can’t they make an RPG of big, ballsy depth, with, I don’t know, the honed, refined, classy gameplay of those numerous Gundam action games as a battle system? Why not, huh? Why not make a whole giant-robot RPG that way? Because Japanese videogame corporate executives tend to be iron-haired, corn-teethed men who stuff coal tar? They demand the most money from the least number of developers — you there, make a robot action game with dynamic play mechanics and nothing between the lines. You there, make a longish anime-like story with characters that people would buy action figures of, with absolutely nothing interesting going on whenever the characters have to kill something. Two games! A million copies each or you’re all eating cup noodles for the rest of your lives!

Wild Arms V: The Vth Vanguard, in addition to having probably the most amazing title anything has ever been given, stands up in the raging sandstorm called “diminished funding” and “development on a dying platform”, and it emerges like a low-fi tape the local schizophrenic made in his basement, just a piano and soft vocals, carrying the twin tones of genius and hope. Sure, the quality is a little rough, though hell if there’s not a brilliant light shining through. It flows, it’s frightfully playable, has excellent, spooky, folky music, brilliant battles and an actual story written by an actual writer, which uses anime-faced characters to disguise heart and an emphasis on a twist as emotionally loaded, casual, and mature as the one in Lufia 2.

Ahh, Lufia 2. Wild Arms V is your successor in many more ways than one. Arriving near the death of its platform, it may very well go just as ignored — even in Japan. Only now, it’s the old-school gamers who are rejecting the changes made to the series — apparently, people don’t like the characters or the presentation, or how the series has “abandoned” its “roots”. Some people also say that the save points are few and far between, which I think is great; more people should be complaining about the lack of full voiceovers, which is an obvious sign of budget constraints. Dear lord, if Kingdom Hearts II can back its pleather fetishism and mass-murderer Mickey Mouse plotline up with full voice overs, why can’t Wild Arms V? Also, why does the screen have to fully refresh every time I kill an enemy during a battle? It takes less than a blink of an eye, and I got used to it after a couple hours, though man, it’s kind of weird.

Oh no, now I’m nitpicking. Ignore the previous sentence. It’s really a lovely game with lovely ideas. Here’s hoping that you, jaded reader, will at least give it a rent when it shows up near you. Even if it rubs you the wrong way, even if you don’t like it, please understand the verve and risk-taking that went into its making.

text by Brendan Lee

★⋆☆☆

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

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

Hey, Lakitu!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by Matthew Sakey

★⋆☆☆

“A LOW-MEGATON YIELD.”

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



“What’s not to get?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then you wait.

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

So you wait.

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

And you wait.

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

And you wait.

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

Someone just blinked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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