ACTIONBUTTONNET
2006
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“AT TIMES ADMIRABLE AND CUTE AS SOME WEIRD ENGRISH SPOKEN BY A SHOP-KEEPER IN A BARELY-KNOWN 8-BIT GAME TRANSLATED BY A TEAM OF TWO JAPANESE GIRLS AND FOUR DICTIONARIES.”
There’s a track by Ryuichi Sakamoto in Seiken Densetsu 4 (aka Dawn of Mana) — the back of the box says so — life-long listener though I am, it took me Actual Internet Research to figure out which track that was. This says many things: first of all, that it’s not clear which of the many bouncy cut-scenes that opens the game is the “opening”, because I reckon if you’re going to get Ryuichi Sakamoto to do a track for your conceptually bland action-adventure videogame, you’d probably want to make it the opening. There’s a scene narrated by an old man with a semi-hateful, mouthful-of-gravel voice, there’s a scene where the elemental spirits from the earlier “Mana” games float and bob around and talk to each other in portentous tones and helium voices about the big events that are probably happening soon, and there’s a scene where a boy and a girl frolic in a field. There’s a scene with credits, too, and the credits are in English, and they say “Opening theme by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Music by Kenji Ito”. Does that mean that the music that’s playing at that scene is the “opening theme”? Well, some games list the performer / composer of the “ending theme” in the opening credits, don’t they? It’s puzzling, after a while.
The composer of the rest of the music in this game, a Mr. Kenji Ito, has been aspiring the Ryuichi Sakamoto’s virtuoso for years, along with other bright game composers, such as Yasunori Mitsuda. What my ears told me when I first played this game was somewhat profound: Kenji Ito is able to surround a single track by Ryuichi Sakamoto and render it invisible. For years, those in the know have understood that Kenji Ito knows what the hell he’s doing — he’s perhaps the top of the top class of Japanese game composers, able to give background music for a Generic Snow Village in, say, Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song the produced roundness and fullness of a hit pop number. He’s not just a “game music composer” — he’s a musician. Conversely, one could argue that Ryuichi Sakamoto has been making Japanese RPG soundtrack music since before videogames ever existed.
The most interesting thing about Sakamoto’s presence in this game at all is that it represents a rare, shining beam of artistic conscience from Square-Enix, who has recently been content to put Mickey Mouse in a black robe and have him murder monsters with a giant key. For Final Fantasy XII, Square had the kind of sneering arrogance to assume that they could make a star out of whoever they let sing the theme song, hence the selection of limp-voiced big-haired piano-banging she-geek Angela Aki. This was evidence that Square had pride in Final Fantasy XII as a game — either that, or they were over-budget, and wanted to hire someone who wasn’t expensive. For Kingdom Hearts, they’ve been hiring hot young pop-star Hikaru Utada, whose English lyrics make me wish I owned a pistol. Why put a world-class, historically important, undeniably “Japanese” super-man like Ryuichi Sakamoto to work on Seiken Densetsu 4? To draw attention to the game, of course. Seiken Densetsu — or, “The Mana Series” is as dead as it is alive; it’s the purgatory of Japanese RPGs. The second one — released in America as “Secret of Mana“, was awesome because you could play it with two friends. The third-one was paper-thin and beloved. The numerous recent spin-offs (including an obnoxiously thin DS outing) have taken the series apart and given players only a shard of what they might have been able to love in a previous installment.
None of the game itself is as illustrious as the career of Mr. Sakamoto, though the physics engine is quite nice. You play the game as a big-haired boy wearing too many garments. You can fight enemies with a sword, a whip, or a slingshot. There’s a weird net-like feeling of physics drifting down on top of the whole package — you can whap objects with your sword, and if you aim them right, they’ll smack into and kill enemies. There might be a stack of objects — hit it with your sword and watch it jiggle. It’ll never jiggle the same way twice. Grab a rock with the whip and throw it; watch stuff break. Hit something with a slingshot, and it moves. The physics are finely tuned, though in the most bizarre little way. It feels like everything’s totally random, even when it’s most obviously not. Most applause-worthy is the sheer number of physics objects. They’re seriously all over the place — Square had already licensed the Havok Physics Engine, so god damn it, they were going to use it as much as possible.
Part of me wants to sigh and/or groan at this game for being linear and kind of boring. There’s a cut-scene involving cartoon-headed characters that are supposed to evoke nostalgic yiffing, and though I loved Secret of Mana like any other man who was once a boy, I do not yiff; then there’s a title card, and then you’re in a dungeon. Progress through the dungeon, whomping physics objects, knocking over enemies, picking up millions of little colored baubles and being congratulated via quick onscreen messages whenever your maximum hit points or some other statistic raise by some small integer. Eventually you’ll reach a locked door; kill the right enemy to get the key, open the door, continue romping through the dungeon. The dungeon ends with another snore-tastic cut-scene in which characters yip and/or weep, and then there’s another dungeon, which you start with your levels reset to zero. It’s all very linear and kind of boring in the context of real-world joy (candlelit sex, et cetera), though at least it’s honest about itself: it’s a dungeon-blaster. It’s an action videogame. It’s colorful, quick, kinetic, bursty, and poppy. It’s not great, and it doesn’t solve the mystery of nuclear fusion or find my missing guitar pick or anything, though it’s still a nice, cute little game that sometimes has some neat little spikes of challenge.
Many fans were outraged or, at the least, disappointed to hear that this game would be just one-player, and that it would apparently just be a stage-based action-adventure thinking-man’s beat-em-down. Says a “customer preview” on Gamestop.com’s list page for Dawn of Mana: “I for one would rather they stick to the traditional 2D graphics for this one.” Another reader calls the series — up until this bastardizing installment, of course — “near-perfection”. This is kind of a shame. This is evidence that, more dangerous than narcotics or alcohol is our children’s tendency to not understand what they really want. I say, if you want 2D graphics, play the original Secret of Mana again. Or play Children of Mana for DS. With a couple of friends on Wi-Fi, it’s not so terrible, and it has some sparkling Kenji Ito music.
Dawn of Mana is something new, as weird as that is for Square (unless you liked and/or remember Threads of Fate), and it mostly works. It’s the physics engine that nails it in. Though it acts weird sometimes, it rarely stops being fascinating. It’s hard to believe that Square would put such a rock-solid, crunchy core into a game that they were convinced could have been nothing at all and still sold thousands of copies to “devoted series fans”. It’s nice to see the effort, though it’s weird that they give the physics objects a name: they call them “MONO” — in all English letters, like that. (“MONO” is Japanese for “object”.) This is really weird and jarring when the first couple help windows describe how to use the physics objects to your advantage. Why give them a name?
Maybe it was because, since the Final Fantasy titles all became multi-hojillion-sellers, the producers at Square have required all RPGs to have an in-game “system” with an arbitrary name — the “Active Time Battle System” or “Active Dimension Battle System”, for example. If that’s why they called the physics objects “MONO”, then that’s kind of a hilarious little dodge, admirable and cute as some weird Engrish spoken by a shop-keeper in a barely-known 8-bit game translated by a team of two Japanese girls and four dictionaries.
Going back to the Gamestop page — sorry, I have to do this — the first three of four bullet points describing this game are as follows:
“Experience the beloved world of Mana in a fully 3D environment for the first time.
Explore sweeping plains and mountains that stretch as far as the eye can see, brought vividly to life by the detailed visuals that fans have come to expect from the Mana series.
*Experience an interactive world that encourages players to “touch†the world of Mana.“
Aren’t these three all describing the same hecking thing? Why not, I don’t know, encourage the kids who learned to read from online videogame retailers to hunt down (read: bittorrent) some culture by listing that the game “Features a theme song by virtuoso composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the father of new age and electronic music!” or even try to make the game sound fun, by saying that it “Features a new, detailed physics engine for countless battle possibilities”? Or is that what they’re talking about with a weird line about “‘Touch’ the World of Mana”?
So what we have here, ultimately, is a poppy, cute game with terrific music that can be listened to on its own without shame (if you, like me, are the type of person to ever have those Ryuichi Sakamoto Mood days), a drippingly schlocky story about people with too much hair who manage to wear entire wardrobes, set in a series that Square expects people to love because earlier entries in the series were pretty fun for gamers who managed to actually have friends when Nirvana was still the coolest band in the world. Square expected this game to sell by name alone, which was slightly weird behavior, seeing as the previous “World of Mana” game, Children of Mana for DS, didn’t sell at all. A funny story is that Square apparently under-shipped Final Fantasy III for DS because Children of Mana had sold less than half a million copies, proving to them that the DS was just a fad for the “non-gamers”. And then Final Fantasy III sold through half a million. This should have proved to Square that a game will sell if it is good enough to get people talking, though instead, it seems to have proved that games will sell if they have numbers in their titles. As a result, Seiken Densetsu 4 is now available at most Japanese game specialty shops for around $20 new. Which is to say, if the number in the title is what interests you in Seiken Densetsu 4: Dawn of Mana, you’ll probably enjoy it less than people who are just looking to have a good time with pseudo-real object physics.
★★☆☆
“AT TIMES ADMIRABLE AND CUTE AS SOME WEIRD ENGRISH SPOKEN BY A SHOP-KEEPER IN A BARELY-KNOWN 8-BIT GAME TRANSLATED BY A TEAM OF TWO JAPANESE GIRLS AND FOUR DICTIONARIES.”
There’s a track by Ryuichi Sakamoto in Seiken Densetsu 4 (aka Dawn of Mana) — the back of the box says so — life-long listener though I am, it took me Actual Internet Research to figure out which track that was. This says many things: first of all, that it’s not clear which of the many bouncy cut-scenes that opens the game is the “opening”, because I reckon if you’re going to get Ryuichi Sakamoto to do a track for your conceptually bland action-adventure videogame, you’d probably want to make it the opening. There’s a scene narrated by an old man with a semi-hateful, mouthful-of-gravel voice, there’s a scene where the elemental spirits from the earlier “Mana” games float and bob around and talk to each other in portentous tones and helium voices about the big events that are probably happening soon, and there’s a scene where a boy and a girl frolic in a field. There’s a scene with credits, too, and the credits are in English, and they say “Opening theme by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Music by Kenji Ito”. Does that mean that the music that’s playing at that scene is the “opening theme”? Well, some games list the performer / composer of the “ending theme” in the opening credits, don’t they? It’s puzzling, after a while.
The composer of the rest of the music in this game, a Mr. Kenji Ito, has been aspiring the Ryuichi Sakamoto’s virtuoso for years, along with other bright game composers, such as Yasunori Mitsuda. What my ears told me when I first played this game was somewhat profound: Kenji Ito is able to surround a single track by Ryuichi Sakamoto and render it invisible. For years, those in the know have understood that Kenji Ito knows what the hell he’s doing — he’s perhaps the top of the top class of Japanese game composers, able to give background music for a Generic Snow Village in, say, Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song the produced roundness and fullness of a hit pop number. He’s not just a “game music composer” — he’s a musician. Conversely, one could argue that Ryuichi Sakamoto has been making Japanese RPG soundtrack music since before videogames ever existed.
The most interesting thing about Sakamoto’s presence in this game at all is that it represents a rare, shining beam of artistic conscience from Square-Enix, who has recently been content to put Mickey Mouse in a black robe and have him murder monsters with a giant key. For Final Fantasy XII, Square had the kind of sneering arrogance to assume that they could make a star out of whoever they let sing the theme song, hence the selection of limp-voiced big-haired piano-banging she-geek Angela Aki. This was evidence that Square had pride in Final Fantasy XII as a game — either that, or they were over-budget, and wanted to hire someone who wasn’t expensive. For Kingdom Hearts, they’ve been hiring hot young pop-star Hikaru Utada, whose English lyrics make me wish I owned a pistol. Why put a world-class, historically important, undeniably “Japanese” super-man like Ryuichi Sakamoto to work on Seiken Densetsu 4? To draw attention to the game, of course. Seiken Densetsu — or, “The Mana Series” is as dead as it is alive; it’s the purgatory of Japanese RPGs. The second one — released in America as “Secret of Mana“, was awesome because you could play it with two friends. The third-one was paper-thin and beloved. The numerous recent spin-offs (including an obnoxiously thin DS outing) have taken the series apart and given players only a shard of what they might have been able to love in a previous installment.
None of the game itself is as illustrious as the career of Mr. Sakamoto, though the physics engine is quite nice. You play the game as a big-haired boy wearing too many garments. You can fight enemies with a sword, a whip, or a slingshot. There’s a weird net-like feeling of physics drifting down on top of the whole package — you can whap objects with your sword, and if you aim them right, they’ll smack into and kill enemies. There might be a stack of objects — hit it with your sword and watch it jiggle. It’ll never jiggle the same way twice. Grab a rock with the whip and throw it; watch stuff break. Hit something with a slingshot, and it moves. The physics are finely tuned, though in the most bizarre little way. It feels like everything’s totally random, even when it’s most obviously not. Most applause-worthy is the sheer number of physics objects. They’re seriously all over the place — Square had already licensed the Havok Physics Engine, so god damn it, they were going to use it as much as possible.
Part of me wants to sigh and/or groan at this game for being linear and kind of boring. There’s a cut-scene involving cartoon-headed characters that are supposed to evoke nostalgic yiffing, and though I loved Secret of Mana like any other man who was once a boy, I do not yiff; then there’s a title card, and then you’re in a dungeon. Progress through the dungeon, whomping physics objects, knocking over enemies, picking up millions of little colored baubles and being congratulated via quick onscreen messages whenever your maximum hit points or some other statistic raise by some small integer. Eventually you’ll reach a locked door; kill the right enemy to get the key, open the door, continue romping through the dungeon. The dungeon ends with another snore-tastic cut-scene in which characters yip and/or weep, and then there’s another dungeon, which you start with your levels reset to zero. It’s all very linear and kind of boring in the context of real-world joy (candlelit sex, et cetera), though at least it’s honest about itself: it’s a dungeon-blaster. It’s an action videogame. It’s colorful, quick, kinetic, bursty, and poppy. It’s not great, and it doesn’t solve the mystery of nuclear fusion or find my missing guitar pick or anything, though it’s still a nice, cute little game that sometimes has some neat little spikes of challenge.
Many fans were outraged or, at the least, disappointed to hear that this game would be just one-player, and that it would apparently just be a stage-based action-adventure thinking-man’s beat-em-down. Says a “customer preview” on Gamestop.com’s list page for Dawn of Mana: “I for one would rather they stick to the traditional 2D graphics for this one.” Another reader calls the series — up until this bastardizing installment, of course — “near-perfection”. This is kind of a shame. This is evidence that, more dangerous than narcotics or alcohol is our children’s tendency to not understand what they really want. I say, if you want 2D graphics, play the original Secret of Mana again. Or play Children of Mana for DS. With a couple of friends on Wi-Fi, it’s not so terrible, and it has some sparkling Kenji Ito music.
Dawn of Mana is something new, as weird as that is for Square (unless you liked and/or remember Threads of Fate), and it mostly works. It’s the physics engine that nails it in. Though it acts weird sometimes, it rarely stops being fascinating. It’s hard to believe that Square would put such a rock-solid, crunchy core into a game that they were convinced could have been nothing at all and still sold thousands of copies to “devoted series fans”. It’s nice to see the effort, though it’s weird that they give the physics objects a name: they call them “MONO” — in all English letters, like that. (“MONO” is Japanese for “object”.) This is really weird and jarring when the first couple help windows describe how to use the physics objects to your advantage. Why give them a name?
Maybe it was because, since the Final Fantasy titles all became multi-hojillion-sellers, the producers at Square have required all RPGs to have an in-game “system” with an arbitrary name — the “Active Time Battle System” or “Active Dimension Battle System”, for example. If that’s why they called the physics objects “MONO”, then that’s kind of a hilarious little dodge, admirable and cute as some weird Engrish spoken by a shop-keeper in a barely-known 8-bit game translated by a team of two Japanese girls and four dictionaries.
Going back to the Gamestop page — sorry, I have to do this — the first three of four bullet points describing this game are as follows:
“Experience the beloved world of Mana in a fully 3D environment for the first time.
Explore sweeping plains and mountains that stretch as far as the eye can see, brought vividly to life by the detailed visuals that fans have come to expect from the Mana series.
*Experience an interactive world that encourages players to “touch†the world of Mana.“
Aren’t these three all describing the same hecking thing? Why not, I don’t know, encourage the kids who learned to read from online videogame retailers to hunt down (read: bittorrent) some culture by listing that the game “Features a theme song by virtuoso composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the father of new age and electronic music!” or even try to make the game sound fun, by saying that it “Features a new, detailed physics engine for countless battle possibilities”? Or is that what they’re talking about with a weird line about “‘Touch’ the World of Mana”?
So what we have here, ultimately, is a poppy, cute game with terrific music that can be listened to on its own without shame (if you, like me, are the type of person to ever have those Ryuichi Sakamoto Mood days), a drippingly schlocky story about people with too much hair who manage to wear entire wardrobes, set in a series that Square expects people to love because earlier entries in the series were pretty fun for gamers who managed to actually have friends when Nirvana was still the coolest band in the world. Square expected this game to sell by name alone, which was slightly weird behavior, seeing as the previous “World of Mana” game, Children of Mana for DS, didn’t sell at all. A funny story is that Square apparently under-shipped Final Fantasy III for DS because Children of Mana had sold less than half a million copies, proving to them that the DS was just a fad for the “non-gamers”. And then Final Fantasy III sold through half a million. This should have proved to Square that a game will sell if it is good enough to get people talking, though instead, it seems to have proved that games will sell if they have numbers in their titles. As a result, Seiken Densetsu 4 is now available at most Japanese game specialty shops for around $20 new. Which is to say, if the number in the title is what interests you in Seiken Densetsu 4: Dawn of Mana, you’ll probably enjoy it less than people who are just looking to have a good time with pseudo-real object physics.
1989
text by Thom Moyles
★☆☆☆
“NOT INSULTING, IT'S JUST DUMB.”
When Sega Classics came out, there was a hue and cry about how horrible the remake of Golden Axe was, about how it was a desecration of the original game, how an all-time classic had been destroyed, etc. This is funny because it’s actually a faithful recreation of the original. It’s just uglier (okay, far uglier). That the game was now rendered in blocky 3D should have been enough to pull the wool from everybody’s eyes and reveal that really, Golden Axe is a terrible game. Only nobody could take the shock of this revelation and instead pretended that it was this new version of Golden Axe that was awful, that their memory of the original was actually as great as it seemed when they wandered up to the towering arcade cabinet and gasped at the gigantic sprites and impressive visual effects, that when they finally built up the courage to put their popsicle-sticky hands on the buttons and put in quarter after quarter, they had been experiencing gaming at its finest. People will believe just about anything to let themselves think that they’ve never been fooled.
You know, I have some fond memories of reading Archie comics in the mountain sun while on vacation with my parents. This doesn’t mean, were I to go back to the yellowed and brittled comics still stuck in an outhouse somewhere north of Yosemite, that I’m somehow obligated to argue that they’re actually any good. I’m older now and besides a brief nostalgic burst when I first see something that rises to the surface of my memory from decades in the murk, I can’t ignore the often-sloppy penmanship, the banal plots or the insipid jokes. Likewise, when I see Golden Axe, I’ll put in a quarter, remember playing it on a boardwalk with a kid twice my age and doing better than him and I still won’t be able to stop thinking about how slow your character moves, how cheap some of the enemies are and how, if you really want to get to the end of the game, all you’re going to need is what would have been a fairly flush bankroll for a 10-year-old in the 1980s (or just a lot of patience, if you’re lucky enough to be near one of those second-run arcades that charges a flat fee and sticks all the old machines in the back on free play).
Even though I have pleasant memories of Golden Axe, they’re also pretty damning, in that I can vividly remember seeing the ending, which was the first time that I’d ever seen an ending for an arcade game. What I can’t remember is whether I beat the game or whether I was just watching some other kid blow his wad to the tune of 4 dollars in change. Now, I also remember the fight against Death Adder, so it’s most likely that I did in fact beat the game myself, especially since I remember putting in about two bucks worth of quarters during that fight because God Dammit Mabel, not today, not today! That I can’t remember whether I did so or not personally is because playing Golden Axe was not a matter of skill, it was a matter of attrition aimed at your wallet. It was a movie, only if the usher kept jabbing you every minute or so for your spare change and if you didn’t give it to him, they drew the curtains.
There were two times in my life where I was crushed by the difference between a console port and the arcade original. The first, Cyberball for the Genesis, redeemed itself after my initial shock because the developers realized that with the change from the quarter-pushing glitz and emphasis on multi-player of the arcade to the ugly sprites, tinny sound and unilimited-tries context of the family den, that the game itself had to change to match the context. So the game slowed down, became more strategic and the money you used to upgrade your team was now based on scoring and gaining yards, rather than pushing in quarters. Golden Axe, on the other hand, was the same game, just uglier. In the same way that the Cyberball port disguised the shallowness of the original, Golden Axe on the Genesis set the shortcomings of the underlying design in sharp relief.
Without those huge colorful sprites, the game was fully revealed as the quarter-sucker that it was a decade before the Sega Classics remake caused a massive Selective Memory Event. Without the draw of seeing what would come next (okay, maybe there was some draw in seeing how spectacularly disa ppointing the end result would be when compared to the original arcade version), there wasn’t much point to slowly walking right and taking turns trading glacial blows with other brown-ish looking sprites until you eventually got bored and put in something worthwhile, in much the same way that once you’d been all the way through the arcade version, there wasn’t any point in doing so again.
Now, don’t let this make you think that I hate Golden Axe. Golden Axe isn’t insulting, it’s just dumb. It’s a relic of older days worn smooth by adoring hands. To those of you who still cherish your sepia-toned memories of Golden Axe, I urge you to hang on to them for dear life and remember, you can’t go back again.
★☆☆☆
“NOT INSULTING, IT'S JUST DUMB.”
When Sega Classics came out, there was a hue and cry about how horrible the remake of Golden Axe was, about how it was a desecration of the original game, how an all-time classic had been destroyed, etc. This is funny because it’s actually a faithful recreation of the original. It’s just uglier (okay, far uglier). That the game was now rendered in blocky 3D should have been enough to pull the wool from everybody’s eyes and reveal that really, Golden Axe is a terrible game. Only nobody could take the shock of this revelation and instead pretended that it was this new version of Golden Axe that was awful, that their memory of the original was actually as great as it seemed when they wandered up to the towering arcade cabinet and gasped at the gigantic sprites and impressive visual effects, that when they finally built up the courage to put their popsicle-sticky hands on the buttons and put in quarter after quarter, they had been experiencing gaming at its finest. People will believe just about anything to let themselves think that they’ve never been fooled.
You know, I have some fond memories of reading Archie comics in the mountain sun while on vacation with my parents. This doesn’t mean, were I to go back to the yellowed and brittled comics still stuck in an outhouse somewhere north of Yosemite, that I’m somehow obligated to argue that they’re actually any good. I’m older now and besides a brief nostalgic burst when I first see something that rises to the surface of my memory from decades in the murk, I can’t ignore the often-sloppy penmanship, the banal plots or the insipid jokes. Likewise, when I see Golden Axe, I’ll put in a quarter, remember playing it on a boardwalk with a kid twice my age and doing better than him and I still won’t be able to stop thinking about how slow your character moves, how cheap some of the enemies are and how, if you really want to get to the end of the game, all you’re going to need is what would have been a fairly flush bankroll for a 10-year-old in the 1980s (or just a lot of patience, if you’re lucky enough to be near one of those second-run arcades that charges a flat fee and sticks all the old machines in the back on free play).
Even though I have pleasant memories of Golden Axe, they’re also pretty damning, in that I can vividly remember seeing the ending, which was the first time that I’d ever seen an ending for an arcade game. What I can’t remember is whether I beat the game or whether I was just watching some other kid blow his wad to the tune of 4 dollars in change. Now, I also remember the fight against Death Adder, so it’s most likely that I did in fact beat the game myself, especially since I remember putting in about two bucks worth of quarters during that fight because God Dammit Mabel, not today, not today! That I can’t remember whether I did so or not personally is because playing Golden Axe was not a matter of skill, it was a matter of attrition aimed at your wallet. It was a movie, only if the usher kept jabbing you every minute or so for your spare change and if you didn’t give it to him, they drew the curtains.
There were two times in my life where I was crushed by the difference between a console port and the arcade original. The first, Cyberball for the Genesis, redeemed itself after my initial shock because the developers realized that with the change from the quarter-pushing glitz and emphasis on multi-player of the arcade to the ugly sprites, tinny sound and unilimited-tries context of the family den, that the game itself had to change to match the context. So the game slowed down, became more strategic and the money you used to upgrade your team was now based on scoring and gaining yards, rather than pushing in quarters. Golden Axe, on the other hand, was the same game, just uglier. In the same way that the Cyberball port disguised the shallowness of the original, Golden Axe on the Genesis set the shortcomings of the underlying design in sharp relief.
Without those huge colorful sprites, the game was fully revealed as the quarter-sucker that it was a decade before the Sega Classics remake caused a massive Selective Memory Event. Without the draw of seeing what would come next (okay, maybe there was some draw in seeing how spectacularly disa ppointing the end result would be when compared to the original arcade version), there wasn’t much point to slowly walking right and taking turns trading glacial blows with other brown-ish looking sprites until you eventually got bored and put in something worthwhile, in much the same way that once you’d been all the way through the arcade version, there wasn’t any point in doing so again.
Now, don’t let this make you think that I hate Golden Axe. Golden Axe isn’t insulting, it’s just dumb. It’s a relic of older days worn smooth by adoring hands. To those of you who still cherish your sepia-toned memories of Golden Axe, I urge you to hang on to them for dear life and remember, you can’t go back again.
text by Andrew Toups
★★★☆
“A HELL OF A LOT BETTER THAN I REMEMBER.”
Well, let me clarify. Like every tucked-in-Aerosmith-t-shirt-wearing youth in the US in 1991, I owned a Super NES, and I begged my parents to buy me the new Zelda game, which I consumed like an 8-year-old consumes Pixy Stix (which is to say: effortlessly, joyously, in a single moment and without a second thought). I completed the game countless times, memorized all the puzzles, and even recorded the ending theme on a tape recorder for part of an imaginary videogame music radio show I made with some of my friends (Jake Millet, if you’re out there reading this: hi! I hope you’re a successful comic book illustrator by now!) From those days, I still remember the game as being great.
But soon after that, the N64 appeared, and a new Zelda with it, which I endured like a 15-year-old endures watching scrambled late-night cable porn (which is to say: eagerly, with great frustration, and with a nagging sense of guilt, ultimately culminating with disappointment). Following this, I largely lost interest in videogames, as the only games which could satisfy my then pulsing adolescent urges (read: Final Fantasy vii/viii) were exclusive to another console which my parents could not be convinced to purchase. In this time I did not play many videogames, but when I did, I was reliving the great games of my youth: Final Fantasy II (as I knew it back then), Chrono Trigger, Soul Blazer, and, of course, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. And it was at this period in my life when I realized that many of these games were meant to be consumed like an ear of corn: the first time around it’s delicious; the second time around, you’re just scraping for those last few kernels.
A Link to the Past is considerably more contrived than either of its predecessors. The original Legend of Zelda (still one of my all-time favorites) was ultimately about exploration and survival. Yes, you could buy items, upgrade abilities, and occasionally you were asked to solve rudimentary puzzles to proceed. Yet even in the dungeons, the challenge was not so much figuring how to get out of the room you were stuck in (hi Twilight Princess!), but merely making sense of where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there, and then actually doing it without dying. The overworld was laid out to encourage an order of playing the dungeons without forcing one. The idea of gaining new abilities which then “unlocked” other areas of the gameworld did not exist so concretely in the minds of game developers in that era.
The Legend of Zelda, like many early NES games, is not very fair. You are often thrown into situations that, thanks to unpolished controls, would inevitably rob you of a few hearts, regardless of your valiance. And so it is: once you know the route, you must buckle down, maybe buy a potion, and hope to survive the gauntlet between you and that precious, glowing triangle hiding in the dungeon’s bowels. Those desperate moments, lost deep within the maze, with nothing but your sword, boomerang, and wits, down to your last heart, are still among the most cathartic found in any videogame made since.
Link to the Past is a game of revision. Unlike Zelda II, it largely retains the framework of first game. It polishes what needs polishing, and expands upon what needs expanding upon. The controls are smooth and the combat is fair. Instead of Zelda‘s barren, abandoned overworld, the Hyrule of Link to the Past is a place where people live and things happen. There is a village, and there are country homes, and occasional scenes of dialogue. In the place of Zelda‘s winding, war-of-attrition dungeons are dungeons which are self-consciously puzzles. There is a much wider variety of switches, keys, and trap doors; often the layout of the dungeon is itself a puzzle.
These are the things that I pondered when other people my age were busy experimenting with booze and loose women. The problem was, my 17 year old self reasoned, once you knew how to kill each enemy, and once you know the secret to each dungeon, there’s no thrill left. If the first playthrough is rote memorization, subsequent ones are rote repetition. Why bother?
I decided to start a band, myself.
Well, now, fifteen years after the game’s release, seven after the birth of my ill-fated music career, and (perhaps more importantly), three major Zelda installments later, I play the game with a bit more perspective. My 17-year-old self’s criticisms are perfectly valid, but they overlook some important virtues.
For one, this is a dramatic game. While The Legend of Zelda begins with a man warning you to use a sword or face your death, Link to the Past opens with a lengthy, atmospheric sequence in which you hear a captured princess speak to you in your dreams, witness the death your uncle, and sneak your way into a well-guarded castle as rain falls from the midnight sky; by the time this sequence is over, you will have valiantly fought through those guards, rescued the princess, and led to her to safety, only to find yourself faced with the task of clearing your name for being her kidnapper. Thanks, however, to Dark Forces At Work, this can never be, and only by unraveling and fulfilling a Great Legend can things be set right.
On the one hand, yes this is obnoxious. Shouldn’t playing the game be motivation unto itself? After all, unless you actually had the patience to wait for the less-than-inspirational introductory scrolling text on the title screen, the original Zelda doesn’t even tell you where you are or what you are doing, and yet we still found it within ourselves to face that game’s challenges. On the other hand, though, the way Link to the Past drops you in the middle of a compelling dramatic situation is infinitely preferable to the way the subsequent games have started. Following the mysterious telepathic commands of a damsel in distress is indescribably more compelling than farting around a village for two hours wondering whose arbitrary whims you’ll have to satisfy just to progress the plot. That Link to the Past manages to maintain this kind of motivation throughout the game is simply because its inhabitants rarely, if ever, assume you have nothing better to do than perform an inane favor for them. Yes, heart containers are broken into pieces here, but at least they are tucked away in caved-in caverns and forgotten forest groves, where they belong.
While the game is indeed easy, it’s not that easy. There’s a lot of nuance and trickiness to killing the enemies. This is important: if you stop paying close attention, you will die. Thanks to fairies, bottles, and a bug catching net, you are granted a bit more leeway. But successful combat is thankfully not solely a matter of holding Z and bashing A. In the game’s lengthier, more convoluted dungeons, those few slip ups you occasionally make start to add up.
Here’s another hidden virtue cast into sharp relief by the Church of Latter Day Zelda: the game’s overworld design is really, really great. I understand, of course, that Ocarina of Time‘s wide open fields are perhaps closer to Miyamoto’s original vision than the screen-by-screen setpieces of the original games. But honestly: once you get past the “whoa” factor of seeing Hyrule Field for the first time, what, really, do you have? A big empty space that’s confusing to navigate without giving you anything to sink your teeth into in the meantime. The screen by screen layout of the first game is more mechanical, yet it’s also more memorable; and then Link to the Past outdoes even it by not only having screens which are, in fact, larger than the screen, but by having two alternate versions of the overworld with subtle (but often crucial) differences.
The layout of Link to the Past‘s Hyrule is open yet populated with enough landscape and locales to keep things interesting. Between any two points you have a variety of routes, divided by river, lake, forest, and rock structures; as you gain equipment, it generally only means new paths are opened up instead of new areas. Exploring the world, then, is not determined by how much the designer wants to you see at that given time, but instead by how motivated you are to find it. As you progress, new abilities subtly redefine the layout. The light/dark world mechanic, in addition to injecting the game with some much-needed atmosphere (as well as a heckin’ badass musical theme), deepens your methods of exploration. It’s possible to switch from dark world to light at will, and if you’re observant enough, you’ll take advantage of that trick to find even more shortcuts and hidden places.
All the little things this game does well make it seem so elegant compared to the beast the series has become since then. While it’s more talkative and assertive than the original classic, it’s ultimately an understated game. What’s more, the basic compelling elements are still intact: you’ve still got those white-knuckle moments when you’re down to your last few hits, and every encounter is a matter of life and death, and if only you could survive a few more screens you might find a fairy or at least a few hearts; they just come a little later in the game. You’ve still got that sense of wonder and exploration, and the satisfying feeling of finding a new shortcut or realizing the ways different areas connect; they’re just stretched over a greater period of time. What the game loses in intensity it gains in subtlety, all while maintaining the essential flavor of the original. While Link to the Past is still low on my own personal ranked list of Zelda games (I still prefer the rawness of the NES original, the gloomy atmosphere of the sequel, and the dreamlike goofiness of the Gameboy iteration), it succeeds in being epic in scope without ever ceasing to be compelling moment-to-moment. In light of where the series has gone since, this achievement is more praise-worthy than ever.
★★★☆
“A HELL OF A LOT BETTER THAN I REMEMBER.”
Well, let me clarify. Like every tucked-in-Aerosmith-t-shirt-wearing youth in the US in 1991, I owned a Super NES, and I begged my parents to buy me the new Zelda game, which I consumed like an 8-year-old consumes Pixy Stix (which is to say: effortlessly, joyously, in a single moment and without a second thought). I completed the game countless times, memorized all the puzzles, and even recorded the ending theme on a tape recorder for part of an imaginary videogame music radio show I made with some of my friends (Jake Millet, if you’re out there reading this: hi! I hope you’re a successful comic book illustrator by now!) From those days, I still remember the game as being great.
But soon after that, the N64 appeared, and a new Zelda with it, which I endured like a 15-year-old endures watching scrambled late-night cable porn (which is to say: eagerly, with great frustration, and with a nagging sense of guilt, ultimately culminating with disappointment). Following this, I largely lost interest in videogames, as the only games which could satisfy my then pulsing adolescent urges (read: Final Fantasy vii/viii) were exclusive to another console which my parents could not be convinced to purchase. In this time I did not play many videogames, but when I did, I was reliving the great games of my youth: Final Fantasy II (as I knew it back then), Chrono Trigger, Soul Blazer, and, of course, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. And it was at this period in my life when I realized that many of these games were meant to be consumed like an ear of corn: the first time around it’s delicious; the second time around, you’re just scraping for those last few kernels.
A Link to the Past is considerably more contrived than either of its predecessors. The original Legend of Zelda (still one of my all-time favorites) was ultimately about exploration and survival. Yes, you could buy items, upgrade abilities, and occasionally you were asked to solve rudimentary puzzles to proceed. Yet even in the dungeons, the challenge was not so much figuring how to get out of the room you were stuck in (hi Twilight Princess!), but merely making sense of where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there, and then actually doing it without dying. The overworld was laid out to encourage an order of playing the dungeons without forcing one. The idea of gaining new abilities which then “unlocked” other areas of the gameworld did not exist so concretely in the minds of game developers in that era.
The Legend of Zelda, like many early NES games, is not very fair. You are often thrown into situations that, thanks to unpolished controls, would inevitably rob you of a few hearts, regardless of your valiance. And so it is: once you know the route, you must buckle down, maybe buy a potion, and hope to survive the gauntlet between you and that precious, glowing triangle hiding in the dungeon’s bowels. Those desperate moments, lost deep within the maze, with nothing but your sword, boomerang, and wits, down to your last heart, are still among the most cathartic found in any videogame made since.
Link to the Past is a game of revision. Unlike Zelda II, it largely retains the framework of first game. It polishes what needs polishing, and expands upon what needs expanding upon. The controls are smooth and the combat is fair. Instead of Zelda‘s barren, abandoned overworld, the Hyrule of Link to the Past is a place where people live and things happen. There is a village, and there are country homes, and occasional scenes of dialogue. In the place of Zelda‘s winding, war-of-attrition dungeons are dungeons which are self-consciously puzzles. There is a much wider variety of switches, keys, and trap doors; often the layout of the dungeon is itself a puzzle.
These are the things that I pondered when other people my age were busy experimenting with booze and loose women. The problem was, my 17 year old self reasoned, once you knew how to kill each enemy, and once you know the secret to each dungeon, there’s no thrill left. If the first playthrough is rote memorization, subsequent ones are rote repetition. Why bother?
I decided to start a band, myself.
Well, now, fifteen years after the game’s release, seven after the birth of my ill-fated music career, and (perhaps more importantly), three major Zelda installments later, I play the game with a bit more perspective. My 17-year-old self’s criticisms are perfectly valid, but they overlook some important virtues.
For one, this is a dramatic game. While The Legend of Zelda begins with a man warning you to use a sword or face your death, Link to the Past opens with a lengthy, atmospheric sequence in which you hear a captured princess speak to you in your dreams, witness the death your uncle, and sneak your way into a well-guarded castle as rain falls from the midnight sky; by the time this sequence is over, you will have valiantly fought through those guards, rescued the princess, and led to her to safety, only to find yourself faced with the task of clearing your name for being her kidnapper. Thanks, however, to Dark Forces At Work, this can never be, and only by unraveling and fulfilling a Great Legend can things be set right.
On the one hand, yes this is obnoxious. Shouldn’t playing the game be motivation unto itself? After all, unless you actually had the patience to wait for the less-than-inspirational introductory scrolling text on the title screen, the original Zelda doesn’t even tell you where you are or what you are doing, and yet we still found it within ourselves to face that game’s challenges. On the other hand, though, the way Link to the Past drops you in the middle of a compelling dramatic situation is infinitely preferable to the way the subsequent games have started. Following the mysterious telepathic commands of a damsel in distress is indescribably more compelling than farting around a village for two hours wondering whose arbitrary whims you’ll have to satisfy just to progress the plot. That Link to the Past manages to maintain this kind of motivation throughout the game is simply because its inhabitants rarely, if ever, assume you have nothing better to do than perform an inane favor for them. Yes, heart containers are broken into pieces here, but at least they are tucked away in caved-in caverns and forgotten forest groves, where they belong.
While the game is indeed easy, it’s not that easy. There’s a lot of nuance and trickiness to killing the enemies. This is important: if you stop paying close attention, you will die. Thanks to fairies, bottles, and a bug catching net, you are granted a bit more leeway. But successful combat is thankfully not solely a matter of holding Z and bashing A. In the game’s lengthier, more convoluted dungeons, those few slip ups you occasionally make start to add up.
Here’s another hidden virtue cast into sharp relief by the Church of Latter Day Zelda: the game’s overworld design is really, really great. I understand, of course, that Ocarina of Time‘s wide open fields are perhaps closer to Miyamoto’s original vision than the screen-by-screen setpieces of the original games. But honestly: once you get past the “whoa” factor of seeing Hyrule Field for the first time, what, really, do you have? A big empty space that’s confusing to navigate without giving you anything to sink your teeth into in the meantime. The screen by screen layout of the first game is more mechanical, yet it’s also more memorable; and then Link to the Past outdoes even it by not only having screens which are, in fact, larger than the screen, but by having two alternate versions of the overworld with subtle (but often crucial) differences.
The layout of Link to the Past‘s Hyrule is open yet populated with enough landscape and locales to keep things interesting. Between any two points you have a variety of routes, divided by river, lake, forest, and rock structures; as you gain equipment, it generally only means new paths are opened up instead of new areas. Exploring the world, then, is not determined by how much the designer wants to you see at that given time, but instead by how motivated you are to find it. As you progress, new abilities subtly redefine the layout. The light/dark world mechanic, in addition to injecting the game with some much-needed atmosphere (as well as a heckin’ badass musical theme), deepens your methods of exploration. It’s possible to switch from dark world to light at will, and if you’re observant enough, you’ll take advantage of that trick to find even more shortcuts and hidden places.
All the little things this game does well make it seem so elegant compared to the beast the series has become since then. While it’s more talkative and assertive than the original classic, it’s ultimately an understated game. What’s more, the basic compelling elements are still intact: you’ve still got those white-knuckle moments when you’re down to your last few hits, and every encounter is a matter of life and death, and if only you could survive a few more screens you might find a fairy or at least a few hearts; they just come a little later in the game. You’ve still got that sense of wonder and exploration, and the satisfying feeling of finding a new shortcut or realizing the ways different areas connect; they’re just stretched over a greater period of time. What the game loses in intensity it gains in subtlety, all while maintaining the essential flavor of the original. While Link to the Past is still low on my own personal ranked list of Zelda games (I still prefer the rawness of the NES original, the gloomy atmosphere of the sequel, and the dreamlike goofiness of the Gameboy iteration), it succeeds in being epic in scope without ever ceasing to be compelling moment-to-moment. In light of where the series has gone since, this achievement is more praise-worthy than ever.
2007
text by Bennett
★★★☆
“NOT A DRIVING GAME. THANK GOD.”
Genre is a tricky thing. In videogames, genre has a status which is unmatched in any other creative form. Every game review site divides the games by console and then by genre. We know that an RPG will sell best in Japan, and an FPS will do better in North America. Games are pitched and funded according to genre, and when the market is flush with games of a particular genre, it is perceived that there is a problem. When a console launches, it needs one game from each major genre.
The problem is that in videogames, genre is bullstuff. It can stop a good game from getting good reviews. It can even stop you from enjoying a good game. Burnout: Dominator is a game which suffers from the industry’s obsession with genre.
A number of people, including me, were disappointed when they played their second Zelda game. Imagine you played Ocarina of Time and then Twilight Princess. You would be thinking to yourself, ‘Wait, the plot is exactly the same. The moves are exactly the same. The equipment and locations are the same. This is the same game.’ A person who thinks this is a person who mistakes Zelda for an action adventure game. But Zelda is a puzzle game, and the puzzles do change from one Zelda game to the next – at least as much as they did between Bomberman and Bomberman II. The sword, the shield, the evil wizard and princess all make Zelda seem like it is related to Dragon Quest, but they are all completely irrelevant to the design, and to your enjoyment of the game.
Just like Zelda is filed under ‘Action Adventure’ at Gamespot, Burnout: Dominator is filed in the ‘Driving’ or ‘Racing’ section of every magazine, every website and every game store. It has cars, it has tracks, it has races, and it should be pretty obvious to everyone that it is a racing game. Only it isn’t.
Dominator lets you know that it isn’t a racing game in subtle ways. For example, in Dominator, as in every other Burnout game, if you are holding the d-pad towards the right when you slam into the outside edge of a right turn, you don’t crash and explode. Instead, your car slows down and gently bumps towards the correct direction. So long as you know whether the road is heading left or right, you are not penalized for missing the corners. Of course, you lose some time when this happens. But as in other Burnout games, the dramatic rubber-banding AI means that a loss of time is not actually a penalty. Very few of the events even record your time.
There is only one penalty for missing a turn. The penalty is this: your turbo-boost meter turns from blue to orange. As long as the meter stays blue, you can chain an unlimited number of boosts together. Drift uninterrupted around a corner, and the meter will stay blue. The second time you do this, you start to accrue double points. Then triple, then quadruple. The moment you screw up a corner, you lose your combo multiplier. This may sound familiar to you if you play games of a certain genre, though I’d guess that most buyers of Dominator have never done so.
The biggest hint as to what kind of game Dominator is comes from the titular gameplay mode. The ‘Dominator’ mode awards a score based mainly on how many turbo boosts you can chain together. The final, game-ending mission is itself a Dominator event which requires you to boost continuously for three laps to rack up the required score. If you break your boost chain even once during the three laps, you lose.
This is where Dominator differs from previous Burnout games. To win a race, no matter which track you are on and no matter which car you are driving, you must chain one boost into another. As long as you corner well and drive on the wrong side of the road, you can boost forever and your score multiplier will increase. Dominator has three separate mission types which essentially measure your ability to generate boost combos. It has two race modes where you always win if you continuously chain boosts. It has a single timed mode which requires you to score a number of boost combos, and finally it retains the ‘Road Rage’ mode which asks you to smash opposing cars. This last mode is the one aberration in a game which is otherwise a completely pure rhythm game.
Like Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Or like Dance Dance Revolution. The circuits are songs, and the corners are beats or notes in the melody. To fully appreciate this metaphor, of course, you will need to switch off the terrible ‘EA Traxx’ music while you play.
The genre trappings of Dominator sometimes detract from its rhythm-game purity. It offers a large number of cars, which handle slightly differently but ultimately turbo boost in the same exact way. I cleared every event but I can’t tell you what even one of the tracks was like. On the plus side, the PSP is a much better platform for a rhythm game than it is for a driving game. I played it from start to finish using the d-pad to steer, which worked beautifully since it didn’t matter if I got the correct racing line or not. The PSP is incapable of the motion blur effects which helped popularize the series on consoles, but that would only matter if it was a driving game.
Unfortunately, whenever Dominator is mistaken for a driving game, its strengths and its weaknesses are totally overlooked. Burnout: Dominator is a horrible driving game. Your racing line is irrelevant, you can’t lose the races and the cars and tracks are all identical. As a rhythm game, it is great, but the genre trappings often interfere with the design. If the next Burnout game ditches the cars, the tracks and the enemy cars, I’ll give it full marks.
As it is, it gets three quarters. In my book, that makes it by far the best game for the PSP.
★★★☆
“NOT A DRIVING GAME. THANK GOD.”
Genre is a tricky thing. In videogames, genre has a status which is unmatched in any other creative form. Every game review site divides the games by console and then by genre. We know that an RPG will sell best in Japan, and an FPS will do better in North America. Games are pitched and funded according to genre, and when the market is flush with games of a particular genre, it is perceived that there is a problem. When a console launches, it needs one game from each major genre.
The problem is that in videogames, genre is bullstuff. It can stop a good game from getting good reviews. It can even stop you from enjoying a good game. Burnout: Dominator is a game which suffers from the industry’s obsession with genre.
A number of people, including me, were disappointed when they played their second Zelda game. Imagine you played Ocarina of Time and then Twilight Princess. You would be thinking to yourself, ‘Wait, the plot is exactly the same. The moves are exactly the same. The equipment and locations are the same. This is the same game.’ A person who thinks this is a person who mistakes Zelda for an action adventure game. But Zelda is a puzzle game, and the puzzles do change from one Zelda game to the next – at least as much as they did between Bomberman and Bomberman II. The sword, the shield, the evil wizard and princess all make Zelda seem like it is related to Dragon Quest, but they are all completely irrelevant to the design, and to your enjoyment of the game.
Just like Zelda is filed under ‘Action Adventure’ at Gamespot, Burnout: Dominator is filed in the ‘Driving’ or ‘Racing’ section of every magazine, every website and every game store. It has cars, it has tracks, it has races, and it should be pretty obvious to everyone that it is a racing game. Only it isn’t.
Dominator lets you know that it isn’t a racing game in subtle ways. For example, in Dominator, as in every other Burnout game, if you are holding the d-pad towards the right when you slam into the outside edge of a right turn, you don’t crash and explode. Instead, your car slows down and gently bumps towards the correct direction. So long as you know whether the road is heading left or right, you are not penalized for missing the corners. Of course, you lose some time when this happens. But as in other Burnout games, the dramatic rubber-banding AI means that a loss of time is not actually a penalty. Very few of the events even record your time.
There is only one penalty for missing a turn. The penalty is this: your turbo-boost meter turns from blue to orange. As long as the meter stays blue, you can chain an unlimited number of boosts together. Drift uninterrupted around a corner, and the meter will stay blue. The second time you do this, you start to accrue double points. Then triple, then quadruple. The moment you screw up a corner, you lose your combo multiplier. This may sound familiar to you if you play games of a certain genre, though I’d guess that most buyers of Dominator have never done so.
The biggest hint as to what kind of game Dominator is comes from the titular gameplay mode. The ‘Dominator’ mode awards a score based mainly on how many turbo boosts you can chain together. The final, game-ending mission is itself a Dominator event which requires you to boost continuously for three laps to rack up the required score. If you break your boost chain even once during the three laps, you lose.
This is where Dominator differs from previous Burnout games. To win a race, no matter which track you are on and no matter which car you are driving, you must chain one boost into another. As long as you corner well and drive on the wrong side of the road, you can boost forever and your score multiplier will increase. Dominator has three separate mission types which essentially measure your ability to generate boost combos. It has two race modes where you always win if you continuously chain boosts. It has a single timed mode which requires you to score a number of boost combos, and finally it retains the ‘Road Rage’ mode which asks you to smash opposing cars. This last mode is the one aberration in a game which is otherwise a completely pure rhythm game.
Like Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Or like Dance Dance Revolution. The circuits are songs, and the corners are beats or notes in the melody. To fully appreciate this metaphor, of course, you will need to switch off the terrible ‘EA Traxx’ music while you play.
The genre trappings of Dominator sometimes detract from its rhythm-game purity. It offers a large number of cars, which handle slightly differently but ultimately turbo boost in the same exact way. I cleared every event but I can’t tell you what even one of the tracks was like. On the plus side, the PSP is a much better platform for a rhythm game than it is for a driving game. I played it from start to finish using the d-pad to steer, which worked beautifully since it didn’t matter if I got the correct racing line or not. The PSP is incapable of the motion blur effects which helped popularize the series on consoles, but that would only matter if it was a driving game.
Unfortunately, whenever Dominator is mistaken for a driving game, its strengths and its weaknesses are totally overlooked. Burnout: Dominator is a horrible driving game. Your racing line is irrelevant, you can’t lose the races and the cars and tracks are all identical. As a rhythm game, it is great, but the genre trappings often interfere with the design. If the next Burnout game ditches the cars, the tracks and the enemy cars, I’ll give it full marks.
As it is, it gets three quarters. In my book, that makes it by far the best game for the PSP.
2005
text by Thom Moyles
☆☆☆☆
“IS THE MOST WORTHWHILE PIECE OF SOFTWARE THAT YOU COULD PUT IN YOUR DS.”
Electroplankton is definitely my favorite piece of software for the DS, probably one of the best portable pieces of software I own and one of the most pleasing pieces of electronic entertainment that I’ve devoted my time towards. It’s a ballsy experiment that wants to be loved, a joyful piece of work that’s happy without making you want to throw up in your mouth (Mario (since the N64), I’m looking at you). Yet, I’m giving it zero stars (out of four). I’m doing this because Electroplankton isn’t a game. And heck, this is a site for game reviews.
Now, this is a little unfair. After all, I’m not going to follow this up with successive zero-star reviews of kanji dicitionaries or any of the other assorted titles for the DS that are clearly not games. That would be a pretty jerky move and would be like if we suddenly started giving zero-star reviews to motorcycles because hey, those aren’t games either. No, Electroplankton is a pretty unique case, in that while it’s not a game, it’s not clearly something else, since generally those other DS titles have a purpose, like trying to teach you Japanese characters or simulating a guitar. Electroplankton, in comparison, is enough like a game to confuse people. After all, there aren’t any explicit goals, which both eliminates it from being a purposeful piece of software like a kanji dictionary and hilariously enough, also from what we typically think of as a game.
Electroplankton‘s modules are based on the theory of “found music” or musique concrète, which basically boils down to “music can be what you find, rather than what you create”. These modules are set up so that a series of small interactions on the part of the user act as triggers for generating musical sequences. The interactions are simple enough that the user can figure out how to manipulate each module in a short period of time and vague enough that the user is never really composing in the traditional sense. They’re hitting things to see what happens and most of the time, you’ll eventually get something you like. The key to the success of Electroplankton in this area is that the modules are mostly very well-designed, allowing the user to generate a wide variety of pleasing tones without sounding like a 5-year-old smashing their hands on a piano.
A major part of musique concrète is the concept of play, which is why Electroplankton is such a confusing piece of software. The best way to put it seems to be that you don’t play Electroplankton, you play with it. The semantic assumption of the latter is that the act of playing is teleological, or to be less of a dick about it, that there’s an end to the means. The way that we understand how to play a game is to progress. It’s this lack of progression that separates Electroplankton from something like SimCity. Electroplankton is a pure sandbox in the sense that the entirety of the experience is to create something temporary, an aural equivalent of the Zen Sand Tray that’s supposed to help executives relax their balls. These things are commonly referred to as ‘toys’ and that’s a good enough term for what Electroplankton does, with the caveat that the usual reaction to ‘toy’ is to assume a lack of significance, which is indicative of a disturbing lack of imagination.
When Electroplankton was shown to a dementedly grinning E3 audience, it was presented by a DJ with a full set of rack-mounted equipment and accompanied on the big screen with quick cuts of gnarly graphics and effects, all while Reggie Fils-Aime gyrated and gurned on-stage. This was, of course, viciously &^#$#ed. If you’re going to make techno music, get a sampler and a synthesizer. Hell, the way things are going now, you’d probably just need the sampler. Using Electroplankton as part of your compositions would be a gimmick, a chiptune-esque trope that says “the most important thing about my music is not my music”. While the actual presentation was astonishingly dumb, I can’t really blame Nintendo for taking the easy way out. Wheeling out somebody on a bed who’s using a nice set of headphones, who just noodles around for 10 minutes before finding something that they find particularly pleasing and then maybe stretches their head back with their eyes closed, while this is nice, while this is a great example of how Electroplankton is the most worthwhile piece of software that you could put in your DS, this is not exactly something that’s going to set Reggie’s loins on fire. Better have Shiggy come out with a sword and shield then.
There is some pandering taking place. The plankton that are basically a collection of samples from Mario Bros. are a one-trick pony wearing a garish red cap and vomiting liquid cotton candy all over your Legend of Zelda bedsheets. In other words, it’s horribly boring and a little repugnant after you get over the novelty of it all. The 4-track recording plankton is also more of a grudging acknowledgement of the DS’s microphone than a good foundation for musical creation. In either of these cases, you’d be much better off getting an actual 4-track or making actual chiptunes than playing around with something that can’t give you the complete functionality of what it’s emulating without offering you anything special on its own.
This is not to say that there’s anything especially profound about Electroplankton. It’s an honest little piece of code that lets you make fun noises through tactile interactions. It succeeds at what it does because it was made by somebody who has a good idea of what sounds good and how people might want to generate sounds, not to mention an interface and graphical style that’s charming without being twee. It’s a success that’s blemished by the wondering and waffling over whether it’s a game or not. This is similar to the too-common message-board argument of whether games are “art” or what “art” is. Ultimately, it’s a waste of everybody’s time and it was with that in mind that a precedent had to be set, that a flag had to be stuck in the ground..
☆☆☆☆
“IS THE MOST WORTHWHILE PIECE OF SOFTWARE THAT YOU COULD PUT IN YOUR DS.”
Electroplankton is definitely my favorite piece of software for the DS, probably one of the best portable pieces of software I own and one of the most pleasing pieces of electronic entertainment that I’ve devoted my time towards. It’s a ballsy experiment that wants to be loved, a joyful piece of work that’s happy without making you want to throw up in your mouth (Mario (since the N64), I’m looking at you). Yet, I’m giving it zero stars (out of four). I’m doing this because Electroplankton isn’t a game. And heck, this is a site for game reviews.
Now, this is a little unfair. After all, I’m not going to follow this up with successive zero-star reviews of kanji dicitionaries or any of the other assorted titles for the DS that are clearly not games. That would be a pretty jerky move and would be like if we suddenly started giving zero-star reviews to motorcycles because hey, those aren’t games either. No, Electroplankton is a pretty unique case, in that while it’s not a game, it’s not clearly something else, since generally those other DS titles have a purpose, like trying to teach you Japanese characters or simulating a guitar. Electroplankton, in comparison, is enough like a game to confuse people. After all, there aren’t any explicit goals, which both eliminates it from being a purposeful piece of software like a kanji dictionary and hilariously enough, also from what we typically think of as a game.
Electroplankton‘s modules are based on the theory of “found music” or musique concrète, which basically boils down to “music can be what you find, rather than what you create”. These modules are set up so that a series of small interactions on the part of the user act as triggers for generating musical sequences. The interactions are simple enough that the user can figure out how to manipulate each module in a short period of time and vague enough that the user is never really composing in the traditional sense. They’re hitting things to see what happens and most of the time, you’ll eventually get something you like. The key to the success of Electroplankton in this area is that the modules are mostly very well-designed, allowing the user to generate a wide variety of pleasing tones without sounding like a 5-year-old smashing their hands on a piano.
A major part of musique concrète is the concept of play, which is why Electroplankton is such a confusing piece of software. The best way to put it seems to be that you don’t play Electroplankton, you play with it. The semantic assumption of the latter is that the act of playing is teleological, or to be less of a dick about it, that there’s an end to the means. The way that we understand how to play a game is to progress. It’s this lack of progression that separates Electroplankton from something like SimCity. Electroplankton is a pure sandbox in the sense that the entirety of the experience is to create something temporary, an aural equivalent of the Zen Sand Tray that’s supposed to help executives relax their balls. These things are commonly referred to as ‘toys’ and that’s a good enough term for what Electroplankton does, with the caveat that the usual reaction to ‘toy’ is to assume a lack of significance, which is indicative of a disturbing lack of imagination.
When Electroplankton was shown to a dementedly grinning E3 audience, it was presented by a DJ with a full set of rack-mounted equipment and accompanied on the big screen with quick cuts of gnarly graphics and effects, all while Reggie Fils-Aime gyrated and gurned on-stage. This was, of course, viciously &^#$#ed. If you’re going to make techno music, get a sampler and a synthesizer. Hell, the way things are going now, you’d probably just need the sampler. Using Electroplankton as part of your compositions would be a gimmick, a chiptune-esque trope that says “the most important thing about my music is not my music”. While the actual presentation was astonishingly dumb, I can’t really blame Nintendo for taking the easy way out. Wheeling out somebody on a bed who’s using a nice set of headphones, who just noodles around for 10 minutes before finding something that they find particularly pleasing and then maybe stretches their head back with their eyes closed, while this is nice, while this is a great example of how Electroplankton is the most worthwhile piece of software that you could put in your DS, this is not exactly something that’s going to set Reggie’s loins on fire. Better have Shiggy come out with a sword and shield then.
There is some pandering taking place. The plankton that are basically a collection of samples from Mario Bros. are a one-trick pony wearing a garish red cap and vomiting liquid cotton candy all over your Legend of Zelda bedsheets. In other words, it’s horribly boring and a little repugnant after you get over the novelty of it all. The 4-track recording plankton is also more of a grudging acknowledgement of the DS’s microphone than a good foundation for musical creation. In either of these cases, you’d be much better off getting an actual 4-track or making actual chiptunes than playing around with something that can’t give you the complete functionality of what it’s emulating without offering you anything special on its own.
This is not to say that there’s anything especially profound about Electroplankton. It’s an honest little piece of code that lets you make fun noises through tactile interactions. It succeeds at what it does because it was made by somebody who has a good idea of what sounds good and how people might want to generate sounds, not to mention an interface and graphical style that’s charming without being twee. It’s a success that’s blemished by the wondering and waffling over whether it’s a game or not. This is similar to the too-common message-board argument of whether games are “art” or what “art” is. Ultimately, it’s a waste of everybody’s time and it was with that in mind that a precedent had to be set, that a flag had to be stuck in the ground..
2007
text by tim rogers
⋆☆☆☆
“APPARENTLY DESIGNED BY MEN WHO TOOK SIX YEARS TO OBTAIN BACHELORS' DEGREES IN POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONOLOGY.”
Musou Orochi is the latest in Koei’s line of sleazy hit games with the word “Musou” in the title. Every time one of these games is released it spikes to the top of the sales charts for a week and then disappears. This game did exactly the same thing. It may just be the same half a million people playing these games over and over again; Koei plays its audience the way a young Korean girl plays the violin, or perhaps the way you play that one friend who bought you six consecutive dinners in a row and genuinely didn’t notice.
Koei floundered for years as a company that just wanted to make games about actual historical events when everyone else was Scotch-taping adjectives over side-scrolling platform game design documents. As a game designer, Koei was always quite unique — one might even say that their works from the pre-Famicom era right up to the release of the PlayStation 2 were exceptionally focused on getting non-gamers to pick up a controller. Over a decade before Gran Turismo would sweep in and prove it was possible to get automobile junkies to buy a videogame console if you showed them enough numerical details, the progressive, hungry Koei was making the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. These games were positioned on pedestals worldwide for their devotion to actual names, places, and approximated numbers, even if the critics weren’t familiar with the historical events being portrayed. For early players of Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga’s Ambition, or (my favorite) Bandit Kings of Ancient China, three games that are more or less alike, the basic requirement for enjoying the game was that you’d read more than two books about each of the names floating up on the screen at any given time. Test your knowledge of a particular historical battle by employing similar tactics (via menu selections), win, and feel really smart. It was a weird rush — different from Civilization or Sim City as Dragon Quest was different from Ultima. For the painstaking sensations they evoked, Koei’s efforts went on to find a niche even in countries where no one know who Liu Bei or Cao Cao were. Soon, Koei was making games about World War II — like the excellent P.T.O. II — and were even experimenting with making backgrounds that weren’t completely black. They were on something of a roll.
Blame Final Fantasy VII if you want; around 1997, all of Japan breathed in the same bus fumes and got to feeling loopy: something shat in the pool and told them that they could, if they wanted, enjoy more success than the niches they’d settled into. Perhaps this accounts for the first Dynasty Warriors game on the original PlayStation, or perhaps it doesn’t: it was a one-on-one fighting game in which historical figures from the Chinese civil war of the second century punched or kicked each other slowly over techno music that occasionally featured pan flutes. The game was high-budget enough to open with a computer-animated scene of such ferocious blockiness it could constipate the viewer for weeks or even months. The wasn’t much of a financial or even critical success. The same team was asked to make another game in a different style, using more or less the same characters, for the upcoming PlayStation 2. Rather than simply call the game Sangoku Musou 2, they decided to call it Shin Sangoku Musou — “REAL Dynasty Warriors”. When it was released outside Japan, the game was still called Dynasty Warriors 2, and this fact is kind of crucial.
The game was something of a lukewarm miracle. One might even say it changed the face of gaming. Imagine that — the first “Musou” had been a one-on-one fighting game just because one-on-one fighting in 3D was all the rage. The second game created a new genre — that of the 3D battlefield brawler. As far as new genres go, though, it wasn’t much. Essentially, it was just a thematic license to make a platform game in 3D, with no platform jumping. The “genre” that issued from Dynasty Warriors 2 is probably the same genre that the makers of the midget-punching Total Recall game for the NES would have made if they’d had better hardware: wide, empty spaces, characters who look like people you recognize if you’ve read the right book or seen the right movie, tons of faceless, motiveless enemies rushing at you and then stopping dead and waiting for you to hit them, et cetera. The posters could read: YOU play the part of the HERO! OBLITERATE the stuntmen!
“Musou” is a Japanese word meaning “peerless” or “matchless”. A “Musou” warrior is one whose name is whispered among grunt soldiers everywhere. They’re known for having killed a hundred opponents without flinching, or whatever. How can we dare say that such men did not exist? Novels like Three Kingdoms are able to list the names of every warrior that died at every battle in the war; the Chinese have always had an ear for history and an eye for detail. Names like Lu Bu surf atop the tides of generations, centuries, and millennia as the names of men who were essentially invincible in combat; they were detached from their own mortality in such a way that they could not fear death, or something. Combat, like any sport, is mostly mental, anyway. Think about all those characters in horror movies that viewers always yell at: “Don’t go that way! Shoot him!” Those characters are based on real-life personalities as well — they are the types of people who would not last on a battlefield. Certainly, there’s a little psyching up that happens prior to donning the armor and shaking a spear in the face of danger, though it was seldom ever enough for a farm boy to take down a legend. (See David and Goliath for an example of a farm boy who became a legend by taking down a legend.)
Any review — whether it’s a blurb in Weekly Famitsu or an Amazon.co.jp staff review, or even an Amazon.co.jp reader review — of a Musou game will mention the word “Soukaikan” — “Refreshing feeling” — in the first sentence. This may be a clue that someone in the PR industry is first-degreeing the murder of good natural human conversation, and at that we can only groan: Japanese people using a buzzword in their user reviews is nothing terrible, compared to, say, global warming. Examining the term closely sure makes me feel kind of lonely, though. They say they feel “refreshed” when they play a Musou game, and it scares me that I can recognize why. A Musou game puts you in the buckled boots of a peerless warrior — the man on the battlefield who gets things done. This appeals to so many tens of thousands of Japanese casual gamers simply because to some people games are not life; they are escapism; and the majority of the human population are or were not the type of twenty-two-year-old Ivy League college graduates to walk into his first day at work at a large multinational corporation in a leather jacket and ripped jeans and perfect hair, ignoring the dress code (tie, suit, bald), and flip off the boss and say “You old codgers need to change your game” and end up the CEO and the proud owner of a yacht within six months. We can’t all be rock stars; we can’t all be legendary warriors; we can’t all be Bill Gates; Musou games let us experience a world with the invincibility code turned on, where enemies stop and sputter before us, technomental canaries flying against the glass walls of an AI script that says “Even on hard difficulty, give him four or five seconds before attacking him”. This sort of medulla oblangata massage wouldn’t have worked on Super Famicom, because the graphics weren’t real enough. (Pseudo-ironically, the Gameboy Advance Musou is probably the best one in the series, because it uses Super Famicom-style graphics.)
I mentioned that Musou games sell about a quarter of a million to a half a million copies and then vanish from the sales charts. This could be because the majority of copies are sold back within a week of release; this isn’t because the games shock and repulse players with their shoddy shallowness — it’s because the players are not necessarily gamers or game collectors. They don’t let the games stock up on their shelves, they don’t show them off to friends. They play them the way a moviegoer watches a DVD: clear it once, check out all the special features, put it back in the case, tell the wife to return it, get yelled at and called lazy, take it back themselves. It’s not ironic, or hardly even funny, at all, that Koei has decided to start their own game rental service — called RentaNet, which is a (***)Â name — to rent out any games by any publishers who sign on the dotted line. Game rentals have been illegal in Japan ever since Nintendo whined up the government’s leg back in 1984. Keep in mind, this is also a country where CD rentals have been legal forever — for about two US dollars, you can rent a CD, rip all of the tracks into iTunes, and take it back the same day. Because the value of owning a CD started to descend through the floor, Japanese record labels began to offer special premiums — stickers, posters, big shiny boxes to contain the CD case. No special premiums, however, were premium enough to defeat the idea of CD rental and an MD player (and eventually iPod). This is why the price of a CD in Japan rose slowly to an average of around thirty US dollars. And thirty US dollars, I swear, is a big price to pay for much of the bullstuff they call music over here. Record shops started importing foreign CDs from their countries of origin, to save themselves and the customers money, much to the anger of the local Japanese label that would be releasing said CDs for a higher price in Japan, hence foreign artists always being encouraged to include a bonus track on the Japanese release of an album. New tracks means more complicated rights, means higher prices. Around and around it goes.
Why is Koei trying to bring back game rental in Japan? The simplest answer is because used game sales, which account for most game sales in Japan (if you’ve spent two minutes in a used Japanese game shop, you cannot doubt this), never count toward official sales rankings. The CD analogy continues further: in order to encourage players to buy new, Koei has been releasing “Treasure Box” versions of every Musou game since the bigwigs became confident that the series was a qualified hit. These boxes are full of the most carnival-prize-esque trinkets — mouse pads, et cetera. The games themselves are soaked in enough tacky “extras” — unlockable art galleries and/or voice clip playback devices — for a shadowy reason: keep the players playing more than a week, long enough for the used shop buyback rates to go down. That first weekend is a big’un — if a hopeful buyer can’t find the game used because someone who bought it new is still unlocking costume colors, that’s another new copy sold — that’s another tick-mark on the Famitsu ranking! If the roots of Koei’s rental service were to plant themselves fully into the earth, that would make a new ranking chart for Famitsu to report every week: the rental chart. A-ha.
The more complicated answer would be “Because of Musou Orochi“. It’s precisely the kind of thing no corporation, even one with a tacky goldfish pond in their headquarters’ lobby, one with a little wooden bridge to walk over and everything (yes, I’ve been there), could possibly muster up the anti-conscience to only sell to people, unless they’d been ordered to do so by Satan himself.
Over the years, Koei has been called masters of “historical detail”: in the Gundam Musou expose in Weekly Famitsu earlier this year, the press-release-language said that Koei had been drafted to apply their expertise with regard to historical detail to the entire “Gundam” story, in order to make the most accurate “Gundam” videogame to date. This was a hell of a polite nod to series fans — Omega Force and Koei would be giving the “Gundam” story the same historical treatment that they’d given the great real-life battles of the Chinese Three Kingdoms period and the Japanese Warring States period.
That treatment includes setting each battle up with a map screen and a talking-head dialogue sequence that goes on a minute too long, before plopping the player, boots and all, into the ping-pong-ball-on-mouse-traps of a lively battlefield. Back two decades and an aeon ago, the history lessons had been the thing; now, our fingers have evolved, and we are no longer apes: we are chimps, and we are chumps, and we have transcended pushing buttons to stay alive — we are pushing buttons to kill. In short, it’s nonsense. The violin has been purloined, and replaced with a kid in a purple sweat suit, with eraserhead hair and tinted glasses, banging out a math-rock solo on a Casio keyboard.
It used to be that anyone and everyone could shrug and exhale and let these games exist because hey, at least the history spoken in slow words at the start of the battle is based on real events. Yeah, and the same people could debunk the game design worth of more exhilarating and crunchy games like Onimusha because they portrayed real-life fifteenth-century warlord Oda Nobunaga as a crazed, frothing, rabid old madman who commanded a legion of zombie samurai against Jean Reno.
Musou Orochi files this justification under the heading “bullstuff”; just as Omega Force got hungry for fighting-game fame with the first Dynasty Warriors, they jump straight into the Kingdom Hearts pool with Orochi — its story centers on a evil, demonic warlord named Orochi, who creates a rift in space-time and sucks the warriors from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war (Dynasty Warriors) and the warriors from the 15th-century Japanese civil war (Samurai Warriors) into the same grey-area time period, where they . . . do what, exactly? Battle against one another? Do the bad guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war team up with the bad guys of the 15th-century Japanese civil war, despite the obvious language barrier and disagreement on fashion or fighting techniques? What about ideals? Might it not be possible that the good guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war might agree with the bad guys from the 15th-centry Japanese civil war? And who says any of these people are “bad” anyway? “History is written by the winners” is a Western proverb, after all; centuries later, the Japanese were and are able to see the good points of the ambitious men who lost to more or less ambitious men in their own national history. We’ve seen plenty of videogames heroizing Toyotomi Hideyoshi, for example, and that man might have been hecking looney tunes.
No, though, in Orochi (to be titled Orochi Warriors for Western release, although “Orochi” isn’t an adjective, though I guess we can pretend: it sounds like something you’d call a hobo), the warriors form quick and dirty alliances in favor nothing in particular, and continue their internal conflicts while being confused about their surroundings. Orochi himself steps in to a couple of battles, and the audience members so inclined will clap their hands to see that new, large, red blip appear on their radar: a boss approaches! A boss approaches!
Dynasty Warriors 2 was interesting because it let you ride a horse and traverse battlefields, whilst killing — among the only other games available for the PlayStation 2 at the time was SSX, which was about snowboards: where’s the killing in that? Every once in a while, a large red blip appeared, and by that blip, a name — the name of someone you’ve read about in a book. It might be Lu Bu, even. You’d chase him down on your horse, and have a back-and-forth throttle-around with the only other guy on the battlefield who seems to know how to press the square button. This mechanic was enough to keep the game interesting for many players because these minibosses were always people you knew about outside the game world. In Gundam Musou, it works better, because the boss characters are not just approximations cobbled together from history books — they are based on a television show, so they look exactly like every fan knows they look. There’s no internet arguments about beard length or color of cape. In Orochi, the celebrity factor doesn’t work nearly as well; it feels made of cardboard. When you throw historical figures through a time rift and onto the same battlefield, you cheapen the idea of historical accuracy; you hover a magnifying glass over the flimsy paper plate onto which you’ve dropped this wedding-cake-chunk of a game, and the frosting starts to smolder.
Perhaps fearing that their fan-savants would some day begin to complain that these games were getting too boring and/or easy, Koei started to shoehorn “strategy” into the battles — every once in a while, one of your fellow Important Characters would get into a rough spot, and you’d have to fly across the battlefield to rescue them. I’m not sure if this is or is not a blatant insistence on Koei’s part that Chinese warlords had ready access to wireless radio communication, or psychic powers, or what. Either way, in Gundam Musou it works best, probably because giant robots have computers on board — boost-run across that epic battlefield, maybe crushing a few skulls on the way, and there’s your ally, rendered in high-definition glory, surrounded by ten to twenty enemies who are mostly just standing there, not attacking. If you had stayed where you were, on the other side of the battlefield, your ally’s life bar would deplete until he died. Saving his life takes about a quarter of a second, and makes you wonder if he was drunk or something. If you let him die — aw, stuff, Jack, you’re going to get a lower ranking at the end of the battle.
Thanks to this mechanic, Musou games of late have often required players to play each battle enough times to know where each Important Character will be when he needs saving, and at exactly which point in the battle this will happen. I might have been inclined to call this a reasonable facsimile of strategy if there was any topography to speak of: the battlefields are still flat and spare. The very sight of a wall is a blessing. Or if the act of running from one side of a battlefield to another wasn’t boring or tedious. If there was any joy in your character’s plodding movement, yeah, this might be a strategy. Instead, as what it is, it’s like a chocolate bar made of stuff instead of of chocolate; it doesn’t encourage rock-solid nerves-of-steel gamer skills like, say Ninja Gaiden, or even stat-mongering devotion like Dragon Quest. It’s just a weird kind of fetishism, and the setups are too ridiculous too often.
Atop this pile of a half-baked game concept, Orochi throws the spear that breaks the aircraft carrier’s back: multiple characters. Using the L2 and R2 buttons, you can now switch between characters! Take three characters into each battle — when you’re not controlling a character, the computer controls him for you! Maybe he’ll get in trouble, so if he does, you can switch to him and let him take care of himself. This is sham-fisted game design as plotted by wrongheaded focus testing and/or men who took six years to obtain their bachelors’ degrees in “PowerPoint Presentationology”. They graduated with 2.5 GPAs and their fathers probably consistently score at least ten strokes above par on whole games of golf (front nine holes, two-hour cigarette break, back nine holes). The short of this is: you can write this stuff in a design document, and you can program it into a videogame, though ultimately you’re only going to end up with pink vomit and/or a Jagermeister logo on your T-shirt, and if you can’t tell, on paper, why this game concept is flawed, then some part of your house might actually have been on fire for perhaps several years.
Games like Sengoku Basara (“Devil Kings”) or Drag-on Dragoon 2 were able to take the should-be-gleeful Musou formula and split its atom over and over again, simply by introducing little quirks like “imaginative scenarios”, “actual dynamic storytelling” (as opposed to talking heads in front of a map), a flying dragon to ride and scorch foes, a “block/parry/evade” system that lends fierce crunch and snap into each of the hundreds of encounters in every battle, and — get this! — enemies that actually attack you. And the king of this genre that would be Jesus, Spartan: Total Warrior, grinds many of Musou‘s concepts down to a razor edge, all while throwing out the unnecessary things. You will never find a sharper game than Spartan: Total Warrior, unless you’re slitting your wrist with a DVD shard.
I can buy the explanation that Koei makes its Musou games with a purpose — to entertain the refugees from life that find invincibility codes “refreshing”, the kind of souls who can’t quite put their finger on the fact that they possess the personalities of machines at a cardboard box factory and that this is what bothers them at all times, even while using the toilet. Musou is a sweet palliative for people who can’t be bothered to press a block button; it’s Campbell’s Chunky vegetable soup for the soul, for people who don’t have enough teeth to eat a steak. I’m not about to suggest that they make the games tongue-bitingly hard; I’m just saying they should at least conscientiously add some snap, and/or quit lying to themselves and us. These games are big soggy bowls of schlock and have been for years; the more they try to complicate them, the more ass-faced they look. Please Koei, give up the ghost. Cut these games back to their essence. Stop tacking on meaningless extras and/or art galleries and touting such flimsy bullstuff on the back of the box — we’ve seen Cao Cao before, man!
If the Musou games are truly the Madden of Japan, then “harder hits” and/or “more brutal tackles”, at least, are in order. Under the present game design circumstances, should any publication respectable enough to feature advertisements for videogames in addition to reviews of said videogames ever score a Musou game (Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, et al) higher than a four out of ten ever again, they will be placed on the Action Button Dot Net Sworn Enemies List, and we will proceed to find their staff members’ Xbox Live usernames and leave them all belligerent, unintelligible voice messages with diarrhea frequency from tomorrow until eternity.
⋆☆☆☆
“APPARENTLY DESIGNED BY MEN WHO TOOK SIX YEARS TO OBTAIN BACHELORS' DEGREES IN POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONOLOGY.”
Musou Orochi is the latest in Koei’s line of sleazy hit games with the word “Musou” in the title. Every time one of these games is released it spikes to the top of the sales charts for a week and then disappears. This game did exactly the same thing. It may just be the same half a million people playing these games over and over again; Koei plays its audience the way a young Korean girl plays the violin, or perhaps the way you play that one friend who bought you six consecutive dinners in a row and genuinely didn’t notice.
Koei floundered for years as a company that just wanted to make games about actual historical events when everyone else was Scotch-taping adjectives over side-scrolling platform game design documents. As a game designer, Koei was always quite unique — one might even say that their works from the pre-Famicom era right up to the release of the PlayStation 2 were exceptionally focused on getting non-gamers to pick up a controller. Over a decade before Gran Turismo would sweep in and prove it was possible to get automobile junkies to buy a videogame console if you showed them enough numerical details, the progressive, hungry Koei was making the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. These games were positioned on pedestals worldwide for their devotion to actual names, places, and approximated numbers, even if the critics weren’t familiar with the historical events being portrayed. For early players of Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga’s Ambition, or (my favorite) Bandit Kings of Ancient China, three games that are more or less alike, the basic requirement for enjoying the game was that you’d read more than two books about each of the names floating up on the screen at any given time. Test your knowledge of a particular historical battle by employing similar tactics (via menu selections), win, and feel really smart. It was a weird rush — different from Civilization or Sim City as Dragon Quest was different from Ultima. For the painstaking sensations they evoked, Koei’s efforts went on to find a niche even in countries where no one know who Liu Bei or Cao Cao were. Soon, Koei was making games about World War II — like the excellent P.T.O. II — and were even experimenting with making backgrounds that weren’t completely black. They were on something of a roll.
Blame Final Fantasy VII if you want; around 1997, all of Japan breathed in the same bus fumes and got to feeling loopy: something shat in the pool and told them that they could, if they wanted, enjoy more success than the niches they’d settled into. Perhaps this accounts for the first Dynasty Warriors game on the original PlayStation, or perhaps it doesn’t: it was a one-on-one fighting game in which historical figures from the Chinese civil war of the second century punched or kicked each other slowly over techno music that occasionally featured pan flutes. The game was high-budget enough to open with a computer-animated scene of such ferocious blockiness it could constipate the viewer for weeks or even months. The wasn’t much of a financial or even critical success. The same team was asked to make another game in a different style, using more or less the same characters, for the upcoming PlayStation 2. Rather than simply call the game Sangoku Musou 2, they decided to call it Shin Sangoku Musou — “REAL Dynasty Warriors”. When it was released outside Japan, the game was still called Dynasty Warriors 2, and this fact is kind of crucial.
The game was something of a lukewarm miracle. One might even say it changed the face of gaming. Imagine that — the first “Musou” had been a one-on-one fighting game just because one-on-one fighting in 3D was all the rage. The second game created a new genre — that of the 3D battlefield brawler. As far as new genres go, though, it wasn’t much. Essentially, it was just a thematic license to make a platform game in 3D, with no platform jumping. The “genre” that issued from Dynasty Warriors 2 is probably the same genre that the makers of the midget-punching Total Recall game for the NES would have made if they’d had better hardware: wide, empty spaces, characters who look like people you recognize if you’ve read the right book or seen the right movie, tons of faceless, motiveless enemies rushing at you and then stopping dead and waiting for you to hit them, et cetera. The posters could read: YOU play the part of the HERO! OBLITERATE the stuntmen!
“Musou” is a Japanese word meaning “peerless” or “matchless”. A “Musou” warrior is one whose name is whispered among grunt soldiers everywhere. They’re known for having killed a hundred opponents without flinching, or whatever. How can we dare say that such men did not exist? Novels like Three Kingdoms are able to list the names of every warrior that died at every battle in the war; the Chinese have always had an ear for history and an eye for detail. Names like Lu Bu surf atop the tides of generations, centuries, and millennia as the names of men who were essentially invincible in combat; they were detached from their own mortality in such a way that they could not fear death, or something. Combat, like any sport, is mostly mental, anyway. Think about all those characters in horror movies that viewers always yell at: “Don’t go that way! Shoot him!” Those characters are based on real-life personalities as well — they are the types of people who would not last on a battlefield. Certainly, there’s a little psyching up that happens prior to donning the armor and shaking a spear in the face of danger, though it was seldom ever enough for a farm boy to take down a legend. (See David and Goliath for an example of a farm boy who became a legend by taking down a legend.)
Any review — whether it’s a blurb in Weekly Famitsu or an Amazon.co.jp staff review, or even an Amazon.co.jp reader review — of a Musou game will mention the word “Soukaikan” — “Refreshing feeling” — in the first sentence. This may be a clue that someone in the PR industry is first-degreeing the murder of good natural human conversation, and at that we can only groan: Japanese people using a buzzword in their user reviews is nothing terrible, compared to, say, global warming. Examining the term closely sure makes me feel kind of lonely, though. They say they feel “refreshed” when they play a Musou game, and it scares me that I can recognize why. A Musou game puts you in the buckled boots of a peerless warrior — the man on the battlefield who gets things done. This appeals to so many tens of thousands of Japanese casual gamers simply because to some people games are not life; they are escapism; and the majority of the human population are or were not the type of twenty-two-year-old Ivy League college graduates to walk into his first day at work at a large multinational corporation in a leather jacket and ripped jeans and perfect hair, ignoring the dress code (tie, suit, bald), and flip off the boss and say “You old codgers need to change your game” and end up the CEO and the proud owner of a yacht within six months. We can’t all be rock stars; we can’t all be legendary warriors; we can’t all be Bill Gates; Musou games let us experience a world with the invincibility code turned on, where enemies stop and sputter before us, technomental canaries flying against the glass walls of an AI script that says “Even on hard difficulty, give him four or five seconds before attacking him”. This sort of medulla oblangata massage wouldn’t have worked on Super Famicom, because the graphics weren’t real enough. (Pseudo-ironically, the Gameboy Advance Musou is probably the best one in the series, because it uses Super Famicom-style graphics.)
I mentioned that Musou games sell about a quarter of a million to a half a million copies and then vanish from the sales charts. This could be because the majority of copies are sold back within a week of release; this isn’t because the games shock and repulse players with their shoddy shallowness — it’s because the players are not necessarily gamers or game collectors. They don’t let the games stock up on their shelves, they don’t show them off to friends. They play them the way a moviegoer watches a DVD: clear it once, check out all the special features, put it back in the case, tell the wife to return it, get yelled at and called lazy, take it back themselves. It’s not ironic, or hardly even funny, at all, that Koei has decided to start their own game rental service — called RentaNet, which is a (***)Â name — to rent out any games by any publishers who sign on the dotted line. Game rentals have been illegal in Japan ever since Nintendo whined up the government’s leg back in 1984. Keep in mind, this is also a country where CD rentals have been legal forever — for about two US dollars, you can rent a CD, rip all of the tracks into iTunes, and take it back the same day. Because the value of owning a CD started to descend through the floor, Japanese record labels began to offer special premiums — stickers, posters, big shiny boxes to contain the CD case. No special premiums, however, were premium enough to defeat the idea of CD rental and an MD player (and eventually iPod). This is why the price of a CD in Japan rose slowly to an average of around thirty US dollars. And thirty US dollars, I swear, is a big price to pay for much of the bullstuff they call music over here. Record shops started importing foreign CDs from their countries of origin, to save themselves and the customers money, much to the anger of the local Japanese label that would be releasing said CDs for a higher price in Japan, hence foreign artists always being encouraged to include a bonus track on the Japanese release of an album. New tracks means more complicated rights, means higher prices. Around and around it goes.
Why is Koei trying to bring back game rental in Japan? The simplest answer is because used game sales, which account for most game sales in Japan (if you’ve spent two minutes in a used Japanese game shop, you cannot doubt this), never count toward official sales rankings. The CD analogy continues further: in order to encourage players to buy new, Koei has been releasing “Treasure Box” versions of every Musou game since the bigwigs became confident that the series was a qualified hit. These boxes are full of the most carnival-prize-esque trinkets — mouse pads, et cetera. The games themselves are soaked in enough tacky “extras” — unlockable art galleries and/or voice clip playback devices — for a shadowy reason: keep the players playing more than a week, long enough for the used shop buyback rates to go down. That first weekend is a big’un — if a hopeful buyer can’t find the game used because someone who bought it new is still unlocking costume colors, that’s another new copy sold — that’s another tick-mark on the Famitsu ranking! If the roots of Koei’s rental service were to plant themselves fully into the earth, that would make a new ranking chart for Famitsu to report every week: the rental chart. A-ha.
The more complicated answer would be “Because of Musou Orochi“. It’s precisely the kind of thing no corporation, even one with a tacky goldfish pond in their headquarters’ lobby, one with a little wooden bridge to walk over and everything (yes, I’ve been there), could possibly muster up the anti-conscience to only sell to people, unless they’d been ordered to do so by Satan himself.
Over the years, Koei has been called masters of “historical detail”: in the Gundam Musou expose in Weekly Famitsu earlier this year, the press-release-language said that Koei had been drafted to apply their expertise with regard to historical detail to the entire “Gundam” story, in order to make the most accurate “Gundam” videogame to date. This was a hell of a polite nod to series fans — Omega Force and Koei would be giving the “Gundam” story the same historical treatment that they’d given the great real-life battles of the Chinese Three Kingdoms period and the Japanese Warring States period.
That treatment includes setting each battle up with a map screen and a talking-head dialogue sequence that goes on a minute too long, before plopping the player, boots and all, into the ping-pong-ball-on-mouse-traps of a lively battlefield. Back two decades and an aeon ago, the history lessons had been the thing; now, our fingers have evolved, and we are no longer apes: we are chimps, and we are chumps, and we have transcended pushing buttons to stay alive — we are pushing buttons to kill. In short, it’s nonsense. The violin has been purloined, and replaced with a kid in a purple sweat suit, with eraserhead hair and tinted glasses, banging out a math-rock solo on a Casio keyboard.
It used to be that anyone and everyone could shrug and exhale and let these games exist because hey, at least the history spoken in slow words at the start of the battle is based on real events. Yeah, and the same people could debunk the game design worth of more exhilarating and crunchy games like Onimusha because they portrayed real-life fifteenth-century warlord Oda Nobunaga as a crazed, frothing, rabid old madman who commanded a legion of zombie samurai against Jean Reno.
Musou Orochi files this justification under the heading “bullstuff”; just as Omega Force got hungry for fighting-game fame with the first Dynasty Warriors, they jump straight into the Kingdom Hearts pool with Orochi — its story centers on a evil, demonic warlord named Orochi, who creates a rift in space-time and sucks the warriors from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war (Dynasty Warriors) and the warriors from the 15th-century Japanese civil war (Samurai Warriors) into the same grey-area time period, where they . . . do what, exactly? Battle against one another? Do the bad guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war team up with the bad guys of the 15th-century Japanese civil war, despite the obvious language barrier and disagreement on fashion or fighting techniques? What about ideals? Might it not be possible that the good guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war might agree with the bad guys from the 15th-centry Japanese civil war? And who says any of these people are “bad” anyway? “History is written by the winners” is a Western proverb, after all; centuries later, the Japanese were and are able to see the good points of the ambitious men who lost to more or less ambitious men in their own national history. We’ve seen plenty of videogames heroizing Toyotomi Hideyoshi, for example, and that man might have been hecking looney tunes.
No, though, in Orochi (to be titled Orochi Warriors for Western release, although “Orochi” isn’t an adjective, though I guess we can pretend: it sounds like something you’d call a hobo), the warriors form quick and dirty alliances in favor nothing in particular, and continue their internal conflicts while being confused about their surroundings. Orochi himself steps in to a couple of battles, and the audience members so inclined will clap their hands to see that new, large, red blip appear on their radar: a boss approaches! A boss approaches!
Dynasty Warriors 2 was interesting because it let you ride a horse and traverse battlefields, whilst killing — among the only other games available for the PlayStation 2 at the time was SSX, which was about snowboards: where’s the killing in that? Every once in a while, a large red blip appeared, and by that blip, a name — the name of someone you’ve read about in a book. It might be Lu Bu, even. You’d chase him down on your horse, and have a back-and-forth throttle-around with the only other guy on the battlefield who seems to know how to press the square button. This mechanic was enough to keep the game interesting for many players because these minibosses were always people you knew about outside the game world. In Gundam Musou, it works better, because the boss characters are not just approximations cobbled together from history books — they are based on a television show, so they look exactly like every fan knows they look. There’s no internet arguments about beard length or color of cape. In Orochi, the celebrity factor doesn’t work nearly as well; it feels made of cardboard. When you throw historical figures through a time rift and onto the same battlefield, you cheapen the idea of historical accuracy; you hover a magnifying glass over the flimsy paper plate onto which you’ve dropped this wedding-cake-chunk of a game, and the frosting starts to smolder.
Perhaps fearing that their fan-savants would some day begin to complain that these games were getting too boring and/or easy, Koei started to shoehorn “strategy” into the battles — every once in a while, one of your fellow Important Characters would get into a rough spot, and you’d have to fly across the battlefield to rescue them. I’m not sure if this is or is not a blatant insistence on Koei’s part that Chinese warlords had ready access to wireless radio communication, or psychic powers, or what. Either way, in Gundam Musou it works best, probably because giant robots have computers on board — boost-run across that epic battlefield, maybe crushing a few skulls on the way, and there’s your ally, rendered in high-definition glory, surrounded by ten to twenty enemies who are mostly just standing there, not attacking. If you had stayed where you were, on the other side of the battlefield, your ally’s life bar would deplete until he died. Saving his life takes about a quarter of a second, and makes you wonder if he was drunk or something. If you let him die — aw, stuff, Jack, you’re going to get a lower ranking at the end of the battle.
Thanks to this mechanic, Musou games of late have often required players to play each battle enough times to know where each Important Character will be when he needs saving, and at exactly which point in the battle this will happen. I might have been inclined to call this a reasonable facsimile of strategy if there was any topography to speak of: the battlefields are still flat and spare. The very sight of a wall is a blessing. Or if the act of running from one side of a battlefield to another wasn’t boring or tedious. If there was any joy in your character’s plodding movement, yeah, this might be a strategy. Instead, as what it is, it’s like a chocolate bar made of stuff instead of of chocolate; it doesn’t encourage rock-solid nerves-of-steel gamer skills like, say Ninja Gaiden, or even stat-mongering devotion like Dragon Quest. It’s just a weird kind of fetishism, and the setups are too ridiculous too often.
Atop this pile of a half-baked game concept, Orochi throws the spear that breaks the aircraft carrier’s back: multiple characters. Using the L2 and R2 buttons, you can now switch between characters! Take three characters into each battle — when you’re not controlling a character, the computer controls him for you! Maybe he’ll get in trouble, so if he does, you can switch to him and let him take care of himself. This is sham-fisted game design as plotted by wrongheaded focus testing and/or men who took six years to obtain their bachelors’ degrees in “PowerPoint Presentationology”. They graduated with 2.5 GPAs and their fathers probably consistently score at least ten strokes above par on whole games of golf (front nine holes, two-hour cigarette break, back nine holes). The short of this is: you can write this stuff in a design document, and you can program it into a videogame, though ultimately you’re only going to end up with pink vomit and/or a Jagermeister logo on your T-shirt, and if you can’t tell, on paper, why this game concept is flawed, then some part of your house might actually have been on fire for perhaps several years.
Games like Sengoku Basara (“Devil Kings”) or Drag-on Dragoon 2 were able to take the should-be-gleeful Musou formula and split its atom over and over again, simply by introducing little quirks like “imaginative scenarios”, “actual dynamic storytelling” (as opposed to talking heads in front of a map), a flying dragon to ride and scorch foes, a “block/parry/evade” system that lends fierce crunch and snap into each of the hundreds of encounters in every battle, and — get this! — enemies that actually attack you. And the king of this genre that would be Jesus, Spartan: Total Warrior, grinds many of Musou‘s concepts down to a razor edge, all while throwing out the unnecessary things. You will never find a sharper game than Spartan: Total Warrior, unless you’re slitting your wrist with a DVD shard.
I can buy the explanation that Koei makes its Musou games with a purpose — to entertain the refugees from life that find invincibility codes “refreshing”, the kind of souls who can’t quite put their finger on the fact that they possess the personalities of machines at a cardboard box factory and that this is what bothers them at all times, even while using the toilet. Musou is a sweet palliative for people who can’t be bothered to press a block button; it’s Campbell’s Chunky vegetable soup for the soul, for people who don’t have enough teeth to eat a steak. I’m not about to suggest that they make the games tongue-bitingly hard; I’m just saying they should at least conscientiously add some snap, and/or quit lying to themselves and us. These games are big soggy bowls of schlock and have been for years; the more they try to complicate them, the more ass-faced they look. Please Koei, give up the ghost. Cut these games back to their essence. Stop tacking on meaningless extras and/or art galleries and touting such flimsy bullstuff on the back of the box — we’ve seen Cao Cao before, man!
If the Musou games are truly the Madden of Japan, then “harder hits” and/or “more brutal tackles”, at least, are in order. Under the present game design circumstances, should any publication respectable enough to feature advertisements for videogames in addition to reviews of said videogames ever score a Musou game (Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, et al) higher than a four out of ten ever again, they will be placed on the Action Button Dot Net Sworn Enemies List, and we will proceed to find their staff members’ Xbox Live usernames and leave them all belligerent, unintelligible voice messages with diarrhea frequency from tomorrow until eternity.
text by Brendan Lee
★⋆☆☆
"BORING."
Most people are in complete agreement that shooters are second only to Those Rhythm Games in terms of sheer Pavlovian click-here-for-joy vacuity. If you’re the type of diehard that gets off on solitary pattern memorization – – and you’re, you know, not prone to epilepsy – – they’re pretty much the ultimate that this life has to offer you.
At least until they begin selling pre-chewed Pop Tarts.
It’s a format that’s rapidly wilting, shooters. People have, by and large, figured out the punchline; only the occasional efforts by a rambunctious, tow-headed doujin community and a handful of rickety old-skoolers have been able to slap enough maids and squirrel-voiced seiyuu into shooters to satisfy their few remaining devotees. Sadly, gamers don’t know how to move on, as a rule. They collectively realize that if you stare at a corpse long and hard enough, eventually some small movement will arise – – that it’s just the worms come to gnaw at the gristle is the sort of observation that only the pickiest of spoilsports would bother coughing into their hands.
The same innate sense of lonely isolation that has preserved the hardcore shooter fanbase is the enemy, in this age of multiplayer . . . and Senko no Ronde (flatly retitled WarTech for the Xbox 360) has the right idea. It is, in fact, a valiant effort to create a cooperative arcade culture from a fundamentally solitary gaming format. In this case, it means a mash-up: a dash of classic shooter dynamics, a jigger of close-quarters punch-up, and a large dollop swiped directly from Virtual On. The mix at least looks utterly compelling – – even if you don’t entirely buy into its Xenosaga-cum-Zegapain PastelBot regime. Any bit of the game you happen to see in motion has you sitting and playing for at least one round . . . it is its own attract mode, and it clearly knows it.
And then you play. And . . . well, it’s just kind of syrup-slow and boring, most of the time. Honestly, if they were expecting to build the same kind of army of nicotine-thumbed fighting fans that has allowed ARC to keep swapping out Guilty Gear color palettes, they should have actually given them something to keep their reflexes from going numb. The Rounders (PastelBots) move like capsule toys through delicious honey, and the Boss Mode combat has one of the worst my-turn-your-turn dynamics since Killer Instinct. The controls are intuitive enough for those with a little patience, but the way the game transitions from one battle mode to another is jarring and annoying enough to create the illusion that they aren’t. When you’re transitioning from the standard space battlefield to close-quarters combat, the camera zooms in to SHOW YOU ALL THE ACTION, and you’re immediately disoriented. When one of the PastelBots (Rounders) switches to Boss Mode, you get a little flashcard of slapdash anime clip-art and a chirpy voice to accompany the entire screen changing on you. If you’ve grown to accept random battles in RPGs and selecting FIGHT from text boxes, you’ll probably be able to shift gears along with Senko no Ronde as it shows you how many games it can try to be, but . . . I dunno, I been working on this thing where I’m less spastic lately.
And another thing: that Boss Mode. It’s . . . well, it’s damn creaky. Once the screen’s done its Big Woosh changing thing and your eyes have uncrossed, you (or your opponent) get the opportunity to be really Big and shoot a million jillion Glow Orbs all around – – just like the bosses in all those beloved shooters. It’s pointless and unnerving, especially with the Rounders inability to dodge with any speed or sensitivity . . . and it’s kind of a psychological kick in the balls for anyone who ever spent their time memorizing bullet patterns on more classically-conceptualized shooting titles. The game kind of realizes this, so don’t expect to spend much time Bossing it around – – it’s just a little Nostalgia Snack, and over before it begins. What a waste: it’s development time that could have been spent on making the normal combat more interesting and responsive.
These kinds of format mash-ups can work, on occasion . . . if you look at something like, say, Data East’s The Great Ragtimeshow, you’ll find a game that successfully blended Metal Slug‘s sense of humor and vehicular variety, the air combat of classic shooters, and an amazing feel for the era’s best platforming into a game that’s a visual feast and an utter joy (and hey, this was 1992). It takes a great deal of vision to make this kind of thing work, though, and it’s painfully obvious when a developer is just trying to ham-fist another format on top of another to help prop up weak gameplay.
Senko no Ronde, for all of the hype and keyfroth, is an also-ran: too wrapped up in making its Game Salad to remember that we’d ordered a hamburger. There may be something out there to defibrillate the paunchy mess of moe-shooters and frame-count twitch-fighters that are littering Japan’s arcades (and increasingly your Xbox 360), but this certainly ain’t it.
★⋆☆☆
"BORING."
Most people are in complete agreement that shooters are second only to Those Rhythm Games in terms of sheer Pavlovian click-here-for-joy vacuity. If you’re the type of diehard that gets off on solitary pattern memorization – – and you’re, you know, not prone to epilepsy – – they’re pretty much the ultimate that this life has to offer you.
At least until they begin selling pre-chewed Pop Tarts.
It’s a format that’s rapidly wilting, shooters. People have, by and large, figured out the punchline; only the occasional efforts by a rambunctious, tow-headed doujin community and a handful of rickety old-skoolers have been able to slap enough maids and squirrel-voiced seiyuu into shooters to satisfy their few remaining devotees. Sadly, gamers don’t know how to move on, as a rule. They collectively realize that if you stare at a corpse long and hard enough, eventually some small movement will arise – – that it’s just the worms come to gnaw at the gristle is the sort of observation that only the pickiest of spoilsports would bother coughing into their hands.
The same innate sense of lonely isolation that has preserved the hardcore shooter fanbase is the enemy, in this age of multiplayer . . . and Senko no Ronde (flatly retitled WarTech for the Xbox 360) has the right idea. It is, in fact, a valiant effort to create a cooperative arcade culture from a fundamentally solitary gaming format. In this case, it means a mash-up: a dash of classic shooter dynamics, a jigger of close-quarters punch-up, and a large dollop swiped directly from Virtual On. The mix at least looks utterly compelling – – even if you don’t entirely buy into its Xenosaga-cum-Zegapain PastelBot regime. Any bit of the game you happen to see in motion has you sitting and playing for at least one round . . . it is its own attract mode, and it clearly knows it.
And then you play. And . . . well, it’s just kind of syrup-slow and boring, most of the time. Honestly, if they were expecting to build the same kind of army of nicotine-thumbed fighting fans that has allowed ARC to keep swapping out Guilty Gear color palettes, they should have actually given them something to keep their reflexes from going numb. The Rounders (PastelBots) move like capsule toys through delicious honey, and the Boss Mode combat has one of the worst my-turn-your-turn dynamics since Killer Instinct. The controls are intuitive enough for those with a little patience, but the way the game transitions from one battle mode to another is jarring and annoying enough to create the illusion that they aren’t. When you’re transitioning from the standard space battlefield to close-quarters combat, the camera zooms in to SHOW YOU ALL THE ACTION, and you’re immediately disoriented. When one of the PastelBots (Rounders) switches to Boss Mode, you get a little flashcard of slapdash anime clip-art and a chirpy voice to accompany the entire screen changing on you. If you’ve grown to accept random battles in RPGs and selecting FIGHT from text boxes, you’ll probably be able to shift gears along with Senko no Ronde as it shows you how many games it can try to be, but . . . I dunno, I been working on this thing where I’m less spastic lately.
And another thing: that Boss Mode. It’s . . . well, it’s damn creaky. Once the screen’s done its Big Woosh changing thing and your eyes have uncrossed, you (or your opponent) get the opportunity to be really Big and shoot a million jillion Glow Orbs all around – – just like the bosses in all those beloved shooters. It’s pointless and unnerving, especially with the Rounders inability to dodge with any speed or sensitivity . . . and it’s kind of a psychological kick in the balls for anyone who ever spent their time memorizing bullet patterns on more classically-conceptualized shooting titles. The game kind of realizes this, so don’t expect to spend much time Bossing it around – – it’s just a little Nostalgia Snack, and over before it begins. What a waste: it’s development time that could have been spent on making the normal combat more interesting and responsive.
These kinds of format mash-ups can work, on occasion . . . if you look at something like, say, Data East’s The Great Ragtimeshow, you’ll find a game that successfully blended Metal Slug‘s sense of humor and vehicular variety, the air combat of classic shooters, and an amazing feel for the era’s best platforming into a game that’s a visual feast and an utter joy (and hey, this was 1992). It takes a great deal of vision to make this kind of thing work, though, and it’s painfully obvious when a developer is just trying to ham-fist another format on top of another to help prop up weak gameplay.
Senko no Ronde, for all of the hype and keyfroth, is an also-ran: too wrapped up in making its Game Salad to remember that we’d ordered a hamburger. There may be something out there to defibrillate the paunchy mess of moe-shooters and frame-count twitch-fighters that are littering Japan’s arcades (and increasingly your Xbox 360), but this certainly ain’t it.
text by David Cabrera
★⋆☆☆
“GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Kong Man Center is my other Chinatown arcade. At first glance yet another of the CD/DVD/VCD shops that lines the street, Kong Man, when one presses into the back of the store, houses a secret compartment of delights which I have affectionately dubbed the “closet arcade”. The closet arcade is just that; a dark, enclosed back room which only has room for five arcade cabinets and–barely– their players. The owner is clearly an SNK fan; when I first came here, to play King of Fighters 2003 before most people would play it, I found myself surrounded by not just the 2003 version of KoF, but every King of Fighters game: even the surreal, recolored bootleg Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2003. Some time later, when Neo Geo Battle Coliseum was released, word got out that, again, Kong Man had it before anybody else. There ended up being an unintentional gathering. These things tend to happen when there is only one place, anywhere, to play a certain videogame right now. The same people tend to come out.
So, as expected, the lot of us crowded around a strange new game which we could see being played before us, but could not yet understand. There was only one guy who knew what the hell he was doing; this is another common circumstance at these things. One guy has always prepared: he’s studied match videos, he’s read Arcadia, something. This guy’s efforts are rewarded by his only having to pay fifty cents all night. Meanwhile the rest of us, the huddled masses, bear the burden of feeding the machine, only to have our sore pixelated asses– retouched 90’s relics, they clash with the beautiful high-resolution backgrounds– dragon-punched into the air over and over again by his Kyo. All I can say for these fights is that NGBC‘s pleasantly quick pace makes these beatdowns mercifully brief, at least. It’s neither much fun for the audience nor for the players to fight such one-sided battles, but this was the only machine we had.
A huge man, the hero of our story, walks into the closet and pushes the human mass, already straining for space, further back, closer, as though a group of three had just entered. After watching a few of the beatings, he loudly proclaims– in this tiny room his yell bounces off the walls, enters and exits our poor, overworked and suffering ears– that our champion is, in fact, a tier-whoring scrub. “Kyo is hecking brooo-ken!” he howl-whines: Kyo is, in layman’s terms, too strong, too unfair to be inflicted upon others. A tier-whoring scrub only uses the strongest characters, because his abilities are themselves insufficient to win fairly. If it wasn’t for Kyo, and that dragon punch bullstuff, he continues, would beat his ass. With Marco.
Kyo Kusanagi feels more or less the same way he feels in latter-day King of Fighters, but as with every incremental upgrade, Kyo has little tricks that need to be learned. In this game, during a juggle combo, the trick is that Kyo can use his dragon punch equivalent three times in a row. He kicks you up into the air; you wait, you fall. He does the dragon punch: you wait, you fall. And then again, and again. It’s not a glitch or an exploit; it’s there because the designers wanted it to be. It’s not overly damaging, not unfair- but it’s terribly frustrating.
It was really pissing this guy off, and he wasn’t even the one losing to it. He was way down on the quarter line; the only way he could think to kill time was to continue to complain to the room. Nobody really wanted to hear it, especially not for the thirty minutes it took him to get to the front of the line. Finally, he moved some people over, stepped up to the machine, picked Marco, and began to fight.
Marco is in fact the Marco you may know from the Metal Slug series: he’s also one of the bigger oddballs in a very unusual cast assembled from all over SNK’s gameography, from Fatal Fury to Aggressors of Dark Kombat. Being a character ripped out of another genre entirely, Marco does not play very conventionally: if you don’t already know what you’re doing, you’re dead. In other words, our hero has made a promise he cannot keep. Marco flops around like a dying fish, his tag teammate who I don’t remember doesn’t fare any better, and Kyo dragon punches them both to his heart’s content. It’s over quickly.
Our defeated protagonist lumbers away from the machine, seething, mumbling to himself. He shuts up for about half a minute. Then, without warning, it is back to the song and dance from before, but louder, with more righteous indignation. Our hero is spiraling into barely coherent rage. He suggests, tentatively, that the champion, a much smaller, fitter guy, come out and have a fight with him, a real one, conducted via bare fists, to prove who is truly the superior joystick-and-buttons fighter. Nobody pays this any mind– we can’t even visualize these two fighting– until he repeats himself a few more times, demands our attention more and more insistently.
“YOU AND ME! WE’RE GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Did I even hear that stuff, in the middle of the closet arcade at Kong Man Center? Did I really hear something so ridiculous? Was it just something I read on a Shoryuken.com thread? Didn’t I hear it at both places? Who knows anymore. The point is that the man wanted to take it outside over a videogame, and that furthermore, he is only able to understand this hypothetical confrontation in terms of another goddamn videogame. Standing out there on the sidewalk, he would see gauges and lifebars in the corners of his mind’s eye.
The owner pops the closet door open after this loudest declaration: he doesn’t know or care what the hell anybody is talking about in here, but he wants us to keep it down, for Christ’s sake. As the owner stares our hero in the face, he casts his eyes down like a child avoiding blame. The volume of his ranting fades, subsides into murmuring. Eventually our hero storms out, our champion leaves with his girlfriend, and I finally get some quality time in with the game: time with people I have a chance of beating.
On even competitive ground, this is SNK’s best in years; a thought-out, solid, unique fighting system coupled with a nearly dangerous overload of SNK’s trademark self-referential fanservice. The latter is SNK’s main export and you can get it packed in with anything they sell nowadays. Pleasant, but not special. The former is rare and precious, and the only reason I ever really loved to play SNK’s games. It was this core that got the twenty-some people to huddle up in the closet-arcade, and later put up with the sound, the smell of our hero; it was also what drove him into a raving videogame tantrum. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, a good videogame is still that strong.
★⋆☆☆
“GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Kong Man Center is my other Chinatown arcade. At first glance yet another of the CD/DVD/VCD shops that lines the street, Kong Man, when one presses into the back of the store, houses a secret compartment of delights which I have affectionately dubbed the “closet arcade”. The closet arcade is just that; a dark, enclosed back room which only has room for five arcade cabinets and–barely– their players. The owner is clearly an SNK fan; when I first came here, to play King of Fighters 2003 before most people would play it, I found myself surrounded by not just the 2003 version of KoF, but every King of Fighters game: even the surreal, recolored bootleg Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2003. Some time later, when Neo Geo Battle Coliseum was released, word got out that, again, Kong Man had it before anybody else. There ended up being an unintentional gathering. These things tend to happen when there is only one place, anywhere, to play a certain videogame right now. The same people tend to come out.
So, as expected, the lot of us crowded around a strange new game which we could see being played before us, but could not yet understand. There was only one guy who knew what the hell he was doing; this is another common circumstance at these things. One guy has always prepared: he’s studied match videos, he’s read Arcadia, something. This guy’s efforts are rewarded by his only having to pay fifty cents all night. Meanwhile the rest of us, the huddled masses, bear the burden of feeding the machine, only to have our sore pixelated asses– retouched 90’s relics, they clash with the beautiful high-resolution backgrounds– dragon-punched into the air over and over again by his Kyo. All I can say for these fights is that NGBC‘s pleasantly quick pace makes these beatdowns mercifully brief, at least. It’s neither much fun for the audience nor for the players to fight such one-sided battles, but this was the only machine we had.
A huge man, the hero of our story, walks into the closet and pushes the human mass, already straining for space, further back, closer, as though a group of three had just entered. After watching a few of the beatings, he loudly proclaims– in this tiny room his yell bounces off the walls, enters and exits our poor, overworked and suffering ears– that our champion is, in fact, a tier-whoring scrub. “Kyo is hecking brooo-ken!” he howl-whines: Kyo is, in layman’s terms, too strong, too unfair to be inflicted upon others. A tier-whoring scrub only uses the strongest characters, because his abilities are themselves insufficient to win fairly. If it wasn’t for Kyo, and that dragon punch bullstuff, he continues, would beat his ass. With Marco.
Kyo Kusanagi feels more or less the same way he feels in latter-day King of Fighters, but as with every incremental upgrade, Kyo has little tricks that need to be learned. In this game, during a juggle combo, the trick is that Kyo can use his dragon punch equivalent three times in a row. He kicks you up into the air; you wait, you fall. He does the dragon punch: you wait, you fall. And then again, and again. It’s not a glitch or an exploit; it’s there because the designers wanted it to be. It’s not overly damaging, not unfair- but it’s terribly frustrating.
It was really pissing this guy off, and he wasn’t even the one losing to it. He was way down on the quarter line; the only way he could think to kill time was to continue to complain to the room. Nobody really wanted to hear it, especially not for the thirty minutes it took him to get to the front of the line. Finally, he moved some people over, stepped up to the machine, picked Marco, and began to fight.
Marco is in fact the Marco you may know from the Metal Slug series: he’s also one of the bigger oddballs in a very unusual cast assembled from all over SNK’s gameography, from Fatal Fury to Aggressors of Dark Kombat. Being a character ripped out of another genre entirely, Marco does not play very conventionally: if you don’t already know what you’re doing, you’re dead. In other words, our hero has made a promise he cannot keep. Marco flops around like a dying fish, his tag teammate who I don’t remember doesn’t fare any better, and Kyo dragon punches them both to his heart’s content. It’s over quickly.
Our defeated protagonist lumbers away from the machine, seething, mumbling to himself. He shuts up for about half a minute. Then, without warning, it is back to the song and dance from before, but louder, with more righteous indignation. Our hero is spiraling into barely coherent rage. He suggests, tentatively, that the champion, a much smaller, fitter guy, come out and have a fight with him, a real one, conducted via bare fists, to prove who is truly the superior joystick-and-buttons fighter. Nobody pays this any mind– we can’t even visualize these two fighting– until he repeats himself a few more times, demands our attention more and more insistently.
“YOU AND ME! WE’RE GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Did I even hear that stuff, in the middle of the closet arcade at Kong Man Center? Did I really hear something so ridiculous? Was it just something I read on a Shoryuken.com thread? Didn’t I hear it at both places? Who knows anymore. The point is that the man wanted to take it outside over a videogame, and that furthermore, he is only able to understand this hypothetical confrontation in terms of another goddamn videogame. Standing out there on the sidewalk, he would see gauges and lifebars in the corners of his mind’s eye.
The owner pops the closet door open after this loudest declaration: he doesn’t know or care what the hell anybody is talking about in here, but he wants us to keep it down, for Christ’s sake. As the owner stares our hero in the face, he casts his eyes down like a child avoiding blame. The volume of his ranting fades, subsides into murmuring. Eventually our hero storms out, our champion leaves with his girlfriend, and I finally get some quality time in with the game: time with people I have a chance of beating.
On even competitive ground, this is SNK’s best in years; a thought-out, solid, unique fighting system coupled with a nearly dangerous overload of SNK’s trademark self-referential fanservice. The latter is SNK’s main export and you can get it packed in with anything they sell nowadays. Pleasant, but not special. The former is rare and precious, and the only reason I ever really loved to play SNK’s games. It was this core that got the twenty-some people to huddle up in the closet-arcade, and later put up with the sound, the smell of our hero; it was also what drove him into a raving videogame tantrum. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, a good videogame is still that strong.
2006
text by Bennett
★★☆☆
“PERFECT IN FORM AND FUNCTION; OTHERWISE, BAD.”
Final Fantasy XII is probably the deepest, lengthiest and most detailed game ever produced. When I finished it, the clock showed over a hundred hours of play, and I think I had plumbed no more than half of its optional sidequests and secret treasures. It has an epic plot, with hours of beautiful video and a richly-detailed script which is voiced perfectly. It has more beautiful art than I have ever seen on a single DVD.
When the credits rolled at the end, I thought to myself: “That’s it? That’s all there is?” I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Had I invested 100 hours in this game for this?
I had to wonder how it could be that I was feeling this way. I had never played a game with superior production values, nor with superior depth. I loved the characters, and the lush, expansive world they inhabited. But somehow, in this Final Fantasy, which had more substance than any of its ancestors, the core experience seemed to be absent. I had to wonder what secret spice was missing which would have recreated the elation I felt at the end of installments VII, VIII and X.
The biggest critical complaint about XII has been that its combat system produces the same kind of repetitive ‘grind’ that is present in an MMO. To my mind, this is an ignorant claim. The Final Fantasy series already had this classic MMO ‘problem’ in spades – indeed, it was Sakaguchi who invented it. By contrast, the new real-time model allows you to avoid random monsters and frees you from endlessly repeated button combinations. It allows you to focus directly on the story and quest mechanics. It lets you constantly interact. The new system is not the problem. So what is it that ruins the game?
There are some obvious suspects. The new summon system asks you to wait five minutes while the summoned creature, or ‘esper’, is introduced. The esper appears, forming a party of two with the summoner. All the nearby monsters wisely attack the summoner, leaving the impotent esper alone, because they know that the esper will disappear when the summoner is killed. The result? You will never call an esper more than once.
The experience system is utterly broken. This is the first Final Fantasy game which puts more weight on your character’s level than on his equipment or tactics. About halfway through the game, it became apparent: you can either buy the largest, most expensive sword, or you can run around in the fields killing monsters for half an hour. The effect is exactly the same. As a result, you are never excited to get treasure.
These problems are annoying because they would have been easy to fix, if an insightful producer had been at the helm. But they don’t stop you from enjoying the game. What stops you from enjoying the game is a much more fundamental problem.
This is what I have realised: When we say a game is a role-playing game, or that it has ‘RPG elements’, we mean that the game allows you to increase your character’s skills and powers over time. Sometimes this device exists only as a Pavlovian reward – a way to addict you to a repetitive process, like the one in Diablo. In good role-playing games, it is a quantified metaphor for the advancement and development of a heroic character.
The development of a character from zero to hero is a powerful and satisfying theme when it appears in books or films. Luke Skywalker, Musashi, Spiderman, Neo, and King Arthur all moved from humble beginnings to a glorious pinnacle. This is at the core of any heroic story, not by convention but by necessity, because it is that contrast in power which gives the story its gravity and its emotional power.
Final Fantasy games always force you to spend the bulk of your time with one central character. It is this character who you bond with – he is the protagonist who must undergo that heroic metamorphosis.
In VII, the protagonist is a Han Solo-esque mercenary whose heroic deeds ultimately win the admiration of his companions. By the end, none of them care that he is an impostor who stole the identity of his girlfriend’s next-door neighbour. Their respect is not misplaced – in a single blow, he defeats his old mentor, a deranged genius who was initially hundreds of times more powerful.
In X, your central character is a dream. By the end of the story, your friends want the dream to be true so badly that they spend a whole sequel scouring the earth for him. Or so I am led to believe – I’m not going to play a game where you change jobs by trying on a new dress.
In XII, the lead is Vaan, once more an androgynous teenaged misfit with a sword. He falls in with a bunch of adults – royalty and thieves. In the closing scenes, one character explicitly suggests that Vaan is the hero of the story. But he never does a single thing to earn this respect.
He’s present in every dramatic scene, and often yells out some defiant line, or words of encouragement to another character. But he never does anything. He has no special powers. He has no particular significant relationship with any of the antagonists. He doesn’t even teach anyone an important emotional lesson, like Naruto would.
He is, in other words, exactly like a sidekick. Vaan is more Pippin than Frodo, more Watson than Holmes. But nobody plays Danger Mouse to Vaan’s Penfold. It’s like a story about Robin, but Batman isn’t around. or It’s Chewbacca Gaiden. It’s Ron Weasley and the Failed Attempt to Protect the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s Luigi at Peach and Bowser’s Wedding.
In the end this opulent, ornate game is a bitter disappointment. Yes, your characters all become much stronger over time. But you get the sense that they would have overcome their challenges whether or not you had gained a single level. And they certainly could have done the whole thing without the help of Vaan.
After VII, VIII and X, I was hooked on a feeling. But you can’t get that feeling back by playing XII.
★★☆☆
“PERFECT IN FORM AND FUNCTION; OTHERWISE, BAD.”
Final Fantasy XII is probably the deepest, lengthiest and most detailed game ever produced. When I finished it, the clock showed over a hundred hours of play, and I think I had plumbed no more than half of its optional sidequests and secret treasures. It has an epic plot, with hours of beautiful video and a richly-detailed script which is voiced perfectly. It has more beautiful art than I have ever seen on a single DVD.
When the credits rolled at the end, I thought to myself: “That’s it? That’s all there is?” I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Had I invested 100 hours in this game for this?
I had to wonder how it could be that I was feeling this way. I had never played a game with superior production values, nor with superior depth. I loved the characters, and the lush, expansive world they inhabited. But somehow, in this Final Fantasy, which had more substance than any of its ancestors, the core experience seemed to be absent. I had to wonder what secret spice was missing which would have recreated the elation I felt at the end of installments VII, VIII and X.
The biggest critical complaint about XII has been that its combat system produces the same kind of repetitive ‘grind’ that is present in an MMO. To my mind, this is an ignorant claim. The Final Fantasy series already had this classic MMO ‘problem’ in spades – indeed, it was Sakaguchi who invented it. By contrast, the new real-time model allows you to avoid random monsters and frees you from endlessly repeated button combinations. It allows you to focus directly on the story and quest mechanics. It lets you constantly interact. The new system is not the problem. So what is it that ruins the game?
There are some obvious suspects. The new summon system asks you to wait five minutes while the summoned creature, or ‘esper’, is introduced. The esper appears, forming a party of two with the summoner. All the nearby monsters wisely attack the summoner, leaving the impotent esper alone, because they know that the esper will disappear when the summoner is killed. The result? You will never call an esper more than once.
The experience system is utterly broken. This is the first Final Fantasy game which puts more weight on your character’s level than on his equipment or tactics. About halfway through the game, it became apparent: you can either buy the largest, most expensive sword, or you can run around in the fields killing monsters for half an hour. The effect is exactly the same. As a result, you are never excited to get treasure.
These problems are annoying because they would have been easy to fix, if an insightful producer had been at the helm. But they don’t stop you from enjoying the game. What stops you from enjoying the game is a much more fundamental problem.
This is what I have realised: When we say a game is a role-playing game, or that it has ‘RPG elements’, we mean that the game allows you to increase your character’s skills and powers over time. Sometimes this device exists only as a Pavlovian reward – a way to addict you to a repetitive process, like the one in Diablo. In good role-playing games, it is a quantified metaphor for the advancement and development of a heroic character.
The development of a character from zero to hero is a powerful and satisfying theme when it appears in books or films. Luke Skywalker, Musashi, Spiderman, Neo, and King Arthur all moved from humble beginnings to a glorious pinnacle. This is at the core of any heroic story, not by convention but by necessity, because it is that contrast in power which gives the story its gravity and its emotional power.
Final Fantasy games always force you to spend the bulk of your time with one central character. It is this character who you bond with – he is the protagonist who must undergo that heroic metamorphosis.
In VII, the protagonist is a Han Solo-esque mercenary whose heroic deeds ultimately win the admiration of his companions. By the end, none of them care that he is an impostor who stole the identity of his girlfriend’s next-door neighbour. Their respect is not misplaced – in a single blow, he defeats his old mentor, a deranged genius who was initially hundreds of times more powerful.
In X, your central character is a dream. By the end of the story, your friends want the dream to be true so badly that they spend a whole sequel scouring the earth for him. Or so I am led to believe – I’m not going to play a game where you change jobs by trying on a new dress.
In XII, the lead is Vaan, once more an androgynous teenaged misfit with a sword. He falls in with a bunch of adults – royalty and thieves. In the closing scenes, one character explicitly suggests that Vaan is the hero of the story. But he never does a single thing to earn this respect.
He’s present in every dramatic scene, and often yells out some defiant line, or words of encouragement to another character. But he never does anything. He has no special powers. He has no particular significant relationship with any of the antagonists. He doesn’t even teach anyone an important emotional lesson, like Naruto would.
He is, in other words, exactly like a sidekick. Vaan is more Pippin than Frodo, more Watson than Holmes. But nobody plays Danger Mouse to Vaan’s Penfold. It’s like a story about Robin, but Batman isn’t around. or It’s Chewbacca Gaiden. It’s Ron Weasley and the Failed Attempt to Protect the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s Luigi at Peach and Bowser’s Wedding.
In the end this opulent, ornate game is a bitter disappointment. Yes, your characters all become much stronger over time. But you get the sense that they would have overcome their challenges whether or not you had gained a single level. And they certainly could have done the whole thing without the help of Vaan.
After VII, VIII and X, I was hooked on a feeling. But you can’t get that feeling back by playing XII.
2007
text by Carl Bohlin
★★★☆
“IS TO THE ORIGINAL WARCRAFT WHAT A MODERN BULLET-HELL SHOOTER IS TO THE FIRST GRADIUS.”
Supreme Commander takes the RTS genre to its logical short-term conclusion. Want to build 100 amphibious tanks? Okay, just queue that stuff up and you’ll have them in a few minutes. Want to give them all orders at once? Sure, absolutely no problem. There is no upper limit to the amount of units you can have selected at any one time. Want to tell all of your warships with legs that maybe they should head over there for a while, even though they’re scattered all over the (motherhecking insanely gigantic) map? You just zoom out enough that you can see the entire map, which is terribly easy and rewarding, select every unit on the field, click on the warship icon, and there you go!
User empowerment through enhancements to the interface, though, is what this game is about: Taking away all the dumb limitations that hem the strategic thinking and innovation of the player in. The game is like comparing the tabbed, spell-checking, greasemonkey’d, fasterfox’d, adblocked Firefox to the rest of the genre’s Internet Explorer 3.0 for Palm and it’s incredible how easy, fun and rewarding it is to use the tools they’ve given you.
Supreme Commander is a game that really, truly wants to make the people who play RTS games ask themselves just what in the hell it is that they’ve been putting up with for all these years. The standard user interface for this particular genre is still trying to respect the limitations set down by games with a lower resolution than my cellphone. It is like intentionally making paper an inch thick because we used to write on stone tablets — which is kind of puzzling, and makes you wonder if these people actually understand what it they’re making. If they ever play their own creations, or just keep making them as some kind of weird tribute to the games that they liked when they were kids. Take Starcraft for one: The player can only select a tiny amount of units at once, he can only give them a single order, and if he wants to be competitive against even the dumbest AI, he will need to constantly micromanage them. The base-building is slow, inefficient, and needs constant looking after, even though it would be terrible easy to give the player more of an indirect, hands-off building tool. Think something more along the lines of planning the base, and then creating some engineers to do it for you, without needing constant input from you. Instead you are forced to both plan the base out in your mind, give tiny, stupid orders to your builders, and just generally micromanage everything to a terrible degree.
Clearly, this was something that shouldn’t, couldn’t last. Not in such a technophilic environment as game design.
Enter Gas-Powered Games, and let none who experience their creation tolerate anything less than what they have created from now on. And yet, I am afraid that it will be remembered as more of a Dragon Quarter than a Goldeneye. Something that could have shown the entire genre it was spawned from how to save itself: To become something that it should always have wanted to become, yet was ignored and cast away because not enough people bought it, or really got what it was trying to do. This game deserves better than that — but then again, so did Dragon Quarter, and, well, that didn’t mean nothing at all.
I could talk about the individual units, the way there are a million avenues of attack, the way everything plays off of everything else, and how you need to constantly balance your needs with your offensive wants — but that’s not really important here. What’s great about the game isn’t the balance, the units or how you actually play it. I mean, it IS really great, and it’s actually incredibly well done, but none of those things are as innovative and powerful as what the UI achieves. The interface is an amazing example of punctuated equilibrium in game design, how the evolution of a genre can stand still for a long time and then shoot forward at a huge speed with the release of a single game, just because of a few designers reinventing the steering wheel, so to speak. That’s exactly what the RTS genre needed at this point in time, and if their ideas and thoughts are heeded, we are going to see some really interesting things happen to it in the near future, as soon as the lessons of this pretty insanely great piece have been absorbed.
★★★☆
“IS TO THE ORIGINAL WARCRAFT WHAT A MODERN BULLET-HELL SHOOTER IS TO THE FIRST GRADIUS.”
Supreme Commander takes the RTS genre to its logical short-term conclusion. Want to build 100 amphibious tanks? Okay, just queue that stuff up and you’ll have them in a few minutes. Want to give them all orders at once? Sure, absolutely no problem. There is no upper limit to the amount of units you can have selected at any one time. Want to tell all of your warships with legs that maybe they should head over there for a while, even though they’re scattered all over the (motherhecking insanely gigantic) map? You just zoom out enough that you can see the entire map, which is terribly easy and rewarding, select every unit on the field, click on the warship icon, and there you go!
User empowerment through enhancements to the interface, though, is what this game is about: Taking away all the dumb limitations that hem the strategic thinking and innovation of the player in. The game is like comparing the tabbed, spell-checking, greasemonkey’d, fasterfox’d, adblocked Firefox to the rest of the genre’s Internet Explorer 3.0 for Palm and it’s incredible how easy, fun and rewarding it is to use the tools they’ve given you.
Supreme Commander is a game that really, truly wants to make the people who play RTS games ask themselves just what in the hell it is that they’ve been putting up with for all these years. The standard user interface for this particular genre is still trying to respect the limitations set down by games with a lower resolution than my cellphone. It is like intentionally making paper an inch thick because we used to write on stone tablets — which is kind of puzzling, and makes you wonder if these people actually understand what it they’re making. If they ever play their own creations, or just keep making them as some kind of weird tribute to the games that they liked when they were kids. Take Starcraft for one: The player can only select a tiny amount of units at once, he can only give them a single order, and if he wants to be competitive against even the dumbest AI, he will need to constantly micromanage them. The base-building is slow, inefficient, and needs constant looking after, even though it would be terrible easy to give the player more of an indirect, hands-off building tool. Think something more along the lines of planning the base, and then creating some engineers to do it for you, without needing constant input from you. Instead you are forced to both plan the base out in your mind, give tiny, stupid orders to your builders, and just generally micromanage everything to a terrible degree.
Clearly, this was something that shouldn’t, couldn’t last. Not in such a technophilic environment as game design.
Enter Gas-Powered Games, and let none who experience their creation tolerate anything less than what they have created from now on. And yet, I am afraid that it will be remembered as more of a Dragon Quarter than a Goldeneye. Something that could have shown the entire genre it was spawned from how to save itself: To become something that it should always have wanted to become, yet was ignored and cast away because not enough people bought it, or really got what it was trying to do. This game deserves better than that — but then again, so did Dragon Quarter, and, well, that didn’t mean nothing at all.
I could talk about the individual units, the way there are a million avenues of attack, the way everything plays off of everything else, and how you need to constantly balance your needs with your offensive wants — but that’s not really important here. What’s great about the game isn’t the balance, the units or how you actually play it. I mean, it IS really great, and it’s actually incredibly well done, but none of those things are as innovative and powerful as what the UI achieves. The interface is an amazing example of punctuated equilibrium in game design, how the evolution of a genre can stand still for a long time and then shoot forward at a huge speed with the release of a single game, just because of a few designers reinventing the steering wheel, so to speak. That’s exactly what the RTS genre needed at this point in time, and if their ideas and thoughts are heeded, we are going to see some really interesting things happen to it in the near future, as soon as the lessons of this pretty insanely great piece have been absorbed.
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“PRECISELY THE KIND OF TOSSED-OFF, DOWN-TO-EARTH POP-SONG VIDEOGAME THESE PEOPLE NEED TO BE MAKING A WHOLE LOT MORE OF.”
More shocking things have happened than Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings‘ not being a terrible videogame at all. What with all the breeding and inbreeding surrounding it, you’d think it would have no right to be anything other than complete trash. It’s a spinoff of a Final Fantasy game that “average gamers” hated despite its accidental brilliance; in the perfect world as represented by the Square-Enix corporate umbrella, the “niche gamers” that are able to find the genius in a game like Final Fantasy XII can go to hell and then die again. You’d think that if they were going to make a spinoff or a side-story, they’d also spray a thick layer of bullstuff all over it, to make it the same brand of zippers-and-pleather fetishism schlock that they make most of their money from these days. Not so — Square-Enix have decided to do the previously unthinkable, and respect their audience, though only in the most ham-handed way: they have graciously created the “Ivalice Alliance”, a brand name for videogames existing within the “Final Fantasy” brand name, which happen to take place in the mythical land of Ivalice, where lizard men and bunny girls politely obey the laws of combat and agility stat numbers as they fight for the future, where the music of Hitoshi Sakimoto, which is like a special kind of language developed to convey strategic thought, booms down from the sky at intense moments, or twitters in the background while generals are micromanaging troops. The “Ivalice Alliance” will no doubt eventually pop out an all-new Final Fantasy Tactics adventure; setting up a new brand name to house remakes and spinoffs is kind of &^#$#ed. At present, the brand is already off to a rolling start, with Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings and Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, already released, and Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and Final Fantasy XII: International + Zodiac Job System on the way. I don’t know about “Job System” being in a game title, especially preceded by a mathematic symbol. It leaves kind of a weird aftertaste. It also makes me kind of thirsty for the inevitable day that someone makes a game title that contains a balanced equation.
At any rate, Revenant Wings is a shockingly not terrible game, for what it’s worth. You think it would play something like Kingdom Hearts without the Disney or Sephiroth, though I guess the 160-year-old man who makes the important business decisions (strike down innovation in the name of paying as few full salaries as possible) was out attending his grandson’s funeral or something, because someone decided to roll with the crazy idea to try to make this actually a good game.
It’s a real-time strategy game, sort of, though less like StarCraft and more like Ogre Battle. Final Fantasy XII was something original because it played kind of like Ogre Battle without all of the fading to black and auto-fighting. FFXII was producer Yasumi Matsuno’s way of trying to come to grips with his dream to create a numberless, dynamic, evolving role-playing adventure game, though Square’s desire to repress his more interesting ideas apparently sent him running. Matsuno is one of the few people in game design we can probably call a “genius”; he was without a doubt the most creatively talented person getting a monthly direct bank deposit from the Square-Enix corporation, or perhaps any Japanese videogame corporation. As convinced as I and we are that Matsuno can make a hell of a videogame if only someone would give him enough money and trust, we’re not about to say that Revenant Wings was doomed to be a horrible game just because Matsuno wasn’t involved.
It’s still a shock that it wound up not being terrible.
Someone with a couple more-than-interesting ideas threw them together, and here you have it. It’s a real-time strategy game that flows kind of like Final Fantasy XII; most of the missions take place indoors, which is quaint. It feels at times almost like Baldur’s Gate, though at many moments the truth shines in: the people who made this game never played Baldur’s Gate, maybe because Baldur’s Gate was never released in the Japanese language. In many ways, the game is free to do whatever it wants because of this pseudo-fact — just as the terrifyingly bad third-person shooter Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII was free to do whatever it wanted because none of its designers had apparently ever played a good shooting game. Where Dirge took the path to the dark side, Revenant takes the path to the light side. It’s a cute, pleasant little game, like Baldur’s Gate meets the stage-by-stage action-adventure spirit of one of those above-average side-scrollers on the Super Famicom.
The game makes nice use of the Nintendo DS touch screen for controlling your units. The bottom screen is the field screen; the top screen is a map; press the L or R button to reverse the two screens; with the map on the bottom screen, touch a location to go there. It’s pretty tight and fast. Almost too fast at times — there’s no speed setting option, and there’s no way to pause the battle and issue commands, which, come to think of it, is kind of inexcusable.
There’s plenty of pleasant brain-clutter all over the place: summon gates allow you to summon monsters; choose the types of monsters you want to be able to summon before the battle by forging a “Summon Deck”; assign the monsters to specific “leader” characters, click the leader character’s portrait at the top of the field screen to select that leader and all of his or her monsters. Pay careful mind to the types of opponents you’re fighting, so you know whom to send after whom. Magic units beat flying units, close-range units beat magic units, close-range units beat flying units. Position your healing units in the right spot on the battlefield to keep your troops living.
The battles get pretty hectic, and sometimes it’s kind of impossible to know what the hell is going on. The graphics are nice enough when you’re not relying on them to do your laundry, I guess. The backgrounds are some Xenogears-esque polygonal 3D, though the screen doesn’t rotate — early Weekly Famitsu articles depicted a little icon in the corner of the screen that you could tap to drag-rotate the map, though that would probably be the lifeboat that broke the battleship’s back, and render the game an unwieldy mess. Speaking of messy, the character sprites are kind of hard to make out, most of the time. When the screen isn’t actively discombobulating in the name of bitching 3D, the sprites are so “Vintage Final Fantasy” that it might make a man serene inside. Once things start moving, it gets confusing. At least the music is nicer than nice; it’s kind of funny how much post-Final Fantasy Tactics Hitoshi Sakimoto’s stuff sounds like it’d fit into Chrono Trigger when it’s rendered with the DS sound chip. The save menu music, in particular, is pretty sublime. During battle, you can hear some choice cuts from Final Fantasy XII now played with warmer, happier, more lovably handheld-feeling synthesizers.
In short, this game is cute and small and kind of easy and mostly good. There’s no two-player wireless versus or co-op mode, which is just plain not cool, though the one-player quest is a breezy and poppy and breathless story about dumb little kids on a dumb air-pirate-battling adventure on a floating continent; it never stops or stoops to pander, which, in this day and age, is utterly remarkable. You can open the menu between battles to unlock new summon monsters using crystals earned in battle, or to put new swords or armor on your troops, which mostly feels like busywork because the swords or armor are just things you find in the natural course of the missions, anyway, though for the most part, it all flows very well. It’s Square’s second attempt at a real-time strategy for the Nintendo DS, after Heroes of Mana, which was so easy that it felt vaguely wrong, like breaking into someone’s kitchen to eat leftovers out of their refrigerator while they’re upstairs watching TV in bed.
Square has flip-flopped back and forth between utter conviction that the DS is a piece of stuff and yen-sign-irised hope that at least a million of those ten million units sold might have found the hands of die-hard Final Fantasy fans. To wit: they announced Dragon Quest IX for DS, and then scrapped the controversial action-RPG style of Dragon Quest IX because Children of Mana (an action-RPG) didn’t sell well enough. There’s going to come a time that Square-Enix has to untie the bundle of controller cords in their game shelf, to sort the pride from the common sense. If Heroes of Mana, Square’s obvious water-testing DS RTS, had sold a half a million copies (it didn’t), Revenant Wings, blest with a Final Fantasy brand name, would no doubt have received the smothering, triple-A, canon treatment, and the story would be bogged down with children whining about how they don’t want to grow up. Instead, we get pages torn out of the “Dragon Ball” rulebook; for example, we have a character who hates the good guys, yet is forced to fight on your side because of some dopey magic torture ring. The game flow follows suit in charming little lapses of game-design grammar, like how a “Gambit” is just the single action you configure a character to automatically use over and over again, not the complicated yet elegant (and kind of revolutionary) AI scripting the term represented in Final Fantasy XII. Et cetera. Though the final product is kind of gimped out of a multiplayer mode or very much real depth at all behind edge-of-the-moment strategic planning, this is seriously the kind of tossed-off, down-to-earth videogame these people need to be making a whole lot more of.
★★☆☆
“PRECISELY THE KIND OF TOSSED-OFF, DOWN-TO-EARTH POP-SONG VIDEOGAME THESE PEOPLE NEED TO BE MAKING A WHOLE LOT MORE OF.”
More shocking things have happened than Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings‘ not being a terrible videogame at all. What with all the breeding and inbreeding surrounding it, you’d think it would have no right to be anything other than complete trash. It’s a spinoff of a Final Fantasy game that “average gamers” hated despite its accidental brilliance; in the perfect world as represented by the Square-Enix corporate umbrella, the “niche gamers” that are able to find the genius in a game like Final Fantasy XII can go to hell and then die again. You’d think that if they were going to make a spinoff or a side-story, they’d also spray a thick layer of bullstuff all over it, to make it the same brand of zippers-and-pleather fetishism schlock that they make most of their money from these days. Not so — Square-Enix have decided to do the previously unthinkable, and respect their audience, though only in the most ham-handed way: they have graciously created the “Ivalice Alliance”, a brand name for videogames existing within the “Final Fantasy” brand name, which happen to take place in the mythical land of Ivalice, where lizard men and bunny girls politely obey the laws of combat and agility stat numbers as they fight for the future, where the music of Hitoshi Sakimoto, which is like a special kind of language developed to convey strategic thought, booms down from the sky at intense moments, or twitters in the background while generals are micromanaging troops. The “Ivalice Alliance” will no doubt eventually pop out an all-new Final Fantasy Tactics adventure; setting up a new brand name to house remakes and spinoffs is kind of &^#$#ed. At present, the brand is already off to a rolling start, with Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings and Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, already released, and Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and Final Fantasy XII: International + Zodiac Job System on the way. I don’t know about “Job System” being in a game title, especially preceded by a mathematic symbol. It leaves kind of a weird aftertaste. It also makes me kind of thirsty for the inevitable day that someone makes a game title that contains a balanced equation.
At any rate, Revenant Wings is a shockingly not terrible game, for what it’s worth. You think it would play something like Kingdom Hearts without the Disney or Sephiroth, though I guess the 160-year-old man who makes the important business decisions (strike down innovation in the name of paying as few full salaries as possible) was out attending his grandson’s funeral or something, because someone decided to roll with the crazy idea to try to make this actually a good game.
It’s a real-time strategy game, sort of, though less like StarCraft and more like Ogre Battle. Final Fantasy XII was something original because it played kind of like Ogre Battle without all of the fading to black and auto-fighting. FFXII was producer Yasumi Matsuno’s way of trying to come to grips with his dream to create a numberless, dynamic, evolving role-playing adventure game, though Square’s desire to repress his more interesting ideas apparently sent him running. Matsuno is one of the few people in game design we can probably call a “genius”; he was without a doubt the most creatively talented person getting a monthly direct bank deposit from the Square-Enix corporation, or perhaps any Japanese videogame corporation. As convinced as I and we are that Matsuno can make a hell of a videogame if only someone would give him enough money and trust, we’re not about to say that Revenant Wings was doomed to be a horrible game just because Matsuno wasn’t involved.
It’s still a shock that it wound up not being terrible.
Someone with a couple more-than-interesting ideas threw them together, and here you have it. It’s a real-time strategy game that flows kind of like Final Fantasy XII; most of the missions take place indoors, which is quaint. It feels at times almost like Baldur’s Gate, though at many moments the truth shines in: the people who made this game never played Baldur’s Gate, maybe because Baldur’s Gate was never released in the Japanese language. In many ways, the game is free to do whatever it wants because of this pseudo-fact — just as the terrifyingly bad third-person shooter Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII was free to do whatever it wanted because none of its designers had apparently ever played a good shooting game. Where Dirge took the path to the dark side, Revenant takes the path to the light side. It’s a cute, pleasant little game, like Baldur’s Gate meets the stage-by-stage action-adventure spirit of one of those above-average side-scrollers on the Super Famicom.
The game makes nice use of the Nintendo DS touch screen for controlling your units. The bottom screen is the field screen; the top screen is a map; press the L or R button to reverse the two screens; with the map on the bottom screen, touch a location to go there. It’s pretty tight and fast. Almost too fast at times — there’s no speed setting option, and there’s no way to pause the battle and issue commands, which, come to think of it, is kind of inexcusable.
There’s plenty of pleasant brain-clutter all over the place: summon gates allow you to summon monsters; choose the types of monsters you want to be able to summon before the battle by forging a “Summon Deck”; assign the monsters to specific “leader” characters, click the leader character’s portrait at the top of the field screen to select that leader and all of his or her monsters. Pay careful mind to the types of opponents you’re fighting, so you know whom to send after whom. Magic units beat flying units, close-range units beat magic units, close-range units beat flying units. Position your healing units in the right spot on the battlefield to keep your troops living.
The battles get pretty hectic, and sometimes it’s kind of impossible to know what the hell is going on. The graphics are nice enough when you’re not relying on them to do your laundry, I guess. The backgrounds are some Xenogears-esque polygonal 3D, though the screen doesn’t rotate — early Weekly Famitsu articles depicted a little icon in the corner of the screen that you could tap to drag-rotate the map, though that would probably be the lifeboat that broke the battleship’s back, and render the game an unwieldy mess. Speaking of messy, the character sprites are kind of hard to make out, most of the time. When the screen isn’t actively discombobulating in the name of bitching 3D, the sprites are so “Vintage Final Fantasy” that it might make a man serene inside. Once things start moving, it gets confusing. At least the music is nicer than nice; it’s kind of funny how much post-Final Fantasy Tactics Hitoshi Sakimoto’s stuff sounds like it’d fit into Chrono Trigger when it’s rendered with the DS sound chip. The save menu music, in particular, is pretty sublime. During battle, you can hear some choice cuts from Final Fantasy XII now played with warmer, happier, more lovably handheld-feeling synthesizers.
In short, this game is cute and small and kind of easy and mostly good. There’s no two-player wireless versus or co-op mode, which is just plain not cool, though the one-player quest is a breezy and poppy and breathless story about dumb little kids on a dumb air-pirate-battling adventure on a floating continent; it never stops or stoops to pander, which, in this day and age, is utterly remarkable. You can open the menu between battles to unlock new summon monsters using crystals earned in battle, or to put new swords or armor on your troops, which mostly feels like busywork because the swords or armor are just things you find in the natural course of the missions, anyway, though for the most part, it all flows very well. It’s Square’s second attempt at a real-time strategy for the Nintendo DS, after Heroes of Mana, which was so easy that it felt vaguely wrong, like breaking into someone’s kitchen to eat leftovers out of their refrigerator while they’re upstairs watching TV in bed.
Square has flip-flopped back and forth between utter conviction that the DS is a piece of stuff and yen-sign-irised hope that at least a million of those ten million units sold might have found the hands of die-hard Final Fantasy fans. To wit: they announced Dragon Quest IX for DS, and then scrapped the controversial action-RPG style of Dragon Quest IX because Children of Mana (an action-RPG) didn’t sell well enough. There’s going to come a time that Square-Enix has to untie the bundle of controller cords in their game shelf, to sort the pride from the common sense. If Heroes of Mana, Square’s obvious water-testing DS RTS, had sold a half a million copies (it didn’t), Revenant Wings, blest with a Final Fantasy brand name, would no doubt have received the smothering, triple-A, canon treatment, and the story would be bogged down with children whining about how they don’t want to grow up. Instead, we get pages torn out of the “Dragon Ball” rulebook; for example, we have a character who hates the good guys, yet is forced to fight on your side because of some dopey magic torture ring. The game flow follows suit in charming little lapses of game-design grammar, like how a “Gambit” is just the single action you configure a character to automatically use over and over again, not the complicated yet elegant (and kind of revolutionary) AI scripting the term represented in Final Fantasy XII. Et cetera. Though the final product is kind of gimped out of a multiplayer mode or very much real depth at all behind edge-of-the-moment strategic planning, this is seriously the kind of tossed-off, down-to-earth videogame these people need to be making a whole lot more of.
text by Brandon Parker
★⋆☆☆
“STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT.”
I think there’s a lot action video games could learn from wrestling video games. In most action video games, you run up, hit your opponent a few times, possibly with attacks that are either weak or strong. While that opponent is still going through his dying animation you’ve already killed the next six or so guys. There’s not a lot of time to get personal with your enemy.
Now me, I prefer circling around my opponent for a bit, sizing him up. We stare at each other for awhile maybe, move our fingers like we’re playing an invisible piano or what-have-you, then we start grabbing each other. There’s just something more satisfying to me about grabbing onto a man, trying to bend him into painful and awkward looking positions, reversing and countering my opponents moves while coming back from an ass beating, and generally just seeing two guys grappling on each other, pulling out their moves and trying to gain the upper hand.
The problem with wrestling video games for me is, they try too much to be like wrestling television. The wrestling you see on television is fake. Everyone knows this. For those who forget, you need only to make a wrestling related purchase and the sales clerk will undoubtedly inquire of you, “You know wrestling is fake, right?” as a reminder. It’s possible he might not say this verbally, look for clues in his body language such as a rolling of the eyes. You can also hear it from friends and family, if you have any of those and are comfortable enough around them to bring up the subject of wrasslin’.
Video games are fake simulations of “things,” you push buttons and if the game is good enough are tricked into thinking the task you’re performing is enjoyable. But wrestling is already a simulation. You watch it and if it’s good enough are tricked into thinking the two guys wrestling each other are really two guys pissed off at each other and wanting to beat the other guy, and JESUS look what he just did to that guys HEAD! Video games have their own limitations that require you to have a suspension of disbelief, I don’t see any reason they need to take on wrestling’s limitations as well.
In SmackDown vs. Raw 2007, there’s a part in the single-player storyline where you get hit on the head with a magic wand and as a consequence are turned into a female. This part got me a little excited, I think I even leaned forward to get a closer look. Here, I thought, maybe the designers have finally realized they don’t have to be shackled into pretending the game is a real TV show with real actor people. But they took the easy way out like the compromising bitches they are and went for the, “it was all just a dream,” bullstuff.
In a wrestling video game, Undertaker can really be a guy who comes back from the dead, instead of a guy who pretends to be dead. An old woman can really give birth to a hand. Why not have somebody, say Kurt Angle or whoever, get knifed to death in the locker room by some crazy wrestler out for revenge. Maybe Kurt spilled coffee on him, I don’t know. Anyway, say later on you’re investigating the murder, new clues surface, etc., and it turns out the guy who murdered Kurt is your opponent this Sunday, at the PAY-PER-VIEW! Not only that, you’re wrestling him in a flaming cage and there’s going to be a lion in there as well. You’re going to need help for this one so you talk to Papa Shango, who resurrects Kurt Angle as a wrestler eating zombie with his voodoo magic so you two can go and get your vengeance at what I’m sure is the VENGEANCE pay-per-view. If Vince McMahon could get away with that I know he’d do it. So why hold back in the video game?
You know what my ideal wrestling game is? Let me tell you. Imagine somebody, let’s say Shawn Michaels, is trudging through some type of African savanna or Australian badlands type of terrain. He comes across a watering hole. He’s thirsty, so he gets a drink. Mmm, that’s good. Wait! He hears a gazelle approaching, so he climbs up into a nearby tree. The gazelle cautiously approaches the watering hole. He looks around for predators and, seeing none, lowers his head to get a drink. Shawn Michaels strikes! “ELBOW DROP FROM THE TOP OF THE OAK TREE ONTO THAT GAZELLE, BAH GAWD! HE JUST KILLED THAT DAMN GAZELLE!! HE’S GOT NO SOOWWWWLLL!“ The Heartbreak Kid lifts up that damn dead gazelle and lugs it across his back, carrying it across the wasteland to his tribal leader Triple H. A great feast is prepared for the coming attack on the Luchadore tribe a few hills over, but they get into an argument over the food. For example, Triple H might say, “I want the heart.” Then Shawn Michaels may say, “No.” Then they beat each other with steel folding chairs.
So I guess it would be something like wrestling, Snake Eater and Afrika. Some sort of survival grappling game. Compared to this ideal game, this, rogue nation of wrestle heaven, I have to say that WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 doesn’t really come close. As a simulation of an actual episode of WWE television it’s pretty accurate though, but that’s more like living in wrestle hell. You have to listen to assy rock music at every menu and loading screen and have a roster of mostly generic and uninteresting people to play as. There’s also the repetitive commentary and stupid stuff like “bra & panty” matches.
I don’t have time for that nonsense. I’m a man and I just want to see two other men of great athletic skill pretend to fight each other. It’s also a bonus if there’s a compelling reason for their pretend fight. This hardly happens on TV wrestling though. So while it’s accurate as a TV wrestling simulator, they should worry more about making a fun wrestling game instead. It’s like a video game based on the game Madden based on the sport of football, when instead it should be a game based on modern day gladiatorial combat.
I still recommend you give it a play though if you’ve never played a wrestling game before or get embarrassed just from seeing it on television while flipping through channels. It’d be good for you to experience something new. You should round up three or more other people, get a controller for each of them, a multi-tap if you need one of those, and have yourselves a 6 man ladder match. It’s fun beating the stuff out of your friends, trying to be the first to climb up a ladder while anywhere around 4 other guys are trying to knock it down or get up there themselves. Next time you play Fight Night you’ll wish they had Tornado-Tag Matches.
★⋆☆☆
“STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT.”
I think there’s a lot action video games could learn from wrestling video games. In most action video games, you run up, hit your opponent a few times, possibly with attacks that are either weak or strong. While that opponent is still going through his dying animation you’ve already killed the next six or so guys. There’s not a lot of time to get personal with your enemy.
Now me, I prefer circling around my opponent for a bit, sizing him up. We stare at each other for awhile maybe, move our fingers like we’re playing an invisible piano or what-have-you, then we start grabbing each other. There’s just something more satisfying to me about grabbing onto a man, trying to bend him into painful and awkward looking positions, reversing and countering my opponents moves while coming back from an ass beating, and generally just seeing two guys grappling on each other, pulling out their moves and trying to gain the upper hand.
The problem with wrestling video games for me is, they try too much to be like wrestling television. The wrestling you see on television is fake. Everyone knows this. For those who forget, you need only to make a wrestling related purchase and the sales clerk will undoubtedly inquire of you, “You know wrestling is fake, right?” as a reminder. It’s possible he might not say this verbally, look for clues in his body language such as a rolling of the eyes. You can also hear it from friends and family, if you have any of those and are comfortable enough around them to bring up the subject of wrasslin’.
Video games are fake simulations of “things,” you push buttons and if the game is good enough are tricked into thinking the task you’re performing is enjoyable. But wrestling is already a simulation. You watch it and if it’s good enough are tricked into thinking the two guys wrestling each other are really two guys pissed off at each other and wanting to beat the other guy, and JESUS look what he just did to that guys HEAD! Video games have their own limitations that require you to have a suspension of disbelief, I don’t see any reason they need to take on wrestling’s limitations as well.
In SmackDown vs. Raw 2007, there’s a part in the single-player storyline where you get hit on the head with a magic wand and as a consequence are turned into a female. This part got me a little excited, I think I even leaned forward to get a closer look. Here, I thought, maybe the designers have finally realized they don’t have to be shackled into pretending the game is a real TV show with real actor people. But they took the easy way out like the compromising bitches they are and went for the, “it was all just a dream,” bullstuff.
In a wrestling video game, Undertaker can really be a guy who comes back from the dead, instead of a guy who pretends to be dead. An old woman can really give birth to a hand. Why not have somebody, say Kurt Angle or whoever, get knifed to death in the locker room by some crazy wrestler out for revenge. Maybe Kurt spilled coffee on him, I don’t know. Anyway, say later on you’re investigating the murder, new clues surface, etc., and it turns out the guy who murdered Kurt is your opponent this Sunday, at the PAY-PER-VIEW! Not only that, you’re wrestling him in a flaming cage and there’s going to be a lion in there as well. You’re going to need help for this one so you talk to Papa Shango, who resurrects Kurt Angle as a wrestler eating zombie with his voodoo magic so you two can go and get your vengeance at what I’m sure is the VENGEANCE pay-per-view. If Vince McMahon could get away with that I know he’d do it. So why hold back in the video game?
You know what my ideal wrestling game is? Let me tell you. Imagine somebody, let’s say Shawn Michaels, is trudging through some type of African savanna or Australian badlands type of terrain. He comes across a watering hole. He’s thirsty, so he gets a drink. Mmm, that’s good. Wait! He hears a gazelle approaching, so he climbs up into a nearby tree. The gazelle cautiously approaches the watering hole. He looks around for predators and, seeing none, lowers his head to get a drink. Shawn Michaels strikes! “ELBOW DROP FROM THE TOP OF THE OAK TREE ONTO THAT GAZELLE, BAH GAWD! HE JUST KILLED THAT DAMN GAZELLE!! HE’S GOT NO SOOWWWWLLL!“ The Heartbreak Kid lifts up that damn dead gazelle and lugs it across his back, carrying it across the wasteland to his tribal leader Triple H. A great feast is prepared for the coming attack on the Luchadore tribe a few hills over, but they get into an argument over the food. For example, Triple H might say, “I want the heart.” Then Shawn Michaels may say, “No.” Then they beat each other with steel folding chairs.
So I guess it would be something like wrestling, Snake Eater and Afrika. Some sort of survival grappling game. Compared to this ideal game, this, rogue nation of wrestle heaven, I have to say that WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 doesn’t really come close. As a simulation of an actual episode of WWE television it’s pretty accurate though, but that’s more like living in wrestle hell. You have to listen to assy rock music at every menu and loading screen and have a roster of mostly generic and uninteresting people to play as. There’s also the repetitive commentary and stupid stuff like “bra & panty” matches.
I don’t have time for that nonsense. I’m a man and I just want to see two other men of great athletic skill pretend to fight each other. It’s also a bonus if there’s a compelling reason for their pretend fight. This hardly happens on TV wrestling though. So while it’s accurate as a TV wrestling simulator, they should worry more about making a fun wrestling game instead. It’s like a video game based on the game Madden based on the sport of football, when instead it should be a game based on modern day gladiatorial combat.
I still recommend you give it a play though if you’ve never played a wrestling game before or get embarrassed just from seeing it on television while flipping through channels. It’d be good for you to experience something new. You should round up three or more other people, get a controller for each of them, a multi-tap if you need one of those, and have yourselves a 6 man ladder match. It’s fun beating the stuff out of your friends, trying to be the first to climb up a ladder while anywhere around 4 other guys are trying to knock it down or get up there themselves. Next time you play Fight Night you’ll wish they had Tornado-Tag Matches.
2006
text by tim rogers
★☆☆☆
“NOT A ROCK AND ROLL STAR OR AN ASTRONAUT DREAMING BIG DREAMS -- IT'S A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SUPERMARKET MANAGER GOING OVER HIS TAXES.”
I’ve checked my Wii Weather Channel twice today, and tomorrow’s forecast hasn’t changed: it’s going to be “Manic”, with a slight chance of scattered “Normal”; so while I’m still here sitting on “Depressive”, let’s do the unthinkable, and talk about how much I dislike — or even, possibly, hate — Wii Sports.
First, though, a disclaimer: do you realize how hecking long it took me to get my Wii online? If you said “almost six months” (or even “almost half a year”), then you’re absolutely right. Well, that’s not to say that I was trying for the whole time. Just that I bought the Wii, brought it home, groaned at the fact that it can’t display high-definition resolutions yet is compatible only to wireless internet connections — which seemed even more backward in reality than it did on paper — and then just let it sit there, unconnected to the rich, honey-dripping goodness of the internet, for nearly half a year. I checked the Virtual Console page on Nintendo’s website every couple weeks, wondering if anything was coming out that I wanted. And then, just two days ago, I got around to configuring my Macbook Pro to share my internet connection wirelessly, and after entering IP addresses and such into the Wii, it now triumphantly works online. There are still no Virtual Console games I would like to play that I don’t already own the original versions of.
I wonder if there’s some psychological equivalent of the IP address entry procedure that I need to complete before I can like Wii Sports. If anything, I’m confident that I don’t enjoy Wii Sports because it’s not for me — it’s for people who either haven’t ever played videogames or people who were old enough to purchase marijuana back when Pong was brand-spanking new, people who gave up on the videogame fad back when no top analyst was capable of believably making the prediction that someday game characters would start to look less like solid white lines and more like people. In Wii Sports, players frantically wave a Wii remote around in order to make their on-screen avatar, a puppet-like human being who may or may not resemble the player or one of the player’s loved (or hated) ones, perform various sports-like tasks. The game opens with three or four steel-handed disclaimers: secure the Wii remote strap tightly around your wrist, be careful not to hit anyone as you swing your arms, don’t wake the neighbors with your triumphant cries of “heck yeah”, et cetera. Though in this reviewer’s humble opinion, most of it isn’t really necessary. You don’t even need to stand up and look like a jerk-ass, like the people on the back of the box, to play this game. You can just sit on the sofa twiddling your wrists. If you don’t believe me, check The Internet. I do believe this phenomenon has been reported in other places.
Here at Action Button Dot Net, we play-test all games we review using a large enough high-definition television situated in the cockpit of a grounded F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and even within these cramped confines we were able to bowl strikes in Wii Sports Bowling, or punch out our molasses-slow would-be adversaries in Wii Sports Boxing. We were even able to hit a homerun in Wii Sports Baseball. It’s really not that difficult to play and succeed at this game without growing a horrifying hairstyle and/or hiding under the sofa and/or flashing a smile so artificially white as to blind the Wii sensor bar atop your television.
When the Wii’s dynamic and interesting remote control was introduced to the public, some keen observers were quick to note that tilt sensitivity had been something that people wanted, perhaps subconsciously: remember your little sister playing Super Mario Bros. forever ago, yanking the controller up above shoulder level every time Mario jumped. You thought nothing of it, back then, and neither did she. And perhaps Nintendo themselves were thinking nothing of it when they created the Wii remote — from the start, their only intent had been to make a “new” controller, for “new” playing “experiences”, and the final design was probably just about as good as they were going to get. I mean, one of the other prototypes showed a “Hungry Hungry Hippos”-looking plastic toy platform with one giant button in the middle, for Peach’s sake.
Sure, tilt sensitivity is pretty awesome. I’ve played a couple demos of Wii games that felt tight and polished and sublimely enjoyable — Dragon Quest Swords, for example — though Wii Sports just, quite frankly, ain’t the future. It’s cheap and tiny; it’s not a rock star dreaming big dreams, it’s the manager of a twenty-four hour supermarket. It’s sold nearly 2 million copies in Japan to date, and it wasn’t released in America for more than two weeks before somebody wrote a letter to Kotaku about how the game had helped them lose something like fourteen pounds, and how they think they could be a spokesperson for Nintendo, the way Jared was for Subway sandwiches. Wii Sports is the weirdest kind of euphoria-exploitation, and it kind of chills me. It’s a little cheap parlor trick, a toy. I went into my Large Japanese Videogame Corporation after the New Years’ holiday had ended, and just about threw up in my mouth when a person I really respected beamed about how much they’d enjoyed playing Wii Sports with their family every night for literally eight days in a row. I asked this person if they’d not found the game kind of cheap and dull, and they replied, “Well, yeah. It was nice to see everyone else in my family having fun, though.”
Tilt sensitivity is a pretty awesome thing, as I’ve said in the above paragraph. I still think that. And I’m pretty dead convinced that Wii Sports doesn’t use it very well. The game that blew the doors off the DS, for example, was Nintendo’s Brain Age — a game about answering simple mathematical problems as per an actual doctor’s recommendation, in the interest of staving off Alzheimer’s disease. Compare this to the over-eager Nintendo DS playable demos shown behind closed doors at that year’s E3: Sega had shown a Sonic the Hedgehog demo with blocky 32-bit polygon graphics and no gameplay aside from the ability to make Sonic run faster and faster by scraping the bottom screen with the stylus. Wii Sports is to that Sonic demo as Dragon Quest Swords is to Brain Training, if you ask me. However, Dragon Quest Swords most likely does not present the “evergreen” quality to sell nearly as many copies to nearly as many consumers of nearly as many age groups as Brain Training.
This review then serves two purposes: Firstly, I’m being optimistic that, despite its great sales numbers, Wii Sports has not blown the doors off the Nintendo Wii. No, the door-blower-offer is still hidden somewhere shadowy, and it’s not Super Mario Galaxy, tear-jerkingly amazing as that game will likely be.
Secondly, I’m going to be pessimistic, though more about myself than about videogames: I’m just a guy writing a review on the internet, and not one of Nintendo’s marketing geniuses, so I can’t fathom what game will ultimately redeem the Nintendo Wii. If I worked for Nintendo, I’d probably make sure that their consoles had LAN ports, because even some people who own HDTVs don’t have wireless routers (ahem!), or else I’d insist on a minimum maximum resolution of 720p for all games, or maybe I’d bring a riding crop to board meetings and slap bald heads en masse until they agreed that rechargeable battery packs and a controller charging cradle were pack-in necessities for their system. (Seriously, I’ve changed the batteries in my Wii remotes like six times now, and I’ve barely played anything on it.) Though you know what? Einstein apparently failed basic math in high school, and needed to ask his friend to do his income taxes for him; piano virtuosos throughout the centuries have tripped on their untied shoelaces while shuffling out for an encore time and time again. As Nintendo is currently the golden boy of pioneering game innovation, we, the loving parents of adorable little Miis and proud owners of Nintendo Wiis and sweat-proof rubber Wiimote covers, might behold Nintendo’s little missteps — the vapidity of Wii Sports, the bleating shamelessness of Nintendo of America’s neanderthal president (seriously, this is business, not wrestling; or: seriously, the guy used to work at Pizza Hut; or: seriously, “Blue Ocean” means you’re not “fighting” anyone; “doing our own thing” means you don’t have to worry about laying “smack-downs” on your rivals — because you should be busy doing your “own thing”) — as dribbles of spittle coagulating at the corner of an idiot savant’s mouth. One day before he masturbates himself to death at the mercy of an issue of Dog Fancy, this unkempt little bastard is going to invent the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, which will prevent cavities and kill plaque and tartar in all peace-loving people after just one dose.
We here at Action Button Dot Net have been under fire, recently — before the official launch of our website, in fact — for writing reviews that accentuate the negative things in videogames, while applauding none of their strengths. A comment on one review bemoaned it for being “off-topic” and “rambling”; I think I replied to that comment personally, with a link to IGN and a well-wishing: “Have fun dying alone!” To wit: I’m sure that kid didn’t give a heck about the game I was reviewing, and neither did I. The goal of this website, as it were, is not to be the “Best source for reviews, previews, screenshots, and news regarding [GAME TITLE]” — it is to use reviews as tools for provoking discussion on videogames. That is to say, if you want a “review” of Wii Sports that tells you everything you need to know about the game, look somewhere else. I merely felt compelled to write something about the game, and didn’t arrive at any other conclusion than this sad realization: “This game is not for me. It’s not for me because I’ve played too many videogames, and seen what they can do.” If the game were a gateway drug pointing the way to a lifetime of substance abuse, it’d probably be Pixy Stix.
Let’s get critical for just a moment, though: the graphics kind of do suck. I’m not saying that I hate the way the Mii characters look, because hey, artistic expression and whatnot. Instead, I’ll say that the colors are washed out and acutely drab. The music is bouncy samba-pop trash. And, to reiterate, the gameplay is vapid and weirdly self-important. For example, in Wii Sports Tennis, where your onscreen avatar moves entirely on his or her own, all you can control is the swinging of the racket — of course, done by shaking the remote. You can do backhands or forehands, apparently, and you can (kind of) control the strength of your swing. I’ve pored over it for over five hours, however, and still don’t quite find the execution delicate enough to laud as triumphant. I can play the game seated on my sofa with a hand on my crotch, and still not lose. So why does the game split the screen when you’re playing with two or more players? The immediate answer is “So each player can see the game from his own perspective, and choose between backhand and forehand effectively.” I get really touchy when games split the screen, especially when they don’t have to. To test myself, I watched my avatar only as represented at the top of my friend’s side of the screen. I had no problem whatsoever differentiating between backhand and forehand. Do normal people not possess the spatial perception to backhand effectively without the screen being split? “No, they don’t,” quipped my friend. How about you? I asked him. I told him to look at my screen instead of his. He won the point. “I guess I can, though.” To be as blunt as possible, I feel a greater sense of intricate challenge when I grab the world globe on my Wii News Channel, and spin it with all my might, and try to grab and stop it on the exact point where I started. (In all honesty, that’s become a great and precious hobby these past twenty-four hours.)
In a way, Wii Sports makes me feel awesome for being able to do something Nintendo’s play-testers apparently thought most people can’t do. In another way, it makes me kind of cringe, because it’s so cheap and tacky that it’s not entirely adorable. Tennis is always doubles, which is kind of hokey, even if you’re just playing two players. When I swing my remote, both players on my team swing their rackets in unison, which is even hokier. It’s enough to make me imagine, for a second, a world where Konami ditches the excellent Winning Eleven series to instead focus on foosball table simulators; where games like Bandai-Namco’s Magic Taizen card-trick-trainer for Nintendo DS are actually popular — that hecking game includes a deck of cards in its box, so you can test the card tricks out on your friends. I say, don’t ask videogames to do what other things can do for you — if you want to learn card tricks, read a book about card tricks. If you want to play foosball, buy a foosball table. Certainly, Wii Sports stands head and shoulders above these two examples, though mostly only because it managed to fulfill its promise without even, you know, making a promise to begin with: it got people together, it got grandma to peel her eyes off her handheld Casio TV and the soap operas within, it got the goth sons and vegan daughters to come out of the basements and garages and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner like they’ll probably never enjoy Thanksgiving dinner again. Each sale of the game represents a flash-in-the-pan holiday for one someone somewhere; it is with sadness that I say that my first experience with the game was not such a monumental occasion, and therefore I can score it no higher than one star. If you disagree with this review, congratulations: you’re far more likely to marry your high school sweetheart than I. I didn’t even have a high school sweetheart, come to think of it — I was a borderline sociopath who spent six hours a night writing letters under dozens of pseudonyms to DIE HARD GAME FAN instead of sleeping, for God’s sake.
And . . . now I’ve said a bit too much.
★☆☆☆
“NOT A ROCK AND ROLL STAR OR AN ASTRONAUT DREAMING BIG DREAMS -- IT'S A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SUPERMARKET MANAGER GOING OVER HIS TAXES.”
I’ve checked my Wii Weather Channel twice today, and tomorrow’s forecast hasn’t changed: it’s going to be “Manic”, with a slight chance of scattered “Normal”; so while I’m still here sitting on “Depressive”, let’s do the unthinkable, and talk about how much I dislike — or even, possibly, hate — Wii Sports.
First, though, a disclaimer: do you realize how hecking long it took me to get my Wii online? If you said “almost six months” (or even “almost half a year”), then you’re absolutely right. Well, that’s not to say that I was trying for the whole time. Just that I bought the Wii, brought it home, groaned at the fact that it can’t display high-definition resolutions yet is compatible only to wireless internet connections — which seemed even more backward in reality than it did on paper — and then just let it sit there, unconnected to the rich, honey-dripping goodness of the internet, for nearly half a year. I checked the Virtual Console page on Nintendo’s website every couple weeks, wondering if anything was coming out that I wanted. And then, just two days ago, I got around to configuring my Macbook Pro to share my internet connection wirelessly, and after entering IP addresses and such into the Wii, it now triumphantly works online. There are still no Virtual Console games I would like to play that I don’t already own the original versions of.
I wonder if there’s some psychological equivalent of the IP address entry procedure that I need to complete before I can like Wii Sports. If anything, I’m confident that I don’t enjoy Wii Sports because it’s not for me — it’s for people who either haven’t ever played videogames or people who were old enough to purchase marijuana back when Pong was brand-spanking new, people who gave up on the videogame fad back when no top analyst was capable of believably making the prediction that someday game characters would start to look less like solid white lines and more like people. In Wii Sports, players frantically wave a Wii remote around in order to make their on-screen avatar, a puppet-like human being who may or may not resemble the player or one of the player’s loved (or hated) ones, perform various sports-like tasks. The game opens with three or four steel-handed disclaimers: secure the Wii remote strap tightly around your wrist, be careful not to hit anyone as you swing your arms, don’t wake the neighbors with your triumphant cries of “heck yeah”, et cetera. Though in this reviewer’s humble opinion, most of it isn’t really necessary. You don’t even need to stand up and look like a jerk-ass, like the people on the back of the box, to play this game. You can just sit on the sofa twiddling your wrists. If you don’t believe me, check The Internet. I do believe this phenomenon has been reported in other places.
Here at Action Button Dot Net, we play-test all games we review using a large enough high-definition television situated in the cockpit of a grounded F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and even within these cramped confines we were able to bowl strikes in Wii Sports Bowling, or punch out our molasses-slow would-be adversaries in Wii Sports Boxing. We were even able to hit a homerun in Wii Sports Baseball. It’s really not that difficult to play and succeed at this game without growing a horrifying hairstyle and/or hiding under the sofa and/or flashing a smile so artificially white as to blind the Wii sensor bar atop your television.
When the Wii’s dynamic and interesting remote control was introduced to the public, some keen observers were quick to note that tilt sensitivity had been something that people wanted, perhaps subconsciously: remember your little sister playing Super Mario Bros. forever ago, yanking the controller up above shoulder level every time Mario jumped. You thought nothing of it, back then, and neither did she. And perhaps Nintendo themselves were thinking nothing of it when they created the Wii remote — from the start, their only intent had been to make a “new” controller, for “new” playing “experiences”, and the final design was probably just about as good as they were going to get. I mean, one of the other prototypes showed a “Hungry Hungry Hippos”-looking plastic toy platform with one giant button in the middle, for Peach’s sake.
Sure, tilt sensitivity is pretty awesome. I’ve played a couple demos of Wii games that felt tight and polished and sublimely enjoyable — Dragon Quest Swords, for example — though Wii Sports just, quite frankly, ain’t the future. It’s cheap and tiny; it’s not a rock star dreaming big dreams, it’s the manager of a twenty-four hour supermarket. It’s sold nearly 2 million copies in Japan to date, and it wasn’t released in America for more than two weeks before somebody wrote a letter to Kotaku about how the game had helped them lose something like fourteen pounds, and how they think they could be a spokesperson for Nintendo, the way Jared was for Subway sandwiches. Wii Sports is the weirdest kind of euphoria-exploitation, and it kind of chills me. It’s a little cheap parlor trick, a toy. I went into my Large Japanese Videogame Corporation after the New Years’ holiday had ended, and just about threw up in my mouth when a person I really respected beamed about how much they’d enjoyed playing Wii Sports with their family every night for literally eight days in a row. I asked this person if they’d not found the game kind of cheap and dull, and they replied, “Well, yeah. It was nice to see everyone else in my family having fun, though.”
Tilt sensitivity is a pretty awesome thing, as I’ve said in the above paragraph. I still think that. And I’m pretty dead convinced that Wii Sports doesn’t use it very well. The game that blew the doors off the DS, for example, was Nintendo’s Brain Age — a game about answering simple mathematical problems as per an actual doctor’s recommendation, in the interest of staving off Alzheimer’s disease. Compare this to the over-eager Nintendo DS playable demos shown behind closed doors at that year’s E3: Sega had shown a Sonic the Hedgehog demo with blocky 32-bit polygon graphics and no gameplay aside from the ability to make Sonic run faster and faster by scraping the bottom screen with the stylus. Wii Sports is to that Sonic demo as Dragon Quest Swords is to Brain Training, if you ask me. However, Dragon Quest Swords most likely does not present the “evergreen” quality to sell nearly as many copies to nearly as many consumers of nearly as many age groups as Brain Training.
This review then serves two purposes: Firstly, I’m being optimistic that, despite its great sales numbers, Wii Sports has not blown the doors off the Nintendo Wii. No, the door-blower-offer is still hidden somewhere shadowy, and it’s not Super Mario Galaxy, tear-jerkingly amazing as that game will likely be.
Secondly, I’m going to be pessimistic, though more about myself than about videogames: I’m just a guy writing a review on the internet, and not one of Nintendo’s marketing geniuses, so I can’t fathom what game will ultimately redeem the Nintendo Wii. If I worked for Nintendo, I’d probably make sure that their consoles had LAN ports, because even some people who own HDTVs don’t have wireless routers (ahem!), or else I’d insist on a minimum maximum resolution of 720p for all games, or maybe I’d bring a riding crop to board meetings and slap bald heads en masse until they agreed that rechargeable battery packs and a controller charging cradle were pack-in necessities for their system. (Seriously, I’ve changed the batteries in my Wii remotes like six times now, and I’ve barely played anything on it.) Though you know what? Einstein apparently failed basic math in high school, and needed to ask his friend to do his income taxes for him; piano virtuosos throughout the centuries have tripped on their untied shoelaces while shuffling out for an encore time and time again. As Nintendo is currently the golden boy of pioneering game innovation, we, the loving parents of adorable little Miis and proud owners of Nintendo Wiis and sweat-proof rubber Wiimote covers, might behold Nintendo’s little missteps — the vapidity of Wii Sports, the bleating shamelessness of Nintendo of America’s neanderthal president (seriously, this is business, not wrestling; or: seriously, the guy used to work at Pizza Hut; or: seriously, “Blue Ocean” means you’re not “fighting” anyone; “doing our own thing” means you don’t have to worry about laying “smack-downs” on your rivals — because you should be busy doing your “own thing”) — as dribbles of spittle coagulating at the corner of an idiot savant’s mouth. One day before he masturbates himself to death at the mercy of an issue of Dog Fancy, this unkempt little bastard is going to invent the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, which will prevent cavities and kill plaque and tartar in all peace-loving people after just one dose.
We here at Action Button Dot Net have been under fire, recently — before the official launch of our website, in fact — for writing reviews that accentuate the negative things in videogames, while applauding none of their strengths. A comment on one review bemoaned it for being “off-topic” and “rambling”; I think I replied to that comment personally, with a link to IGN and a well-wishing: “Have fun dying alone!” To wit: I’m sure that kid didn’t give a heck about the game I was reviewing, and neither did I. The goal of this website, as it were, is not to be the “Best source for reviews, previews, screenshots, and news regarding [GAME TITLE]” — it is to use reviews as tools for provoking discussion on videogames. That is to say, if you want a “review” of Wii Sports that tells you everything you need to know about the game, look somewhere else. I merely felt compelled to write something about the game, and didn’t arrive at any other conclusion than this sad realization: “This game is not for me. It’s not for me because I’ve played too many videogames, and seen what they can do.” If the game were a gateway drug pointing the way to a lifetime of substance abuse, it’d probably be Pixy Stix.
Let’s get critical for just a moment, though: the graphics kind of do suck. I’m not saying that I hate the way the Mii characters look, because hey, artistic expression and whatnot. Instead, I’ll say that the colors are washed out and acutely drab. The music is bouncy samba-pop trash. And, to reiterate, the gameplay is vapid and weirdly self-important. For example, in Wii Sports Tennis, where your onscreen avatar moves entirely on his or her own, all you can control is the swinging of the racket — of course, done by shaking the remote. You can do backhands or forehands, apparently, and you can (kind of) control the strength of your swing. I’ve pored over it for over five hours, however, and still don’t quite find the execution delicate enough to laud as triumphant. I can play the game seated on my sofa with a hand on my crotch, and still not lose. So why does the game split the screen when you’re playing with two or more players? The immediate answer is “So each player can see the game from his own perspective, and choose between backhand and forehand effectively.” I get really touchy when games split the screen, especially when they don’t have to. To test myself, I watched my avatar only as represented at the top of my friend’s side of the screen. I had no problem whatsoever differentiating between backhand and forehand. Do normal people not possess the spatial perception to backhand effectively without the screen being split? “No, they don’t,” quipped my friend. How about you? I asked him. I told him to look at my screen instead of his. He won the point. “I guess I can, though.” To be as blunt as possible, I feel a greater sense of intricate challenge when I grab the world globe on my Wii News Channel, and spin it with all my might, and try to grab and stop it on the exact point where I started. (In all honesty, that’s become a great and precious hobby these past twenty-four hours.)
In a way, Wii Sports makes me feel awesome for being able to do something Nintendo’s play-testers apparently thought most people can’t do. In another way, it makes me kind of cringe, because it’s so cheap and tacky that it’s not entirely adorable. Tennis is always doubles, which is kind of hokey, even if you’re just playing two players. When I swing my remote, both players on my team swing their rackets in unison, which is even hokier. It’s enough to make me imagine, for a second, a world where Konami ditches the excellent Winning Eleven series to instead focus on foosball table simulators; where games like Bandai-Namco’s Magic Taizen card-trick-trainer for Nintendo DS are actually popular — that hecking game includes a deck of cards in its box, so you can test the card tricks out on your friends. I say, don’t ask videogames to do what other things can do for you — if you want to learn card tricks, read a book about card tricks. If you want to play foosball, buy a foosball table. Certainly, Wii Sports stands head and shoulders above these two examples, though mostly only because it managed to fulfill its promise without even, you know, making a promise to begin with: it got people together, it got grandma to peel her eyes off her handheld Casio TV and the soap operas within, it got the goth sons and vegan daughters to come out of the basements and garages and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner like they’ll probably never enjoy Thanksgiving dinner again. Each sale of the game represents a flash-in-the-pan holiday for one someone somewhere; it is with sadness that I say that my first experience with the game was not such a monumental occasion, and therefore I can score it no higher than one star. If you disagree with this review, congratulations: you’re far more likely to marry your high school sweetheart than I. I didn’t even have a high school sweetheart, come to think of it — I was a borderline sociopath who spent six hours a night writing letters under dozens of pseudonyms to DIE HARD GAME FAN instead of sleeping, for God’s sake.
And . . . now I’ve said a bit too much.
2012
text by Bennett
★★★★
“LIKE ALL THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE, NOT FOR KIDS.”
Let’s talk about difficulty in games.
In the early days, games were usually written, drawn, coded and directed by one lone nerd. The nerd usually had around six weeks to produce a game which would suck down a billion coins in video arcades worldwide. The nerd’s goal was onefold: the game had to suck down as many coins as possible.
The obstacle in the path of the nerd’s goal was also onefold. Because of time and manpower constraints, the game would have around twenty minutes worth of unique content, meaning that players could quickly become bored, and take their precious coins elsewhere. Thus there was a problem: videogames could not reach commercial success until the obstacle could be overcome and the goal could be met.
In 1980, Eugene Jarvis solved the problem at Williams when he was programming ‘Defender‘: he made the game amazingly hard, and it went on to suck down more coins than any other game other than Pacman. (Full disclosure: these facts have been dramatized.)
The eighties saw a large number of very difficult games introduced into arcades and even into homes. Of course, on a home console, Jarvis’ elegant solution for attracting coins to the slot was irrelevant; every sale of a cartridge, disk or a tape was – and is – final. But since many of the most popular games were written for the arcades and ported for the home, the difficulty remained.
In the 90s, though, the arcades gradually died, and there was no longer any commercial reason for games to be hard. And gradually, the difficulty went away. The old Prince of Persia gave you no option to save your game, and one hour to finish the entire game. The new Prince of Persia gives you a rewind button. Every PC game lets you save at will, inching through the game by trial and error like a climber on a two-inch safety rope, because they get much lower review scores if they do not. Games today offer step-by-step tutorials, balloon help, and almost never require you to read the manual. It’s not a matter of controversy: modern games are easy.
Every year a survey tells us that the median age of gamers has increased. Last year, the average US gamer was 33. This means that majority of today’s gamers were weaned on games which were exceedingly difficult. But they cannot buy games to test their skills and their patience. They are like Spartan warriors or Vikings who have been forcibly migrated to modern Sweden.
It is no longer a viable commercial proposition to write a game for these hardened champions. The only way that these games can be made is if they are made for free, and distributed for free.
Which brings us to La Mulana, a Japanese freeware indie game in the mold of Castlevania and Metroid. The developers want you to feel as though they have released a sequel to Maze of Galious for your dusty, electrically-unsafe MSX console. From the collectible MSX game cartridges in the game’s dungeons, to the portable MSX laptop which is used to decipher inscriptions and read maps, this game is a 100-hour love letter to the ‘Xbox of 1983’. It runs happily on a Pentium 66, and it’s reasonable to describe it as ‘retro stylee’.
Yet somehow, La Mulana manages to avoid the clunky presentation and gameplay which has aged the real 1980s games so dramatically. Operating without real 8-bit constraints, the developers have made an 8-bit game with modern ambition. It makes me want to throw away my next-gen devices, but at the same time it is richer and more satisfying than any game I could find for an emulator. La Mulana is deeper and more complicated than any other game with 16-colour graphics, though it is never inaccessible or obtuse. It is exceedingly difficult without ever feeling arbitrary.
Did I just say difficult? La Mulana, unlike almost every other recent game of merit, is more than difficult. It is the kind of difficult which is no longer present outside of Japanese arcades.
Let me paint a picture. Your character is Professor Lemeza Kosugi, but let’s call him ‘Indiana Jones’ for short. Dr. Jones has come to a room which is pitch black. Somewhere in the room, there is a torch which can be lit with his newly-acquired flare gun, but he only has seven flares, and the torch will only stay lit for around five seconds. This is nowhere near long enough to traverse the platforms and spike traps which line the room. But he cannot simply step through the room flailing his whip like a coward. For if he accidentally whips a sacred monument in the darkness, an angry god will strike him with lightning. Dr. Jones will have to memorise the room!
In La Mulana, you cannot save your game until you get enough money to buy a save card. Even then, you can’t save without returning to the beginning of the game. You’ll certainly get stuck. You may have to call your friends to ask them how to solve a particular puzzle, or overcome a particular boss. You’ll need to read the (html) manual from cover to cover. You’ll want to write the game to a floppy disk so you can wrench it out of the drive and throw it across the room and stomp on it.
It is such a refreshment. For the last few years, most games I’ve played have given me a feeling of inevitability – as though I will certainly reach the end, even if I play like a brain-dead cabbage with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It can feel like reading a repetitive book. By contrast, La Mulana makes it feel like you are changing the outcome through your actions. You can fail, even to the point where you might give up. Since it is possible to fail, it becomes possible to succeed.
Satoru Iwata recently described the appeal of Zelda thus:
“Whenever I solve a difficult puzzle in Zelda, it always makes me think “I might be pretty smart!”
When I cleared the first boss in La Mulana, I knew I was smart. This feeling totally eclipsed my feelings of guilt for having forsaken my work, my dinner, and my personal hygiene for the preceding 48 hours.
Yes, there are other hard games out there. There are other games where it is possible to fail. But not many of them are platformers, and not many of them have La Mulana’s quality. La Mulana is not ‘good for an indie game’ or ‘good for a freeware title’. It’s the best game I’ve played in a year. You get the feeling that the history of video games went awry about 20 years ago, and that La Mulana somehow came to us through a wormhole from a beautiful parallel universe.
★★★★
“LIKE ALL THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE, NOT FOR KIDS.”
Let’s talk about difficulty in games.
In the early days, games were usually written, drawn, coded and directed by one lone nerd. The nerd usually had around six weeks to produce a game which would suck down a billion coins in video arcades worldwide. The nerd’s goal was onefold: the game had to suck down as many coins as possible.
The obstacle in the path of the nerd’s goal was also onefold. Because of time and manpower constraints, the game would have around twenty minutes worth of unique content, meaning that players could quickly become bored, and take their precious coins elsewhere. Thus there was a problem: videogames could not reach commercial success until the obstacle could be overcome and the goal could be met.
In 1980, Eugene Jarvis solved the problem at Williams when he was programming ‘Defender‘: he made the game amazingly hard, and it went on to suck down more coins than any other game other than Pacman. (Full disclosure: these facts have been dramatized.)
The eighties saw a large number of very difficult games introduced into arcades and even into homes. Of course, on a home console, Jarvis’ elegant solution for attracting coins to the slot was irrelevant; every sale of a cartridge, disk or a tape was – and is – final. But since many of the most popular games were written for the arcades and ported for the home, the difficulty remained.
In the 90s, though, the arcades gradually died, and there was no longer any commercial reason for games to be hard. And gradually, the difficulty went away. The old Prince of Persia gave you no option to save your game, and one hour to finish the entire game. The new Prince of Persia gives you a rewind button. Every PC game lets you save at will, inching through the game by trial and error like a climber on a two-inch safety rope, because they get much lower review scores if they do not. Games today offer step-by-step tutorials, balloon help, and almost never require you to read the manual. It’s not a matter of controversy: modern games are easy.
Every year a survey tells us that the median age of gamers has increased. Last year, the average US gamer was 33. This means that majority of today’s gamers were weaned on games which were exceedingly difficult. But they cannot buy games to test their skills and their patience. They are like Spartan warriors or Vikings who have been forcibly migrated to modern Sweden.
It is no longer a viable commercial proposition to write a game for these hardened champions. The only way that these games can be made is if they are made for free, and distributed for free.
Which brings us to La Mulana, a Japanese freeware indie game in the mold of Castlevania and Metroid. The developers want you to feel as though they have released a sequel to Maze of Galious for your dusty, electrically-unsafe MSX console. From the collectible MSX game cartridges in the game’s dungeons, to the portable MSX laptop which is used to decipher inscriptions and read maps, this game is a 100-hour love letter to the ‘Xbox of 1983’. It runs happily on a Pentium 66, and it’s reasonable to describe it as ‘retro stylee’.
Yet somehow, La Mulana manages to avoid the clunky presentation and gameplay which has aged the real 1980s games so dramatically. Operating without real 8-bit constraints, the developers have made an 8-bit game with modern ambition. It makes me want to throw away my next-gen devices, but at the same time it is richer and more satisfying than any game I could find for an emulator. La Mulana is deeper and more complicated than any other game with 16-colour graphics, though it is never inaccessible or obtuse. It is exceedingly difficult without ever feeling arbitrary.
Did I just say difficult? La Mulana, unlike almost every other recent game of merit, is more than difficult. It is the kind of difficult which is no longer present outside of Japanese arcades.
Let me paint a picture. Your character is Professor Lemeza Kosugi, but let’s call him ‘Indiana Jones’ for short. Dr. Jones has come to a room which is pitch black. Somewhere in the room, there is a torch which can be lit with his newly-acquired flare gun, but he only has seven flares, and the torch will only stay lit for around five seconds. This is nowhere near long enough to traverse the platforms and spike traps which line the room. But he cannot simply step through the room flailing his whip like a coward. For if he accidentally whips a sacred monument in the darkness, an angry god will strike him with lightning. Dr. Jones will have to memorise the room!
In La Mulana, you cannot save your game until you get enough money to buy a save card. Even then, you can’t save without returning to the beginning of the game. You’ll certainly get stuck. You may have to call your friends to ask them how to solve a particular puzzle, or overcome a particular boss. You’ll need to read the (html) manual from cover to cover. You’ll want to write the game to a floppy disk so you can wrench it out of the drive and throw it across the room and stomp on it.
It is such a refreshment. For the last few years, most games I’ve played have given me a feeling of inevitability – as though I will certainly reach the end, even if I play like a brain-dead cabbage with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It can feel like reading a repetitive book. By contrast, La Mulana makes it feel like you are changing the outcome through your actions. You can fail, even to the point where you might give up. Since it is possible to fail, it becomes possible to succeed.
Satoru Iwata recently described the appeal of Zelda thus:
“Whenever I solve a difficult puzzle in Zelda, it always makes me think “I might be pretty smart!”
When I cleared the first boss in La Mulana, I knew I was smart. This feeling totally eclipsed my feelings of guilt for having forsaken my work, my dinner, and my personal hygiene for the preceding 48 hours.
Yes, there are other hard games out there. There are other games where it is possible to fail. But not many of them are platformers, and not many of them have La Mulana’s quality. La Mulana is not ‘good for an indie game’ or ‘good for a freeware title’. It’s the best game I’ve played in a year. You get the feeling that the history of video games went awry about 20 years ago, and that La Mulana somehow came to us through a wormhole from a beautiful parallel universe.
text by tim rogers
★★⋆☆
“DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO 'THE NEW RETRO'.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4 to the “Five years or less away from being considered ‘Retro Gaming'” club. The third version of this game (after the Gamecube original and the PlayStation 2 port) is for the Nintendo Wii, and the inclusion of precise, snappy motion controls simultaneously perfects the beautiful skeleton that’s existed for three years and exposes all the tiniest flaws to new scrutiny.
First, know this: if you or someone you trust has recently expressed doubts about playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii because you’re “not sure how the motion controls could add anything to the experience”, or maybe because you’ve “played that Red Steel (1/2*) game, and boy that sucked ass“, you need to wake up and smell the wrong and/or get the heck over yourself. Motion controls make this game control perfectly. I do not use that word lightly: perfectly. If you want to shoot a zombie in the head, you point the remote at his head and you press the B button (on the bottom of the remote) to command Leon S. Kennedy to whip out his firearm and aim it right at that nasty Hispanic cranium, and then you press the Action Button to fire the shot. Some will puzzle about this game, and declare with a weird degree of mouth-breathing fetishism that they need not possess in order to continue living that this game was perfect with the Nintendo Gamecube controller so they’ll only buy the Wii version for its true 16:9 video output, and only if you can play it with the Gamecube controller. Really, though, this isn’t Zelda, with motion controls shoehorned in cutely: this is a game about shooting mobs of deranged men in the head in rapid succession, and the point-and-shoot interface here is about as good as it gets. If you’d rather consider holding a big pillowy shoulder button down and moving an analog stick to aim “perfect”, be my guest, and be also wrong. You’re probably the kind of person who wanted a dual-analog-stick control scheme in Metroid Prime, because the auto-lock thing is “so fake” and “for babies”. Yeah, I’m sure the boys in the foxholes in World War I enjoyed drawing figure-eights against the starry skies of Germany with their gun muzzles.
Wii remote aiming is visceral and weirdly real; it feels like a lightgun shooter felt before you were too mature to realize how vapid Duck Hunt was — and it’s deep, because you’re controlling the character’s movement, as well. The sound of a spent shotgun cartridge hitting a wooden floor echoing out of the speaker in the middle of the videogame controller in your hands is worth the price admission to anyone with a Shadow of the Colossus limited-edition print poster on his wall. Pointing, aiming and shooting with the Wii remote is unabashedly fantastic stuff. No, it’s nothing like aiming with a mouse and a keyboard. It’s not that tacky. It feels real — you aim, you shoot. Moving Leon with the nunchuk is pretty smooth as well. Sometimes the position of the nunchuk shifts around in my hand so that I’m holding it a little funny, and I accidentally press it to the left or right when I mean to go up, though I guess that’s my fault for not knowing the palms of my own hands very well, or my fault (again) for not buying the rubber sweat-grip-thing for the nunchuk, or even Nintendo’s fault for not making the nunchuk out of a surface more conducive to gripping ecstatically while hip-deep in the semi-undead.
If pressed to mention a negative aspect of the Wii remote controls, I’d have to say that the lack of an option to turn the aiming reticle off is kind of stupid. I mean, it’s so intuitive as-is. You know when you’re pointing at a zombie’s head, because you can see the remote pointing at the television. Hell, the remote even thumps in your hand when you aim the gun at an enemy. Why can’t we rely completely on the tactile feedback? Wouldn’t that add a neat little element of challenge? Instead, there’s the aiming reticle, crowding up the screen. Hey, at least it’s not as bad as the enormous HUD in Zelda: Twilight Princess.
And that’s about it. As the old saying goes, it takes only one blinged-out young man with diamond-encrusted platinum teeth (we call those “ice teeth”) to steal a tricky ho off an old playah, and Gears of War has long held Resident Evil 4 over its thigh and spanked the ever-loving stuff out of it. If the game industry were working correctly (Protip: it’s kind of not), this is how it would be for the next couple of years: game A revolutionizes a genre, and then game B arrives, taking the revolution into account, while marrying the genre back into the family where it belongs and rendering game A pretty much irrelevant. Gears of War has perfected the Resident Evil 4 formula: the challenges are faster and the enemies are more thrilling to kill. The set-pieces are simple and more honest; in Gears of War, climbing up a staircase into a mansion feels meatier and more meaningful than the original Resident Evil‘s entire zombie-infested mansion. After Gears of War, Resident Evil 4 feels more like a frequently-interrupted stroll through some rustic horror film scenery.
Dead or Alive producer Tomonobu Itagaki once somewhat-famously quipped, of Resident Evil 4, that though he appreciated the game for its integration of concepts, he couldn’t exactly stand playing it for too long because of how the main character had to stop and stand in place every time he fired his pistol. “What kind of man stops to fire a pistol?” asked Itagaki, to the fist-pumping, aww-yeahing, and hilarity of much of the internet. The truth is, a man who doesn’t want to throw his back out is the kind of man who stops to fire a pistol. Though you know what? I can let Itagaki’s ignorance slide; he’s obviously the kind of man who learned everything he needs to know about real life from Contra III: The Alien Wars. He knows what this world is about: brawny men hefting two-ton beef-cannons and strut-rushing into the collective face of the red-fleshed alien bitch-menace. And you know what else? Maybe he’s kind of right. There’s a certain avant-garde love to be found in this recent art-like obsession with detailing, in fiction of whatever format, the real-life-like reactions of ordinary people to fantastic situations. We’re a couple half-decades away from “summer blockbuster” being synonymous with a film about a labcoat-wearing scientist defeating a Hummer full of werewolves with a champagne glass full of orange Skittles.
Either way, why not let Leon move when he’s firing his gun? Really? The situation around him is already pretty hecked-up; disbelief all over the place is going to be suspended through the roof. We’ve got hundreds of psychic Spanish-speakers sharing a half a dozen faces, starting fires and brandishing pitchforks, over here. Leon is able to pause the action whenever he wants, and eat one of many green herbs that he finds conveniently lying all over the place. Why stay dead-realistic about the gun aiming, then? I’m not asking for rocket shoes and X-ray vision or anything. In fact, I could hardly even care less about being able to walk and shoot simultaneously. I’m sure it would be nice, though, really, I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it.
“I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it”. That’s a pretty meek way of putting it, though hey. There you go.
What other game-design misdemeanors do we put up with in the name of “enjoying” a “classic”? How about the completely, terribly bullstuff story? Resident Evil 4‘s story is pretty bad. Sorry to have to break it to you, kiddo. Does its story have to be good? I guess not; Super Mario Bros. had a lame-ass story about a guy rescuing the princess of a fungus fairyland from a turtle-dragon, though it manages to ascend to the status of almost art because it carries itself with noblest distinction.
Resident Evil 4 is not so noble. It’s lazy, in fact: it begins with a man named Leon S. Kennedy, who once fought zombies on his first day as a police officer (because a rookie cop was a good choice for a main character of a game (Resident Evil 2) set during a zombie outbreak in a small town), now on his way to a city in a Spanish-speaking country the name of which was omitted because Capcom Japan feared legal action from a tourism department or two, to rescue the president’s daughter from an unknown organization with unknown demands. “The president’s daughter” is the primary goal of this mission at the start because “The president” seemed too difficult for the story planners: on the one hand, the United States of America Tourism Department might end up suing Capcom because of the implication that the American President’s bodyguards are weak enough to allow him to be captured, which might increase the possibility of terrorism attempts; on the other hand, this is a Japanese videogame, and there is significantly less opportunity to show the president’s panties than there is to show the president’s daughter‘s panties, because the president probably wouldn’t be wearing a skirt, even on vacation.
Right from the start, the storytelling is hokey; the little secrets and somethings they’re not telling us are either groaningly obvious or sighingly contrived. The “president’s daughter” could be a brilliant MacGuffin, though in order for that to happen, it would have to stay a MacGuffin. You rescue her, because the planners were eager to get a skirt on the screen, and the “real plot” begins. That a “real plot” exists at all is kind of &^#$#ed; in the end, all they’re doing is giving Leon reasons to shoot beastly men in the head (or reasons to shoot them anywhere except the head), and each longwinded radio conversation screen functions something like a ten-minute cut-scene between world 2-4 and world 3-1 of Super Mario Bros., during which Super Mario meets a gnarly old man in the woods, eats sausages while discussing the meaning of life until sundown, and is eventually driven, on the old man’s bitching Harley, to the castle gates at World 3 under cover of midnight: thus, the sky being blue in World 2 and black in World 3. In other words, who the heck cares? In other words: don’t you dare say to me that Resident Evil 4 is a silly action game, and the story “doesn’t matter”. The simple fact that it has a story is confirmation enough, straight from the developers’ mouths, that they believed a story was necessary.
This weird, cautious self-importance manages to seep into the game’s soil and poison its reservoir in the tiniest spots. The story’s “chapters” are made up of large, ingenious interconnecting set-pieces teeming with the semi-undead; usually, to get from one section to another, you need to open up a few treasure boxes and find magic items — crests or whatever — to open doors. The first time I played this game, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ever once reach a door and find I didn’t have the right items. Why have the items at all? Why advertise the game’s genre as “Survival Horror” on the box (yes, that’s what the genre is listed as in the Japanese version), if it’s more of an “Adventure Horror”? Sure, “survival” in this case indicates that we must move forward at all costs, which means finding those crests, keys, or whatever. The menu screen is pretty nice — Diablo-like, space-based, kind of a mini-game in and of itself — though really, why have herbs and whatnot, anyway? This game lets you continue at the beginning of an area when you die, just like any old FPS. And death normally comes pretty suddenly, after a short burst of hard hits. Why not just have a Gears of War-esque “run away, take cover, and wait” healing system? I suppose that would be because the enemies aren’t very smart, and running away from them isn’t always difficult.
Let’s see how many more times we can mention Gears of War: how about the radio communication segments? Why does this have to take up the whole screen? I’m sure that the little camera whirling around Leon as he detaches the radio from his belt and holds it up to his ear has become something of a gaming archetype in recent years, though really, let’s look at this, here. When the screen fades to the radio correspondence mode, Leon is holding the radio up to his ear. Yet now we see a video image of him. And we see a video image of whoever he’s talking to. Of course, as he’s holding the radio up to his ear, this means that the camera in front of Leon must be hovering on an invisible wire over his face, and that the image of his current conversation partner is kind of sitting against his cheek. At first, the game’s eagerness to show you the radio is kind of understandable, because you’ve never seen the person that Leon is going to be talking to, so they might as well show you. Eventually, though, little things stick out like gangrenous thumbs: why the hell is the name of the character speaking displayed above the (huge) subtitle window? There are obviously only two faces visible at any given time, and if we can’t tell the difference between the two characters’ voices, then it’s not our fault — it’s the storytellers’. Why, in Gears of War, the main character only ever converses on the radio with someone he’s seen in person before, and even then, it’s only in voiceover. Sure, radio transmission also forces the main character to stick his finger in his ear and slow his trotting pace down to a crawl, though hey! At least it doesn’t swamp up the whole hecking screen and make our trigger fingers itchy. Dead Rising did something kind of right smack in the middle of Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, with the walkie-talkie banter being displayed only in text and requiring the main character to hold the walkie talkie up to his head powerlessly. Either Gears of War 2 or Resident Evil 5 will have fixed this I’m guessing.
Either way, here it is, broken as can be, stinking up several parts of Resident Evil 4; the break-ins aren’t as frequent as in, say, Metal Gear Solid 3, though I dare say that they are also not one-tenth as well-written.
And here I will also compliment Resident Evil 4, by saying that even though the interruptions are not frequent, they are terribly painful, because I want to continue playing the game.
And now I will frown: the voice acting, as per Capcom, is pretty bone-chillingly atrocious, which may or may not have been for “camp” value, or maybe not. If the bad voice-acting, the stuffty story, and the weird inconsistencies like the radio-screen video-image paradox are, in any way, ever confirmed to be throwbacks, elbow-nudges, or send-ups of other “videogame cliches”, then I will be boarding an airplane with a pair of ceramic brass knuckles in my carry-on baggage, I swear. Resident Evil is already a send-up of horror movie cliches, now made thrilling because I’m in control of the action. We don’t need “ironic” videogame references stuffting in the game design gene pool, please.
If you read the internet (Protip: You’re doing so right now), you might have seen a story with “OMG” in the headline, which detailed the censorship of the Japanese version of this game. The censorship is not new news; the previous Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions were censored in exactly the same way. Namely, there’s no blood (none, of any kind, at all, et cetera) and the satisfying, explosive pop-splash of shooting a man in the head is deleted in favor of making every single location on an enemy’s body cause the same amount of damage when shot. Yes, this means you can shoot an enemy in the head five or six times in a row. Yes, this kind of breaks the game as the story starts to develop. Capcom is a fan of doing this to their games on both sides of every ocean: here in Japan, for example, where the content rating system consists of four ratings that are not “enforced” (A (all ages), B (12-13), C (13-17), D (17 and up)) and one rating that is “enforced” (Z (ages 18 and up only)), companies like Capcom are left with no other choice than to cast a vote of no-confidence in the system, and censor their games out of “social responsibility”. The simplest way of looking at it is this: the ratings board is stating from the start that none of their ratings matter except the one that does, so why should retailers trust the one rating that does, if the board is admitting that all of the other ratings are bullstuff? And, ironically, as with anything containing “mature” content (blood, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, income taxes), games like Resident Evil 4 are mostly popular amongst snot-nosed twelve-year-olds, anyway. It’s a shame, then, that the censorship practices have to kind of break the game — not as bad as in the US release of Monster Hunter, though, where the blood was removed because the enemies’ similarities to animals elevated the game to something of an animal-cruelty simulator, which is not to be chuckled at in this time of hooker-killing-simulators. Unfortunately, blood was also the game’s indicator of when you were hitting an enemy in the right spot (Monster Hunter keeps numbers out of the gameplay), so the game was essentially broken.
It’s a weird culture-clash, I tell you. The best solution, probably, is to just leave the games how they are intended to be, and everyone will be happy. I’ll be damned if the mere sight of a realistic man pointing a gun at a realistic man-monster wasn’t enough to cause an actual girl who dresses mostly in pink to avert her eyes from the screen. Should she keep her eyes on the screen after the “bang”, even she would raise critical questions about the absence of blood.
Like Ninja Gaiden on the PlayStation 3, Resident Evil 4 is getting a somewhat-deserved second wind on the Wii. It’s a breezy game despite its heavy subject matter, and despite the intrusion of some nasty game design archetypes and some groan-worthy narrative choices, it has exceptional flow, some awesome bosses, and tons of visceral crunch. The Wii version is the best version available, and I’m trying real hard to not mention how heart-breaking it is that the game can’t display in at least 720p resolutions, or how I wish Gears of War could use this control scheme, because hey, these things just aren’t possible. You have to make do with what you have.
I’ve saved the best for last: you know those brain-dead quick-timer events in the Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions, where you have to press a button quickly in order to make Leon cinematically avoid chains of certain perils? If you answered “Yes, that’s one of the dumbest trends in videogames today”, then you’re correct. They’re all gone in the Wii version — kind of. Rather than press buttons in time, all you have to do for every quick-timer event is shake the controller from side to side as vigorously as possible. Even long, elaborate sequences require no more than a vigorous controller shaking. I was prepared to call this the worst part of the game, and bemoan it as the lamest possible forced implementation of the Wii motion controls. I was going to say that, in a game where the motion controls are used so maturely and cleanly, they really didn’t have to put this in here. That was until I figured out the secret — you don’t have to shake the controller side-to-side. No, no, if you’re a man, you already know the best way to grip the controller. I tell you, I was sitting here in the middle of the night, window open, cool spring breeze wafting in, jerking this Wiimote like it was a pretty plastic penis, and there, on the screen in front of me, not some hot babe engaged in pornographic pleasure — no, it was Leon S. Kennedy running toward the screen, huffing and puffing, a boulder hot on his heels. There was a sudden, electric disconnect between Leon’s huffing and puffing and the jacking-off-like motion of my hand on the Wiimote, and a big spark jumped up in my throat and I had what was probably the best laugh I’ve had in months. Of course, I thought, of course. Thank you, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, for making that perfectly clear to me. I’d been on the fence about it for years.
★★⋆☆
“DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO 'THE NEW RETRO'.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4 to the “Five years or less away from being considered ‘Retro Gaming'” club. The third version of this game (after the Gamecube original and the PlayStation 2 port) is for the Nintendo Wii, and the inclusion of precise, snappy motion controls simultaneously perfects the beautiful skeleton that’s existed for three years and exposes all the tiniest flaws to new scrutiny.
First, know this: if you or someone you trust has recently expressed doubts about playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii because you’re “not sure how the motion controls could add anything to the experience”, or maybe because you’ve “played that Red Steel (1/2*) game, and boy that sucked ass“, you need to wake up and smell the wrong and/or get the heck over yourself. Motion controls make this game control perfectly. I do not use that word lightly: perfectly. If you want to shoot a zombie in the head, you point the remote at his head and you press the B button (on the bottom of the remote) to command Leon S. Kennedy to whip out his firearm and aim it right at that nasty Hispanic cranium, and then you press the Action Button to fire the shot. Some will puzzle about this game, and declare with a weird degree of mouth-breathing fetishism that they need not possess in order to continue living that this game was perfect with the Nintendo Gamecube controller so they’ll only buy the Wii version for its true 16:9 video output, and only if you can play it with the Gamecube controller. Really, though, this isn’t Zelda, with motion controls shoehorned in cutely: this is a game about shooting mobs of deranged men in the head in rapid succession, and the point-and-shoot interface here is about as good as it gets. If you’d rather consider holding a big pillowy shoulder button down and moving an analog stick to aim “perfect”, be my guest, and be also wrong. You’re probably the kind of person who wanted a dual-analog-stick control scheme in Metroid Prime, because the auto-lock thing is “so fake” and “for babies”. Yeah, I’m sure the boys in the foxholes in World War I enjoyed drawing figure-eights against the starry skies of Germany with their gun muzzles.
Wii remote aiming is visceral and weirdly real; it feels like a lightgun shooter felt before you were too mature to realize how vapid Duck Hunt was — and it’s deep, because you’re controlling the character’s movement, as well. The sound of a spent shotgun cartridge hitting a wooden floor echoing out of the speaker in the middle of the videogame controller in your hands is worth the price admission to anyone with a Shadow of the Colossus limited-edition print poster on his wall. Pointing, aiming and shooting with the Wii remote is unabashedly fantastic stuff. No, it’s nothing like aiming with a mouse and a keyboard. It’s not that tacky. It feels real — you aim, you shoot. Moving Leon with the nunchuk is pretty smooth as well. Sometimes the position of the nunchuk shifts around in my hand so that I’m holding it a little funny, and I accidentally press it to the left or right when I mean to go up, though I guess that’s my fault for not knowing the palms of my own hands very well, or my fault (again) for not buying the rubber sweat-grip-thing for the nunchuk, or even Nintendo’s fault for not making the nunchuk out of a surface more conducive to gripping ecstatically while hip-deep in the semi-undead.
If pressed to mention a negative aspect of the Wii remote controls, I’d have to say that the lack of an option to turn the aiming reticle off is kind of stupid. I mean, it’s so intuitive as-is. You know when you’re pointing at a zombie’s head, because you can see the remote pointing at the television. Hell, the remote even thumps in your hand when you aim the gun at an enemy. Why can’t we rely completely on the tactile feedback? Wouldn’t that add a neat little element of challenge? Instead, there’s the aiming reticle, crowding up the screen. Hey, at least it’s not as bad as the enormous HUD in Zelda: Twilight Princess.
And that’s about it. As the old saying goes, it takes only one blinged-out young man with diamond-encrusted platinum teeth (we call those “ice teeth”) to steal a tricky ho off an old playah, and Gears of War has long held Resident Evil 4 over its thigh and spanked the ever-loving stuff out of it. If the game industry were working correctly (Protip: it’s kind of not), this is how it would be for the next couple of years: game A revolutionizes a genre, and then game B arrives, taking the revolution into account, while marrying the genre back into the family where it belongs and rendering game A pretty much irrelevant. Gears of War has perfected the Resident Evil 4 formula: the challenges are faster and the enemies are more thrilling to kill. The set-pieces are simple and more honest; in Gears of War, climbing up a staircase into a mansion feels meatier and more meaningful than the original Resident Evil‘s entire zombie-infested mansion. After Gears of War, Resident Evil 4 feels more like a frequently-interrupted stroll through some rustic horror film scenery.
Dead or Alive producer Tomonobu Itagaki once somewhat-famously quipped, of Resident Evil 4, that though he appreciated the game for its integration of concepts, he couldn’t exactly stand playing it for too long because of how the main character had to stop and stand in place every time he fired his pistol. “What kind of man stops to fire a pistol?” asked Itagaki, to the fist-pumping, aww-yeahing, and hilarity of much of the internet. The truth is, a man who doesn’t want to throw his back out is the kind of man who stops to fire a pistol. Though you know what? I can let Itagaki’s ignorance slide; he’s obviously the kind of man who learned everything he needs to know about real life from Contra III: The Alien Wars. He knows what this world is about: brawny men hefting two-ton beef-cannons and strut-rushing into the collective face of the red-fleshed alien bitch-menace. And you know what else? Maybe he’s kind of right. There’s a certain avant-garde love to be found in this recent art-like obsession with detailing, in fiction of whatever format, the real-life-like reactions of ordinary people to fantastic situations. We’re a couple half-decades away from “summer blockbuster” being synonymous with a film about a labcoat-wearing scientist defeating a Hummer full of werewolves with a champagne glass full of orange Skittles.
Either way, why not let Leon move when he’s firing his gun? Really? The situation around him is already pretty hecked-up; disbelief all over the place is going to be suspended through the roof. We’ve got hundreds of psychic Spanish-speakers sharing a half a dozen faces, starting fires and brandishing pitchforks, over here. Leon is able to pause the action whenever he wants, and eat one of many green herbs that he finds conveniently lying all over the place. Why stay dead-realistic about the gun aiming, then? I’m not asking for rocket shoes and X-ray vision or anything. In fact, I could hardly even care less about being able to walk and shoot simultaneously. I’m sure it would be nice, though, really, I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it.
“I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it”. That’s a pretty meek way of putting it, though hey. There you go.
What other game-design misdemeanors do we put up with in the name of “enjoying” a “classic”? How about the completely, terribly bullstuff story? Resident Evil 4‘s story is pretty bad. Sorry to have to break it to you, kiddo. Does its story have to be good? I guess not; Super Mario Bros. had a lame-ass story about a guy rescuing the princess of a fungus fairyland from a turtle-dragon, though it manages to ascend to the status of almost art because it carries itself with noblest distinction.
Resident Evil 4 is not so noble. It’s lazy, in fact: it begins with a man named Leon S. Kennedy, who once fought zombies on his first day as a police officer (because a rookie cop was a good choice for a main character of a game (Resident Evil 2) set during a zombie outbreak in a small town), now on his way to a city in a Spanish-speaking country the name of which was omitted because Capcom Japan feared legal action from a tourism department or two, to rescue the president’s daughter from an unknown organization with unknown demands. “The president’s daughter” is the primary goal of this mission at the start because “The president” seemed too difficult for the story planners: on the one hand, the United States of America Tourism Department might end up suing Capcom because of the implication that the American President’s bodyguards are weak enough to allow him to be captured, which might increase the possibility of terrorism attempts; on the other hand, this is a Japanese videogame, and there is significantly less opportunity to show the president’s panties than there is to show the president’s daughter‘s panties, because the president probably wouldn’t be wearing a skirt, even on vacation.
Right from the start, the storytelling is hokey; the little secrets and somethings they’re not telling us are either groaningly obvious or sighingly contrived. The “president’s daughter” could be a brilliant MacGuffin, though in order for that to happen, it would have to stay a MacGuffin. You rescue her, because the planners were eager to get a skirt on the screen, and the “real plot” begins. That a “real plot” exists at all is kind of &^#$#ed; in the end, all they’re doing is giving Leon reasons to shoot beastly men in the head (or reasons to shoot them anywhere except the head), and each longwinded radio conversation screen functions something like a ten-minute cut-scene between world 2-4 and world 3-1 of Super Mario Bros., during which Super Mario meets a gnarly old man in the woods, eats sausages while discussing the meaning of life until sundown, and is eventually driven, on the old man’s bitching Harley, to the castle gates at World 3 under cover of midnight: thus, the sky being blue in World 2 and black in World 3. In other words, who the heck cares? In other words: don’t you dare say to me that Resident Evil 4 is a silly action game, and the story “doesn’t matter”. The simple fact that it has a story is confirmation enough, straight from the developers’ mouths, that they believed a story was necessary.
This weird, cautious self-importance manages to seep into the game’s soil and poison its reservoir in the tiniest spots. The story’s “chapters” are made up of large, ingenious interconnecting set-pieces teeming with the semi-undead; usually, to get from one section to another, you need to open up a few treasure boxes and find magic items — crests or whatever — to open doors. The first time I played this game, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ever once reach a door and find I didn’t have the right items. Why have the items at all? Why advertise the game’s genre as “Survival Horror” on the box (yes, that’s what the genre is listed as in the Japanese version), if it’s more of an “Adventure Horror”? Sure, “survival” in this case indicates that we must move forward at all costs, which means finding those crests, keys, or whatever. The menu screen is pretty nice — Diablo-like, space-based, kind of a mini-game in and of itself — though really, why have herbs and whatnot, anyway? This game lets you continue at the beginning of an area when you die, just like any old FPS. And death normally comes pretty suddenly, after a short burst of hard hits. Why not just have a Gears of War-esque “run away, take cover, and wait” healing system? I suppose that would be because the enemies aren’t very smart, and running away from them isn’t always difficult.
Let’s see how many more times we can mention Gears of War: how about the radio communication segments? Why does this have to take up the whole screen? I’m sure that the little camera whirling around Leon as he detaches the radio from his belt and holds it up to his ear has become something of a gaming archetype in recent years, though really, let’s look at this, here. When the screen fades to the radio correspondence mode, Leon is holding the radio up to his ear. Yet now we see a video image of him. And we see a video image of whoever he’s talking to. Of course, as he’s holding the radio up to his ear, this means that the camera in front of Leon must be hovering on an invisible wire over his face, and that the image of his current conversation partner is kind of sitting against his cheek. At first, the game’s eagerness to show you the radio is kind of understandable, because you’ve never seen the person that Leon is going to be talking to, so they might as well show you. Eventually, though, little things stick out like gangrenous thumbs: why the hell is the name of the character speaking displayed above the (huge) subtitle window? There are obviously only two faces visible at any given time, and if we can’t tell the difference between the two characters’ voices, then it’s not our fault — it’s the storytellers’. Why, in Gears of War, the main character only ever converses on the radio with someone he’s seen in person before, and even then, it’s only in voiceover. Sure, radio transmission also forces the main character to stick his finger in his ear and slow his trotting pace down to a crawl, though hey! At least it doesn’t swamp up the whole hecking screen and make our trigger fingers itchy. Dead Rising did something kind of right smack in the middle of Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, with the walkie-talkie banter being displayed only in text and requiring the main character to hold the walkie talkie up to his head powerlessly. Either Gears of War 2 or Resident Evil 5 will have fixed this I’m guessing.
Either way, here it is, broken as can be, stinking up several parts of Resident Evil 4; the break-ins aren’t as frequent as in, say, Metal Gear Solid 3, though I dare say that they are also not one-tenth as well-written.
And here I will also compliment Resident Evil 4, by saying that even though the interruptions are not frequent, they are terribly painful, because I want to continue playing the game.
And now I will frown: the voice acting, as per Capcom, is pretty bone-chillingly atrocious, which may or may not have been for “camp” value, or maybe not. If the bad voice-acting, the stuffty story, and the weird inconsistencies like the radio-screen video-image paradox are, in any way, ever confirmed to be throwbacks, elbow-nudges, or send-ups of other “videogame cliches”, then I will be boarding an airplane with a pair of ceramic brass knuckles in my carry-on baggage, I swear. Resident Evil is already a send-up of horror movie cliches, now made thrilling because I’m in control of the action. We don’t need “ironic” videogame references stuffting in the game design gene pool, please.
If you read the internet (Protip: You’re doing so right now), you might have seen a story with “OMG” in the headline, which detailed the censorship of the Japanese version of this game. The censorship is not new news; the previous Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions were censored in exactly the same way. Namely, there’s no blood (none, of any kind, at all, et cetera) and the satisfying, explosive pop-splash of shooting a man in the head is deleted in favor of making every single location on an enemy’s body cause the same amount of damage when shot. Yes, this means you can shoot an enemy in the head five or six times in a row. Yes, this kind of breaks the game as the story starts to develop. Capcom is a fan of doing this to their games on both sides of every ocean: here in Japan, for example, where the content rating system consists of four ratings that are not “enforced” (A (all ages), B (12-13), C (13-17), D (17 and up)) and one rating that is “enforced” (Z (ages 18 and up only)), companies like Capcom are left with no other choice than to cast a vote of no-confidence in the system, and censor their games out of “social responsibility”. The simplest way of looking at it is this: the ratings board is stating from the start that none of their ratings matter except the one that does, so why should retailers trust the one rating that does, if the board is admitting that all of the other ratings are bullstuff? And, ironically, as with anything containing “mature” content (blood, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, income taxes), games like Resident Evil 4 are mostly popular amongst snot-nosed twelve-year-olds, anyway. It’s a shame, then, that the censorship practices have to kind of break the game — not as bad as in the US release of Monster Hunter, though, where the blood was removed because the enemies’ similarities to animals elevated the game to something of an animal-cruelty simulator, which is not to be chuckled at in this time of hooker-killing-simulators. Unfortunately, blood was also the game’s indicator of when you were hitting an enemy in the right spot (Monster Hunter keeps numbers out of the gameplay), so the game was essentially broken.
It’s a weird culture-clash, I tell you. The best solution, probably, is to just leave the games how they are intended to be, and everyone will be happy. I’ll be damned if the mere sight of a realistic man pointing a gun at a realistic man-monster wasn’t enough to cause an actual girl who dresses mostly in pink to avert her eyes from the screen. Should she keep her eyes on the screen after the “bang”, even she would raise critical questions about the absence of blood.
Like Ninja Gaiden on the PlayStation 3, Resident Evil 4 is getting a somewhat-deserved second wind on the Wii. It’s a breezy game despite its heavy subject matter, and despite the intrusion of some nasty game design archetypes and some groan-worthy narrative choices, it has exceptional flow, some awesome bosses, and tons of visceral crunch. The Wii version is the best version available, and I’m trying real hard to not mention how heart-breaking it is that the game can’t display in at least 720p resolutions, or how I wish Gears of War could use this control scheme, because hey, these things just aren’t possible. You have to make do with what you have.
I’ve saved the best for last: you know those brain-dead quick-timer events in the Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions, where you have to press a button quickly in order to make Leon cinematically avoid chains of certain perils? If you answered “Yes, that’s one of the dumbest trends in videogames today”, then you’re correct. They’re all gone in the Wii version — kind of. Rather than press buttons in time, all you have to do for every quick-timer event is shake the controller from side to side as vigorously as possible. Even long, elaborate sequences require no more than a vigorous controller shaking. I was prepared to call this the worst part of the game, and bemoan it as the lamest possible forced implementation of the Wii motion controls. I was going to say that, in a game where the motion controls are used so maturely and cleanly, they really didn’t have to put this in here. That was until I figured out the secret — you don’t have to shake the controller side-to-side. No, no, if you’re a man, you already know the best way to grip the controller. I tell you, I was sitting here in the middle of the night, window open, cool spring breeze wafting in, jerking this Wiimote like it was a pretty plastic penis, and there, on the screen in front of me, not some hot babe engaged in pornographic pleasure — no, it was Leon S. Kennedy running toward the screen, huffing and puffing, a boulder hot on his heels. There was a sudden, electric disconnect between Leon’s huffing and puffing and the jacking-off-like motion of my hand on the Wiimote, and a big spark jumped up in my throat and I had what was probably the best laugh I’ve had in months. Of course, I thought, of course. Thank you, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, for making that perfectly clear to me. I’d been on the fence about it for years.