ACTIONBUTTONNET
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“ACTUALLY A VIDEOGAME.”
I’ve honestly never liked Pac-Man. At all. Here I will take a page from all of the middle-aged mohawkers submitting guitar effects pedals reviews on Harmony Central, and say that I’ve been playing guitar for 35 years, have owned Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, and SGs, used Bigsby tremolos and Gibson Vibrolas, have covered everything from AC/DC to Rage Against the Machine, and I’ve never found a better fuzz pedal than the traditional Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, so trust me when I say that the Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff is a pansy-ass piece of stuff.
Take all the guitar terms in the previous sentence, and replace them with the names of game consoles and software franchises.
Why don’t I like Pac-Man? In the past, when I had to stand on a milk carton, I played it in pizza joints because my dad figured I loved it; I played it on Atari 2600 because it existed, and eventually, I played Ms. Pac-Man on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I can’t say I hated Ms. Pac-Man — I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t have any balls, machismo, guts, or what have you. In later years — leading right up until Pac-Man CE was released for Xbox Live Arcade, in fact — I’d identify that I just didn’t like the way Pac-Man controlled. It felt too loose and weird, which just didn’t totally mesh with how tight the game was conceptually.
If you’d have asked me how to make a better Pac-Manning experience, I probably would have told you I’d think about it and then get back to you later. That night, when you weren’t watching, I would have cut you off of my LiveJournal friends list, and then set my own journal to “friends-only”.
It’s a hell of an IQ-test question: how do you make Pac-Man better? It’s like asking me to list, off the top of my head, as many verbs that start with “V” as possible (validate, verify, vindicate, et cetera). I couldn’t think of any possible solutions, probably because I’m not a genius game designer. Maybe I could be, I don’t know, though like my mother always told me, I guess I’m kind of lazy. Either way, it’s evokes ambiguously positive emotions that original Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was reportedly responsible for the virtuosic Pac-Man CE — it makes me feel good to know that it took him nearly 30 years to come up with all these ideas.
Was Namco ever trying, though, to make Pac-Man anything more than an icon? Judging by the quality of every game starring Pac-Man, it would seem that none of them were made for any more generous reason than to keep bumping his name to the top of the gamer subconscious, to keep telling people who play games that, hey, this company called Namco has an archetypically deep heritage, and they’re not afraid of it!
They’ve been plopping remakes and reissues of Pac-Man out on the lunchroom tray of humanity for the better part of this most recent decade. They never hesitate to flop the original game onto one of their six-game “Museum” volumes, you know, which generously use up about 1/3000th of their storage medium. As of this writing, in addition to Pac-Man CE, there are two other Pac-Mans on Xbox Live Arcade — the original, and Ms. Pac-Man, both with six-dollar price tags, ugly borders and awesome online ranking leaderboards, which can only be accessed if you unlock the full version of the game.
(Really, for heck’s sake, Microsoft, let’s stop using the word “unlock”. It’s not like we’re using keys to play these games — nor even, in the gaming sense, are we using points or in-game currency. Using the word “Unlock” makes it seem like we can purchase the games using the “Gamer Points” we get from unlocking “Achievements”. Just use the word “Purchase”, please. It’s bad enough that you’ve made your own currency with “Microsoft Points”, and it’s precisely because you’ve made your own currency with which to buy things that it’s ridiculous that you award another kind of “Points” to people who do &^#$#ed stuff in games, which in turn makes it more ridiculous that you use the same word (“Unlock”) to indicate the option to purchase an Xbox Live Arcade game as you use to indicate a player being awarded an “Achievement”.)
Anyway, yeah, who wants to pay 400 “Microsoft Points” to play the original Pac-Man, when you can just pick up Ridge Racer 6 from a bargain bin and play Pac-Man to your heart’s content on the loading screen? When (not if) you get bored, you can just play Ridge Racer 6, which has nitro in it, which is awesome. However, it doesn’t have slipstreaming in it, even though Ridge Racer 5 did, because they wanted to save slipstreaming for Ridge Racer 7, which is as marginal an upgrade as you’re ever to see in videogames, though once you’ve played 7, 6 — and its Pac-Man loading screen — should seem utterly and horribly broken. After years of not upgrading the number in the series title, Namco sprung Ridge Racer 6, a statement of their staunch support of the Xbox 360, only to announce Ridge Racer 7 for the PlayStation 3 literally months later.
There’s a point to be made of this slipstream-talk, however muddy it might be: this is the sort of bullstuff Namco does. More to the point: the Pac-Man loading screen of Ridge Racer 6 isn’t even a loading screen. It’s just there. From the second it pops up, it says at the bottom of the screen: “Press the A button to begin Ridge Racer 6.” Why do they even put Pac-Man there in the first place? One slightly morbid reason is that it’s a throwback to Ridge Racer on the PlayStation, which let you play Galaxian at the pre-game loading scene. Many Namco games since then have let you play a game at the loading screen, so maybe Ridge Racer 6 was slyly trying to stir up nostalgia in the kinds of people who give a stuff. I wonder what happened to the guy who suggested the idea of putting a game in the loading screen. He’s probably 65 years old right now, with teeth the color of wooden stuff, and just finished paying off the loan for his mid-size condominium in a boring neighborhood in Tokyo. I’ve probably walked past his home a hundred times and never realized it. Probably some younger guy came up with the idea, and passed it on to the older guy out of “respect” so that the older guy could get a promotion, after which he would remember the younger guy and promote him some day. The younger guy probably never smoked a single cigarette until he was twenty-four years old.
Pac-Man is not just for loading screens — no, he’s also all over scoreboards in the Ridge Racer series, as well. Every time you hit a checkpoint, he pops up on your time display, chasing ghosts. This retro-gamer appeal is sprinkled into Namco games quite viciously, aiming to be the sort of thing some surreal-Dig-Dug-painting-owning poser on a UK games forum hears about and then says “SOLD”, maybe with some exclamation marks.
Also, a little Pac-Man badge appeared on Klonoa’s hat. Klonoa was Namco’s would-be mascot, star of a bland 2.5D game released for the PlayStation; some people still think that game was Jesus, and it kind of sucks to be those people. Klonoa had potential, anyway, though Namco didn’t care, and immediately resumed exhuming Pac-Man’s iconic profile and propping his corpse up in the weirdest places.
At the same time, developers all over the place claimed to love the original Pac-Man and tightened-up Ms. Pac-Man. Shigeru Miyamoto said, in an interview, that without Pac-Man, there would have been no Donkey Kong, and I guess he’s probably right. Donkey Kong is, subtly, about as inspired by Pac-Man as a game can get without also playing a lot like Pac-Man. The one game publisher in the world to understand the core of Pac-Man the least, ironically, has been Namco: since the success of the two “canon” games in the series, Namco has used and abused the “character” on numerous numbing occasions, such as the dull platformer Pac-Land, which no one likes unless they realize first that no one else likes it, or Pac-Man World, a 3D take on Pac-Land, where Pac-Man is now a sphere instead of a circle, which makes the fact that he has legs all the more freakish, and the fact that he has a speaking voice actually quite terrifying, and the fact that the stages lack actual design unforgivable. Recently, there’s been Pac-Pix on the DS, a game less tangentially related to the original Pac-Man than Pac-Man World, though jarring all the same: you have to keep drawing pictures of Pac-Man, his mouth facing in the correct direction, so that he munches the perpetually spawning ghosts. Pac-Pix, while a tiny bit interesting, misses the core of Pac-Man — the game is no longer about the “hunted becomes the hunter” dynamic, it’s just about drawing pictures big enough and quickly enough.
Arguably the most inspired of all the Pac-Man rehashes was Pac-Man VS, designed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. This was back when Nintendo was pushing the feature to connect a Gameboy Advance to a Gamecube, and use the Gameboy Advance as a controller. This era also brought us the dismal Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (it’s as much a challenge to try to enjoy it alone as it is to find three people willing to play it at the same time) and the friendship-wrecking The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords.
It might be most accurate to say that, back in those days, Nintendo was forcing all developers to include some level of GBA-Gamecube connectivity in all games. Player two could use a GBA to control remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell, for example. Games like Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles were big-scale brainstorms. Pac-Man VS was a lot smaller-scale, and as such, Nintendo and Namco had no clue what to do with it. Ultimately, they just slopped it onto some discs that included other games. I guess that was about the best place for it.
Pac-Man VS isn’t so much a game as a reason to scream. Essentially, it’s Pac-Man, where one player plays as Pac-Man and the other players play as the ghosts. Only the ghosts can’t see the entire playing field. Pac-Man, however, can see the ghosts. The Pac-Man player plays with the Gameboy Advance. The other players control their ghosts on the television. If it doesn’t immediately sound brilliant, it’s because it’s subtle. You really have to play it to “get” it, and playing it is, as you might imagine, kind of a hard thing to arrange: there is no one-player mode.
Yet none of these games cut to the heart of Pac-Man, where the ghosts hunt you until you eat a Power Pellet, at which point the tables turn and the ghosts flee in terror, because now you can eat them. This is a really good dynamic, and it’s just been sitting there locked up in a clunky shell for decades, reissued time and time again as-is by its shrugging, money-hungry parents, or else being shot in the feet and told to dance in monsterpieces like Pac-Man World 2, with its elbow jabbing, LOLing bullstuff cut-scenes wherein Pac-Man talks about constantly being hungry, and Ms. Pac-Man gives Pac-Man a birthday cake with a Power Pellet on top of it.
When Microsoft announced at their press conference at Tokyo Game Show 2006 that they would be holding the world’s first “Pac-Man World Championship”, I had to groan. First of all, hasn’t some guy played a perfect game of Pac-Man? How can you have a world championship of something that someone out there is perfect at? Aren’t you just asking him — and hundreds like him — to show up and dominate? Sitting there at the press conference, I couldn’t even begin to conceive of Pac-Man Championship Edition. Maybe it was because of how bullstuffty the whole presentation of it was. Peter Moore stood up there with a little headset microphone on his cranium, looking like he was either Madonna singing “Vogue” live or a high-rolling coach of a Halo team on Xbox Live. When he said that they were planning this Pac-Man world championship with the help of original creator Toru Iwatani, he repeatedly mispronounced Mr. Iwatani’s last name with such ferocity that I found it exceedingly hard to believe he’d ever met the guy. He kept calling him “Mistah Iwatawwy”. Seriously, Mr. Moore, I see only one “W” in the man’s last name, not sixteen of them.
EE-WAH-TAH-NEE.
For God’s sake.
Iwatani came out and gave a little speech. He talked about his plans to leave Namco in 2007 to become a lecturer on the subject of game design at Tokyo Polytechnic University. Listening to Iwatani’s speech, I figured this Pac-Man World Championship thing was just a big corporate flog, and Iwatani was only called in, thanks to a modest-sized envelope of money, to temporarily increase the number of Japanese people on the stage, making for a friendlier “photo op” (or, “shutter chance” as they call it in katakana) with which to infiltrate the Japanese juvenile consciousness via many games news services. Seriously, I’ve seen the notes on the PowerPoints they use to set these things up.
When Pac-Man: Championship Edition was announced and subsequently released, six whole days went by before I noticed and then downloaded the demo. Three days later, I played the demo, and purchased the full version after three play-throughs, making it the first thing I ever purchased with Microsoft Points.
Holy stuff, this is a hell of a videogame. Toru Iwatani, before walking out of Namco, put his balls on the table, and holy stuff, that’s a lot of balls. It’s like him flipping off decades of idiocy, and telling Namco to, seriously, heck Pac-Man as a “character”.
It’s basically Pac-Man with the aesthetic completed, and the dynamics mastered. Simply put: you can’t ever completely clear the board. It constantly re-seeds. The whole thing starts with just a few dots and a power pellet on each side. Eat all the dots on the right side and a fruit will appear on the left side. Eat the fruit on the left side to re-seed fresh dots and power pellets on the right side. Eat all the dots on the left side to reveal a fruit on the right side. Eat the fruit on the right side to re-seed the dots and power pellets on the left side. Et cetera, to infinity. As you repeatedly refresh the board, the layout changes, subtly. This gives the game a flow that no Pac-Man had ever possessed — the original is too stop-start to be nearly this much fun: eat all the dots to clear the stage, then start back at the middle of the maze with a completely fresh board of dots. Pac-Man CE nails the flow: the action never stops, and by staying alive, you start to feel like a hero. Every successful outwitting of ghosts, every eight-ghost combo scored, every time sparks shoot from Pac-Man’s body as he grinds around a corner, you want to pump your fist.
The longer you stay alive, the faster Pac-Man moves, and the more points the dots are worth. Being hunted by ghosts and escaping would-be run-downs is such a glimmering, pure experience that no car-chase in any 3D videogame can touch its primal thrills of success. Power pellets let you eat ghosts, as always; when you eat a ghost, the game pauses for a second, as the controller thumps, letting you savor your big point score. Eat several ghosts in a row to score increasing points — eat another power pellet before all four ghosts escape from the middle of the board, and you can find yourself lining up eight-ghost combos. If Pac-Man is fast enough and you’re a bad enough dude, you can eat twelve, sixteen, twenty ghosts in a row.
At first, scoring big in this game feels like luck. Eventually, the skill involved is undeniable. Look up some replays on YouTube after your first shot at the game, and feel the doors unlocking in your brain. I force everyone who sits on my sofa to play this game at least once, and every time I watch intently, always picking up little idiosyncrasies that I myself either possess or don’t possess. Every time, I learn a little something about my friend, the game, or — ideally — both.
So — final answer: Pac-Man CE has essentially made Pac-Man into a videogame I’m likely to enjoy for the rest of my life, and it gives Toru Iwatani good enough reason to lecture about videogame design. Maybe he has a whole lecture based around how and why it took him thirty years to wonder, “If the ghosts refresh constantly, why do the stages reset to zero every time?” Cheers, Mr. Iwatani, for having the guts to go back and complete what your company and your public had never doubted was a masterpiece.
There are a couple of other modes apart from “Championship Mode” in Pac-Man CE, including one where the power pellets don’t refresh, and ones with longer wraparound escape tunnels — where you can seriously get screwed by clever ghosts. Some people have complained about a lack of variety in the modes, or moaned about the lack of an endless mode, and I guess the latter complaint is kind of valid. It would be hella cool to see how long people could last, though I think the designers probably feared that the game might devolve into extreme, Tetris-Grand-Master-esque freakish speed, or else because they were getting conscientious, and didn’t want people losing their whole lives to this game. At any rate, the “Championship Mode” is pretty finely tuned as-is: get as high a score as you can in five minutes. I think that’s good enough. It’s good enough, even, for Japanese arcades: I could totally see this game working in Japanese arcades. Twitch masters would eat it up — figuratively. If they managed to hook it up to the internet, said twitch masters could even participate in the international leaderboards.
Then again, why pay 100 yen per play if you can just play the demo of this game for free? You don’t even need to pay for the game. All you really get out of paying for it is the ability to put your score up on the international leaderboards, which is kind of boring. I mean, I don’t suspect I’ll ever be not tied for 10,000th place, if you know what I mean. As willing as I am to admit that this game is a masterpiece by default, I’m not exactly jumping at the chance to spend my life playing it. I’d much rather continue cycling guitar scales (this week it’s the Spanish Gypsy Scale) in the dark when I should be sleeping, if you know what I mean.
When I do play this game, though, I find the Xbox 360 controller sorely lacking — either the D-pad or the analog stick is too wishy-washy about rounding corners. I wish I could play it with a joystick, though I never bought a joystick for the 360. I wish I could just get a Sanwa ball-type stick and one button (the Start button), and hack my own exclusive controller for this game, though the Xbox 360 is too complicated to work with. Damn it. There’s always the Hori Dead of Alive 4 stick, still clogging select Japanese retailers ever since that game tanked, hard. I could get one of those, I guess, though the prospect of another monolithic Hori joystick in my house — and of the tacky plastic-like boobs engraved into said special-edition stick — kind of turns me off. As it stands, the Xbox 360 controller is Pac-Man CE‘s biggest fault, though I really can’t dock its score for that.
The second-biggest flaw would have to do with the cheesy American glazed-over aesthetic. The glimmering rainbow colors of the playing field are a bit much. I mean, it’s high-definition enough, though I personally would probably prefer it more if the cute neon texture of the borders just stayed one solid color, and maybe changed just once every time both sides of the board re-seed. As it is now, it gives me a bit of a headache. There’s too much jumpy flashing going on, like the producers were trying to overcompensate for something. Leave it the hell alone, man! It’s Pac-Man. Next thing you know, they’ll release a patch that gives Pac-Man legs and eyes and a hecking snifter of brandy.
Also, the music is pretty terrible. It sounds something like what’s playing in any given club in Berlin the moment a hip German teenager first contemplates acting on the insecurity that his penis is smaller than that of other guys. It’s cute how it builds to a swell in the five minutes allotted for play-time, though really, it’s not even good techno. It’s like the record the DJ puts on when the club manager tells him they need to sell some drinks right now.
I know, I can use the Xbox 360’s excellent custom soundtracks feature, though isn’t that kind of cheating? It sounds almost like game companies are giving up, refusing to budget good music, and hoping that the player has good enough taste in music to make up for their games’ faults. As I’ll no doubt say again, ideally, a game should have music good enough to make me not want to use a custom soundtrack.
Even so, it’s convenient that a game of Pac-Man CE lasts only five minutes. There are many songs that are exactly five minutes in length, like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (off the “Scary Monsters” album). The Stone Roses’ “This is The One” is also precisely five minutes. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is 5:01, though that last second doesn’t really have too much going on.
After dipping deep into my memory banks, I recall that “Big Bikes” by Kyuss is 5:01, and would probably be really awesome to listen to while playing this game. It even has an awesome little false stop with twenty-two seconds to go, and then with nineteen seconds left it comes back, at double-time. That would be pretty badass for the closing seconds, rushing to kill just a couple more ghosts, to push the score up over your record.
I can think of a couple more songs off the top of my head, though I keep getting tempted to just check iTunes and sort all songs by length. In the face of this strong temptation to cheat, I’m just going to go ahead and quit writing this.
EXTRA BONUS PARAGRAPH. Hello and welcome to an extra bonus paragraph, written in celebration of Pac-Man: Championship Edition‘s induction to the Action Button Dot Net Manifesto Hall of Fame. Anyway, here’s Pac-Man. Since beginning this list, we have received literally dozens of emails from readers who promise terrible things if we don’t acknowledge some “Actual Great Games” on our pissy little contrarian list of videogames we possess the gall and nerve to pretend we like. Pac-Man is our way of throwing you lovable scamps a bone and flipping you off at the same time. On the one hand, it’s a Classic Japanese Videogame made by an Indisputably Wise “Genius”! On the other hand, it’s a remake! On the one hand, it’s Pac-Man! On the other hand, it’s Microsoft! On the one hand, it’s got retro-cool geek-chic in spades! On the other hand, it’s got Horrifying, Terrible Electronic Music!
All kidding aside, though, really, this is a brain-blastingly perfect videogame. There’s this cliche, about how music was great on the NES “because” of the limitations of the hardware, or how retro remakes are a key to the future of game design because they force us to examine what game designers used to do when they didn’t have normal maps, when they didn’t have the ability to drench any character’s skin in oatmeal and add six pounds of simulated fat into their chest with the click of a mouse. To this, we say “Duh”. Freedom will always breed laziness: compare yourself to a convicted bank robber Doing Hard Time. You have the freedom to leave your house; you also have the freedom to do this in your living room. However, it goes without (and sometimes with) saying that the guy Doing Hard Time is probably better at doing that than you are. Grand Theft Auto III is you — Pac-Man: Championship Edition is the convicted felon. We like the convicted felon more than we like you.
Anyway, Pac-Man: Championship Edition is a classic arcade game revisited with an attention to detail, money, and a newfound kernel of wisdom re: the very concept of games and their rules. It’s sharp, punctual, and entertaining. You can enjoy it as much as you want. For example, though the game was promoted well before its release as a proving ground for a Pac-Man world championship, and though we find that marvelous and precious, we have never bothered to check Wikipedia to see if the anybody won, or if the championship is still going on, or what. We don’t care! Pac-Man: CE is a brilliantly polished little product; it is the computer programming of 1977 graduated from Tetris university. It is an actual videogame. It is the Return of Awesome. Recently, Taito released Space Invaders Extreme, which is also pretty astounding, and kind of has better music, and Capcom released Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which has amazing music though now looks so good that the idea of being unable to jump is actually vaguely creepy (when a single chest-high stone brick blocks your progress in one direction, it feels funny to have all that HDR lighting); meanwhile, a man named Jonathon Blow makes a game called Braid, as serious a meditation on the core of classic game design as it is an exercise in making something absolutely new, which coincidentally might have actually existed twenty years ago. Then there’s Megaman 9: rather than simply remake an old Megaman game with slick graphics for a quick yen, Capcom have decided that they are Not Afraid of Death, that they are going to make a new installment in an old series, complete with old-like graphics: only now, the level design has the benefit of decades of wisdom. It could be glorious.
Thus it is abundantly clear that someone, somewhere, has sounded a giant gong, proclaiming that Games Today Kind of Suck. Cautious backward-tiptoe-steps (tipheels?) are being taken in the direction of Maybe It’s Not Just Nostalgia After All, and people are looking long and hard at the very essence of “fun”. We’d really love to see Takashi Tezuka take one for the team with New Super Mario Bros. 2, remove the “world map” segments, get rid of the “Whoa Crazy Huge” mushroom, shoehorn harder Mario Physics in, and actually make the triple-jumping and wall-jumping work in the context of the level design. That would make for something really excellent. For the meantime, Pac-Man CE is the best example yet of how to look backward and forward at the same time. Since making it, Toru Iwatani has bowed out of the games industry, though it won’t surprise us to see his former slavemasters at Namco exhuming Pac-Man and splattering him all over menus, loading screens, and car hood ornaments in Ridge Racer — nor will it surprise us to see level design and game design (Tenuous Namedrop: Gears of War (2), Uncharted (2?)) re-awakened to the awesome simplicity of Pac-Man. It’s kind of funny, and kind of sad — all these years, Namco has been looking for ways to make Pac-Man marketable, and all they could ever think of was to give him arms, legs, and a family. Really, what they should have been doing, is applying the delicacy, grace, and utter shocking nobility of the original Pac-Man‘s game design into other games starring new characters. In short, to use the phrase we hope you’ve caught on to by now: Artistic Conscience.
In closing, it has come to our attention that not everyone owning an Xbox 360 has purchased Pac-Man: Championship Edition or even downloaded the free demo. If one of you is reading this, please, stop being a jackass. Don’t let the fact that Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are also available for download fool you. It’s not a cop-out of a cash-in: it’s something real. Download it and make everyone you know play it. If anyone doesn’t enjoy it, tell them to hit the bricks.
★★★★
“ACTUALLY A VIDEOGAME.”
I’ve honestly never liked Pac-Man. At all. Here I will take a page from all of the middle-aged mohawkers submitting guitar effects pedals reviews on Harmony Central, and say that I’ve been playing guitar for 35 years, have owned Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, and SGs, used Bigsby tremolos and Gibson Vibrolas, have covered everything from AC/DC to Rage Against the Machine, and I’ve never found a better fuzz pedal than the traditional Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, so trust me when I say that the Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff is a pansy-ass piece of stuff.
Take all the guitar terms in the previous sentence, and replace them with the names of game consoles and software franchises.
Why don’t I like Pac-Man? In the past, when I had to stand on a milk carton, I played it in pizza joints because my dad figured I loved it; I played it on Atari 2600 because it existed, and eventually, I played Ms. Pac-Man on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I can’t say I hated Ms. Pac-Man — I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t have any balls, machismo, guts, or what have you. In later years — leading right up until Pac-Man CE was released for Xbox Live Arcade, in fact — I’d identify that I just didn’t like the way Pac-Man controlled. It felt too loose and weird, which just didn’t totally mesh with how tight the game was conceptually.
If you’d have asked me how to make a better Pac-Manning experience, I probably would have told you I’d think about it and then get back to you later. That night, when you weren’t watching, I would have cut you off of my LiveJournal friends list, and then set my own journal to “friends-only”.
It’s a hell of an IQ-test question: how do you make Pac-Man better? It’s like asking me to list, off the top of my head, as many verbs that start with “V” as possible (validate, verify, vindicate, et cetera). I couldn’t think of any possible solutions, probably because I’m not a genius game designer. Maybe I could be, I don’t know, though like my mother always told me, I guess I’m kind of lazy. Either way, it’s evokes ambiguously positive emotions that original Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was reportedly responsible for the virtuosic Pac-Man CE — it makes me feel good to know that it took him nearly 30 years to come up with all these ideas.
Was Namco ever trying, though, to make Pac-Man anything more than an icon? Judging by the quality of every game starring Pac-Man, it would seem that none of them were made for any more generous reason than to keep bumping his name to the top of the gamer subconscious, to keep telling people who play games that, hey, this company called Namco has an archetypically deep heritage, and they’re not afraid of it!
They’ve been plopping remakes and reissues of Pac-Man out on the lunchroom tray of humanity for the better part of this most recent decade. They never hesitate to flop the original game onto one of their six-game “Museum” volumes, you know, which generously use up about 1/3000th of their storage medium. As of this writing, in addition to Pac-Man CE, there are two other Pac-Mans on Xbox Live Arcade — the original, and Ms. Pac-Man, both with six-dollar price tags, ugly borders and awesome online ranking leaderboards, which can only be accessed if you unlock the full version of the game.
(Really, for heck’s sake, Microsoft, let’s stop using the word “unlock”. It’s not like we’re using keys to play these games — nor even, in the gaming sense, are we using points or in-game currency. Using the word “Unlock” makes it seem like we can purchase the games using the “Gamer Points” we get from unlocking “Achievements”. Just use the word “Purchase”, please. It’s bad enough that you’ve made your own currency with “Microsoft Points”, and it’s precisely because you’ve made your own currency with which to buy things that it’s ridiculous that you award another kind of “Points” to people who do &^#$#ed stuff in games, which in turn makes it more ridiculous that you use the same word (“Unlock”) to indicate the option to purchase an Xbox Live Arcade game as you use to indicate a player being awarded an “Achievement”.)
Anyway, yeah, who wants to pay 400 “Microsoft Points” to play the original Pac-Man, when you can just pick up Ridge Racer 6 from a bargain bin and play Pac-Man to your heart’s content on the loading screen? When (not if) you get bored, you can just play Ridge Racer 6, which has nitro in it, which is awesome. However, it doesn’t have slipstreaming in it, even though Ridge Racer 5 did, because they wanted to save slipstreaming for Ridge Racer 7, which is as marginal an upgrade as you’re ever to see in videogames, though once you’ve played 7, 6 — and its Pac-Man loading screen — should seem utterly and horribly broken. After years of not upgrading the number in the series title, Namco sprung Ridge Racer 6, a statement of their staunch support of the Xbox 360, only to announce Ridge Racer 7 for the PlayStation 3 literally months later.
There’s a point to be made of this slipstream-talk, however muddy it might be: this is the sort of bullstuff Namco does. More to the point: the Pac-Man loading screen of Ridge Racer 6 isn’t even a loading screen. It’s just there. From the second it pops up, it says at the bottom of the screen: “Press the A button to begin Ridge Racer 6.” Why do they even put Pac-Man there in the first place? One slightly morbid reason is that it’s a throwback to Ridge Racer on the PlayStation, which let you play Galaxian at the pre-game loading scene. Many Namco games since then have let you play a game at the loading screen, so maybe Ridge Racer 6 was slyly trying to stir up nostalgia in the kinds of people who give a stuff. I wonder what happened to the guy who suggested the idea of putting a game in the loading screen. He’s probably 65 years old right now, with teeth the color of wooden stuff, and just finished paying off the loan for his mid-size condominium in a boring neighborhood in Tokyo. I’ve probably walked past his home a hundred times and never realized it. Probably some younger guy came up with the idea, and passed it on to the older guy out of “respect” so that the older guy could get a promotion, after which he would remember the younger guy and promote him some day. The younger guy probably never smoked a single cigarette until he was twenty-four years old.
Pac-Man is not just for loading screens — no, he’s also all over scoreboards in the Ridge Racer series, as well. Every time you hit a checkpoint, he pops up on your time display, chasing ghosts. This retro-gamer appeal is sprinkled into Namco games quite viciously, aiming to be the sort of thing some surreal-Dig-Dug-painting-owning poser on a UK games forum hears about and then says “SOLD”, maybe with some exclamation marks.
Also, a little Pac-Man badge appeared on Klonoa’s hat. Klonoa was Namco’s would-be mascot, star of a bland 2.5D game released for the PlayStation; some people still think that game was Jesus, and it kind of sucks to be those people. Klonoa had potential, anyway, though Namco didn’t care, and immediately resumed exhuming Pac-Man’s iconic profile and propping his corpse up in the weirdest places.
At the same time, developers all over the place claimed to love the original Pac-Man and tightened-up Ms. Pac-Man. Shigeru Miyamoto said, in an interview, that without Pac-Man, there would have been no Donkey Kong, and I guess he’s probably right. Donkey Kong is, subtly, about as inspired by Pac-Man as a game can get without also playing a lot like Pac-Man. The one game publisher in the world to understand the core of Pac-Man the least, ironically, has been Namco: since the success of the two “canon” games in the series, Namco has used and abused the “character” on numerous numbing occasions, such as the dull platformer Pac-Land, which no one likes unless they realize first that no one else likes it, or Pac-Man World, a 3D take on Pac-Land, where Pac-Man is now a sphere instead of a circle, which makes the fact that he has legs all the more freakish, and the fact that he has a speaking voice actually quite terrifying, and the fact that the stages lack actual design unforgivable. Recently, there’s been Pac-Pix on the DS, a game less tangentially related to the original Pac-Man than Pac-Man World, though jarring all the same: you have to keep drawing pictures of Pac-Man, his mouth facing in the correct direction, so that he munches the perpetually spawning ghosts. Pac-Pix, while a tiny bit interesting, misses the core of Pac-Man — the game is no longer about the “hunted becomes the hunter” dynamic, it’s just about drawing pictures big enough and quickly enough.
Arguably the most inspired of all the Pac-Man rehashes was Pac-Man VS, designed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. This was back when Nintendo was pushing the feature to connect a Gameboy Advance to a Gamecube, and use the Gameboy Advance as a controller. This era also brought us the dismal Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (it’s as much a challenge to try to enjoy it alone as it is to find three people willing to play it at the same time) and the friendship-wrecking The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords.
It might be most accurate to say that, back in those days, Nintendo was forcing all developers to include some level of GBA-Gamecube connectivity in all games. Player two could use a GBA to control remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell, for example. Games like Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles were big-scale brainstorms. Pac-Man VS was a lot smaller-scale, and as such, Nintendo and Namco had no clue what to do with it. Ultimately, they just slopped it onto some discs that included other games. I guess that was about the best place for it.
Pac-Man VS isn’t so much a game as a reason to scream. Essentially, it’s Pac-Man, where one player plays as Pac-Man and the other players play as the ghosts. Only the ghosts can’t see the entire playing field. Pac-Man, however, can see the ghosts. The Pac-Man player plays with the Gameboy Advance. The other players control their ghosts on the television. If it doesn’t immediately sound brilliant, it’s because it’s subtle. You really have to play it to “get” it, and playing it is, as you might imagine, kind of a hard thing to arrange: there is no one-player mode.
Yet none of these games cut to the heart of Pac-Man, where the ghosts hunt you until you eat a Power Pellet, at which point the tables turn and the ghosts flee in terror, because now you can eat them. This is a really good dynamic, and it’s just been sitting there locked up in a clunky shell for decades, reissued time and time again as-is by its shrugging, money-hungry parents, or else being shot in the feet and told to dance in monsterpieces like Pac-Man World 2, with its elbow jabbing, LOLing bullstuff cut-scenes wherein Pac-Man talks about constantly being hungry, and Ms. Pac-Man gives Pac-Man a birthday cake with a Power Pellet on top of it.
When Microsoft announced at their press conference at Tokyo Game Show 2006 that they would be holding the world’s first “Pac-Man World Championship”, I had to groan. First of all, hasn’t some guy played a perfect game of Pac-Man? How can you have a world championship of something that someone out there is perfect at? Aren’t you just asking him — and hundreds like him — to show up and dominate? Sitting there at the press conference, I couldn’t even begin to conceive of Pac-Man Championship Edition. Maybe it was because of how bullstuffty the whole presentation of it was. Peter Moore stood up there with a little headset microphone on his cranium, looking like he was either Madonna singing “Vogue” live or a high-rolling coach of a Halo team on Xbox Live. When he said that they were planning this Pac-Man world championship with the help of original creator Toru Iwatani, he repeatedly mispronounced Mr. Iwatani’s last name with such ferocity that I found it exceedingly hard to believe he’d ever met the guy. He kept calling him “Mistah Iwatawwy”. Seriously, Mr. Moore, I see only one “W” in the man’s last name, not sixteen of them.
EE-WAH-TAH-NEE.
For God’s sake.
Iwatani came out and gave a little speech. He talked about his plans to leave Namco in 2007 to become a lecturer on the subject of game design at Tokyo Polytechnic University. Listening to Iwatani’s speech, I figured this Pac-Man World Championship thing was just a big corporate flog, and Iwatani was only called in, thanks to a modest-sized envelope of money, to temporarily increase the number of Japanese people on the stage, making for a friendlier “photo op” (or, “shutter chance” as they call it in katakana) with which to infiltrate the Japanese juvenile consciousness via many games news services. Seriously, I’ve seen the notes on the PowerPoints they use to set these things up.
When Pac-Man: Championship Edition was announced and subsequently released, six whole days went by before I noticed and then downloaded the demo. Three days later, I played the demo, and purchased the full version after three play-throughs, making it the first thing I ever purchased with Microsoft Points.
Holy stuff, this is a hell of a videogame. Toru Iwatani, before walking out of Namco, put his balls on the table, and holy stuff, that’s a lot of balls. It’s like him flipping off decades of idiocy, and telling Namco to, seriously, heck Pac-Man as a “character”.
It’s basically Pac-Man with the aesthetic completed, and the dynamics mastered. Simply put: you can’t ever completely clear the board. It constantly re-seeds. The whole thing starts with just a few dots and a power pellet on each side. Eat all the dots on the right side and a fruit will appear on the left side. Eat the fruit on the left side to re-seed fresh dots and power pellets on the right side. Eat all the dots on the left side to reveal a fruit on the right side. Eat the fruit on the right side to re-seed the dots and power pellets on the left side. Et cetera, to infinity. As you repeatedly refresh the board, the layout changes, subtly. This gives the game a flow that no Pac-Man had ever possessed — the original is too stop-start to be nearly this much fun: eat all the dots to clear the stage, then start back at the middle of the maze with a completely fresh board of dots. Pac-Man CE nails the flow: the action never stops, and by staying alive, you start to feel like a hero. Every successful outwitting of ghosts, every eight-ghost combo scored, every time sparks shoot from Pac-Man’s body as he grinds around a corner, you want to pump your fist.
The longer you stay alive, the faster Pac-Man moves, and the more points the dots are worth. Being hunted by ghosts and escaping would-be run-downs is such a glimmering, pure experience that no car-chase in any 3D videogame can touch its primal thrills of success. Power pellets let you eat ghosts, as always; when you eat a ghost, the game pauses for a second, as the controller thumps, letting you savor your big point score. Eat several ghosts in a row to score increasing points — eat another power pellet before all four ghosts escape from the middle of the board, and you can find yourself lining up eight-ghost combos. If Pac-Man is fast enough and you’re a bad enough dude, you can eat twelve, sixteen, twenty ghosts in a row.
At first, scoring big in this game feels like luck. Eventually, the skill involved is undeniable. Look up some replays on YouTube after your first shot at the game, and feel the doors unlocking in your brain. I force everyone who sits on my sofa to play this game at least once, and every time I watch intently, always picking up little idiosyncrasies that I myself either possess or don’t possess. Every time, I learn a little something about my friend, the game, or — ideally — both.
So — final answer: Pac-Man CE has essentially made Pac-Man into a videogame I’m likely to enjoy for the rest of my life, and it gives Toru Iwatani good enough reason to lecture about videogame design. Maybe he has a whole lecture based around how and why it took him thirty years to wonder, “If the ghosts refresh constantly, why do the stages reset to zero every time?” Cheers, Mr. Iwatani, for having the guts to go back and complete what your company and your public had never doubted was a masterpiece.
There are a couple of other modes apart from “Championship Mode” in Pac-Man CE, including one where the power pellets don’t refresh, and ones with longer wraparound escape tunnels — where you can seriously get screwed by clever ghosts. Some people have complained about a lack of variety in the modes, or moaned about the lack of an endless mode, and I guess the latter complaint is kind of valid. It would be hella cool to see how long people could last, though I think the designers probably feared that the game might devolve into extreme, Tetris-Grand-Master-esque freakish speed, or else because they were getting conscientious, and didn’t want people losing their whole lives to this game. At any rate, the “Championship Mode” is pretty finely tuned as-is: get as high a score as you can in five minutes. I think that’s good enough. It’s good enough, even, for Japanese arcades: I could totally see this game working in Japanese arcades. Twitch masters would eat it up — figuratively. If they managed to hook it up to the internet, said twitch masters could even participate in the international leaderboards.
Then again, why pay 100 yen per play if you can just play the demo of this game for free? You don’t even need to pay for the game. All you really get out of paying for it is the ability to put your score up on the international leaderboards, which is kind of boring. I mean, I don’t suspect I’ll ever be not tied for 10,000th place, if you know what I mean. As willing as I am to admit that this game is a masterpiece by default, I’m not exactly jumping at the chance to spend my life playing it. I’d much rather continue cycling guitar scales (this week it’s the Spanish Gypsy Scale) in the dark when I should be sleeping, if you know what I mean.
When I do play this game, though, I find the Xbox 360 controller sorely lacking — either the D-pad or the analog stick is too wishy-washy about rounding corners. I wish I could play it with a joystick, though I never bought a joystick for the 360. I wish I could just get a Sanwa ball-type stick and one button (the Start button), and hack my own exclusive controller for this game, though the Xbox 360 is too complicated to work with. Damn it. There’s always the Hori Dead of Alive 4 stick, still clogging select Japanese retailers ever since that game tanked, hard. I could get one of those, I guess, though the prospect of another monolithic Hori joystick in my house — and of the tacky plastic-like boobs engraved into said special-edition stick — kind of turns me off. As it stands, the Xbox 360 controller is Pac-Man CE‘s biggest fault, though I really can’t dock its score for that.
The second-biggest flaw would have to do with the cheesy American glazed-over aesthetic. The glimmering rainbow colors of the playing field are a bit much. I mean, it’s high-definition enough, though I personally would probably prefer it more if the cute neon texture of the borders just stayed one solid color, and maybe changed just once every time both sides of the board re-seed. As it is now, it gives me a bit of a headache. There’s too much jumpy flashing going on, like the producers were trying to overcompensate for something. Leave it the hell alone, man! It’s Pac-Man. Next thing you know, they’ll release a patch that gives Pac-Man legs and eyes and a hecking snifter of brandy.
Also, the music is pretty terrible. It sounds something like what’s playing in any given club in Berlin the moment a hip German teenager first contemplates acting on the insecurity that his penis is smaller than that of other guys. It’s cute how it builds to a swell in the five minutes allotted for play-time, though really, it’s not even good techno. It’s like the record the DJ puts on when the club manager tells him they need to sell some drinks right now.
I know, I can use the Xbox 360’s excellent custom soundtracks feature, though isn’t that kind of cheating? It sounds almost like game companies are giving up, refusing to budget good music, and hoping that the player has good enough taste in music to make up for their games’ faults. As I’ll no doubt say again, ideally, a game should have music good enough to make me not want to use a custom soundtrack.
Even so, it’s convenient that a game of Pac-Man CE lasts only five minutes. There are many songs that are exactly five minutes in length, like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (off the “Scary Monsters” album). The Stone Roses’ “This is The One” is also precisely five minutes. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is 5:01, though that last second doesn’t really have too much going on.
After dipping deep into my memory banks, I recall that “Big Bikes” by Kyuss is 5:01, and would probably be really awesome to listen to while playing this game. It even has an awesome little false stop with twenty-two seconds to go, and then with nineteen seconds left it comes back, at double-time. That would be pretty badass for the closing seconds, rushing to kill just a couple more ghosts, to push the score up over your record.
I can think of a couple more songs off the top of my head, though I keep getting tempted to just check iTunes and sort all songs by length. In the face of this strong temptation to cheat, I’m just going to go ahead and quit writing this.
EXTRA BONUS PARAGRAPH. Hello and welcome to an extra bonus paragraph, written in celebration of Pac-Man: Championship Edition‘s induction to the Action Button Dot Net Manifesto Hall of Fame. Anyway, here’s Pac-Man. Since beginning this list, we have received literally dozens of emails from readers who promise terrible things if we don’t acknowledge some “Actual Great Games” on our pissy little contrarian list of videogames we possess the gall and nerve to pretend we like. Pac-Man is our way of throwing you lovable scamps a bone and flipping you off at the same time. On the one hand, it’s a Classic Japanese Videogame made by an Indisputably Wise “Genius”! On the other hand, it’s a remake! On the one hand, it’s Pac-Man! On the other hand, it’s Microsoft! On the one hand, it’s got retro-cool geek-chic in spades! On the other hand, it’s got Horrifying, Terrible Electronic Music!
All kidding aside, though, really, this is a brain-blastingly perfect videogame. There’s this cliche, about how music was great on the NES “because” of the limitations of the hardware, or how retro remakes are a key to the future of game design because they force us to examine what game designers used to do when they didn’t have normal maps, when they didn’t have the ability to drench any character’s skin in oatmeal and add six pounds of simulated fat into their chest with the click of a mouse. To this, we say “Duh”. Freedom will always breed laziness: compare yourself to a convicted bank robber Doing Hard Time. You have the freedom to leave your house; you also have the freedom to do this in your living room. However, it goes without (and sometimes with) saying that the guy Doing Hard Time is probably better at doing that than you are. Grand Theft Auto III is you — Pac-Man: Championship Edition is the convicted felon. We like the convicted felon more than we like you.
Anyway, Pac-Man: Championship Edition is a classic arcade game revisited with an attention to detail, money, and a newfound kernel of wisdom re: the very concept of games and their rules. It’s sharp, punctual, and entertaining. You can enjoy it as much as you want. For example, though the game was promoted well before its release as a proving ground for a Pac-Man world championship, and though we find that marvelous and precious, we have never bothered to check Wikipedia to see if the anybody won, or if the championship is still going on, or what. We don’t care! Pac-Man: CE is a brilliantly polished little product; it is the computer programming of 1977 graduated from Tetris university. It is an actual videogame. It is the Return of Awesome. Recently, Taito released Space Invaders Extreme, which is also pretty astounding, and kind of has better music, and Capcom released Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which has amazing music though now looks so good that the idea of being unable to jump is actually vaguely creepy (when a single chest-high stone brick blocks your progress in one direction, it feels funny to have all that HDR lighting); meanwhile, a man named Jonathon Blow makes a game called Braid, as serious a meditation on the core of classic game design as it is an exercise in making something absolutely new, which coincidentally might have actually existed twenty years ago. Then there’s Megaman 9: rather than simply remake an old Megaman game with slick graphics for a quick yen, Capcom have decided that they are Not Afraid of Death, that they are going to make a new installment in an old series, complete with old-like graphics: only now, the level design has the benefit of decades of wisdom. It could be glorious.
Thus it is abundantly clear that someone, somewhere, has sounded a giant gong, proclaiming that Games Today Kind of Suck. Cautious backward-tiptoe-steps (tipheels?) are being taken in the direction of Maybe It’s Not Just Nostalgia After All, and people are looking long and hard at the very essence of “fun”. We’d really love to see Takashi Tezuka take one for the team with New Super Mario Bros. 2, remove the “world map” segments, get rid of the “Whoa Crazy Huge” mushroom, shoehorn harder Mario Physics in, and actually make the triple-jumping and wall-jumping work in the context of the level design. That would make for something really excellent. For the meantime, Pac-Man CE is the best example yet of how to look backward and forward at the same time. Since making it, Toru Iwatani has bowed out of the games industry, though it won’t surprise us to see his former slavemasters at Namco exhuming Pac-Man and splattering him all over menus, loading screens, and car hood ornaments in Ridge Racer — nor will it surprise us to see level design and game design (Tenuous Namedrop: Gears of War (2), Uncharted (2?)) re-awakened to the awesome simplicity of Pac-Man. It’s kind of funny, and kind of sad — all these years, Namco has been looking for ways to make Pac-Man marketable, and all they could ever think of was to give him arms, legs, and a family. Really, what they should have been doing, is applying the delicacy, grace, and utter shocking nobility of the original Pac-Man‘s game design into other games starring new characters. In short, to use the phrase we hope you’ve caught on to by now: Artistic Conscience.
In closing, it has come to our attention that not everyone owning an Xbox 360 has purchased Pac-Man: Championship Edition or even downloaded the free demo. If one of you is reading this, please, stop being a jackass. Don’t let the fact that Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are also available for download fool you. It’s not a cop-out of a cash-in: it’s something real. Download it and make everyone you know play it. If anyone doesn’t enjoy it, tell them to hit the bricks.
text by tim rogers
★★★☆
“TO DYNASTY WARRIORS AS SUPER MARIO BROS. IS TO THE SCORE DISPLAY IN PAC-MAN.”
Bladestorm is a new game — emphasis on the “game” — by Koei, who earned its earliest fans way back in the early 1980s by making computer software simulations of Chinese wars which were specific when it came to names and shimmeringly incomprehensible when it came to figuring if you were winning or losing, or why you were winning or losing. Koei decided much later that their cult fan base wasn’t enough, so they objectified ancient Chinese wars the way only an American man could objectify, say, a Korean woman: they rolled the bones, and out of the fireplace stepped one with the largest breasts, the smoothest skin, and the most vapid hack-and-slash action, one that constantly told you you were bigger and stronger than any other man on the battlefield. The game was Dynasty Warriors 2, sequel to a boring one-on-one fighting game. Dynasty Warriors was something like a big brother to many dozens of thousands of fully grown men who never got chances to ace their college entrance exams. Koei (and developer Omega Force) rode Dynasty Warriors like a wild young pony for six years that felt like a decade. The series has never, quite specifically, evolved past its PlayStation 2 iterations, which makes a whole lot of sense, because they haven’t made a “canonical” entry for the PlayStation 3 yet. Bladestorm is the first original PlayStation 3 game by Omega Force, and, quite frankly, it is to Dynasty Warriors what Super Mario Bros. was to the score display in Pac-Man. It takes the concept of running around a battlefield, and it turns it into a man.
The time setting for Bladestorm just so happens to be the Hundred Years War. Unlike the obsessively well-documented second-century Chinese civil wars on which Dynasty Warriors games are based, the Hundred Years War, despite having lasted a hundred years, is not quite the source of any literature outside the story of Joan of Arc, who, really, wasn’t a very big deal and couldn’t have possibly mattered much in the war if she got burned at the stake while she was still a teenager.
In other words, whereas button-bashing history buffs would march to Koei’s home office and crucify the receptionist if one pertinent person’s name failed to be present in a Dynasty Warriors title, with Bladestorm, they arrive at the proverbial table with plenty of room to heck around. The biggest, most amazing change, which on paper is enough to qualify Bladestorm as a hit of Dynasty Warriors proportions, is the fact that you can make your own character, and level him (or her) up. Choose from a variety of faces far less hideous than anything you could make in Oblivion, choose the color of your little tunic, and get out there and fight. (I named my Laurence-Fishburne-looking warrior “Jackamost”, by the way. It’s something of a one-up of “Lancelot”.) Not a second done being born, here your character is in a bar — hell of a place to be born — talking to an eyepatched bartender, who runs you through some easy-enough-to-understand training missions. When it’s time to do some actual missions, you realize that your character is just a mercenary. In some missions you fight the French as a member of the English army. In some missions, it’s the other way around. A cut-scene early in the game, in addition to featuring a slow scroll over a CG-rendered map while an announcer reads from a textbook, depicts two shoulders clashing swords in a great confusing battle charge. One soldier looks the other in the eye and says, “What are you doing fighting with the French? I thought you were with us?” “Times change!” says his old friend. So amusing was this that I was prompted to think of the language barrier an uneducated English grunt would have to overcome to fight on the side of the French. Then it dawned on me that everyone in the cut-scenes was speaking Japanese, anyway, which made perfect sense, seeing as all the Chinese people in Dynasty Warriors speak Japanese, as well. If it seems odd to you that the caucasians in Bladestorm all speak Japanese, that might make you something of a closet racist. In conclusion: you know why Final Fantasy VII‘s Wikipedia article is longer than Gandhi’s? No, it’s not because all internet users are game geeks — it’s because a high percentage of game geeks use the internet, while Gandhi geeks tend to sit around at home practicing peaceful contemplation.
The Hundred Years War setting is conceptually integral to Bladestorm, though when you realize, as many of us have, that Dynasty Warriors games manage to sell hundreds of thousands of copies despite the “history” portion being contained entirely in pre-battle talking-head screens with dialogue boxes beneath abstract maps marking enemy locations, it becomes clear: the history is more of an excuse than anything else. It’s not even the excuse to play the game — it’s excuse for the developers to make it, with all its clashing swords and whinnying horses. There are elements of the war-going experience that Omega Force has never bothered to touch upon — I’d appreciate trumpet-bearers and drummer-boys on the battlefield, or something similar — and it’s as easy to say that they’re saving these ideas for later as it is to say that it doesn’t matter: the die is cast, the game is made, and there’s more than enough bloom lighting reflecting off shiny armor textures to convince anyone with a pulse rate over 90 beats per minute that yes, this is a videogame.
And what a game it is! It’s actually not that bad at all. The lengthy tutorial is full of exclamation marks, imploring the player not to play this game like Dynasty Warriors, though not in those exact words. Though it’s obviously running the latest build of the Dynasty Warriors engine, they saw fit to actually make a game with that engine, which is just so nice of them. You’re a lone soldier, and you will die if you dash alone into a group of men with blades. So you find a small group of soldiers and take charge of them with a button-press — much easier than in real life. Where you go, they follow — if by “follow” you mean “lead the way”. (I’m suddenly reminded of how the CIA and other intelligence agencies teach field agents how to follow someone from the front.) Different button presses will change formations. When your group of guys runs into another group of guys, they start fighting, in dynamic 3D. It feels like Dragon Force, though without any screen transitions. And you can stand there watching, or issue commands to your own dude to start slashing some other dudes. You can control your dudes while they’re fighting, though only vaguely. Sometimes they won’t hear your commands to fight harder, or to retreat. Sometimes only one or two of them will. It’s seemingly random — random, like war itself. When the target group of bad guys dies, what’s left of your squad will regroup. Using your handy map screen, you can plot out a course. It’s remarkable and incredulous in Dynasty Warriors that the boss characters’ dots on the map will be larger than all the other dots — like the ancient Chinese possessed radar technology. In Bladestorm, the blinking dots of enemy-occupied castles makes a whole lot more sense, and you’ll be grateful to know where enemy generals are, so you can prepare yourself ahead of time. In other words, with a few elegant strokes, Bladestorm reveals that the dumbest design flaws of Dynasty Warriors only stand out because the game has no hecking challenge whatsoever outside of the fights with characters who actually have names. You will never be killed by a random soldier in Dynasty Warriors because that would be a disgusting distortion of history: no nameless soldier ever killed Lu Bu, because if he did, then people would know his name. Further analysis of this reveals deeper conceptual flaws in Dynasty Warriors: Liu Bei didn’t kill Lu Bu either, though in the game, he can. In Bladestorm, you yourself are a nameless soldier, meaning that death at the hands of a nameless soldier isn’t purely impossible.
Koei’s promotional push for the game involves near-limitless, unbelievably tacky use of the word “Soukaikan” (“Refreshing feeling”), which is then repeated ad nauseum in user reviews on Amazon.co.jp, by people who either have no minds of their own or think that if they constantly write like they’re PR representatives then maybe someday they’ll wake up and they’ll be a PR representative, which has to pay a lot more than their current profession of the Japanese equivalent of basement-dwelling aerosol-huffer. Dynasty Warriors games are “refreshing” because not everyone can be an astronaut: unfortunately for some people with big or even medium-sized dreams, there exists no “square button” in life which, when pounded repeatedly, causes your boss to stuff his pants, call you a genius, and then give you the keys to his Jaguar. For better — and not for worse — there is no such square button in Bladestorm, either. You actually need to possess some functional understanding of strategy to ensure you have enough troops left alive to take on the next challenge.
Prior to each battle, you choose your character’s deployment point on a massive battle map — at any given location on the map, blue squad icons are facing off against red squad icons. It doesn’t matter where you start — you’re in the middle of the fight. The epic charges of the cut-scenes are not to be found in the actual game, and it doesn’t matter. The battles play out with more of a fine quality than the general-hunting battlefield traipses in Dynasty Warriors; in Bladestorm it’s more about the minutiae, and, as you realize eventually — it’s more about playing your part in the battle. You’re not some super-warrior who, before sunset, is going to have killed every senior officer and sacked every fort in a six-mile radius — you’re just one good soldier of many. This lends the battles a more engrossing scale — they’re bigger, though at the same time exceptionally more focused. They’re easier to understand, though simultaneously more mysteriously convoluted. There’s a lot going on, though as you’ll ideally understand, you don’t need to involve yourself in all of it: by the end of the battle, you’ll have earned a lot of experience points (the in-game explanation of “witnesses to your great deeds”), and you’ll level up, earn money with which to buy bigger, shinier armor, and earn the ability to command more troops. After a couple hours, your little squad of twenty guys might soon number more than a hundred. It’s kind of a thrill, and “refreshing” in a totally different way than mowing a hundred guys with your own spear. In a way, it revokes repressed memories of Koei’s Famicom classics Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Bandit Kings of Ancient China, with their black backgrounds, randomized numerical calamities, and confounded, fascinated players. Or maybe it’s just reminding me of Kessen 3, the most action-oriented entry in the series — which began with Kessen on the PlayStation 2, a sheerly mopey map-wandering “strategy” game with automated 3D fights in which many men moved quickly and fiercely. The third game was meaty and crunchy, allowing you to take control of your general and pilot his horse around the battlefield, leading your eager acre of troops toward the field of battle, and other angry groups of men to battle. Kessen 3 was weirdly disconnected, like a real-time strategy game where you control just one unit. Bladestorm is Kessen 3 as seen from the ground. It’s reined in and, when it’s not being silly, it’s fascinating, though only if you’re in the mood.
Of course, spacious cut-scenes typical of the Dynasty Warriors games are present in huge numbers, though they always involve characters like Joan of Arc, commanding groups of seven or eight hundred thousand ant-like soldiers beneath a vomit-colored foggy sky, inter-cut with images of perfect tears falling from the eye of a pink-hair princess, images of the battlefield reflected in the globular liquid. The cut-scenes are so bland compared to the vibrant colors of the in-game graphics, though I suppose, at least, I can understand the poison: developers made CG way back when, and the computers have gotten better and better over the years, so there will always exist CG that looks better than in-game graphics, so the developers will always be bound by the corporate profile to use CG. It’s just that the disparity is more alive and hideous than ever in Bladestorm.
And then there’s the videogameliness, these little gopher heads popping up out of the ground at every opportunity and telling us “Yes, you’re playing a videogame, not watching the History Channel.” Here I will reference something I’ve referenced before: the president of Acclaim, months before the collapse of the company, showing a reporter for “60 Minutes” a beta build of some Major League Baseball game, explaining that “Our goal is to make games that people mistake for television broadcasts.” The semantics were amazing, no matter how you interpret that sentence. Koei must have had it written down in a file somewhere, stored away in the cabinet where they keep the food for the carp in the lobby pond, because there are a literally disgusting amount of big glossy numbers popping up all over the screen. There’s a chance that the “refreshing feeling” being touted by Koei’s genius marketers is supposed to have something to do with the numbers: watch your combo counter and hit counter climb — your soldiers’ hits and kills count toward your hits and kills, meaning the more guys you have, the bigger the numbers. Why not allow me to just take the battle in stride, and show me the stats at the end?
There are also little things like how you can be riding a horse one second, and then, when you get off the horse, it just vanishes into thin air, though that’s actually kind of hilarious, given the shine of the graphics. Previous hilarious Koei-isms involve soldiers in Dynasty Warriors running right up to your commander and then standing still, resulting in your commanders calling for your help to defeat said soldiers — oh Koei, you lovable scamps! Bladestorm, with its shiny graphics, is beyond such philosophical black holes with regards to strategy, though it’s by no means above a good disappearing horse trick.
Bladestorm isn’t perfect — a pseudo-menu-based-strategy-game interface overlapped with the hack-and-slash maybe isn’t the best way to make an action game (I prefer the rock-solid and rewarding parry systems of Drag-on Dragoon 2 or Sengoku Basara). Though hey, for what it’s worth, the game represents an effort to try harder, and it even has customizable characters, so what the hell — let’s give it three stars.
★★★☆
“TO DYNASTY WARRIORS AS SUPER MARIO BROS. IS TO THE SCORE DISPLAY IN PAC-MAN.”
Bladestorm is a new game — emphasis on the “game” — by Koei, who earned its earliest fans way back in the early 1980s by making computer software simulations of Chinese wars which were specific when it came to names and shimmeringly incomprehensible when it came to figuring if you were winning or losing, or why you were winning or losing. Koei decided much later that their cult fan base wasn’t enough, so they objectified ancient Chinese wars the way only an American man could objectify, say, a Korean woman: they rolled the bones, and out of the fireplace stepped one with the largest breasts, the smoothest skin, and the most vapid hack-and-slash action, one that constantly told you you were bigger and stronger than any other man on the battlefield. The game was Dynasty Warriors 2, sequel to a boring one-on-one fighting game. Dynasty Warriors was something like a big brother to many dozens of thousands of fully grown men who never got chances to ace their college entrance exams. Koei (and developer Omega Force) rode Dynasty Warriors like a wild young pony for six years that felt like a decade. The series has never, quite specifically, evolved past its PlayStation 2 iterations, which makes a whole lot of sense, because they haven’t made a “canonical” entry for the PlayStation 3 yet. Bladestorm is the first original PlayStation 3 game by Omega Force, and, quite frankly, it is to Dynasty Warriors what Super Mario Bros. was to the score display in Pac-Man. It takes the concept of running around a battlefield, and it turns it into a man.
The time setting for Bladestorm just so happens to be the Hundred Years War. Unlike the obsessively well-documented second-century Chinese civil wars on which Dynasty Warriors games are based, the Hundred Years War, despite having lasted a hundred years, is not quite the source of any literature outside the story of Joan of Arc, who, really, wasn’t a very big deal and couldn’t have possibly mattered much in the war if she got burned at the stake while she was still a teenager.
In other words, whereas button-bashing history buffs would march to Koei’s home office and crucify the receptionist if one pertinent person’s name failed to be present in a Dynasty Warriors title, with Bladestorm, they arrive at the proverbial table with plenty of room to heck around. The biggest, most amazing change, which on paper is enough to qualify Bladestorm as a hit of Dynasty Warriors proportions, is the fact that you can make your own character, and level him (or her) up. Choose from a variety of faces far less hideous than anything you could make in Oblivion, choose the color of your little tunic, and get out there and fight. (I named my Laurence-Fishburne-looking warrior “Jackamost”, by the way. It’s something of a one-up of “Lancelot”.) Not a second done being born, here your character is in a bar — hell of a place to be born — talking to an eyepatched bartender, who runs you through some easy-enough-to-understand training missions. When it’s time to do some actual missions, you realize that your character is just a mercenary. In some missions you fight the French as a member of the English army. In some missions, it’s the other way around. A cut-scene early in the game, in addition to featuring a slow scroll over a CG-rendered map while an announcer reads from a textbook, depicts two shoulders clashing swords in a great confusing battle charge. One soldier looks the other in the eye and says, “What are you doing fighting with the French? I thought you were with us?” “Times change!” says his old friend. So amusing was this that I was prompted to think of the language barrier an uneducated English grunt would have to overcome to fight on the side of the French. Then it dawned on me that everyone in the cut-scenes was speaking Japanese, anyway, which made perfect sense, seeing as all the Chinese people in Dynasty Warriors speak Japanese, as well. If it seems odd to you that the caucasians in Bladestorm all speak Japanese, that might make you something of a closet racist. In conclusion: you know why Final Fantasy VII‘s Wikipedia article is longer than Gandhi’s? No, it’s not because all internet users are game geeks — it’s because a high percentage of game geeks use the internet, while Gandhi geeks tend to sit around at home practicing peaceful contemplation.
The Hundred Years War setting is conceptually integral to Bladestorm, though when you realize, as many of us have, that Dynasty Warriors games manage to sell hundreds of thousands of copies despite the “history” portion being contained entirely in pre-battle talking-head screens with dialogue boxes beneath abstract maps marking enemy locations, it becomes clear: the history is more of an excuse than anything else. It’s not even the excuse to play the game — it’s excuse for the developers to make it, with all its clashing swords and whinnying horses. There are elements of the war-going experience that Omega Force has never bothered to touch upon — I’d appreciate trumpet-bearers and drummer-boys on the battlefield, or something similar — and it’s as easy to say that they’re saving these ideas for later as it is to say that it doesn’t matter: the die is cast, the game is made, and there’s more than enough bloom lighting reflecting off shiny armor textures to convince anyone with a pulse rate over 90 beats per minute that yes, this is a videogame.
And what a game it is! It’s actually not that bad at all. The lengthy tutorial is full of exclamation marks, imploring the player not to play this game like Dynasty Warriors, though not in those exact words. Though it’s obviously running the latest build of the Dynasty Warriors engine, they saw fit to actually make a game with that engine, which is just so nice of them. You’re a lone soldier, and you will die if you dash alone into a group of men with blades. So you find a small group of soldiers and take charge of them with a button-press — much easier than in real life. Where you go, they follow — if by “follow” you mean “lead the way”. (I’m suddenly reminded of how the CIA and other intelligence agencies teach field agents how to follow someone from the front.) Different button presses will change formations. When your group of guys runs into another group of guys, they start fighting, in dynamic 3D. It feels like Dragon Force, though without any screen transitions. And you can stand there watching, or issue commands to your own dude to start slashing some other dudes. You can control your dudes while they’re fighting, though only vaguely. Sometimes they won’t hear your commands to fight harder, or to retreat. Sometimes only one or two of them will. It’s seemingly random — random, like war itself. When the target group of bad guys dies, what’s left of your squad will regroup. Using your handy map screen, you can plot out a course. It’s remarkable and incredulous in Dynasty Warriors that the boss characters’ dots on the map will be larger than all the other dots — like the ancient Chinese possessed radar technology. In Bladestorm, the blinking dots of enemy-occupied castles makes a whole lot more sense, and you’ll be grateful to know where enemy generals are, so you can prepare yourself ahead of time. In other words, with a few elegant strokes, Bladestorm reveals that the dumbest design flaws of Dynasty Warriors only stand out because the game has no hecking challenge whatsoever outside of the fights with characters who actually have names. You will never be killed by a random soldier in Dynasty Warriors because that would be a disgusting distortion of history: no nameless soldier ever killed Lu Bu, because if he did, then people would know his name. Further analysis of this reveals deeper conceptual flaws in Dynasty Warriors: Liu Bei didn’t kill Lu Bu either, though in the game, he can. In Bladestorm, you yourself are a nameless soldier, meaning that death at the hands of a nameless soldier isn’t purely impossible.
Koei’s promotional push for the game involves near-limitless, unbelievably tacky use of the word “Soukaikan” (“Refreshing feeling”), which is then repeated ad nauseum in user reviews on Amazon.co.jp, by people who either have no minds of their own or think that if they constantly write like they’re PR representatives then maybe someday they’ll wake up and they’ll be a PR representative, which has to pay a lot more than their current profession of the Japanese equivalent of basement-dwelling aerosol-huffer. Dynasty Warriors games are “refreshing” because not everyone can be an astronaut: unfortunately for some people with big or even medium-sized dreams, there exists no “square button” in life which, when pounded repeatedly, causes your boss to stuff his pants, call you a genius, and then give you the keys to his Jaguar. For better — and not for worse — there is no such square button in Bladestorm, either. You actually need to possess some functional understanding of strategy to ensure you have enough troops left alive to take on the next challenge.
Prior to each battle, you choose your character’s deployment point on a massive battle map — at any given location on the map, blue squad icons are facing off against red squad icons. It doesn’t matter where you start — you’re in the middle of the fight. The epic charges of the cut-scenes are not to be found in the actual game, and it doesn’t matter. The battles play out with more of a fine quality than the general-hunting battlefield traipses in Dynasty Warriors; in Bladestorm it’s more about the minutiae, and, as you realize eventually — it’s more about playing your part in the battle. You’re not some super-warrior who, before sunset, is going to have killed every senior officer and sacked every fort in a six-mile radius — you’re just one good soldier of many. This lends the battles a more engrossing scale — they’re bigger, though at the same time exceptionally more focused. They’re easier to understand, though simultaneously more mysteriously convoluted. There’s a lot going on, though as you’ll ideally understand, you don’t need to involve yourself in all of it: by the end of the battle, you’ll have earned a lot of experience points (the in-game explanation of “witnesses to your great deeds”), and you’ll level up, earn money with which to buy bigger, shinier armor, and earn the ability to command more troops. After a couple hours, your little squad of twenty guys might soon number more than a hundred. It’s kind of a thrill, and “refreshing” in a totally different way than mowing a hundred guys with your own spear. In a way, it revokes repressed memories of Koei’s Famicom classics Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Bandit Kings of Ancient China, with their black backgrounds, randomized numerical calamities, and confounded, fascinated players. Or maybe it’s just reminding me of Kessen 3, the most action-oriented entry in the series — which began with Kessen on the PlayStation 2, a sheerly mopey map-wandering “strategy” game with automated 3D fights in which many men moved quickly and fiercely. The third game was meaty and crunchy, allowing you to take control of your general and pilot his horse around the battlefield, leading your eager acre of troops toward the field of battle, and other angry groups of men to battle. Kessen 3 was weirdly disconnected, like a real-time strategy game where you control just one unit. Bladestorm is Kessen 3 as seen from the ground. It’s reined in and, when it’s not being silly, it’s fascinating, though only if you’re in the mood.
Of course, spacious cut-scenes typical of the Dynasty Warriors games are present in huge numbers, though they always involve characters like Joan of Arc, commanding groups of seven or eight hundred thousand ant-like soldiers beneath a vomit-colored foggy sky, inter-cut with images of perfect tears falling from the eye of a pink-hair princess, images of the battlefield reflected in the globular liquid. The cut-scenes are so bland compared to the vibrant colors of the in-game graphics, though I suppose, at least, I can understand the poison: developers made CG way back when, and the computers have gotten better and better over the years, so there will always exist CG that looks better than in-game graphics, so the developers will always be bound by the corporate profile to use CG. It’s just that the disparity is more alive and hideous than ever in Bladestorm.
And then there’s the videogameliness, these little gopher heads popping up out of the ground at every opportunity and telling us “Yes, you’re playing a videogame, not watching the History Channel.” Here I will reference something I’ve referenced before: the president of Acclaim, months before the collapse of the company, showing a reporter for “60 Minutes” a beta build of some Major League Baseball game, explaining that “Our goal is to make games that people mistake for television broadcasts.” The semantics were amazing, no matter how you interpret that sentence. Koei must have had it written down in a file somewhere, stored away in the cabinet where they keep the food for the carp in the lobby pond, because there are a literally disgusting amount of big glossy numbers popping up all over the screen. There’s a chance that the “refreshing feeling” being touted by Koei’s genius marketers is supposed to have something to do with the numbers: watch your combo counter and hit counter climb — your soldiers’ hits and kills count toward your hits and kills, meaning the more guys you have, the bigger the numbers. Why not allow me to just take the battle in stride, and show me the stats at the end?
There are also little things like how you can be riding a horse one second, and then, when you get off the horse, it just vanishes into thin air, though that’s actually kind of hilarious, given the shine of the graphics. Previous hilarious Koei-isms involve soldiers in Dynasty Warriors running right up to your commander and then standing still, resulting in your commanders calling for your help to defeat said soldiers — oh Koei, you lovable scamps! Bladestorm, with its shiny graphics, is beyond such philosophical black holes with regards to strategy, though it’s by no means above a good disappearing horse trick.
Bladestorm isn’t perfect — a pseudo-menu-based-strategy-game interface overlapped with the hack-and-slash maybe isn’t the best way to make an action game (I prefer the rock-solid and rewarding parry systems of Drag-on Dragoon 2 or Sengoku Basara). Though hey, for what it’s worth, the game represents an effort to try harder, and it even has customizable characters, so what the hell — let’s give it three stars.
2002
text by Brandon Parker
⋆☆☆☆
“IN NEED OF TROOP REDUCTIONS AND A TIMETABLE FOR WITHDRAWAL.”
If someone broke into my house and started shooting at me, even if I had a gun I’d think, “Well, maybe they’ve mistaken me for someone else,” or “Maybe someone is holding their child hostage and forcing them to shoot me,” or “Maybe they have a sick mother and they need to murder me and rob my house to get her medicine,” or, “Maybe they’re shooting at a big dangerous man behind me that I didn’t notice.” I mean, I wouldn’t be able to shoot back. If I did that there would be a good chance they’d fall down and never get up again, because they would be dead, and I just don’t want to do that to anybody.
So there’s really no reason for me to join the military, being that that’s all they do. There have been a few times when they’ve tried to call and hassle or guilt trip me into giving some sort of a stuff about my country and it’s caught me off guard when “U.S. GOVERNMENT” shows up in big letters on the Caller ID. and I think finally the hounds are closing in and the hammer is coming down. Thankfully, I need only mention my “condition” I’ve had ever since the “incident” and they just try to awkwardly end the conversation and leave me alone.
Recently, at the Missouri Black Expo, the army showed up to use their predatory recruitment tactics and show off their video game, America’s Army. Some Iraq veterans put in an appearance and protested the use of the game as a recruitment tool, since someone might sign up for the army thinking they’ll respawn after they’re shot. Since I live in Missouri, all of those people thinking about the game sent subconscious signals to the idea-antenna in my brain and that’s when I decided to play it suddenly. I also thought it might help me if I were worn down through rigorous training into a computer killing machine, especially since these giant stubborn sonsabitches with drill hands and diving armor were giving me a hard time in another video game. So I was going to get tough and come back and get those bastards. Drill hands, I mean, how do you beat that? Joining a damn army, that’s how.
During basic training, I lost control to my obsessive compulsive needs. I couldn’t settle for anything less than perfection. I retook the “Shoot House” test until I hit all targets with 100% accuracy well under the allotted time. “Hell yes,” I said, as I got up from the game to do some celebratory push-ups for my badassery. However, my arms got tired and a bead of sweat felt like it was beginning to think about forming on my forehead during the first one, so I postponed the celebration until later. It seems fate has bestowed upon me an Iggy Pop build and an Idler work ethic, incapable of performing any actions requiring more effort than grinding one’s teeth.
For combat medic training you have to actually sit through someone giving a lecture and take a real damn multiple choice test afterward. Just like real school, almost immediately after the teacher began to speak my mind sort of went off and thought about other things and the next thing I knew it was test time. They seem fairly detailed with this business. I almost felt like I could have saved a real human if I needed to. I probably could have if I had paid attention instead of just checking GameFaqs for the answers. So I was pretty disappointed when it came time for the field test and all I had to do was go up and press a button to fix up the casualties. All of that effort of alt-tabbing and looking for a FAQ with the test answers, all gone to waste, it seemed.
The training did end up coming in handy, though. Eventually after enough basic training I was deemed worthy by America’s Army of playing online with other human beings, or “in the stuff,” as us hardened veterans call it. It wasn’t long into my first mission before a teammate next to me cried out for a medic, which was me. He was a mess. He had been hit and it was bad. A heads-up-display told me he was in the RED, which meant he was probably mere seconds away from bleeding to death. But for some reason I couldn’t figure out what to do. Even in a damn video game all the best laid plans and training go right the hell out the window the second the bullets start flying.
And they were flying all around us while I was pressing all sorts of buttons, accidentally throwing down my weapon, putting my binoculars on, bringing up a large map to look at, trying everything I could think of just to help this guy. I could have sworn his character model took on a pleading look in his eyes. What do I do? What’s that damn button? GOD DAMNIT, SOMEBODY, THIS MAN’S DYING, I just wanted the co-Oh right the “Use” key. There you go pal, all patched up and good as new. He thanked me with a “Hooah!” and stood up ready to charge forward again, filled with renewed vigor, then took a round from a sniper rifle right in his hecking heart. I’ll never forget the look on his primitively textured face.
I guess in war you might end up having to fight alongside some jackasses. But war is war and we’re all buddies in war, even Texas.Lawman.357, who first made his presence known to the squad with a joke:
“HABLA ESPANOL?”
“No.”
“me neither LOL. Any wimmenz here?”
He truly lived up to his name, so much that I expected Trivette to pull up in the jeep at any moment, needing his help to solve a mystery or bust a drug ring or whatnot. It bothered me later on, though, when he was trying to get people to talk to him, and he said his TeamSpeak server was 9mm.somethingorother. I just wish he’d pick a caliber and stick with it already. You can’t just have both.
America’s Army has a curious feature: whether you pick offense or defense, the mission briefing always refers to the other side as terrorists and the player will always see himself and his allies as U.S. soldiers and the enemy as brown men in black ski masks. First of all, that makes camouflage pointless if everyone who is going to be seeing you see’s you as a black ninja. So the game deceives you by making you think you’re wearing desert fatigues or whatever, when you’re actually standing out like a sore thumb. Maybe that’s just real army training for being told you’re wearing protective gear that’s actual some flimsy bullet attracting stuff.
Second of all, the army seems to be sending some conflicting messages here. According to them, we’re the good guys and all those terrorists out there kept awake at night by the thought that we’re just too damn free need to be found and killed immediately. But according to the army’s video game, everyone is a terrorist in the right situation and to the right people. Yes, even your mother is a terrorist if the retrieval of her delicious home cooked muffins are determined to be critical to national security (she would be defense in that situation). So, which is it, army? Who is the bad guy? Mom and her hired private military company, or the army seeking her tasty home baked treats? Or is everyone the bad guy? In which case, the only way to win America’s Army is to not play at all. I like to win, so I’ll do that.
⋆☆☆☆
“IN NEED OF TROOP REDUCTIONS AND A TIMETABLE FOR WITHDRAWAL.”
If someone broke into my house and started shooting at me, even if I had a gun I’d think, “Well, maybe they’ve mistaken me for someone else,” or “Maybe someone is holding their child hostage and forcing them to shoot me,” or “Maybe they have a sick mother and they need to murder me and rob my house to get her medicine,” or, “Maybe they’re shooting at a big dangerous man behind me that I didn’t notice.” I mean, I wouldn’t be able to shoot back. If I did that there would be a good chance they’d fall down and never get up again, because they would be dead, and I just don’t want to do that to anybody.
So there’s really no reason for me to join the military, being that that’s all they do. There have been a few times when they’ve tried to call and hassle or guilt trip me into giving some sort of a stuff about my country and it’s caught me off guard when “U.S. GOVERNMENT” shows up in big letters on the Caller ID. and I think finally the hounds are closing in and the hammer is coming down. Thankfully, I need only mention my “condition” I’ve had ever since the “incident” and they just try to awkwardly end the conversation and leave me alone.
Recently, at the Missouri Black Expo, the army showed up to use their predatory recruitment tactics and show off their video game, America’s Army. Some Iraq veterans put in an appearance and protested the use of the game as a recruitment tool, since someone might sign up for the army thinking they’ll respawn after they’re shot. Since I live in Missouri, all of those people thinking about the game sent subconscious signals to the idea-antenna in my brain and that’s when I decided to play it suddenly. I also thought it might help me if I were worn down through rigorous training into a computer killing machine, especially since these giant stubborn sonsabitches with drill hands and diving armor were giving me a hard time in another video game. So I was going to get tough and come back and get those bastards. Drill hands, I mean, how do you beat that? Joining a damn army, that’s how.
During basic training, I lost control to my obsessive compulsive needs. I couldn’t settle for anything less than perfection. I retook the “Shoot House” test until I hit all targets with 100% accuracy well under the allotted time. “Hell yes,” I said, as I got up from the game to do some celebratory push-ups for my badassery. However, my arms got tired and a bead of sweat felt like it was beginning to think about forming on my forehead during the first one, so I postponed the celebration until later. It seems fate has bestowed upon me an Iggy Pop build and an Idler work ethic, incapable of performing any actions requiring more effort than grinding one’s teeth.
For combat medic training you have to actually sit through someone giving a lecture and take a real damn multiple choice test afterward. Just like real school, almost immediately after the teacher began to speak my mind sort of went off and thought about other things and the next thing I knew it was test time. They seem fairly detailed with this business. I almost felt like I could have saved a real human if I needed to. I probably could have if I had paid attention instead of just checking GameFaqs for the answers. So I was pretty disappointed when it came time for the field test and all I had to do was go up and press a button to fix up the casualties. All of that effort of alt-tabbing and looking for a FAQ with the test answers, all gone to waste, it seemed.
The training did end up coming in handy, though. Eventually after enough basic training I was deemed worthy by America’s Army of playing online with other human beings, or “in the stuff,” as us hardened veterans call it. It wasn’t long into my first mission before a teammate next to me cried out for a medic, which was me. He was a mess. He had been hit and it was bad. A heads-up-display told me he was in the RED, which meant he was probably mere seconds away from bleeding to death. But for some reason I couldn’t figure out what to do. Even in a damn video game all the best laid plans and training go right the hell out the window the second the bullets start flying.
And they were flying all around us while I was pressing all sorts of buttons, accidentally throwing down my weapon, putting my binoculars on, bringing up a large map to look at, trying everything I could think of just to help this guy. I could have sworn his character model took on a pleading look in his eyes. What do I do? What’s that damn button? GOD DAMNIT, SOMEBODY, THIS MAN’S DYING, I just wanted the co-Oh right the “Use” key. There you go pal, all patched up and good as new. He thanked me with a “Hooah!” and stood up ready to charge forward again, filled with renewed vigor, then took a round from a sniper rifle right in his hecking heart. I’ll never forget the look on his primitively textured face.
I guess in war you might end up having to fight alongside some jackasses. But war is war and we’re all buddies in war, even Texas.Lawman.357, who first made his presence known to the squad with a joke:
“HABLA ESPANOL?”
“No.”
“me neither LOL. Any wimmenz here?”
He truly lived up to his name, so much that I expected Trivette to pull up in the jeep at any moment, needing his help to solve a mystery or bust a drug ring or whatnot. It bothered me later on, though, when he was trying to get people to talk to him, and he said his TeamSpeak server was 9mm.somethingorother. I just wish he’d pick a caliber and stick with it already. You can’t just have both.
America’s Army has a curious feature: whether you pick offense or defense, the mission briefing always refers to the other side as terrorists and the player will always see himself and his allies as U.S. soldiers and the enemy as brown men in black ski masks. First of all, that makes camouflage pointless if everyone who is going to be seeing you see’s you as a black ninja. So the game deceives you by making you think you’re wearing desert fatigues or whatever, when you’re actually standing out like a sore thumb. Maybe that’s just real army training for being told you’re wearing protective gear that’s actual some flimsy bullet attracting stuff.
Second of all, the army seems to be sending some conflicting messages here. According to them, we’re the good guys and all those terrorists out there kept awake at night by the thought that we’re just too damn free need to be found and killed immediately. But according to the army’s video game, everyone is a terrorist in the right situation and to the right people. Yes, even your mother is a terrorist if the retrieval of her delicious home cooked muffins are determined to be critical to national security (she would be defense in that situation). So, which is it, army? Who is the bad guy? Mom and her hired private military company, or the army seeking her tasty home baked treats? Or is everyone the bad guy? In which case, the only way to win America’s Army is to not play at all. I like to win, so I’ll do that.
text by Brandon Parker
★☆☆☆
“AN ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY JASON HALL AND NATHAN HENDRICKSON.”
If you take every serial killer movie cliché and let them sit under a swinging light bulb in a dark, blood-stained, dilapidated room for a few hours, you’ll eventually wind up with Condemned: Criminal Origins. The opening credits mention something about an original concept being somewhere in here. At first I just thought they meant the concept where law enforcement officials in the future have the right to kill anyone who looks vaguely homeless or might possibly become dangerous someday. Which is really not so original, the idea could have come from any number of newspapers. But it’s handy, since the game is swarming with 2×4 wielding vagrants that you kill brutally without a word when they get upset once you intrude upon their makeshift homes. Injure them enough and instead of, say, arresting them, the game offers you a few different options of breaking their necks or bashing their heads in or what have you while they’re laying helpless. So it’s really just an attempt to try and fit the circle-shape called a police procedural into the square-hole called the first-person-shooter genre.
This Original Concept by Jason Hall and Nathan Hendrickson begins with an investigation at a crime scene in a typical horror movie what-a-stuffhole type building. Don’t worry though; the investigating is made easy by magic automatic clue detecting cameras and flashlights. Wait… my god. It’s the same M.O. as the others. We got a serial killer at work here! Suddenly you hear movement upstairs. The officers on the scene throw a stuff fit and scream for backup while crying, “The killer’s still here!!” The lights flicker and shut off, “That sick bastard, he’s playing with us!”You’d think their first thought would have been, “Oh it’s just some transients hecking around upstairs,” especially if you lived in the bloodthirsty raging hobo filled world that Condemned takes place in, instead of, “Good god, the killer left the body here, waited for an officer to wander into this labyrinthine stuffhole, find the body, radio it in, waited for his backup to arrive, then waited for the FBI to show up, then flipped the light switch off, just to mess with our heads! We’re dealing with a brilliant madman obviously.â€
The crime scene itself has a dead girl posed with a mannequin that has a scarred face. That’s it, that’s the M.O.. Seems pretty ridiculous, taking the time to get mannequins and pose them like that. That’s the bottom of the serial killer shtick barrel, if you ask me. He puts more time into the mannequin than killing the girl. It’s like the girl is just some after thought, maybe they just keep catching him robbing the department store of its mannequins so he has to get rid of them like that, all he wants is a mannequin without getting caught.
Being an Original Concept, of course it has some Original Loading Screens. They consist of important looking classified-type FBI documents which try to help explain some of the finer plot points, like the endless waves of homicidal bums being simply due to an “increase in crime and drug use,” and offer helpful tips like “use block to your advantage” (so you don’t get mixed up and try to give yourself a disadvantage). There’s also, of course, a wide variety of bullets randomly strewn about on top of the document. Somebody who shoots stuff owns that document, you see, so take it seriously. I bet it was Mr. Hendrickson who thought up the bullets bit, or maybe it was a joint effort, I wish I knew the creative process of the minds at work here.
Each level consists of room after room of the same thing, yet they all don’t really look like any one thing in particular. I can’t ever really tell what the hell kind of building I’m supposed to be in. They all just look like the basement of somewhere. Room after room of some place’s basement, and it’s hard to tell where you’ve been and where you’re going.
In Condemned: Criminal Origins, slow and unresponsive combat is a feature, not poor design. Firearms are rare, so it’s mostly swinging slow pipes and hammers and things. Why make a game half-police investigation and half-first person shooter if you’re just going to dumb down the investigative parts and eliminate firearms yet still fill the game with hordes of enemies whose presence never really has a good explanation? I don’t know!
The story in the game is probably where most of the original in the Original Concept originally originated from. They took a dream-like approach to the narrative and-ah, who am I kidding. None of this makes any sense. I have a feeling the people who made this video game watched and enjoyed a few movies before, and maybe even a particular David Fincher one, but if this game was a movie they wouldn’t be able to get away with half the stuff here. One minute you’re thrown out of a window and land on a car after a guy shoots some policemen with your gun. In the next scene your waking up in your apartment and an old man is sitting there just watching you. A complete stranger, he says, “Oh me? I was a friend of your fathers.” And we’re just supposed to take all this nonsense in stride because it’s a video game and the main character has a special jawbone or something. How do you argue with a special jawbone? You just don’t.
Strangely enough, there are one or more individuals out there that think this series would make a good movie, or make good money as a movie, so that’s what they’re doing. Although it’s not going to be a direct adaptation, just set in the same “universe” as the game. I assume hordes of dirty looking murderous vagrants are to be expected. Maybe they’ll make a game based off the movie and call it “Se7en.”
★☆☆☆
“AN ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY JASON HALL AND NATHAN HENDRICKSON.”
If you take every serial killer movie cliché and let them sit under a swinging light bulb in a dark, blood-stained, dilapidated room for a few hours, you’ll eventually wind up with Condemned: Criminal Origins. The opening credits mention something about an original concept being somewhere in here. At first I just thought they meant the concept where law enforcement officials in the future have the right to kill anyone who looks vaguely homeless or might possibly become dangerous someday. Which is really not so original, the idea could have come from any number of newspapers. But it’s handy, since the game is swarming with 2×4 wielding vagrants that you kill brutally without a word when they get upset once you intrude upon their makeshift homes. Injure them enough and instead of, say, arresting them, the game offers you a few different options of breaking their necks or bashing their heads in or what have you while they’re laying helpless. So it’s really just an attempt to try and fit the circle-shape called a police procedural into the square-hole called the first-person-shooter genre.
This Original Concept by Jason Hall and Nathan Hendrickson begins with an investigation at a crime scene in a typical horror movie what-a-stuffhole type building. Don’t worry though; the investigating is made easy by magic automatic clue detecting cameras and flashlights. Wait… my god. It’s the same M.O. as the others. We got a serial killer at work here! Suddenly you hear movement upstairs. The officers on the scene throw a stuff fit and scream for backup while crying, “The killer’s still here!!” The lights flicker and shut off, “That sick bastard, he’s playing with us!”You’d think their first thought would have been, “Oh it’s just some transients hecking around upstairs,” especially if you lived in the bloodthirsty raging hobo filled world that Condemned takes place in, instead of, “Good god, the killer left the body here, waited for an officer to wander into this labyrinthine stuffhole, find the body, radio it in, waited for his backup to arrive, then waited for the FBI to show up, then flipped the light switch off, just to mess with our heads! We’re dealing with a brilliant madman obviously.â€
The crime scene itself has a dead girl posed with a mannequin that has a scarred face. That’s it, that’s the M.O.. Seems pretty ridiculous, taking the time to get mannequins and pose them like that. That’s the bottom of the serial killer shtick barrel, if you ask me. He puts more time into the mannequin than killing the girl. It’s like the girl is just some after thought, maybe they just keep catching him robbing the department store of its mannequins so he has to get rid of them like that, all he wants is a mannequin without getting caught.
Being an Original Concept, of course it has some Original Loading Screens. They consist of important looking classified-type FBI documents which try to help explain some of the finer plot points, like the endless waves of homicidal bums being simply due to an “increase in crime and drug use,” and offer helpful tips like “use block to your advantage” (so you don’t get mixed up and try to give yourself a disadvantage). There’s also, of course, a wide variety of bullets randomly strewn about on top of the document. Somebody who shoots stuff owns that document, you see, so take it seriously. I bet it was Mr. Hendrickson who thought up the bullets bit, or maybe it was a joint effort, I wish I knew the creative process of the minds at work here.
Each level consists of room after room of the same thing, yet they all don’t really look like any one thing in particular. I can’t ever really tell what the hell kind of building I’m supposed to be in. They all just look like the basement of somewhere. Room after room of some place’s basement, and it’s hard to tell where you’ve been and where you’re going.
In Condemned: Criminal Origins, slow and unresponsive combat is a feature, not poor design. Firearms are rare, so it’s mostly swinging slow pipes and hammers and things. Why make a game half-police investigation and half-first person shooter if you’re just going to dumb down the investigative parts and eliminate firearms yet still fill the game with hordes of enemies whose presence never really has a good explanation? I don’t know!
The story in the game is probably where most of the original in the Original Concept originally originated from. They took a dream-like approach to the narrative and-ah, who am I kidding. None of this makes any sense. I have a feeling the people who made this video game watched and enjoyed a few movies before, and maybe even a particular David Fincher one, but if this game was a movie they wouldn’t be able to get away with half the stuff here. One minute you’re thrown out of a window and land on a car after a guy shoots some policemen with your gun. In the next scene your waking up in your apartment and an old man is sitting there just watching you. A complete stranger, he says, “Oh me? I was a friend of your fathers.” And we’re just supposed to take all this nonsense in stride because it’s a video game and the main character has a special jawbone or something. How do you argue with a special jawbone? You just don’t.
Strangely enough, there are one or more individuals out there that think this series would make a good movie, or make good money as a movie, so that’s what they’re doing. Although it’s not going to be a direct adaptation, just set in the same “universe” as the game. I assume hordes of dirty looking murderous vagrants are to be expected. Maybe they’ll make a game based off the movie and call it “Se7en.”
2003
text by Thomas Callahan
⋆☆☆☆
“DOOR-BASHING, WINDOW-SMASHING VANDALISM.”
As somebody who has played Halo 2 online, I can tell you that the Xbox Live Headset is usually pretty terrifying. Women are demeaned on a medieval level. Prepubescent boys bark military jargon with gut-wrenching enthusiasm. Dead players are angry and they will let you know; racism and inflammatory bullstuff accumulates. I feel sleazy by proxy just listening to it all. These people are in my living room. At some point I'm bound to claw off my headset, banishing them out the door. Inevitably I'Il let them back in — listening to their vapid bile is almost as morbidly amusing as reading YouTube comments.
In Manhunt, you play as James Cash, a gore-loving serial killer lining up in death row. You bastard! When you escape, to the delight of journalists, you begin murdering people again — only this time, murder is your full-time job. No, you're not a hitman, you're a film star. You're employed by "The Director" to kill men in sadistic, needlessly complicated fashion. Each kill is videotaped with a shaky handheld camera and broadcast through a grainy filter. The footage is then spliced and edited into a series of snuff films.
Manhunt uses the Xbox Live Headset outside of an online context, and the result is more outright terrifying than any testosterone-fuelled internet-deathmatch banter could hope to be. We hear narration, a device criminally underused in videogames, through the headset, while all other sounds are emitted from television speakers. This maneuver reinforces the narration as separate from the in-game action; less detached and expository, more akin to a DVD's audio commentary. As you butcher and maim enemies, "The Director" chortles with uninhibited glee into your headset. To him, these illegal-voyeur-reality-HOT! death videos are captivating pornography — he's getting off, and uncomfortably close to your inner ear.
What kind of sick freak would buy tapes of real murders? Is there really an existing audience, an actual market? Are there others just like The Director, giggling rapturously at these senseless snuff films? Man, that’s hardly even a question. Of course there's an audience. There will always be an audience for depraved violence. For starters: you, the player. You the player bought Manhunt, a game documenting depraved violence in vivid detail; a game by that depraved studio Rockstar Games; a game created for depraved gamers just like you.
This is a damning portrayal of the videogame industry, where developers endlessly one-up each other, piling on the shock value for consumers endlessly craving more. Blame falls equally on the entertainers and the entertained. James Cash provides inspired violence for the camera — he is Rockstar's loathsome self-portrait — and The Director is a pastiche of you, the grinning spectator clamoring for more. What a mess. Manhunt sends up everyone. It's not preachy satire: it presents no escape from the gory supply and gory demand. Perhaps it's nothing more than an expression of videogame industry turmoil circa 2000. Either way, the whole enterprise is thick with despair. When I suffocate a man with a plastic bag and The Director chortles in my headset, his cruel delight and my instinctive satisfaction mirror each other.
And I don't like it. In fact, I find the parallel pretty hecking nihilistic. Pretty hecking patronizing.
Rockstar Games created Grand Theft Auto with the most earnest of intentions. They aimed to accommodate as many stray ideas as possible, without care or precision, in order to provide templates for more polished games to come (such as Bully, Crackdown and Dead Rising). They succeeded; the series' reckless ambition was and continues to be infectious. Somewhat regrettably, its explicit subject matter spawned lawsuits, activists, and sensationalist press. But that was mere tabloid opportunism, wasn't it?
Here comes the nigh-unwatchable navet: this controversy is treated by Manhunt as another stray idea of Grand Theft Auto's to be polished, a template to build upon.
That's not only tactless, it's, uh. What the hell's the point?
Manhunt is a pointless act of destruction. It flaunts the sickness of an industry and continues the sickness with knowing symbolism, providing more blood and sex, you sickos, and don't worry, we're sickos too. The Director is a sadist for enjoying violence; you're a sadist for enjoying violence because ha! you're still playing our violent videogame. Serial killer James Cash is forced to pump out more violence by The Director; us Grand Theft Auto developers are forced to pump out more videogame violence by you. This is not an anguished protest. It's an opportunistic tantrum. If everyone is guilty and accused, even the victims of the snuff films — yeah, they're hecking neo-Nazis — then what's the intent beneath the bleak, all-encompassing cynicism? More spotlight, more sales. So what if Manhunt can draw clever parallels; it drags its players, its developers and the public image of videogames a little further into a vague sludgy pit. Consider the mission revolving around a 300-pound mentally &^#$#ed man wielding a chainsaw. Or the anemic stealth engine, where tossing decapitated heads into distracting corners is the end-all answer to everything. Was Rockstar inspired to create this game as one giant mischievous heck You to the likes of Jack Thompson? If so, they've simply handed their opponents more ammunition. Was Manhunt intended to provoke discussion about the pitfalls of the medium? If so, Rockstar have provoked discussion from me: this review, where I give their noisy pitfall of a game a resounding half star.
As sheer horrific provocation, Manhunt succeeds. Yet underneath is dreary, methodical stealth, and underneath that is door-bashing window-smashing vandalism. None of it has purpose. A tinge of self-parody is undeniable, but it's a baseless, rabble-rousing plea for attention all the same, and the attention it received — frenzied 11:00 breaking-news drama — has subtly pushed videogames further away from respectability, further into the publicly scorned fringes that comics, wrestling and pornography call home.
Further still, now: Manhunt 2 has been banned in the UK. Nintendo and Sony, in an attempt to save face, are refusing to publish the sequel without some hefty censorship. The situation is all kinds of ridiculous. It brings to mind countless independent films forever silenced by their NC-17 ratings. I'm too drained to line up in defense of Manhunt 2, though, because judging by the adulatory PR — featuring necrophilia and castration — I doubt it will amount to anything greater than Grisly Unfriendly Action Utilizing Wiimote Stabbing Motions. I conclude now, having finished Manhunt (it ends up ditching all symbolism and resorting to trite cops vs. robbers), that the good folks at Rockstar have been playing a bit too much Grand Theft Auto. Here they snag the attention of mass media the same way giddy "sandbox-gamers" snag the attention of cops: with desperate, drunken destruction demanding immediate response. Run over that pedestrian! Ah, a policeman: a dead policeman! Twenty innocent bystanders and five unsuspecting hookers later, C.J. is under fire from the US Army. And they're using hecking helicopters, dude! Slash them down! And now Manhunt is getting blamed for homicides, dude! And now the UK government is throwing us into the bonfire — we might have too many stars to wriggle out of this one, dude! Do it again! This has gotta be the biggest adrenaline rush we've had since we free-climbed the Mayan ruins!
⋆☆☆☆
“DOOR-BASHING, WINDOW-SMASHING VANDALISM.”
As somebody who has played Halo 2 online, I can tell you that the Xbox Live Headset is usually pretty terrifying. Women are demeaned on a medieval level. Prepubescent boys bark military jargon with gut-wrenching enthusiasm. Dead players are angry and they will let you know; racism and inflammatory bullstuff accumulates. I feel sleazy by proxy just listening to it all. These people are in my living room. At some point I'm bound to claw off my headset, banishing them out the door. Inevitably I'Il let them back in — listening to their vapid bile is almost as morbidly amusing as reading YouTube comments.
In Manhunt, you play as James Cash, a gore-loving serial killer lining up in death row. You bastard! When you escape, to the delight of journalists, you begin murdering people again — only this time, murder is your full-time job. No, you're not a hitman, you're a film star. You're employed by "The Director" to kill men in sadistic, needlessly complicated fashion. Each kill is videotaped with a shaky handheld camera and broadcast through a grainy filter. The footage is then spliced and edited into a series of snuff films.
Manhunt uses the Xbox Live Headset outside of an online context, and the result is more outright terrifying than any testosterone-fuelled internet-deathmatch banter could hope to be. We hear narration, a device criminally underused in videogames, through the headset, while all other sounds are emitted from television speakers. This maneuver reinforces the narration as separate from the in-game action; less detached and expository, more akin to a DVD's audio commentary. As you butcher and maim enemies, "The Director" chortles with uninhibited glee into your headset. To him, these illegal-voyeur-reality-HOT! death videos are captivating pornography — he's getting off, and uncomfortably close to your inner ear.
What kind of sick freak would buy tapes of real murders? Is there really an existing audience, an actual market? Are there others just like The Director, giggling rapturously at these senseless snuff films? Man, that’s hardly even a question. Of course there's an audience. There will always be an audience for depraved violence. For starters: you, the player. You the player bought Manhunt, a game documenting depraved violence in vivid detail; a game by that depraved studio Rockstar Games; a game created for depraved gamers just like you.
This is a damning portrayal of the videogame industry, where developers endlessly one-up each other, piling on the shock value for consumers endlessly craving more. Blame falls equally on the entertainers and the entertained. James Cash provides inspired violence for the camera — he is Rockstar's loathsome self-portrait — and The Director is a pastiche of you, the grinning spectator clamoring for more. What a mess. Manhunt sends up everyone. It's not preachy satire: it presents no escape from the gory supply and gory demand. Perhaps it's nothing more than an expression of videogame industry turmoil circa 2000. Either way, the whole enterprise is thick with despair. When I suffocate a man with a plastic bag and The Director chortles in my headset, his cruel delight and my instinctive satisfaction mirror each other.
And I don't like it. In fact, I find the parallel pretty hecking nihilistic. Pretty hecking patronizing.
Rockstar Games created Grand Theft Auto with the most earnest of intentions. They aimed to accommodate as many stray ideas as possible, without care or precision, in order to provide templates for more polished games to come (such as Bully, Crackdown and Dead Rising). They succeeded; the series' reckless ambition was and continues to be infectious. Somewhat regrettably, its explicit subject matter spawned lawsuits, activists, and sensationalist press. But that was mere tabloid opportunism, wasn't it?
Here comes the nigh-unwatchable navet: this controversy is treated by Manhunt as another stray idea of Grand Theft Auto's to be polished, a template to build upon.
That's not only tactless, it's, uh. What the hell's the point?
Manhunt is a pointless act of destruction. It flaunts the sickness of an industry and continues the sickness with knowing symbolism, providing more blood and sex, you sickos, and don't worry, we're sickos too. The Director is a sadist for enjoying violence; you're a sadist for enjoying violence because ha! you're still playing our violent videogame. Serial killer James Cash is forced to pump out more violence by The Director; us Grand Theft Auto developers are forced to pump out more videogame violence by you. This is not an anguished protest. It's an opportunistic tantrum. If everyone is guilty and accused, even the victims of the snuff films — yeah, they're hecking neo-Nazis — then what's the intent beneath the bleak, all-encompassing cynicism? More spotlight, more sales. So what if Manhunt can draw clever parallels; it drags its players, its developers and the public image of videogames a little further into a vague sludgy pit. Consider the mission revolving around a 300-pound mentally &^#$#ed man wielding a chainsaw. Or the anemic stealth engine, where tossing decapitated heads into distracting corners is the end-all answer to everything. Was Rockstar inspired to create this game as one giant mischievous heck You to the likes of Jack Thompson? If so, they've simply handed their opponents more ammunition. Was Manhunt intended to provoke discussion about the pitfalls of the medium? If so, Rockstar have provoked discussion from me: this review, where I give their noisy pitfall of a game a resounding half star.
As sheer horrific provocation, Manhunt succeeds. Yet underneath is dreary, methodical stealth, and underneath that is door-bashing window-smashing vandalism. None of it has purpose. A tinge of self-parody is undeniable, but it's a baseless, rabble-rousing plea for attention all the same, and the attention it received — frenzied 11:00 breaking-news drama — has subtly pushed videogames further away from respectability, further into the publicly scorned fringes that comics, wrestling and pornography call home.
Further still, now: Manhunt 2 has been banned in the UK. Nintendo and Sony, in an attempt to save face, are refusing to publish the sequel without some hefty censorship. The situation is all kinds of ridiculous. It brings to mind countless independent films forever silenced by their NC-17 ratings. I'm too drained to line up in defense of Manhunt 2, though, because judging by the adulatory PR — featuring necrophilia and castration — I doubt it will amount to anything greater than Grisly Unfriendly Action Utilizing Wiimote Stabbing Motions. I conclude now, having finished Manhunt (it ends up ditching all symbolism and resorting to trite cops vs. robbers), that the good folks at Rockstar have been playing a bit too much Grand Theft Auto. Here they snag the attention of mass media the same way giddy "sandbox-gamers" snag the attention of cops: with desperate, drunken destruction demanding immediate response. Run over that pedestrian! Ah, a policeman: a dead policeman! Twenty innocent bystanders and five unsuspecting hookers later, C.J. is under fire from the US Army. And they're using hecking helicopters, dude! Slash them down! And now Manhunt is getting blamed for homicides, dude! And now the UK government is throwing us into the bonfire — we might have too many stars to wriggle out of this one, dude! Do it again! This has gotta be the biggest adrenaline rush we've had since we free-climbed the Mayan ruins!
2007
text by tim rogers
★★★⋆
“SO SLIPPERY IT'S PSYCHOTIC.”
In addition to being mostly a great videogame, John Woo’s Stranglehold also proves why games are not art, especially when they’re not trying to be: Stranglehold is so sleek it’s slippery, and so slippery it’s psychotic, and when every tiny input on the controller seeks to tell the game to be a blockbuster, the facade falls away and idiocy seeps in the second you stop pressing buttons.
The main character, Inspector Tequila, played by Chow Yun-Fat’s polygonal twin, is hard-wired to slide over any surface he comes into contact with. It takes the majority of dyed-in-the-wool videogamers no more than ten seconds to realize how hilarious it is that he slides over countertops and tables with such ease. There, not ten seconds in, most sneering gamers will have broken Stranglehold over their knee. No
The thing some might shrug off, though, is that Stranglehold is trying, really, really hard. It’s trying to be an actual blockbuster, not just the “gaming equivalent”. (Yes, we pause to reflect how ironic it is that it bills itself as the “sequel” to the film “Hard Boiled”.) At its core are enough spiffy concepts and neat tricks to earn it four stars — though only if you’re willing to play along, to get into character.
Your character is a man who shoots lots of people, sometimes in slow-motion. He dives and slides a lot. Sometimes he shoots people in the face, other times in the chest, and sometimes — if he has enough power in his special meter — he can kill by shooting a man in the testicles. The story of the game has something to do with the main character’s wife and daughter being kidnapped, though the first stage puts to rest any doubts that we’re going to have to think: gangsters call the police, asking them to send one cop to a certain location, where they will tell him what happened to a cop who disappeared a few days earlier. The cop was killed, of course, and our hero can’t even make his way to the rendezvous point without being shot at literally a thousand times. The story isn’t trying to be a sweeping epic, it’s about giving our character somewhere to go, so that he can get shot at (and shoot people) along the way. There’s dialogue, and there are some dramatic sequences, and it’s kind of revealing that cheesy John Woo flick dialogue acted out by the same hammy voice actors used to actually dub John Woo flicks actually feels leagues closer to the Mona Lisa than any other dialogue in most other games. Though essentially, the joy of the game is in the shooting, and — most precisely — the way things are shot, the way objects explode. It’s violent, though it’s not depraved — it’s just idiotic.
Literally everything explodes in Stranglehold. Early on, there’s a gunfight in a marketplace where you can destroy everything — people, fruit, wooden crates, concrete pillars. Shoot “glints” to cause small-scale environmental disasters to crush the bad guys. The glints are actually more interesting than they seem at first: as you pan the camera around, objects glint for an instant and then return to normal. That’s how you know that object can be shot. Shoot a glinting sign and it might fall on a dude’s head. Repeat for air-conditioners, steel beams, bags of bricks, dinosaur bones, whatever.
Lately, there’s been this poisonous trend in videogame design: Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue termed it the “Quick-Timer Event”. In many “cinematic” games since Shenmue, occasionally you’ll see a button icon flash hugely on the screen. Press that button to perform a special “cinematic” action. In Shenmue II, there were plenty of extended sequences with branching paths and clever animations. Say, if you missed press the A button, your character might get punched by one guy, though that might give him an opportunity to spin around and punch the other guy instead. Shenmue II kind of lost its way in a Quick-Timer sequence in which your main character tried to keep his balance while walking across ten successive steel beams, though for the most part, it was cute, and it seldom felt cloying. Further games would expand and fetishize the idea of the Quick-Timer Event, and eventually, we’re playing God of War II, where pretty much everything is a Quick Timer Event, except there’s really only one button you ever have to press. Recently, Ninja Theory, the developers of Heavenly Sword, had to defend their game when Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Ninja Gaiden, jeered it for having relied on such epic Quick-Timer sequences as “pound the X button to run across this chain”. They said that the Quick-Timer sequences existed to allow players to experience a new level of cinematic interactivity, which they otherwise couldn’t experience through, you know, playing the game.
Well, Stranglehold, as a videogame and as a trip from many point As to many point Bs, manages to be both more challenging to play than Heavenly Sword‘s action sequences and more cinematically enthralling than Heavenly Sword‘s cut-scenes — not to mention quick-timer events. As in God of War II, every button press of Stranglehold is a quick-timer event; every button press is an action scene, a heavy metal guitar riff; every button press is The Biggest Motion Picture of the Summer. Except in Stranglehold, the player is always joyfully in control of the context. We’re shooting glinting air-conditioners or dinosaur bones to crush dudes we could otherwise be just shooting in the face. We’re winning “Stylish Kill” points for doing so, we’re using those “Stylish Kill” points to activate special abilities like Precision Shot (zoom in in ultra slo-mo to perform a one-hit kill on any one of twenty-something instant-kill zones on an opponent’s body (yes, testicles included)) or Barrage Mode (which gives you unlimited ammo for a few seconds — a crafty nod to the climactic scenes in John Woo films where the idea of clips dropping out of the guns in slow-motion as the hero reloads becomes too much of a cinematic burden, and he just shoots hundreds of bullets without flinching).
And every once in a while, there’s a standoff. Usually, the standoffs’ reasons for existing are not very clear, to say the least. In the first stage, there’s a standoff where one of the gangsters you’re here to meet tells you to go to a certain bar and ask the bartender a question. Then he and his four friends start shooting at you. Never mind the setup — it’s the execution that shines. The game just seamlessly slips into the setup sequence, and the camera pans around the armed men John Woo style. Keep your eyes on the screen and you just might catch sight of a few glints. When the standoff starts, in super-slo-mo, you’ll face the opponents one at a time. Dodge to one side and then the other to trick your opponents into shooting the wrong way. Shoot the glints to send exploding propane tanks careening into unfashionable mens’ bodies so hard that when they slam into a concrete wall, the wall cracks and buckles. Kill one guy, and the camera spins around to the next.
The setups and the locations of the glints get progressively more tricky, and it hardly ever stops being entertaining when you catch a gunman in the face with a flying gas tank. In something like God of War, when you press the X button at just the right time to send your hero jumping onto the shoulders of a mythical beast, where he proceeds to plunge his swords into the beast’s neck, producing a geyser of blood, it feels like all business — we’re not aiming the blade at the neck; in Stranglehold, it’s me aiming my gun at that gas tank. It’s me pulling the trigger. The game is only offering me a tiny hint — in the form of a glint — that something will happen if I shoot the gas tank. The glint might represent a spark in the hero’s imagination: he’s a chance-taking, risk-breaking man, and he didn’t survive so long on the police force in this alternate universe where everyone owns a gun without sometimes shooting at the most tangentially related stuff. It’s like, one day, he got shot in the arm, cursed a lot, and then resolved to stop trying to shoot guys in the face all the time and, wherever necessary, start shooting at random objects. It’s never done him wrong since.
Compare and contrast this, once again, to Shenmue‘s lame storytelling, where the hero has to actually ask people, in his hometown renowned as one of the largest ports in Asia, where he can find some sailors. Shenmue wanted, very hard, to be a gangster-schlock action epic, only it was apparently written and designed by a couple of guys who literally felt chills the first time they submitted a draft to their creative writing teacher in which one guy threatens to hit another guy if he doesn’t “shut up”; with Shenmue, in which the hero rides a motorcycle at one point and someone eventually gets punched, they must have thought they were writing actual literature. This mealy-mouthed-ness permeates into the deepest layers of the game design, and to many other deep layers of many other games’ design. Who would have ever guessed that some actual John Woo was exactly what the game industry needed? Compare the barroom brawl early in Shenmue — press the A button to pick up that pool cue — to a scene exceedingly early in Stranglehold, in which our hardened cop runs along a railing down a staircase, and the game kicks into slow motion, and dudes start shooting at us, and we can either shoot them or stylishly pick off the glints, fatally crushing them with air-conditioners and neon signs, all in real-time, all under our control.
Some would say that Max Payne pioneered many of the concepts employed in Stranglehold — such as bullet-time — though it’s safe to say that Max Payne was only ever drawing its inspiration from John Woo’s movies, anyway. Besides, Max Payne is too cheeky: there’s really only one impression of it you’re allowed to get. Stranglehold is dead serious, which means that if you want to find it hilarious, that’s your choice.
There are a few nagging issues, like the “health pack” dynamic — you can use Stylish Kill points to refill some of your health, if you so choose, which makes no sense in the context of a gun battle — and the overall exhaustion you might feel after trying to play the whole game at once. It’s kind of like Smash TV, in a way — as much as I consider it a masterpiece of simplicity and design, there’s really only so much of it I can take. The ultimate disappointment of Stranglehold — and it’s a small one — is that, well-sketched as the characters are, if you’ve never voted Republican in your life, there’s a huge chance you’re not going to care who the real bad guy is, nor will there be any actual suspense about whether the hero survives or not. The setup is a string of dumb red herrings and one-liners that stand no chance of being memorable thanks to the (admittedly awesome) way everything in game sounds like it was translated from Cantonese to English. Again we come back to four angry gunmen, having an incomprehensible conversation as the camera pans around and we count up the glints. In this way, the story comes to resemble the Swedish speed metal Picasso listens to while painting his next masterpiece: if there were no words, he’d stop painting and feel depressed. If the angry men weren’t talking, there’d be no reason to shoot them, et cetera. At least they understand the reasons they’re screaming. And when the game is off, no one needs to be angry anymore. It’s therapeutic, really. It’s extraordinary.
Top Line: Stranglehold is “one of the year’s best games, whether or not you play more than ten minutes of it. Steps in the right direction all around. When it comes to merging story and game, no one does it better.“
Games magazine-style quote: “First the exemplary Psi-Ops, and now this. Developer Tiger Hill Entertainment is one to watch.”
★★★⋆
“SO SLIPPERY IT'S PSYCHOTIC.”
In addition to being mostly a great videogame, John Woo’s Stranglehold also proves why games are not art, especially when they’re not trying to be: Stranglehold is so sleek it’s slippery, and so slippery it’s psychotic, and when every tiny input on the controller seeks to tell the game to be a blockbuster, the facade falls away and idiocy seeps in the second you stop pressing buttons.
The main character, Inspector Tequila, played by Chow Yun-Fat’s polygonal twin, is hard-wired to slide over any surface he comes into contact with. It takes the majority of dyed-in-the-wool videogamers no more than ten seconds to realize how hilarious it is that he slides over countertops and tables with such ease. There, not ten seconds in, most sneering gamers will have broken Stranglehold over their knee. No
The thing some might shrug off, though, is that Stranglehold is trying, really, really hard. It’s trying to be an actual blockbuster, not just the “gaming equivalent”. (Yes, we pause to reflect how ironic it is that it bills itself as the “sequel” to the film “Hard Boiled”.) At its core are enough spiffy concepts and neat tricks to earn it four stars — though only if you’re willing to play along, to get into character.
Your character is a man who shoots lots of people, sometimes in slow-motion. He dives and slides a lot. Sometimes he shoots people in the face, other times in the chest, and sometimes — if he has enough power in his special meter — he can kill by shooting a man in the testicles. The story of the game has something to do with the main character’s wife and daughter being kidnapped, though the first stage puts to rest any doubts that we’re going to have to think: gangsters call the police, asking them to send one cop to a certain location, where they will tell him what happened to a cop who disappeared a few days earlier. The cop was killed, of course, and our hero can’t even make his way to the rendezvous point without being shot at literally a thousand times. The story isn’t trying to be a sweeping epic, it’s about giving our character somewhere to go, so that he can get shot at (and shoot people) along the way. There’s dialogue, and there are some dramatic sequences, and it’s kind of revealing that cheesy John Woo flick dialogue acted out by the same hammy voice actors used to actually dub John Woo flicks actually feels leagues closer to the Mona Lisa than any other dialogue in most other games. Though essentially, the joy of the game is in the shooting, and — most precisely — the way things are shot, the way objects explode. It’s violent, though it’s not depraved — it’s just idiotic.
Literally everything explodes in Stranglehold. Early on, there’s a gunfight in a marketplace where you can destroy everything — people, fruit, wooden crates, concrete pillars. Shoot “glints” to cause small-scale environmental disasters to crush the bad guys. The glints are actually more interesting than they seem at first: as you pan the camera around, objects glint for an instant and then return to normal. That’s how you know that object can be shot. Shoot a glinting sign and it might fall on a dude’s head. Repeat for air-conditioners, steel beams, bags of bricks, dinosaur bones, whatever.
Lately, there’s been this poisonous trend in videogame design: Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue termed it the “Quick-Timer Event”. In many “cinematic” games since Shenmue, occasionally you’ll see a button icon flash hugely on the screen. Press that button to perform a special “cinematic” action. In Shenmue II, there were plenty of extended sequences with branching paths and clever animations. Say, if you missed press the A button, your character might get punched by one guy, though that might give him an opportunity to spin around and punch the other guy instead. Shenmue II kind of lost its way in a Quick-Timer sequence in which your main character tried to keep his balance while walking across ten successive steel beams, though for the most part, it was cute, and it seldom felt cloying. Further games would expand and fetishize the idea of the Quick-Timer Event, and eventually, we’re playing God of War II, where pretty much everything is a Quick Timer Event, except there’s really only one button you ever have to press. Recently, Ninja Theory, the developers of Heavenly Sword, had to defend their game when Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Ninja Gaiden, jeered it for having relied on such epic Quick-Timer sequences as “pound the X button to run across this chain”. They said that the Quick-Timer sequences existed to allow players to experience a new level of cinematic interactivity, which they otherwise couldn’t experience through, you know, playing the game.
Well, Stranglehold, as a videogame and as a trip from many point As to many point Bs, manages to be both more challenging to play than Heavenly Sword‘s action sequences and more cinematically enthralling than Heavenly Sword‘s cut-scenes — not to mention quick-timer events. As in God of War II, every button press of Stranglehold is a quick-timer event; every button press is an action scene, a heavy metal guitar riff; every button press is The Biggest Motion Picture of the Summer. Except in Stranglehold, the player is always joyfully in control of the context. We’re shooting glinting air-conditioners or dinosaur bones to crush dudes we could otherwise be just shooting in the face. We’re winning “Stylish Kill” points for doing so, we’re using those “Stylish Kill” points to activate special abilities like Precision Shot (zoom in in ultra slo-mo to perform a one-hit kill on any one of twenty-something instant-kill zones on an opponent’s body (yes, testicles included)) or Barrage Mode (which gives you unlimited ammo for a few seconds — a crafty nod to the climactic scenes in John Woo films where the idea of clips dropping out of the guns in slow-motion as the hero reloads becomes too much of a cinematic burden, and he just shoots hundreds of bullets without flinching).
And every once in a while, there’s a standoff. Usually, the standoffs’ reasons for existing are not very clear, to say the least. In the first stage, there’s a standoff where one of the gangsters you’re here to meet tells you to go to a certain bar and ask the bartender a question. Then he and his four friends start shooting at you. Never mind the setup — it’s the execution that shines. The game just seamlessly slips into the setup sequence, and the camera pans around the armed men John Woo style. Keep your eyes on the screen and you just might catch sight of a few glints. When the standoff starts, in super-slo-mo, you’ll face the opponents one at a time. Dodge to one side and then the other to trick your opponents into shooting the wrong way. Shoot the glints to send exploding propane tanks careening into unfashionable mens’ bodies so hard that when they slam into a concrete wall, the wall cracks and buckles. Kill one guy, and the camera spins around to the next.
The setups and the locations of the glints get progressively more tricky, and it hardly ever stops being entertaining when you catch a gunman in the face with a flying gas tank. In something like God of War, when you press the X button at just the right time to send your hero jumping onto the shoulders of a mythical beast, where he proceeds to plunge his swords into the beast’s neck, producing a geyser of blood, it feels like all business — we’re not aiming the blade at the neck; in Stranglehold, it’s me aiming my gun at that gas tank. It’s me pulling the trigger. The game is only offering me a tiny hint — in the form of a glint — that something will happen if I shoot the gas tank. The glint might represent a spark in the hero’s imagination: he’s a chance-taking, risk-breaking man, and he didn’t survive so long on the police force in this alternate universe where everyone owns a gun without sometimes shooting at the most tangentially related stuff. It’s like, one day, he got shot in the arm, cursed a lot, and then resolved to stop trying to shoot guys in the face all the time and, wherever necessary, start shooting at random objects. It’s never done him wrong since.
Compare and contrast this, once again, to Shenmue‘s lame storytelling, where the hero has to actually ask people, in his hometown renowned as one of the largest ports in Asia, where he can find some sailors. Shenmue wanted, very hard, to be a gangster-schlock action epic, only it was apparently written and designed by a couple of guys who literally felt chills the first time they submitted a draft to their creative writing teacher in which one guy threatens to hit another guy if he doesn’t “shut up”; with Shenmue, in which the hero rides a motorcycle at one point and someone eventually gets punched, they must have thought they were writing actual literature. This mealy-mouthed-ness permeates into the deepest layers of the game design, and to many other deep layers of many other games’ design. Who would have ever guessed that some actual John Woo was exactly what the game industry needed? Compare the barroom brawl early in Shenmue — press the A button to pick up that pool cue — to a scene exceedingly early in Stranglehold, in which our hardened cop runs along a railing down a staircase, and the game kicks into slow motion, and dudes start shooting at us, and we can either shoot them or stylishly pick off the glints, fatally crushing them with air-conditioners and neon signs, all in real-time, all under our control.
Some would say that Max Payne pioneered many of the concepts employed in Stranglehold — such as bullet-time — though it’s safe to say that Max Payne was only ever drawing its inspiration from John Woo’s movies, anyway. Besides, Max Payne is too cheeky: there’s really only one impression of it you’re allowed to get. Stranglehold is dead serious, which means that if you want to find it hilarious, that’s your choice.
There are a few nagging issues, like the “health pack” dynamic — you can use Stylish Kill points to refill some of your health, if you so choose, which makes no sense in the context of a gun battle — and the overall exhaustion you might feel after trying to play the whole game at once. It’s kind of like Smash TV, in a way — as much as I consider it a masterpiece of simplicity and design, there’s really only so much of it I can take. The ultimate disappointment of Stranglehold — and it’s a small one — is that, well-sketched as the characters are, if you’ve never voted Republican in your life, there’s a huge chance you’re not going to care who the real bad guy is, nor will there be any actual suspense about whether the hero survives or not. The setup is a string of dumb red herrings and one-liners that stand no chance of being memorable thanks to the (admittedly awesome) way everything in game sounds like it was translated from Cantonese to English. Again we come back to four angry gunmen, having an incomprehensible conversation as the camera pans around and we count up the glints. In this way, the story comes to resemble the Swedish speed metal Picasso listens to while painting his next masterpiece: if there were no words, he’d stop painting and feel depressed. If the angry men weren’t talking, there’d be no reason to shoot them, et cetera. At least they understand the reasons they’re screaming. And when the game is off, no one needs to be angry anymore. It’s therapeutic, really. It’s extraordinary.
Top Line: Stranglehold is “one of the year’s best games, whether or not you play more than ten minutes of it. Steps in the right direction all around. When it comes to merging story and game, no one does it better.“
Games magazine-style quote: “First the exemplary Psi-Ops, and now this. Developer Tiger Hill Entertainment is one to watch.”
2007
text by tim rogers
★⋆☆☆
“DEFINITELY NOT THE GAME ANYONE INVOLVED WANTED TO MAKE.”
In a riveting scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia”, William H. Macy’s character, teeth broken out of his skull, tells someone he just met, “I have so much love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Ignoring the fact that it makes you objectively gay to actually express sympathy for the man portrayed in said piece of cinema, we can move right along and say that each and every human being at Ninja Theory, developers of this videogame called Heavenly Sword, would probably say the same thing if they’d fallen off a metal ladder and had their teeth broken in. Heavenly Sword is a big, lush game, crafted with careful and deliberate attention to what’s popular in videogames these days, and it’s also just about jaw-droppingly boring.
I have wracked my brain, and the brains of many innocent and unwilling civilians, and pored over the cat-burglar-calling-card-like clues that plopped all around the PlayStation Store in the months leading up to the game’s release, and I have come to the Sherlock Holmesian conclusion that Heavenly Sword is in no way the videogame that anyone working on it actually wanted to make. You can tell by the way the nice-enough developers chat about the game in the making-of featurettes, you find scraps of evidence in the shiny two-minute “anime” episodes.
Exhibit A: the PlayStation Store description for the making-of featurettes touts the game as “with a budget rivaling a Hollywood blockbuster”. So games are at war with Hollywood now? And whoever spends the most money is the winner? That settles that debate.
Exhibit B: the anime episodes are actually called “anime” — they’re obviously trying to sell the game to the anime-liking crowd, via wholly optional episodes of “anime” that look good and go nowhere plot-wise, just like, hey, most actual anime.
Exhibit C: I see these anime episodes and think, “If the game actually looked like this, I’d probably buy it”, which is exactly what they want people to think. As far as the marketers are concerned, the next step from here is “Well, the game doesn’t actually look like this, though I guess I’ll buy it anyway.”
Exhibit D: a video I saw on YouTube around two months ago, comparing the way this game ended up looking on PlayStation 3 to the way it used to look when it was in development on Xbox. Back on Xbox, the main character was a large-headed China-dress-wearing kung-fuing she-freak. This must have been because the developers knew that another popular game on the Xbox was Dead or Alive, where characters looked just about exactly the same. Now that the game’s on PS3, the main character is something like the daughter of a supermodel and the hero from God of War. She has some kind of ambiguous friend, who’s about halfway mentally &^#$#ed, who wears a cat ear hood, because, as we’ve established, someone on the game’s staff both watches and likes anime. It’s safe to say that the oriental trappings were chosen because someone had a hunch that east Asia was marketable and no one could prove him wrong. And while the game isn’t nearly as offensive with its setting as Jade Empire, which painstakingly recreated a “mythical fantasy world” that looked a whole heck of a lot like Ancient China and then hired an actual linguist to create some hokey-as-stuff-sounding “Ching-chong ching-chong” Chinese apery and/or scrawl disgusting scribbles on scrolls in temples instead of just, you know, using actual Chinese and being done with it, it has these jarring, groan-worthy moments in which large Asian-looking men will scream at our red-haired femme fatale, “I’LL TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!!” I’m pretty sure that coloquialism didn’t exist in any one of the many imaginary Japanese historical periods. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t actually any Japanese girls named “Nariko”.
How is the game, then, you ask? Who gives a heck? Read IGN, for God’s sake.
Heavenly Sword screams focus-tested, market-safe, screenshot-approved. The graphics are nice enough, with more bloom than a rose garden. The music is brassy, boring Bruckheimer-film-score stuff. There are big, meaningless heaps of collapsing architecture and things that break just because something needs to break. There are enemies who block every attack you throw at them, because otherwise, you’d never press any different buttons. If you want to just keep pressing the same button, however, you can do that, and you might get away with it. It’s actually not that terrible to play, when you’re fighting things. You dial in combos and hit the right button when you see a flash on the screen, to perform a “spectacular” “finishing move”. After seeing these a hundred times or so, you won’t care less, though as a core game system, I guess it’s not too terrible. There are boss battles, and a story that I suppose is more interesting than taking a stuff without a magazine to read, and while it’s easier to follow than the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” film’s screenplay-by-the-numbers, it sure as hell isn’t Tolstoy. It’s just . . . there.
Should it be trying to be Tolstoy? There’s the rub. Games that, in the past, have tried to be Tolstoy have included Sin and Punishment, the pre-written English script of which scared so much stuff out of so many marketing directors that the game, spectacular as it was, never got released outside of Japan. Heavenly Sword is made by British people; Britian is a country that has produced many proud people who hecked the system and did whatever the hell they wanted in the name of rock and roll, though Ninja Theory is acting bizarrely Japanese, like one of those aching Japanese developers who avoids showing off by clinging to one tired license for twenty years. Except they don’t have a license. They just have Heavenly Sword. And after playing Heavenly Sword, I’m neither convinced nor not convinced that they could make a great game, that they could put all their love somewhere without frightening us or putting us to sleep. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it might be nice if they try, though I will be (slightly) unfair and insist that, with Heavenly Sword, they didn’t try, really. There’s the occasional scene where you control a semi-&^#$#ed girl whose method of “attacking” involves pressing the appropriate button to counter an enemy’s attack and swerve around them; I could try really hard to spin this out and call it a subversion the modern trend in “stealth” segments in videogames, though when I consider how heavily the game relies on quick-timer events (press X rapidly to run down a chain!), and how utterly bland the rest of the game is, I have to go ahead and consider the actual cool concept an accidental one-off.
Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, when asked what he thought about this game for some reason, said that the quick-timer events were boring, and that he would never make a game with such things in it. Itagaki is known for saying some jerkweed things with diarrhea frequency, though sometimes you really have to hand it to the guy. A spokesman for Ninja Theory, clearly on the defensive because he has Dead or Alive posters on his wall, was quick to say that they put these button-rapping events into the game because it allows players to experience an unparalleled level of cinematic excitement that they can’t experience merely through playing the game. I thought about this answer, knew deep in my heart that it was a cop-out, scoffed, and spoke to my computer monitor: “Maybe you just need to make some more interesting games!” There was no one around to high-five me, so I got a little depressed for a bit, and I got even more depressed when I realized that the Ninja Theory dude’s statement had been, essentially, a confession — he was apologizing for not being able to think of more interesting concepts for a game. All at once, it dawned: this is why Treasure bases their games on one tiny core concept, explored and mutated throughout the duration of the game; this is why Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden lets the player run up walls: without these little crunch-pockets, your videogame is not a videogame. Man, I don’t even like Ninja Gaiden, and here I am defending it. I guess that says about all there is to say about Heavenly Sword, then.
★⋆☆☆
“DEFINITELY NOT THE GAME ANYONE INVOLVED WANTED TO MAKE.”
In a riveting scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia”, William H. Macy’s character, teeth broken out of his skull, tells someone he just met, “I have so much love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Ignoring the fact that it makes you objectively gay to actually express sympathy for the man portrayed in said piece of cinema, we can move right along and say that each and every human being at Ninja Theory, developers of this videogame called Heavenly Sword, would probably say the same thing if they’d fallen off a metal ladder and had their teeth broken in. Heavenly Sword is a big, lush game, crafted with careful and deliberate attention to what’s popular in videogames these days, and it’s also just about jaw-droppingly boring.
I have wracked my brain, and the brains of many innocent and unwilling civilians, and pored over the cat-burglar-calling-card-like clues that plopped all around the PlayStation Store in the months leading up to the game’s release, and I have come to the Sherlock Holmesian conclusion that Heavenly Sword is in no way the videogame that anyone working on it actually wanted to make. You can tell by the way the nice-enough developers chat about the game in the making-of featurettes, you find scraps of evidence in the shiny two-minute “anime” episodes.
Exhibit A: the PlayStation Store description for the making-of featurettes touts the game as “with a budget rivaling a Hollywood blockbuster”. So games are at war with Hollywood now? And whoever spends the most money is the winner? That settles that debate.
Exhibit B: the anime episodes are actually called “anime” — they’re obviously trying to sell the game to the anime-liking crowd, via wholly optional episodes of “anime” that look good and go nowhere plot-wise, just like, hey, most actual anime.
Exhibit C: I see these anime episodes and think, “If the game actually looked like this, I’d probably buy it”, which is exactly what they want people to think. As far as the marketers are concerned, the next step from here is “Well, the game doesn’t actually look like this, though I guess I’ll buy it anyway.”
Exhibit D: a video I saw on YouTube around two months ago, comparing the way this game ended up looking on PlayStation 3 to the way it used to look when it was in development on Xbox. Back on Xbox, the main character was a large-headed China-dress-wearing kung-fuing she-freak. This must have been because the developers knew that another popular game on the Xbox was Dead or Alive, where characters looked just about exactly the same. Now that the game’s on PS3, the main character is something like the daughter of a supermodel and the hero from God of War. She has some kind of ambiguous friend, who’s about halfway mentally &^#$#ed, who wears a cat ear hood, because, as we’ve established, someone on the game’s staff both watches and likes anime. It’s safe to say that the oriental trappings were chosen because someone had a hunch that east Asia was marketable and no one could prove him wrong. And while the game isn’t nearly as offensive with its setting as Jade Empire, which painstakingly recreated a “mythical fantasy world” that looked a whole heck of a lot like Ancient China and then hired an actual linguist to create some hokey-as-stuff-sounding “Ching-chong ching-chong” Chinese apery and/or scrawl disgusting scribbles on scrolls in temples instead of just, you know, using actual Chinese and being done with it, it has these jarring, groan-worthy moments in which large Asian-looking men will scream at our red-haired femme fatale, “I’LL TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!!” I’m pretty sure that coloquialism didn’t exist in any one of the many imaginary Japanese historical periods. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t actually any Japanese girls named “Nariko”.
How is the game, then, you ask? Who gives a heck? Read IGN, for God’s sake.
Heavenly Sword screams focus-tested, market-safe, screenshot-approved. The graphics are nice enough, with more bloom than a rose garden. The music is brassy, boring Bruckheimer-film-score stuff. There are big, meaningless heaps of collapsing architecture and things that break just because something needs to break. There are enemies who block every attack you throw at them, because otherwise, you’d never press any different buttons. If you want to just keep pressing the same button, however, you can do that, and you might get away with it. It’s actually not that terrible to play, when you’re fighting things. You dial in combos and hit the right button when you see a flash on the screen, to perform a “spectacular” “finishing move”. After seeing these a hundred times or so, you won’t care less, though as a core game system, I guess it’s not too terrible. There are boss battles, and a story that I suppose is more interesting than taking a stuff without a magazine to read, and while it’s easier to follow than the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” film’s screenplay-by-the-numbers, it sure as hell isn’t Tolstoy. It’s just . . . there.
Should it be trying to be Tolstoy? There’s the rub. Games that, in the past, have tried to be Tolstoy have included Sin and Punishment, the pre-written English script of which scared so much stuff out of so many marketing directors that the game, spectacular as it was, never got released outside of Japan. Heavenly Sword is made by British people; Britian is a country that has produced many proud people who hecked the system and did whatever the hell they wanted in the name of rock and roll, though Ninja Theory is acting bizarrely Japanese, like one of those aching Japanese developers who avoids showing off by clinging to one tired license for twenty years. Except they don’t have a license. They just have Heavenly Sword. And after playing Heavenly Sword, I’m neither convinced nor not convinced that they could make a great game, that they could put all their love somewhere without frightening us or putting us to sleep. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it might be nice if they try, though I will be (slightly) unfair and insist that, with Heavenly Sword, they didn’t try, really. There’s the occasional scene where you control a semi-&^#$#ed girl whose method of “attacking” involves pressing the appropriate button to counter an enemy’s attack and swerve around them; I could try really hard to spin this out and call it a subversion the modern trend in “stealth” segments in videogames, though when I consider how heavily the game relies on quick-timer events (press X rapidly to run down a chain!), and how utterly bland the rest of the game is, I have to go ahead and consider the actual cool concept an accidental one-off.
Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, when asked what he thought about this game for some reason, said that the quick-timer events were boring, and that he would never make a game with such things in it. Itagaki is known for saying some jerkweed things with diarrhea frequency, though sometimes you really have to hand it to the guy. A spokesman for Ninja Theory, clearly on the defensive because he has Dead or Alive posters on his wall, was quick to say that they put these button-rapping events into the game because it allows players to experience an unparalleled level of cinematic excitement that they can’t experience merely through playing the game. I thought about this answer, knew deep in my heart that it was a cop-out, scoffed, and spoke to my computer monitor: “Maybe you just need to make some more interesting games!” There was no one around to high-five me, so I got a little depressed for a bit, and I got even more depressed when I realized that the Ninja Theory dude’s statement had been, essentially, a confession — he was apologizing for not being able to think of more interesting concepts for a game. All at once, it dawned: this is why Treasure bases their games on one tiny core concept, explored and mutated throughout the duration of the game; this is why Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden lets the player run up walls: without these little crunch-pockets, your videogame is not a videogame. Man, I don’t even like Ninja Gaiden, and here I am defending it. I guess that says about all there is to say about Heavenly Sword, then.
text by tim rogers
★★★☆
“A GOOD CONVERSATION, ABOUT OBSERVATION.”
The “training” game market has become something of a cluttered wasteland: pink flamingos standing at obscene angles in a sea of congealed clam chowder. Step into any Japanese electronics retailer and you’ll see literally hundreds of different titles, all of them with spookily similar packages. Primary colors, big text, and the either photographed, polygon-rendered, or hand-drawn face of some balding professor so superficially boring he probably couldn’t sell liquid nitrogen in hell. It’s gotten objectively offensive, really: one can imagine the boardrooms in all the office buildings in Japan, where wood-teethed old men swat a large table with a small financial newspaper and shout about how we need to make games the way Nintendo makes games, if we ever expect to retire. And then, instead of making games in the spirit of the Modern Nintendo — evergreen products with function and fun — they just go ahead and make another training game exactly like Nintendo’s training games, copying everything right down to the box. The average user, however, rejects these games like a bad kidney transplant: that is to say, for reasons they don’t entirely understand. I mean, a kidney’s a kidney. If we were to look at most of these training games with a magnifying glass — and a microphone — it would start to make sense: above all else, the sound design tends to be pretty terrible. Many of these games require the “player” to wear headphones and keep a close ear on voice samples: listen to a voice recording in a foreign language, test your comprehension by writing it down. This is why it’s unforgivable that many of these games feature pencil sound effects reminiscent of the sound of a butter knife scraping a chalkboard. When the back of the box only has to show sample questions and an unobtrusive screen layout, if the front of the box looks just like the front of every other box on the aisle-long shelf, it’s easy to hook rubes into the stufftiest edutainment. Loiter around the front counter of any Japanese electronics shop for more than ten minutes after seven PM on a weekday, and you’ll no doubt hear some fine young woman ask the cashier, “Which one of these English games for DS is . . . you know . . . the good one?” She might go on: her friend bought one the other day, and it wasn’t very good. If the store you’re at is kind of shady (like my favorite little store), you might hear the guy say “They’re all the same, really.” If the store is a mega-huge franchise, the guy will say “It is with great fear that I humbly intone to you, esteemed miss: they’re all the same, really.” Go to a tiny shop where the manager knows his stuff, and — well, they’re only stocking the Nintendo-brand training games. Huh. I wonder if Nintendo owns the patent on “minimalist handheld edutainment software where the sound effects and presentation don’t force the player to seriously contemplate stomping a hecking chihuahua flat to the ground”.
Either way, one thing’s for sure, and by for sure, I mean for real: Nintendo maybe kinda need to exercise a tiny bit of conscience about these things. Whatever happened to the heyday of the Nintendo Seal of Approval? They have to get a little more stingy about that stuff, I swear.
The situation is that sketchy publishers are flooding the market with me-too “training” games that will sell a half a million copies upon release, only to have sequels that sell less than five thousand. The publishers, out to make quick yen, realize that their games don’t have to actually be good, though they also underestimate the power of word-of-mouth — which, yes, is how Nintendo started selling all of these training games in the first place. It’s that word-of-mouth that could, quite possibly, be holding a pistol to Nintendo’s head right about now. While I’m optimistic that, maybe, Nintendo has some ace up its sleeve, that Brain Training was merely their way to make the public aware of games again, I have friends in the Japanese games industry who are quick to gravely intone: the DS bubble has already burst.
At any rate, Vision Training (or “Flash Focus“, or whatever they’re calling it in your country) represents a conscientious effort on Nintendo’s part to offer a non-stuffty alternative to some of the stuffty trainers already clogging the market. Or maybe Vision Training‘s gimpy conceptual predecessors (I think one of them was published by Kokuyo, a stationery company) were like “Deep Impact” to Nintendo’s “Armageddon” — you know, some documents somewhere were leaked, and people started rubbing their hands together at amazing speeds.
The bastard fathers of Vision Training were riding low on the speed-reading wave that’s repeatedly crashing against these island shores and getting back up again. There’s certainly been a mysterious atmosphere of self-improvement around here, even before Nintendo released Brain Training. That game was certainly a catalyst, though it was by no means the beginning: to wit, Professor Kawashima had originally released his brain-training method as a standalone portable device. Likewise, self-help books have swung all the way around the carousel we call “culture” and come back to the pop-arty side of things. Except people aren’t asking for help with problems or deficits so much as they want to obtain — and cheaply — lower-tier superhuman powers of vision, wine-tasting ability, common sense, or business manners. Last year’s wild gush of paperback books about speed-reading felt vaguely like a pyramid scheme in which everyone is selling pyramid scheme brochures. In a way, the whole climate is ripe for cute marketing: This is the Information Age! What Better Way to Process All This Information than to Obtain SPEEEEED REEEEEADING POWWWWWWERS! No one ever goes the “cute” route, though: it’s all stone-faced, testicles-on-table deadly seriousness.
When a couple of these book-publishers got the idea to jump on the gaming train, a few problems popped to the fore. Namely, the games sucked. All they could scrounge out of the pit of greed was the idea to make the “game” consist of long passages of text which appear on the screen for a limited amount of time, challenging — taunting, almost — the player to read as quickly as he or she could, before answering some comprehension questions. “Dick and Jane go for a walk in the park. Jane says ‘I hate you’. Dick says ‘Why don’t you–‘” “What did Dick ask Jane to do?”
Other wannabes tried pretty hard to bring some simple hand-eye based games into the mix, though how these make you better at speed-reading, who the heck knows. Said games mostly felt like some sub Wii Play stuff, only without the force feedback and/or 97% of the alleged fun. Follow the bouncing ball with the stylus, et cetera. Mostly, just stuff you could do with Ouendan, while also listening to terrible covers of questionable music. In other words, while the facade is lacking to the point of being absent (and therefore, um, not quite “grating”), a game pretty much needs a purpose or else we start to hunger for a facade.
Nintendo’s Vision Training, however, analyzes the core concepts of speed-reading, and presents a set of daily, toothbrushing, vitaminesque challenges that will wax players on and off until, theoretically, they can count toothpicks like Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man”.
It’s a leaner, cleaner, more, um, focused training game for Nintendo. They eschew the style they personally turned into a cookie-cutter, and present the consumer with a semi-hip modern-art-style eyeball logo instead of a photograph of some charcoal-stuffting old Japanese man. Challenges include speed-reading comprehension tests (sure to come in hand for purchasers of the recently-released Nintendo-brand DS Japanese literature primer (unfortunately, all of the novels are abridged)), variants on the shell-game theme (which become increasingly difficult as your day-to-day performance rises), and some super-clever Magic-Eye-like challenges: the magic eye is on the top screen, the multiple choices on the bottom. Like all of Nintendo’s self-improvement software, the true genius lies in the game’s attention to detail, keen memory, and persistent, flamboyant tracking of your performance. Triumphantly, where Vision Training succeeds as a “game”, it starts being a “software application”: the hardware, of course, is you. If Brain Training‘s hook was the iconic “Brain Age”, updated every day, based on your performance, then Vision Training‘s hook (ignoring that it actually does give your “eye age”) is the fact that it actually can make your eyes faster.
Recently, Japanese television networks have reported grave news: ratings this year are down by something like 75%. There could be any number of reasons for this, and most of those reasons might have something to do with Japanese actors being hired because their fathers are rich, or because the guys who host talk shows are chosen because they’ve been hosting talk shows for years, even though they’re now old enough to look like teenager-molesters, or maybe it’s because the network TV in Japan really does suck (the cable, however, is exceptional, though mostly because you get American channels plus the wacky Japanese stuff). I think maybe it’s all of the above, plus a little bit more. You see, even before reality TV took off in America, Japan has been enjoying (word used loosely) a prototypical form of reality television. Where the West would later invent “Survivor”, which takes normal people and puts them into the interesting situation of being trapped on a desert island with no food (and ubiquitous men with cameras, who make sure no one dies), the Japanese — well, we can’t say “invented”; it’s more like — developed “reality-esque” television programs in which interesting people are put through the paces of normal situations. Like, say, eating dinner at a moderately cheap restaurant, for example. This television trend has started to stew Japanese casual conversation in a marinade du bastard, however, and we will often see otherwise not-mentally-handicapped-looking Japanese children with silly hair standing up during a meal at a family restaurant to scream something “hilarious” at a classmate, because hey, the restaurant those two “famous” comedians were eating at on that mundanely fascinating television show last night couldn’t have been more expensive than this, and hey, we’re only in high school — we might as well be adults, already.
One reason Japanese television might be going down the crapper is the popularity of videogames. When a Japanese television executive was pressed for comment semi-recently, he replied that “Maybe everyone is busy playing their Wiis”. This quote got blown out of proportion — he was most likely in a joshing mood when he said that. Still — it might be right. Because, you see, Japanese proto-reality TV has always been less about any kind of “entertainment” status quo and more about providing background noise for people in informal situations. Some of these proto-reality TV shows will pit celebrities against one another in laid-back quizzes, where no one gets a prize in the end. It’s just filler sound for someone who spent all day at work, whether they’re eating dinner alone or with their husband. Whether they’re talking to their husband or just kind of reading a magazine.
The accidental glory of Nintendo’s training series is that they give us things to talk about with our friends; there is no prize for winning. There is only a feeling that comes in one of two flavors: warm, or lukewarm. (Usually, if you just keep getting worse for about ten days in a row, that’s when you give up.) And though Vision Training lacks the iconic conversation hook of “What’s your Brain Age, sweet thing?” there is a whole new plane of pickup lines etched beneath the surface, if you’re willing to look. Let me seduce you a little bit:
When I was four years old, I was in a car accident with my dad, on a snowy road, on the way to church. My right eye popped out of my head. They managed to stuff it back in there, though the muscles never quite grew back correctly. As a result, two dozen years later, I can see Magic Eye puzzles just by taking off my glasses and blinking. This talent for soft-focus has allowed me to build a pretty impressive speed-reading ability, though precision movement — as with shell games — is a little more taxing. However, whenever my cellular phone (eternally on silent mode) blinks with an incoming email, wherever it is in my apartment, I detect it, and I find it with my eyes before the blink has finished. The major drawbacks of my Weird Eyes are that I Can’t See Shit without my glasses, and that anything with multiple moving perspectives gives me an instant migraine — hence my being unable to ever play first-person shooters split-screen, ever. I got good enough at Gradius V to one-credit it all the way up to the stage with the asteroid field, though I could not proceed any further because of the terrifying headache caused by the multidirectional scrolling. I do not, however, get carsick while reading a book. The worst game-related headache I ever endured was in Sega’s game Dororo (Blood Will Tell), where the first stage is black and white, with the only color being the life meter, which was red and green. That actually shocked the hell out of me.
Do I feel like any videogames in the traditional sense have made my eyes worse? Not really. Though all this reminds me of something: there was this letter in Nintendo Power way back when, from the parent of a kid who was diagnosed as legally blind. The progressive-minded specialist recommended by their family doctor prescribed videogames, preferably ones with large characters moving at medium speeds. The kid got hooked on Double Dragon II, and after a few months of sitting very close to the television, was finally able to function sight-wise with a pair of thick glasses. “Look out, Howard [Lincoln, then-president of Nintendo of America] — some day a kid with thick glasses might show up in your office, after your job!” said the mother, in closing. I wonder what ever happened to that kid. For some reason, just thinking about Vision Training makes me curious. It makes me sincerely hope he got a good deal somewhere down the line. Who would have imagined — games making people do something sincerely.
★★★☆
“A GOOD CONVERSATION, ABOUT OBSERVATION.”
The “training” game market has become something of a cluttered wasteland: pink flamingos standing at obscene angles in a sea of congealed clam chowder. Step into any Japanese electronics retailer and you’ll see literally hundreds of different titles, all of them with spookily similar packages. Primary colors, big text, and the either photographed, polygon-rendered, or hand-drawn face of some balding professor so superficially boring he probably couldn’t sell liquid nitrogen in hell. It’s gotten objectively offensive, really: one can imagine the boardrooms in all the office buildings in Japan, where wood-teethed old men swat a large table with a small financial newspaper and shout about how we need to make games the way Nintendo makes games, if we ever expect to retire. And then, instead of making games in the spirit of the Modern Nintendo — evergreen products with function and fun — they just go ahead and make another training game exactly like Nintendo’s training games, copying everything right down to the box. The average user, however, rejects these games like a bad kidney transplant: that is to say, for reasons they don’t entirely understand. I mean, a kidney’s a kidney. If we were to look at most of these training games with a magnifying glass — and a microphone — it would start to make sense: above all else, the sound design tends to be pretty terrible. Many of these games require the “player” to wear headphones and keep a close ear on voice samples: listen to a voice recording in a foreign language, test your comprehension by writing it down. This is why it’s unforgivable that many of these games feature pencil sound effects reminiscent of the sound of a butter knife scraping a chalkboard. When the back of the box only has to show sample questions and an unobtrusive screen layout, if the front of the box looks just like the front of every other box on the aisle-long shelf, it’s easy to hook rubes into the stufftiest edutainment. Loiter around the front counter of any Japanese electronics shop for more than ten minutes after seven PM on a weekday, and you’ll no doubt hear some fine young woman ask the cashier, “Which one of these English games for DS is . . . you know . . . the good one?” She might go on: her friend bought one the other day, and it wasn’t very good. If the store you’re at is kind of shady (like my favorite little store), you might hear the guy say “They’re all the same, really.” If the store is a mega-huge franchise, the guy will say “It is with great fear that I humbly intone to you, esteemed miss: they’re all the same, really.” Go to a tiny shop where the manager knows his stuff, and — well, they’re only stocking the Nintendo-brand training games. Huh. I wonder if Nintendo owns the patent on “minimalist handheld edutainment software where the sound effects and presentation don’t force the player to seriously contemplate stomping a hecking chihuahua flat to the ground”.
Either way, one thing’s for sure, and by for sure, I mean for real: Nintendo maybe kinda need to exercise a tiny bit of conscience about these things. Whatever happened to the heyday of the Nintendo Seal of Approval? They have to get a little more stingy about that stuff, I swear.
The situation is that sketchy publishers are flooding the market with me-too “training” games that will sell a half a million copies upon release, only to have sequels that sell less than five thousand. The publishers, out to make quick yen, realize that their games don’t have to actually be good, though they also underestimate the power of word-of-mouth — which, yes, is how Nintendo started selling all of these training games in the first place. It’s that word-of-mouth that could, quite possibly, be holding a pistol to Nintendo’s head right about now. While I’m optimistic that, maybe, Nintendo has some ace up its sleeve, that Brain Training was merely their way to make the public aware of games again, I have friends in the Japanese games industry who are quick to gravely intone: the DS bubble has already burst.
At any rate, Vision Training (or “Flash Focus“, or whatever they’re calling it in your country) represents a conscientious effort on Nintendo’s part to offer a non-stuffty alternative to some of the stuffty trainers already clogging the market. Or maybe Vision Training‘s gimpy conceptual predecessors (I think one of them was published by Kokuyo, a stationery company) were like “Deep Impact” to Nintendo’s “Armageddon” — you know, some documents somewhere were leaked, and people started rubbing their hands together at amazing speeds.
The bastard fathers of Vision Training were riding low on the speed-reading wave that’s repeatedly crashing against these island shores and getting back up again. There’s certainly been a mysterious atmosphere of self-improvement around here, even before Nintendo released Brain Training. That game was certainly a catalyst, though it was by no means the beginning: to wit, Professor Kawashima had originally released his brain-training method as a standalone portable device. Likewise, self-help books have swung all the way around the carousel we call “culture” and come back to the pop-arty side of things. Except people aren’t asking for help with problems or deficits so much as they want to obtain — and cheaply — lower-tier superhuman powers of vision, wine-tasting ability, common sense, or business manners. Last year’s wild gush of paperback books about speed-reading felt vaguely like a pyramid scheme in which everyone is selling pyramid scheme brochures. In a way, the whole climate is ripe for cute marketing: This is the Information Age! What Better Way to Process All This Information than to Obtain SPEEEEED REEEEEADING POWWWWWWERS! No one ever goes the “cute” route, though: it’s all stone-faced, testicles-on-table deadly seriousness.
When a couple of these book-publishers got the idea to jump on the gaming train, a few problems popped to the fore. Namely, the games sucked. All they could scrounge out of the pit of greed was the idea to make the “game” consist of long passages of text which appear on the screen for a limited amount of time, challenging — taunting, almost — the player to read as quickly as he or she could, before answering some comprehension questions. “Dick and Jane go for a walk in the park. Jane says ‘I hate you’. Dick says ‘Why don’t you–‘” “What did Dick ask Jane to do?”
Other wannabes tried pretty hard to bring some simple hand-eye based games into the mix, though how these make you better at speed-reading, who the heck knows. Said games mostly felt like some sub Wii Play stuff, only without the force feedback and/or 97% of the alleged fun. Follow the bouncing ball with the stylus, et cetera. Mostly, just stuff you could do with Ouendan, while also listening to terrible covers of questionable music. In other words, while the facade is lacking to the point of being absent (and therefore, um, not quite “grating”), a game pretty much needs a purpose or else we start to hunger for a facade.
Nintendo’s Vision Training, however, analyzes the core concepts of speed-reading, and presents a set of daily, toothbrushing, vitaminesque challenges that will wax players on and off until, theoretically, they can count toothpicks like Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man”.
It’s a leaner, cleaner, more, um, focused training game for Nintendo. They eschew the style they personally turned into a cookie-cutter, and present the consumer with a semi-hip modern-art-style eyeball logo instead of a photograph of some charcoal-stuffting old Japanese man. Challenges include speed-reading comprehension tests (sure to come in hand for purchasers of the recently-released Nintendo-brand DS Japanese literature primer (unfortunately, all of the novels are abridged)), variants on the shell-game theme (which become increasingly difficult as your day-to-day performance rises), and some super-clever Magic-Eye-like challenges: the magic eye is on the top screen, the multiple choices on the bottom. Like all of Nintendo’s self-improvement software, the true genius lies in the game’s attention to detail, keen memory, and persistent, flamboyant tracking of your performance. Triumphantly, where Vision Training succeeds as a “game”, it starts being a “software application”: the hardware, of course, is you. If Brain Training‘s hook was the iconic “Brain Age”, updated every day, based on your performance, then Vision Training‘s hook (ignoring that it actually does give your “eye age”) is the fact that it actually can make your eyes faster.
Recently, Japanese television networks have reported grave news: ratings this year are down by something like 75%. There could be any number of reasons for this, and most of those reasons might have something to do with Japanese actors being hired because their fathers are rich, or because the guys who host talk shows are chosen because they’ve been hosting talk shows for years, even though they’re now old enough to look like teenager-molesters, or maybe it’s because the network TV in Japan really does suck (the cable, however, is exceptional, though mostly because you get American channels plus the wacky Japanese stuff). I think maybe it’s all of the above, plus a little bit more. You see, even before reality TV took off in America, Japan has been enjoying (word used loosely) a prototypical form of reality television. Where the West would later invent “Survivor”, which takes normal people and puts them into the interesting situation of being trapped on a desert island with no food (and ubiquitous men with cameras, who make sure no one dies), the Japanese — well, we can’t say “invented”; it’s more like — developed “reality-esque” television programs in which interesting people are put through the paces of normal situations. Like, say, eating dinner at a moderately cheap restaurant, for example. This television trend has started to stew Japanese casual conversation in a marinade du bastard, however, and we will often see otherwise not-mentally-handicapped-looking Japanese children with silly hair standing up during a meal at a family restaurant to scream something “hilarious” at a classmate, because hey, the restaurant those two “famous” comedians were eating at on that mundanely fascinating television show last night couldn’t have been more expensive than this, and hey, we’re only in high school — we might as well be adults, already.
One reason Japanese television might be going down the crapper is the popularity of videogames. When a Japanese television executive was pressed for comment semi-recently, he replied that “Maybe everyone is busy playing their Wiis”. This quote got blown out of proportion — he was most likely in a joshing mood when he said that. Still — it might be right. Because, you see, Japanese proto-reality TV has always been less about any kind of “entertainment” status quo and more about providing background noise for people in informal situations. Some of these proto-reality TV shows will pit celebrities against one another in laid-back quizzes, where no one gets a prize in the end. It’s just filler sound for someone who spent all day at work, whether they’re eating dinner alone or with their husband. Whether they’re talking to their husband or just kind of reading a magazine.
The accidental glory of Nintendo’s training series is that they give us things to talk about with our friends; there is no prize for winning. There is only a feeling that comes in one of two flavors: warm, or lukewarm. (Usually, if you just keep getting worse for about ten days in a row, that’s when you give up.) And though Vision Training lacks the iconic conversation hook of “What’s your Brain Age, sweet thing?” there is a whole new plane of pickup lines etched beneath the surface, if you’re willing to look. Let me seduce you a little bit:
When I was four years old, I was in a car accident with my dad, on a snowy road, on the way to church. My right eye popped out of my head. They managed to stuff it back in there, though the muscles never quite grew back correctly. As a result, two dozen years later, I can see Magic Eye puzzles just by taking off my glasses and blinking. This talent for soft-focus has allowed me to build a pretty impressive speed-reading ability, though precision movement — as with shell games — is a little more taxing. However, whenever my cellular phone (eternally on silent mode) blinks with an incoming email, wherever it is in my apartment, I detect it, and I find it with my eyes before the blink has finished. The major drawbacks of my Weird Eyes are that I Can’t See Shit without my glasses, and that anything with multiple moving perspectives gives me an instant migraine — hence my being unable to ever play first-person shooters split-screen, ever. I got good enough at Gradius V to one-credit it all the way up to the stage with the asteroid field, though I could not proceed any further because of the terrifying headache caused by the multidirectional scrolling. I do not, however, get carsick while reading a book. The worst game-related headache I ever endured was in Sega’s game Dororo (Blood Will Tell), where the first stage is black and white, with the only color being the life meter, which was red and green. That actually shocked the hell out of me.
Do I feel like any videogames in the traditional sense have made my eyes worse? Not really. Though all this reminds me of something: there was this letter in Nintendo Power way back when, from the parent of a kid who was diagnosed as legally blind. The progressive-minded specialist recommended by their family doctor prescribed videogames, preferably ones with large characters moving at medium speeds. The kid got hooked on Double Dragon II, and after a few months of sitting very close to the television, was finally able to function sight-wise with a pair of thick glasses. “Look out, Howard [Lincoln, then-president of Nintendo of America] — some day a kid with thick glasses might show up in your office, after your job!” said the mother, in closing. I wonder what ever happened to that kid. For some reason, just thinking about Vision Training makes me curious. It makes me sincerely hope he got a good deal somewhere down the line. Who would have imagined — games making people do something sincerely.
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“NOT REMOTELY AS 'ADVANCED' AS IT NEEDS TO BE.”
In all the official writings, the title of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is written as Final Fantasy Tactics A2. Anyone who’s played the previous game in this now-two-game “series” knows that the “A” stands for “Advance”, because the first game was called Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That game was produced by videogame legend Yasumi Matsuno. It was also for Gameboy Advance. The sequel is neither produced by Yasumi Matsuno, nor is it for Gameboy Advance. Though games are generally better on the Nintendo DS than they were on the Gameboy Advance, and generally worse when they’re not produced by Yasumi Matsuno, weirdly, neither of these things make the game in question exponentially better or worse.
The most interesting thing about this game, if you’re forced to talk about it, is probably its branding. Square-Enix’s business model has come to feel more like a big tobacco company than a videogame developer, these days. In 2007, the mega-publisher is releasing a staggering fourteen Final Fantasy products, all of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” brand, some of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy VII 10th Anniversary” brand, and some of them belonging to the somewhat conceptually hilarious “Final Fantasy XI 5th Anniversary” brand. The Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series, in which three titles were announced this year, oddly doesn’t get its own brand. You’d think that, by now, they’d be slightly ashamed of the fact that almost every game they release has a title that begins with the same two words. Why not call them Crystal Chronicles: Final Fantasy? “Crystal Chronicles” is a pleasant, striking combination of words. I guess someone in the company isn’t willing to let anyone mention taking a risk until he finishes having his new mansion built. Or maybe not: the Wii-exclusive download-only Crystal Chronicles game’s title is going to begin with seven whole words preceding the words “Final Fantasy” — The Little King and the Promised Country: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, is what they’re calling it. I guess someone was able to slap together a pitch-perfect PowerPoint presentation detailing that it’s okay to bury the keywords in the middle of the title so long as that title includes two colons. You know, there used to be a time this company was proud of their own name, where customers were trusted enough to buy the games because of the maker’s logo on the box. I wonder what happened.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 belongs to the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, in which three other titles were also released this year: Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, a remake of the original Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, a pleasant-enough, stupidly simple strategy game for the Nintendo DS, and Final Fantasy XII: International Zodiac Job System, which might be the worst subtitle they’ve ever put on a game. I mean, seriously, they’re mentioning one of the most absolutely technical aspects of the game, right there in the title. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also belongs, of course, to the “Final Fantasy Tactics” brand, which I suppose is a sub-brand of the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, unless they decide some day to make a Tactics game with Crystal Chronicles characters in it. That would be amazing. That would be hilarious. Either way, I wouldn’t put it past them. At any rate, slap a “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” sticker on the box, and here you have it: a triple-branded game, by Square-Enix, which is kind of like a fourth brand, kind of like a pseudo-brand. How can it not sell at least a quarter million copies?
As what it is — branded, polished, focus-tested — it’s pretty much a perfect little package. The graphics are almost overwhelmingly pleasant, with rich colors and delicious little animations. The music, by Kenji Ito (probably the best (capitalized) Game Music Composer in the world right now), is fascinating: he took Hitoshi Sakimoto’s iconic Final Fantasy Tactics jams and somehow mated them with Italian 1950s pre-proto-pop, little dinging bells and all. The arrangements are literally miraculous. And then there are the sound effects — I swear to god, I’d thought for the longest time that Square’s menu cursor sound effect was perfect, and that they’d be fools to mess with it. Well, FFTA2 messes with it, and the results are gaspingly gorgeous. If you’re anything like me, you will find yourself — figuratively — filled, many times during each battle, with the strong desire to rip the earbuds out of your ears and lick them, expecting honey to be dripping out.
You have a tremendous 56 job classes to choose from this time, some of them total conceptual cop-outs (like “Animal User”, who can use a “Sheep” spell to protect himself with “Wool”, which guards against cold), and others are pretty simply awesome (Fencer, who specializes in thrusting sword attacks that push enemies back). At the end of the day, though, you might wonder why there are three elementary classes (Fencer, Soldier, Warrior) for sword techniques, though hey, they all have different techniques, and it’s pretty cool to learn new techniques.
The back of the box describes this game as “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players!” Maybe they should have said “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players who know what ‘RPG’ stands for”. Maybe that would have taken up too much precious real estate on the back of the box, though hey, maybe they could have spared it: the back of the box is mostly text, anyway, with only one actual screenshot of the game at play. The other two (tiny) screenshots show a dialogue in one of the many towns’ many bars and the hecking map screen. Yeah, good work, there.
This weird shame is confusing, because A2 is a much better game, as far as games go, than its predecessor. This is funny, because the first one was, you know, actually directed by an actual genius. Geniuses make weird decisions sometimes, I guess: the first game ditched the brilliant (and now simulation-RPG standard) “Active Time” turn-based battle system in favor of a “player side attacks, enemy side attacks” style. This type of battle system, as present in Matsuno’s Tactics Ogre, wasn’t so bad because it gave us a peculiar sensation: go to the bathroom (or cook an omelette) while the enemy side is attacking, and then come back into the living room, where the game screen has changed, either drastically or subtly. Sit down, pick up the controller, and feel something like a forensics expert as you plan your strategy. This didn’t work so well when the game console is something you carry around in your hands. The reinstatement of the AT system, now without a name — now just something that is — works wonders for FFTA2. Each battle is a polished, cute little challenge. The battlefields sometimes feel a little bit flat, which is a real shame: at last, the ability to push an opponent back one square is a lot more executable, and there just aren’t enough heights to knock the enemies down from. I suppose the flat battlefields are on account of the game’s not being presented in actual, rotatable 3D. Why isn’t it in 3D, though? The Dragon Quest IV remake for DS, from what I could tell at Tokyo Game Show, handles 3D exceptionally well, if in a “Porno for Pixelantes” kind of way.
Moreover, why doesn’t this game support touch screen controls at all? It seems like an amazing omission to me. I suppose to controller-only inputs are clean and simple enough — press the L and R buttons during battle to zip between enemy targets when targeting spells, or press them while in free-targeting mode to peruse each troop on the battlefield, in the order that they’re going to attack. Though really, some people like the pointing and clicking. It’s really weird — the window size and fonts seem optimized for touching with a stylus. Though maybe they cut out stylus controls because that way you wouldn’t be able to hear that delicious cursor sound so much. The game includes an option to set the “main screen” as the top or the bottom, though, and I guess couldn’t do that with touch-screen controls.
The most glaring omission in this game — and it glares pretty ferociously — is the multiplayer. The back of the box says that players can “Enjoy wireless play with a friend!” It also says that the friend needs a copy of the game — this must mean . . . yes, that there are multiplayer battles! In a Final Fantasy Tactics game! On the DS, a system my friends actually own and play! I figured that multiplayer battles were a shoe-in, seeing as the battle system has been reverted to the glory of the original FFT‘s AT. I mean, no one would want to play a two-player competitive battle if it was the old “one side attacks, other side attacks” system, yeah? And this is the Nintendo DS, the home of the eight-million-selling Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. And the, uhh, half-million selling Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Square-Enix knows that players love to play together. They’ve already got the most intensive co-op RPG-esque experience on the system; why not go for the monopoly on awesome versus strategy, as well?
Well, a quick tear through the instruction manual will leave you cursing like a sailor: it’s hecking Item Trading. No versus mode for you — you’ll have to buy the PSP Final Fantasy Tactics remake, and then convince your friends to all buy PSPs, jackass. Man, what a rip-off. I guess, ultimately, Square-Enix didn’t want to cannibalize their own sales. Which makes about as much sense as, well, it doesn’t. This is where the in-branding becomes interesting again: “Traditional” FFT and FFT “Advance” are two different sub-sub-brands within one sub-brand (FFT) of another sub-brand (“Ivalice Alliance”) within the “Final Fantasy” brand. If they share too many features — despite the fact that they’re on different consoles — then the publisher will be philosophically defeated. And we wouldn’t want that — otherwise we’d never get that remake of Final Fantasy VII!
Speaking of remakes of Final Fantasy VII: the same in-breeding apparent in every other recent Square-Enix release is oozing out of the corners of Final Fantasy Tactics A2. It should be a given at this point, I guess: remember Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for the Gameboy Advance, in which Sora, the hero of Kingdom Hearts, a PlayStation 2 game about Disney characters and Final Fantasy characters meeting and having long philosophical discussions and legally constricted brawls with blunt objects, forgets the events of the previous canonical game, and must relive them in portable game form by using an artifact called the “Chain of Memories”. Flash forward to Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix for PlayStation 2, which includes the entirety of Chain of Memories, now upgraded to look and play like the PlayStation 2 that originally inspired it. Copies of copies of copies of copies — that’s what suffices for blockbuster material these days. Well, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is pretty much just a cover band of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance — it’s so busy trying to be the exact same game that it ends up completely missing the point.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a gentle, slow-moving little game, and as such, it was enjoyable. The tutorial, which should be more famous than it is, involved characters having a snowball fight. When these real-world characters got transported into the Final Fantasy universe, things got more mortal, though the sense of innocence never quite lifted. It added up to a quirky kind of pleasant aura. In the Final Fantasy world, our young hero joins a “clan” of warriors, takes “missions”, and fights “battles” in order to raise his reputation. The game plays out in episodes. Take a mission, fight the battle, save the game, get off the train, et cetera. A story (and one with a weirdly powerful moral message), however, comes creeping slowly in, and that story unfolds as we take more missions, fight more battles, and get off more trains.
FFT-A2 is essentially the same game, without the creeping story. A young boy, while serving detention in the library on the eve of his school summer vacation, is sucked into an old book. Now he joins a clan led by a man named Cid (absolute earliest-ever appearance of Cid in a Final Fantasy game: check), and goes off on an adventure! By “adventure” I mean he takes on missions at identical pubs in identical cities all around the world. He revels boyishly in the logistics of combat. “Wow! Earning new job-specific abilities and then equipping them while in another job class is fun!” There’s a weird kind of Pokemon-esque sheen covering the whole thing, and it might even be more disturbing — though only because it’s a bit harder to place — than the plucky main character in Advance Wars, grinning and saying “Cool! Tanks are super-strong against infantry!” after witnessing a battalion of cartoon tanks wiping out a hundred men on foot. At times, as you start and finish your fiftieth or hundredth battle and still no story pokes its head out of the ground, as the main character continues to expresses profound interest in the book-keeping elements of raising an army, it starts to feel like maybe this isn’t an RPG after all. Maybe it’s a middle-school pre-primer for one of those business-manners-training games that are flooding the market these days, with some critical thinking exercises (strategic battles) thrown in for good measure.
This microthin story facade doesn’t change the fact that the game sparkles when it comes down to dudes fighting dudes. With 56 job classes (for God’s sake!) and a total of twenty-four soldiers in your reserve army, it’s very flexible and very open to experimentation. Taken one mission at a time, played like a board game, it’s a heck of a polished package — and some of the battles are pretty tough. That there’s no versus mode, however, is a crippling flaw that cannot be ignored. You’d think that, you know, when the game is so light on story and loose with regards to structure, that a versus mode would just be a given. Oh well. I will continue to raise my job levels in horrible solitude, with nothing human to fling my made men against. There certainly exist many worse things to do on the train.
★★☆☆
“NOT REMOTELY AS 'ADVANCED' AS IT NEEDS TO BE.”
In all the official writings, the title of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is written as Final Fantasy Tactics A2. Anyone who’s played the previous game in this now-two-game “series” knows that the “A” stands for “Advance”, because the first game was called Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That game was produced by videogame legend Yasumi Matsuno. It was also for Gameboy Advance. The sequel is neither produced by Yasumi Matsuno, nor is it for Gameboy Advance. Though games are generally better on the Nintendo DS than they were on the Gameboy Advance, and generally worse when they’re not produced by Yasumi Matsuno, weirdly, neither of these things make the game in question exponentially better or worse.
The most interesting thing about this game, if you’re forced to talk about it, is probably its branding. Square-Enix’s business model has come to feel more like a big tobacco company than a videogame developer, these days. In 2007, the mega-publisher is releasing a staggering fourteen Final Fantasy products, all of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” brand, some of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy VII 10th Anniversary” brand, and some of them belonging to the somewhat conceptually hilarious “Final Fantasy XI 5th Anniversary” brand. The Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series, in which three titles were announced this year, oddly doesn’t get its own brand. You’d think that, by now, they’d be slightly ashamed of the fact that almost every game they release has a title that begins with the same two words. Why not call them Crystal Chronicles: Final Fantasy? “Crystal Chronicles” is a pleasant, striking combination of words. I guess someone in the company isn’t willing to let anyone mention taking a risk until he finishes having his new mansion built. Or maybe not: the Wii-exclusive download-only Crystal Chronicles game’s title is going to begin with seven whole words preceding the words “Final Fantasy” — The Little King and the Promised Country: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, is what they’re calling it. I guess someone was able to slap together a pitch-perfect PowerPoint presentation detailing that it’s okay to bury the keywords in the middle of the title so long as that title includes two colons. You know, there used to be a time this company was proud of their own name, where customers were trusted enough to buy the games because of the maker’s logo on the box. I wonder what happened.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 belongs to the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, in which three other titles were also released this year: Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, a remake of the original Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, a pleasant-enough, stupidly simple strategy game for the Nintendo DS, and Final Fantasy XII: International Zodiac Job System, which might be the worst subtitle they’ve ever put on a game. I mean, seriously, they’re mentioning one of the most absolutely technical aspects of the game, right there in the title. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also belongs, of course, to the “Final Fantasy Tactics” brand, which I suppose is a sub-brand of the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, unless they decide some day to make a Tactics game with Crystal Chronicles characters in it. That would be amazing. That would be hilarious. Either way, I wouldn’t put it past them. At any rate, slap a “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” sticker on the box, and here you have it: a triple-branded game, by Square-Enix, which is kind of like a fourth brand, kind of like a pseudo-brand. How can it not sell at least a quarter million copies?
As what it is — branded, polished, focus-tested — it’s pretty much a perfect little package. The graphics are almost overwhelmingly pleasant, with rich colors and delicious little animations. The music, by Kenji Ito (probably the best (capitalized) Game Music Composer in the world right now), is fascinating: he took Hitoshi Sakimoto’s iconic Final Fantasy Tactics jams and somehow mated them with Italian 1950s pre-proto-pop, little dinging bells and all. The arrangements are literally miraculous. And then there are the sound effects — I swear to god, I’d thought for the longest time that Square’s menu cursor sound effect was perfect, and that they’d be fools to mess with it. Well, FFTA2 messes with it, and the results are gaspingly gorgeous. If you’re anything like me, you will find yourself — figuratively — filled, many times during each battle, with the strong desire to rip the earbuds out of your ears and lick them, expecting honey to be dripping out.
You have a tremendous 56 job classes to choose from this time, some of them total conceptual cop-outs (like “Animal User”, who can use a “Sheep” spell to protect himself with “Wool”, which guards against cold), and others are pretty simply awesome (Fencer, who specializes in thrusting sword attacks that push enemies back). At the end of the day, though, you might wonder why there are three elementary classes (Fencer, Soldier, Warrior) for sword techniques, though hey, they all have different techniques, and it’s pretty cool to learn new techniques.
The back of the box describes this game as “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players!” Maybe they should have said “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players who know what ‘RPG’ stands for”. Maybe that would have taken up too much precious real estate on the back of the box, though hey, maybe they could have spared it: the back of the box is mostly text, anyway, with only one actual screenshot of the game at play. The other two (tiny) screenshots show a dialogue in one of the many towns’ many bars and the hecking map screen. Yeah, good work, there.
This weird shame is confusing, because A2 is a much better game, as far as games go, than its predecessor. This is funny, because the first one was, you know, actually directed by an actual genius. Geniuses make weird decisions sometimes, I guess: the first game ditched the brilliant (and now simulation-RPG standard) “Active Time” turn-based battle system in favor of a “player side attacks, enemy side attacks” style. This type of battle system, as present in Matsuno’s Tactics Ogre, wasn’t so bad because it gave us a peculiar sensation: go to the bathroom (or cook an omelette) while the enemy side is attacking, and then come back into the living room, where the game screen has changed, either drastically or subtly. Sit down, pick up the controller, and feel something like a forensics expert as you plan your strategy. This didn’t work so well when the game console is something you carry around in your hands. The reinstatement of the AT system, now without a name — now just something that is — works wonders for FFTA2. Each battle is a polished, cute little challenge. The battlefields sometimes feel a little bit flat, which is a real shame: at last, the ability to push an opponent back one square is a lot more executable, and there just aren’t enough heights to knock the enemies down from. I suppose the flat battlefields are on account of the game’s not being presented in actual, rotatable 3D. Why isn’t it in 3D, though? The Dragon Quest IV remake for DS, from what I could tell at Tokyo Game Show, handles 3D exceptionally well, if in a “Porno for Pixelantes” kind of way.
Moreover, why doesn’t this game support touch screen controls at all? It seems like an amazing omission to me. I suppose to controller-only inputs are clean and simple enough — press the L and R buttons during battle to zip between enemy targets when targeting spells, or press them while in free-targeting mode to peruse each troop on the battlefield, in the order that they’re going to attack. Though really, some people like the pointing and clicking. It’s really weird — the window size and fonts seem optimized for touching with a stylus. Though maybe they cut out stylus controls because that way you wouldn’t be able to hear that delicious cursor sound so much. The game includes an option to set the “main screen” as the top or the bottom, though, and I guess couldn’t do that with touch-screen controls.
The most glaring omission in this game — and it glares pretty ferociously — is the multiplayer. The back of the box says that players can “Enjoy wireless play with a friend!” It also says that the friend needs a copy of the game — this must mean . . . yes, that there are multiplayer battles! In a Final Fantasy Tactics game! On the DS, a system my friends actually own and play! I figured that multiplayer battles were a shoe-in, seeing as the battle system has been reverted to the glory of the original FFT‘s AT. I mean, no one would want to play a two-player competitive battle if it was the old “one side attacks, other side attacks” system, yeah? And this is the Nintendo DS, the home of the eight-million-selling Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. And the, uhh, half-million selling Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Square-Enix knows that players love to play together. They’ve already got the most intensive co-op RPG-esque experience on the system; why not go for the monopoly on awesome versus strategy, as well?
Well, a quick tear through the instruction manual will leave you cursing like a sailor: it’s hecking Item Trading. No versus mode for you — you’ll have to buy the PSP Final Fantasy Tactics remake, and then convince your friends to all buy PSPs, jackass. Man, what a rip-off. I guess, ultimately, Square-Enix didn’t want to cannibalize their own sales. Which makes about as much sense as, well, it doesn’t. This is where the in-branding becomes interesting again: “Traditional” FFT and FFT “Advance” are two different sub-sub-brands within one sub-brand (FFT) of another sub-brand (“Ivalice Alliance”) within the “Final Fantasy” brand. If they share too many features — despite the fact that they’re on different consoles — then the publisher will be philosophically defeated. And we wouldn’t want that — otherwise we’d never get that remake of Final Fantasy VII!
Speaking of remakes of Final Fantasy VII: the same in-breeding apparent in every other recent Square-Enix release is oozing out of the corners of Final Fantasy Tactics A2. It should be a given at this point, I guess: remember Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for the Gameboy Advance, in which Sora, the hero of Kingdom Hearts, a PlayStation 2 game about Disney characters and Final Fantasy characters meeting and having long philosophical discussions and legally constricted brawls with blunt objects, forgets the events of the previous canonical game, and must relive them in portable game form by using an artifact called the “Chain of Memories”. Flash forward to Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix for PlayStation 2, which includes the entirety of Chain of Memories, now upgraded to look and play like the PlayStation 2 that originally inspired it. Copies of copies of copies of copies — that’s what suffices for blockbuster material these days. Well, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is pretty much just a cover band of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance — it’s so busy trying to be the exact same game that it ends up completely missing the point.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a gentle, slow-moving little game, and as such, it was enjoyable. The tutorial, which should be more famous than it is, involved characters having a snowball fight. When these real-world characters got transported into the Final Fantasy universe, things got more mortal, though the sense of innocence never quite lifted. It added up to a quirky kind of pleasant aura. In the Final Fantasy world, our young hero joins a “clan” of warriors, takes “missions”, and fights “battles” in order to raise his reputation. The game plays out in episodes. Take a mission, fight the battle, save the game, get off the train, et cetera. A story (and one with a weirdly powerful moral message), however, comes creeping slowly in, and that story unfolds as we take more missions, fight more battles, and get off more trains.
FFT-A2 is essentially the same game, without the creeping story. A young boy, while serving detention in the library on the eve of his school summer vacation, is sucked into an old book. Now he joins a clan led by a man named Cid (absolute earliest-ever appearance of Cid in a Final Fantasy game: check), and goes off on an adventure! By “adventure” I mean he takes on missions at identical pubs in identical cities all around the world. He revels boyishly in the logistics of combat. “Wow! Earning new job-specific abilities and then equipping them while in another job class is fun!” There’s a weird kind of Pokemon-esque sheen covering the whole thing, and it might even be more disturbing — though only because it’s a bit harder to place — than the plucky main character in Advance Wars, grinning and saying “Cool! Tanks are super-strong against infantry!” after witnessing a battalion of cartoon tanks wiping out a hundred men on foot. At times, as you start and finish your fiftieth or hundredth battle and still no story pokes its head out of the ground, as the main character continues to expresses profound interest in the book-keeping elements of raising an army, it starts to feel like maybe this isn’t an RPG after all. Maybe it’s a middle-school pre-primer for one of those business-manners-training games that are flooding the market these days, with some critical thinking exercises (strategic battles) thrown in for good measure.
This microthin story facade doesn’t change the fact that the game sparkles when it comes down to dudes fighting dudes. With 56 job classes (for God’s sake!) and a total of twenty-four soldiers in your reserve army, it’s very flexible and very open to experimentation. Taken one mission at a time, played like a board game, it’s a heck of a polished package — and some of the battles are pretty tough. That there’s no versus mode, however, is a crippling flaw that cannot be ignored. You’d think that, you know, when the game is so light on story and loose with regards to structure, that a versus mode would just be a given. Oh well. I will continue to raise my job levels in horrible solitude, with nothing human to fling my made men against. There certainly exist many worse things to do on the train.
2003
text by Thomas Callahan
★★★☆
“NEAT AND TIDY.”
Racecourses are lumped together into “peaksâ€, then stitched between dead-end “slopestyle†and “superpipe†runs. Win exactly three races, one slopestyle competition and one superpipe event to achieve Peak Completion, and Unlock the next peak.
The upshot is that these courses are interconnected, albeit pretty artificially. It’s very important that you can finish barreling down a racecourse (participation is entirely optional) and carve directly into the next one without a loading screen, a signpost, or any sort of hiccup. When you Unlock Final Peak Three, you can drop in directly onto the precarious, finely pointed tip of Big Mountain and tumble downhill for 30 minutes without interruption. This shouldn’t be absolutely exceptional, but it is. Anyone who has pedantically compared Half-Life’s insistence on seamless videogaming and removal of uninteractive cutscenes to cinéma verité will surely scrounge up something of interest here.
Perhaps that came off as a bit harsh. SSX 3’s breathless, mountain-encompassing half-hour of continuous play really does feel as bold and absorbing an endeavor as any meticulously composed extended take. The game boots up with a lengthy series of logos (as per the norm with EA), has you wait around a moment before skipping the intro, and puts you through a sizable loading sequence before granting access to Big Mountain — the tradeoff being that it will never stop you pushing buttons again. Judging by the sporadic clicking of machinery in my GameCube, memory/RAM is hauled up during the occasional “base runsâ€, which serve as gateways to different Events. That these runs are fairly barren has something to do with disc-reading, I suppose. All the same, they keep up illusions far better than menus, meters or videoclips; though they are visibly contrived, at the very least they continue the constant engagement of my thumbs and reflexes.
On that note: SSX 3 is wonderfully satisfying in terms of tactile feedback. To pull off tricks, you must reach your hand over to your controller’s four-way “directional pad” (speaking in generalities here because this is a multi-console affair), tapping it in one of eight directions while, simultaneously, jamming down one, two or three of your controller’s “shoulder buttons”, midair. This kind of bracing, effortful clunkiness makes onscreen response all the more compelling — it’s the same principle that makes Nintendo 64 first-person shooters, with their stilted combination of genuine analog movement with purely digital C-Button “strafe†and “look up/downâ€, eminently enjoyable in a way weightless modern-day “dual-stick” setups are not.
Also contributing here is a kind of odd application of RPG mechanics. While you compete in events, or even while you pull off jumps and grabs in your spare time, you accumulate cash, and the money can be put towards Acceleration, or Edging, or Stability, or Toughness. Character attributes are rated on a scale of 11; you’ll pay through the nose. Odd because leveling-up is usually implemented as a substitute for actual, trial-and-error bred improvement in videogames: pattern recognition, pattern memorization, grasp of in-game physics . . . all the little factors which fall into place, ideally, as a game’s difficulty level ramps up. (Few recent games manage to coordinate this learning curve/tension ratio elegantly. Super Monkey Ball does, brilliantly, and I suppose Metroid Prime does too.) Such is not the case here: your numbers go up and your “real” skill level increases at the same time. The two are indistinguishable. You merely notice, faintly, that while you continue exploring the mountain, stumbling upon shortcuts and little rail-to-rail sequences, your snowboarder’s response to your button-pushing feels increasingly fluid, increasingly smooth. It happens gradually, under your nose. Jump from an 11/11 stats-maxed-out character to a new one, though, and you’ll feel it, you’ll feel sort of vaguely stuffty, that’s it.
(A quibble: the 2-player splitscreen mode forces you to use the same character profiles you use in the main mode, which means that — unless you have two people actively playing through the main, peak-unlocking Quest at the same time on the same disc, leveling up two characters at an equal rate — one player will control a responsive, graceful character, and the other will be stuck with some loose and dinky counterpart. This little oversight renders the multiplayer quite irrelevant.)
I’ve owned this game for about two years. Every month or so I put it on and attempt to make it down from the summit to the village without falling or slipping up. It’s amazing how much can go wrong in 30 minutes of unbroken concentration, and with enough repetition, it’s amazing how mindless the half-hour marathon becomes. Pure autopilot — yet it remains gripping simply for the kind of flow state it puts you in. Videogames are generally stressful experiences; this alone separates SSX 3, with its serene all-mountain glide, from most of my (unenviable) games collection. Add onto this a completely inoffensive, banal aesthetic: generic arcadey clutter is coupled with Big Mountain’s increasingly fractured courses, a soft-spoken DJ mutters about trail conditions. Hell, even if you do find this stuff aesthetically offensive, you can turn off the HUD and the arcade SFX and the DJ and his pop-punk, streamlining the interface to something as lonesome as you like.
There’s something to be said for convenient videogames, games you can glean a pleasant response out of without significant time input or emotional investment. A swift double-punch — economic inflation, coupled with mainstream reviews solemnly emphasizing, above all things, “replay value†— has lent sheer game length a new importance. Developers hasten to pad their games out, advertising raw hours on the back of their “box-artâ€. It’s, yeah, infantile and powerful as hell: filler is bang for your buck, because digestibility, before you know it, is digested. Still, you know. A certain degree of detachment here is worthwhile. Yes, industry-wide nostalgia-riding is relentless; yes, the medium’s narrative potential looks to remain unfulfilled for obvious logistic reasons; yes, videogames are, on average, deeply mediocre. But I don’t have the energy nor the idealism to get truly angry over this carnivalesque little market. Lucky exceptions, coincidences and successes pop up with enough frequency to make the console-owning experience worthwhile. SSX 3's 30-minute full-mountain run is exceptionally good instant gratification. A neat, self-contained burst of escapism. I can casually speed down SSX 3‘s Big Mountain — or through chunks of Mega Man 2 or Super Mario Bros. 3 or Goldeneye 007 or other such rhythmically entrancing, expertly paced entertainment — when I want to punctuate my schedule with this specific, delightful sensation.
★★★☆
“NEAT AND TIDY.”
Racecourses are lumped together into “peaksâ€, then stitched between dead-end “slopestyle†and “superpipe†runs. Win exactly three races, one slopestyle competition and one superpipe event to achieve Peak Completion, and Unlock the next peak.
The upshot is that these courses are interconnected, albeit pretty artificially. It’s very important that you can finish barreling down a racecourse (participation is entirely optional) and carve directly into the next one without a loading screen, a signpost, or any sort of hiccup. When you Unlock Final Peak Three, you can drop in directly onto the precarious, finely pointed tip of Big Mountain and tumble downhill for 30 minutes without interruption. This shouldn’t be absolutely exceptional, but it is. Anyone who has pedantically compared Half-Life’s insistence on seamless videogaming and removal of uninteractive cutscenes to cinéma verité will surely scrounge up something of interest here.
Perhaps that came off as a bit harsh. SSX 3’s breathless, mountain-encompassing half-hour of continuous play really does feel as bold and absorbing an endeavor as any meticulously composed extended take. The game boots up with a lengthy series of logos (as per the norm with EA), has you wait around a moment before skipping the intro, and puts you through a sizable loading sequence before granting access to Big Mountain — the tradeoff being that it will never stop you pushing buttons again. Judging by the sporadic clicking of machinery in my GameCube, memory/RAM is hauled up during the occasional “base runsâ€, which serve as gateways to different Events. That these runs are fairly barren has something to do with disc-reading, I suppose. All the same, they keep up illusions far better than menus, meters or videoclips; though they are visibly contrived, at the very least they continue the constant engagement of my thumbs and reflexes.
On that note: SSX 3 is wonderfully satisfying in terms of tactile feedback. To pull off tricks, you must reach your hand over to your controller’s four-way “directional pad” (speaking in generalities here because this is a multi-console affair), tapping it in one of eight directions while, simultaneously, jamming down one, two or three of your controller’s “shoulder buttons”, midair. This kind of bracing, effortful clunkiness makes onscreen response all the more compelling — it’s the same principle that makes Nintendo 64 first-person shooters, with their stilted combination of genuine analog movement with purely digital C-Button “strafe†and “look up/downâ€, eminently enjoyable in a way weightless modern-day “dual-stick” setups are not.
Also contributing here is a kind of odd application of RPG mechanics. While you compete in events, or even while you pull off jumps and grabs in your spare time, you accumulate cash, and the money can be put towards Acceleration, or Edging, or Stability, or Toughness. Character attributes are rated on a scale of 11; you’ll pay through the nose. Odd because leveling-up is usually implemented as a substitute for actual, trial-and-error bred improvement in videogames: pattern recognition, pattern memorization, grasp of in-game physics . . . all the little factors which fall into place, ideally, as a game’s difficulty level ramps up. (Few recent games manage to coordinate this learning curve/tension ratio elegantly. Super Monkey Ball does, brilliantly, and I suppose Metroid Prime does too.) Such is not the case here: your numbers go up and your “real” skill level increases at the same time. The two are indistinguishable. You merely notice, faintly, that while you continue exploring the mountain, stumbling upon shortcuts and little rail-to-rail sequences, your snowboarder’s response to your button-pushing feels increasingly fluid, increasingly smooth. It happens gradually, under your nose. Jump from an 11/11 stats-maxed-out character to a new one, though, and you’ll feel it, you’ll feel sort of vaguely stuffty, that’s it.
(A quibble: the 2-player splitscreen mode forces you to use the same character profiles you use in the main mode, which means that — unless you have two people actively playing through the main, peak-unlocking Quest at the same time on the same disc, leveling up two characters at an equal rate — one player will control a responsive, graceful character, and the other will be stuck with some loose and dinky counterpart. This little oversight renders the multiplayer quite irrelevant.)
I’ve owned this game for about two years. Every month or so I put it on and attempt to make it down from the summit to the village without falling or slipping up. It’s amazing how much can go wrong in 30 minutes of unbroken concentration, and with enough repetition, it’s amazing how mindless the half-hour marathon becomes. Pure autopilot — yet it remains gripping simply for the kind of flow state it puts you in. Videogames are generally stressful experiences; this alone separates SSX 3, with its serene all-mountain glide, from most of my (unenviable) games collection. Add onto this a completely inoffensive, banal aesthetic: generic arcadey clutter is coupled with Big Mountain’s increasingly fractured courses, a soft-spoken DJ mutters about trail conditions. Hell, even if you do find this stuff aesthetically offensive, you can turn off the HUD and the arcade SFX and the DJ and his pop-punk, streamlining the interface to something as lonesome as you like.
There’s something to be said for convenient videogames, games you can glean a pleasant response out of without significant time input or emotional investment. A swift double-punch — economic inflation, coupled with mainstream reviews solemnly emphasizing, above all things, “replay value†— has lent sheer game length a new importance. Developers hasten to pad their games out, advertising raw hours on the back of their “box-artâ€. It’s, yeah, infantile and powerful as hell: filler is bang for your buck, because digestibility, before you know it, is digested. Still, you know. A certain degree of detachment here is worthwhile. Yes, industry-wide nostalgia-riding is relentless; yes, the medium’s narrative potential looks to remain unfulfilled for obvious logistic reasons; yes, videogames are, on average, deeply mediocre. But I don’t have the energy nor the idealism to get truly angry over this carnivalesque little market. Lucky exceptions, coincidences and successes pop up with enough frequency to make the console-owning experience worthwhile. SSX 3's 30-minute full-mountain run is exceptionally good instant gratification. A neat, self-contained burst of escapism. I can casually speed down SSX 3‘s Big Mountain — or through chunks of Mega Man 2 or Super Mario Bros. 3 or Goldeneye 007 or other such rhythmically entrancing, expertly paced entertainment — when I want to punctuate my schedule with this specific, delightful sensation.
2002
text by Alex Felix
★★★⋆
“UNIMAGINABLY, POST-MARIO.”
Super Mario Sunshine is unimaginably post-Mario.
The problem, meanwhile, lies in videogames’ woeful inadequacy when it comes to being post-anything. Am I not allowed to take the bottom line as a given in writing an ActionButton review? I don’t think I am. You know what that makes this?
A post-review!
Thus, once more for emphasis: Super Mario Sunshine is – unimaginably, post-Mario.
See, a lot of people aren’t really sure if they liked Sunshine all that much in retrospect, and us people who play these videogames being who they are, this would count for exactly nothing except for that plenty of those same people (myself, for instance) weren’t really sure if they liked it all that much while they were playing it in the first place.
You know what I don’t like? I don’t like how it’s perhaps the only “canonical” Mario game to date that you couldn’t up and give to a six year old, expecting them to play it. The camera, for one thing, is absurdly player-dependent; actually, what with the game having you hover all over the place, the camera becomes this wonderful, ballet-like approximation of a dual-analog Mario game, for those who can handle it.
Not many could. This was a failure on Miyamoto’s part.
What other direction could they have headed in? It was, profoundly, 2002.
And besides – seriously – your right thumb has to be doing something once you’re already in the air, now that there isn’t any more B button. No run button, anyway.
It’s a strange thing, that B button. Like-minded folks have retroactively identified it as providing a much-needed sense of balance to the NES platfomers of yore, and that may yet be what made Mario into Mario – apart, of course, from all of the other things that did.
It’s awfully hard to tackle this one, you know that? Lord knows that nobody ever tried making the Sonic criticism “all you’re doing is holding right!” of a Mario title, lest the whole of the genre collapse like that right before their eyes. The point, just maybe, is that holding right and B really is that much more enjoyable, really did make all of the difference. Maybe.
And yet Mario 64 seemed to get by okay without, for the most part. That one gets the eternal nod for occupying the (positively gargantuan) time and place that it does, and hey, so much the better; rationalizing all of this talk of balance may yet get a person started on how it might not be a coincidence that the analog stick was smack in the middle of the N64 controller, whether or not anybody knew what to make of it. Or if, being displaced by the infinitely superior consideration of two analog sticks a short while later, it made all that much difference in the long run. Nevertheless. We were contented in 1996 to play, to explore; in 2002, not so much.
Six years is sort of a long time, you know. But getting back to the hovering.
Most people will tell you that Mario games are about jumping and I don’t know why they do that. To the best of my knowledge, that erstwhile moniker “platformer” only ever sprang up sometime between 1996 and 2002 (along with, it’s worth mentioning, IGN.com and ZSNES), and mainly to describe Mario 64-derived playgrounds. Before then, Mario was pure “action/adventure,” baby.
But now we knew. In our ever-changing world, we could be sure now and forever that in Mario, you jump. In Super Mario Bros., you jumped – as opposed to shooting people or kicking a soccer ball, I guess – and that was a lot of fun, so presumably you want to keep on jumping.
I think maybe we missed the point.
There’s only so many ways you can barely reach that next platform, you know.
Super Mario Sunshine did not miss the point. It took jumping completely for granted, in giving you a water-jetpack. Suddenly, the game couldn’t be bothered as to whether you could make a given jump – “have fun,” it said, “and if you insist on getting so much satisfaction out of jumping as late as you possibly can to reach the other side, then you can keep right on pretending the R button doesn’t exist, but frankly, we think you’ve had enough of that by now.”
Sunshine did not know its audience very well. I’m not sure it had an audience. But I’ll tell you what, there weren’t all that very many difficult jumps in Mario 64, either.
Was ever the onus on Sunshine to prove once and for all that videogames (read: Mario) were actually going somewhere? Can anybody remember? Somehow, I don’t think so; besides, all anybody wanted to play at the time were the linear, obstacle course levels where you didn’t get to use your water pack, and jumping was once again something to be proud of.
God forbid any game heed the term “bonus level” nowadays.
except, of course, post-modern, but nobody wants to be your friend when you bring up that one in your first sentence.
Poor Nintendo. A broad look at their main franchises (or at least “the big three,” as they were called for no reason whatsoever) early in the GameCube’s lifespan shows just how willing they were to stop and reconsider the whole darned thing. Wind Waker was too little too soon, ironically; nostalgia’s the hardest thing in the entire world to rationalize, don’t you know.
I’d venture to say that sometime in the not too distant past, Miyamoto and company realized that the way forward – if there was to be such a thing – practically had to involve a more or less complete break with their longstanding fans. They’d misjudged why people play videogames (answer: because they’ve always played videogames); and they were Nintendo, for chrissakes! They made Smash Brothers! If anybody ought to know better!
The end result of all this, of course, is the Wii. The Wii knows its audience, inasmuch as its audience unabashedly knows what they like, and the videogame industry – Nintendo in particular – has thus either imploded miserably, or else reached a previously unknown and unexpected level of “maturity.” Super Mario Galaxy, meanwhile, stands as the only franchise entry to date on the Wii that at least has a certain confidence about it. It’s going, ineffably. Disparage it for the same reasons we did Twilight Princess you cannot.
You know what it doesn’t have, though? A neat hub world. Galaxy’s hub world is, for most intents and purposes, a menu screen. For all it gives the player (otherwise an impossible amount), it can’t help but evoke in me pleasant memories of Delfino Plaza’s pastel rooftops.
And gosh, I mean –
Whatever makes you happy.
Whatever you remember as having made you happy.
–Alex Felix
★★★⋆
“UNIMAGINABLY, POST-MARIO.”
Super Mario Sunshine is unimaginably post-Mario.
The problem, meanwhile, lies in videogames’ woeful inadequacy when it comes to being post-anything. Am I not allowed to take the bottom line as a given in writing an ActionButton review? I don’t think I am. You know what that makes this?
A post-review!
Thus, once more for emphasis: Super Mario Sunshine is – unimaginably, post-Mario.
See, a lot of people aren’t really sure if they liked Sunshine all that much in retrospect, and us people who play these videogames being who they are, this would count for exactly nothing except for that plenty of those same people (myself, for instance) weren’t really sure if they liked it all that much while they were playing it in the first place.
You know what I don’t like? I don’t like how it’s perhaps the only “canonical” Mario game to date that you couldn’t up and give to a six year old, expecting them to play it. The camera, for one thing, is absurdly player-dependent; actually, what with the game having you hover all over the place, the camera becomes this wonderful, ballet-like approximation of a dual-analog Mario game, for those who can handle it.
Not many could. This was a failure on Miyamoto’s part.
What other direction could they have headed in? It was, profoundly, 2002.
And besides – seriously – your right thumb has to be doing something once you’re already in the air, now that there isn’t any more B button. No run button, anyway.
It’s a strange thing, that B button. Like-minded folks have retroactively identified it as providing a much-needed sense of balance to the NES platfomers of yore, and that may yet be what made Mario into Mario – apart, of course, from all of the other things that did.
It’s awfully hard to tackle this one, you know that? Lord knows that nobody ever tried making the Sonic criticism “all you’re doing is holding right!” of a Mario title, lest the whole of the genre collapse like that right before their eyes. The point, just maybe, is that holding right and B really is that much more enjoyable, really did make all of the difference. Maybe.
And yet Mario 64 seemed to get by okay without, for the most part. That one gets the eternal nod for occupying the (positively gargantuan) time and place that it does, and hey, so much the better; rationalizing all of this talk of balance may yet get a person started on how it might not be a coincidence that the analog stick was smack in the middle of the N64 controller, whether or not anybody knew what to make of it. Or if, being displaced by the infinitely superior consideration of two analog sticks a short while later, it made all that much difference in the long run. Nevertheless. We were contented in 1996 to play, to explore; in 2002, not so much.
Six years is sort of a long time, you know. But getting back to the hovering.
Most people will tell you that Mario games are about jumping and I don’t know why they do that. To the best of my knowledge, that erstwhile moniker “platformer” only ever sprang up sometime between 1996 and 2002 (along with, it’s worth mentioning, IGN.com and ZSNES), and mainly to describe Mario 64-derived playgrounds. Before then, Mario was pure “action/adventure,” baby.
But now we knew. In our ever-changing world, we could be sure now and forever that in Mario, you jump. In Super Mario Bros., you jumped – as opposed to shooting people or kicking a soccer ball, I guess – and that was a lot of fun, so presumably you want to keep on jumping.
I think maybe we missed the point.
There’s only so many ways you can barely reach that next platform, you know.
Super Mario Sunshine did not miss the point. It took jumping completely for granted, in giving you a water-jetpack. Suddenly, the game couldn’t be bothered as to whether you could make a given jump – “have fun,” it said, “and if you insist on getting so much satisfaction out of jumping as late as you possibly can to reach the other side, then you can keep right on pretending the R button doesn’t exist, but frankly, we think you’ve had enough of that by now.”
Sunshine did not know its audience very well. I’m not sure it had an audience. But I’ll tell you what, there weren’t all that very many difficult jumps in Mario 64, either.
Was ever the onus on Sunshine to prove once and for all that videogames (read: Mario) were actually going somewhere? Can anybody remember? Somehow, I don’t think so; besides, all anybody wanted to play at the time were the linear, obstacle course levels where you didn’t get to use your water pack, and jumping was once again something to be proud of.
God forbid any game heed the term “bonus level” nowadays.
except, of course, post-modern, but nobody wants to be your friend when you bring up that one in your first sentence.
Poor Nintendo. A broad look at their main franchises (or at least “the big three,” as they were called for no reason whatsoever) early in the GameCube’s lifespan shows just how willing they were to stop and reconsider the whole darned thing. Wind Waker was too little too soon, ironically; nostalgia’s the hardest thing in the entire world to rationalize, don’t you know.
I’d venture to say that sometime in the not too distant past, Miyamoto and company realized that the way forward – if there was to be such a thing – practically had to involve a more or less complete break with their longstanding fans. They’d misjudged why people play videogames (answer: because they’ve always played videogames); and they were Nintendo, for chrissakes! They made Smash Brothers! If anybody ought to know better!
The end result of all this, of course, is the Wii. The Wii knows its audience, inasmuch as its audience unabashedly knows what they like, and the videogame industry – Nintendo in particular – has thus either imploded miserably, or else reached a previously unknown and unexpected level of “maturity.” Super Mario Galaxy, meanwhile, stands as the only franchise entry to date on the Wii that at least has a certain confidence about it. It’s going, ineffably. Disparage it for the same reasons we did Twilight Princess you cannot.
You know what it doesn’t have, though? A neat hub world. Galaxy’s hub world is, for most intents and purposes, a menu screen. For all it gives the player (otherwise an impossible amount), it can’t help but evoke in me pleasant memories of Delfino Plaza’s pastel rooftops.
And gosh, I mean –
Whatever makes you happy.
Whatever you remember as having made you happy.
–Alex Felix
text by Brandon Parker
★★☆☆
“LIKE PLAYING A VIDEOGAME ADAPTATION OF SOME BADASS FILM OF MYTH AND LEGEND; IT'S STILL LIKE PLAYING A LICENSED VIDEOGAME.”
My brother is something of a gun and warfare connoisseur, while historically, I’m the more medicated of the Parker Brothers. Much like Kane and Lynch, on their hell-bound quest of greed and vengeance, we too are on a hell-bound quest for a good cooperative game. And a game that already has us screaming at each other as part of the story to begin with, me shooting innocent bystanders while he tries to proceed tactically, well what could we do? We were helpless, it seemed, as if it were designed specifically for us and us alone.  Unfortunately I must report that Kane & Lynch is not the perfect game it should have been.
Everyone knows a videogame based on a movie is a stuffty thing. We learn this as children. They’ve got all the movie’s 1-2 minute realistic looking action scenes drawn out to ridiculous hour long John Woo-ish shootout levels, with the actual story edited down to some cheaply animated cutscene, or maybe just some text on a loading screen.Kane & Lynch is not based on a film, at least not one in particular or officially, but playing the thing you’d think you were playing a mediocre game adaptation of what must be the single most badass film ever. A film so badass anyone who watches it is rendered impotent or insane, the only way we could possible hope to experience it safely is through some stuffty game adaptation, acting as a sort of thick concrete barrier against such a radiation bath of pure awesomeness.
Looking at the concept art for the game, you can see all sorts of cool stuff going on. Kane grabbing Lynch in a bank lobby, screaming as bullets are flying past, while Lynch just gives him the ol’ “I didn’t mean to murder all the hostages” look. Or the two of them in a car together yelling at each other with some taped up terror-stricken tart in the back seat.
My friends, listen, we need that sort of stuff in the actual game. Don’t just draw that up then stick it in a drawer and forget about it. And if you do throw a driving part into the next game you don’t automatically have to make it into some getaway action scene with stuffty driving mechanics. Maybe they want to get some food at a drive-in restrurant and while they are sitting there enjoying their food, the nice weather, talking about the next big score, maybe then a patrol car spots them and then you can turn it into a mini-game with stuffty driving physics if you want.  I’m not asking for Metal Gear-esque hour long cutscenes in every game, unless you want to, if you want, that is, it’s up to you. Just something to liven up this nonstop shooting really. Let’s see Kane and Lynch doing something normal in between these levels or something.
At the beginning of one level Lynch mentions having taken the last of his pills on the plane ride. Well why not let us see that plane ride? What drove him to take his last pill? Some kid kicking his seat? Some annoying old lady trying to get chatty with him? Kane and Lynch’s airplane adventure, why not. Something to help the illusion that these a real people, not videogame characters who do nothing but constantly shoot stuff.
There is one part of the game where it skips in the story a little, suddenly showing the characters in a war torn country, in military garb and sporting beards. Now, that time it was awesome. So you have to figure this out Io, and know when to skip around and when to show us what these guys are doing in between the 3d shooting gallery parts, because I won’t always be there for you.
There’s a little trailer deal for the game out there. It’s just shows some closed elevator doors while you hear Kane and Lynch talk about Grand Theft Auto 4 being delayed. For some reason it’s just supposed to be some stupid “just for laughs” internet trailer, but that’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about here that needs to be in the actual game. That irks me to no end that they didn’t put that in the game, or that they just thought something like that was nothing more than a “joke” or whatever. To me, that’s the whole thing right there.
The biggest problem with the game though, is a music one.  That badass theme they play in all the trailers and on the website?  Where the hell was that during the game?  Nowhere.  Mostly it’s just some depressing Silent Hill sounding stuff.  I thought I’d be doing all sorts of heists and what have you to that music.  When I saw it listed in the credits as “trailer music,” I have to say, a part of me felt violated.  Conned at the least.
Io Interactive had a good idea, it was: “Flawed Mercenary and Medicated Psychopath pull heists and stuff, co-op!” They plastered it all over their press releases and the back of the damn box, they constantly pistol-whipped you with the idea the whole time they were hyping the game up and always with the same wording. They really wanted to emphasize how flawed Kane is, how medicated Lynch is, and boy what a ticking time bomb their relationship is. I’m sure if you looked it up, you’d see they’ve probably got a copyright on “mercenary who is not perfect and unstable man with a condition operating in conjunction,” or something. They really liked this idea, they just forgot to make the game as good as the idea, is what happened.
They were hoping that if their idea was good enough to get a movie deal and sequel before the first damn game is even finished, then maybe it was good enough to carry their generic shooting game all by itself. Maybe it would have if they didn’t leave all the good music out, I don’t know. But I won’t settle for secondhand awesome next time. I’d like to believe they love the idea behind their game, as I do, and I hope that next time they just show it the proper care and guidance it needs. Kane and Lynch just need love and attention, that’s all.
★★☆☆
“LIKE PLAYING A VIDEOGAME ADAPTATION OF SOME BADASS FILM OF MYTH AND LEGEND; IT'S STILL LIKE PLAYING A LICENSED VIDEOGAME.”
My brother is something of a gun and warfare connoisseur, while historically, I’m the more medicated of the Parker Brothers. Much like Kane and Lynch, on their hell-bound quest of greed and vengeance, we too are on a hell-bound quest for a good cooperative game. And a game that already has us screaming at each other as part of the story to begin with, me shooting innocent bystanders while he tries to proceed tactically, well what could we do? We were helpless, it seemed, as if it were designed specifically for us and us alone.  Unfortunately I must report that Kane & Lynch is not the perfect game it should have been.
Everyone knows a videogame based on a movie is a stuffty thing. We learn this as children. They’ve got all the movie’s 1-2 minute realistic looking action scenes drawn out to ridiculous hour long John Woo-ish shootout levels, with the actual story edited down to some cheaply animated cutscene, or maybe just some text on a loading screen.Kane & Lynch is not based on a film, at least not one in particular or officially, but playing the thing you’d think you were playing a mediocre game adaptation of what must be the single most badass film ever. A film so badass anyone who watches it is rendered impotent or insane, the only way we could possible hope to experience it safely is through some stuffty game adaptation, acting as a sort of thick concrete barrier against such a radiation bath of pure awesomeness.
Looking at the concept art for the game, you can see all sorts of cool stuff going on. Kane grabbing Lynch in a bank lobby, screaming as bullets are flying past, while Lynch just gives him the ol’ “I didn’t mean to murder all the hostages” look. Or the two of them in a car together yelling at each other with some taped up terror-stricken tart in the back seat.
My friends, listen, we need that sort of stuff in the actual game. Don’t just draw that up then stick it in a drawer and forget about it. And if you do throw a driving part into the next game you don’t automatically have to make it into some getaway action scene with stuffty driving mechanics. Maybe they want to get some food at a drive-in restrurant and while they are sitting there enjoying their food, the nice weather, talking about the next big score, maybe then a patrol car spots them and then you can turn it into a mini-game with stuffty driving physics if you want.  I’m not asking for Metal Gear-esque hour long cutscenes in every game, unless you want to, if you want, that is, it’s up to you. Just something to liven up this nonstop shooting really. Let’s see Kane and Lynch doing something normal in between these levels or something.
At the beginning of one level Lynch mentions having taken the last of his pills on the plane ride. Well why not let us see that plane ride? What drove him to take his last pill? Some kid kicking his seat? Some annoying old lady trying to get chatty with him? Kane and Lynch’s airplane adventure, why not. Something to help the illusion that these a real people, not videogame characters who do nothing but constantly shoot stuff.
There is one part of the game where it skips in the story a little, suddenly showing the characters in a war torn country, in military garb and sporting beards. Now, that time it was awesome. So you have to figure this out Io, and know when to skip around and when to show us what these guys are doing in between the 3d shooting gallery parts, because I won’t always be there for you.
There’s a little trailer deal for the game out there. It’s just shows some closed elevator doors while you hear Kane and Lynch talk about Grand Theft Auto 4 being delayed. For some reason it’s just supposed to be some stupid “just for laughs” internet trailer, but that’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about here that needs to be in the actual game. That irks me to no end that they didn’t put that in the game, or that they just thought something like that was nothing more than a “joke” or whatever. To me, that’s the whole thing right there.
The biggest problem with the game though, is a music one.  That badass theme they play in all the trailers and on the website?  Where the hell was that during the game?  Nowhere.  Mostly it’s just some depressing Silent Hill sounding stuff.  I thought I’d be doing all sorts of heists and what have you to that music.  When I saw it listed in the credits as “trailer music,” I have to say, a part of me felt violated.  Conned at the least.
Io Interactive had a good idea, it was: “Flawed Mercenary and Medicated Psychopath pull heists and stuff, co-op!” They plastered it all over their press releases and the back of the damn box, they constantly pistol-whipped you with the idea the whole time they were hyping the game up and always with the same wording. They really wanted to emphasize how flawed Kane is, how medicated Lynch is, and boy what a ticking time bomb their relationship is. I’m sure if you looked it up, you’d see they’ve probably got a copyright on “mercenary who is not perfect and unstable man with a condition operating in conjunction,” or something. They really liked this idea, they just forgot to make the game as good as the idea, is what happened.
They were hoping that if their idea was good enough to get a movie deal and sequel before the first damn game is even finished, then maybe it was good enough to carry their generic shooting game all by itself. Maybe it would have if they didn’t leave all the good music out, I don’t know. But I won’t settle for secondhand awesome next time. I’d like to believe they love the idea behind their game, as I do, and I hope that next time they just show it the proper care and guidance it needs. Kane and Lynch just need love and attention, that’s all.
2007
text by tim rogers
★★⋆☆
“NOT A CULTURAL EVENT -- IT'S JUST A VIDEOGAME.”
There comes a point in every high-profile game-reviewer’s life when he has to put down that can of Red Bull (which has likely been empty for minutes now) and start banging out the words. Here at Action Button Dot Net, we don’t have the rigorous deadlines and tight schedules of videogame magazines, who employ what must be the hardest-working souls on earth; without them, we wouldn’t exist, for better or for worse, though forget about that. This paragraph is meant to indicate that it is only after great consideration and much stewing in my own juices that I finally decide to talk about Super Mario Galaxy, a month after tearing all the way through it from start to finish, a year and a day after the Wii’s launch in Japan, a year and two days after deciding that it couldn’t be released any sooner, and nearly twelve years of praying that, some day, it would come, and that it would be great.
Though I was yet a teenager at a time, Super Mario 64 did not excite me precisely in the way it excited Chris Slate of Ultra Game Players, who said (and this is off the top of my head) “Right now, today, Super Mario 64 is the best game I’ve ever played”. I appreciated his use of the commas around the word “today” — very literesque — though I didn’t quite share his enthusiasm. I was a boy gifted with the experience of having played Super Mario Bros. for only a few short months before God brought us Super Mario Bros. 3. I hadn’t had years of habitual Super Mario Bros. under my belt, and if anything, this made the refinements of Super Mario Bros. 3 all the more crisp.
In other words, upon playing Super Mario 64 for ten minutes, I was already anticipating the game that would play Super Mario Bros. 3 to its Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Sunshine, released for the Gamecube, was more or less a one-off. Around the time of its release, Nintendo had already been parading Super Mario left and right, in party games, puzzle games, golf games, tennis games. Sunshine seemingly existed to prove that Nintendo could put Super Mario into another action-platform game, if they wanted. It was like they were saying, see, we’re not scared to make another Super Mario game. I’ll admit that I was rather crushed with how just-decent it was, though now that I look back, I wish that people like me had just let it slide. What Mario — the person — needed was a bloodletting. He needed to cool his jets. He needed to star in one action-platform game a year for, I don’t know, five years. Sunshine had the tropical island theme. Maybe they could have set the next one at a ski resort, had Mario sliding down lots of hills.
Instead, a million slighted fanboy hearts beat in unison; the drumming on the horizon scared Nintendo’s creative geniuses back into their shells. When, eventually, Super Mario Galaxy was announced, Nintendo’s American face kept no secrets: lovable buffoon president Reggie Fils-Aime was proud to say that Galaxy would be the “true successor to Super Mario 64“. We — the proverbial “kids at home” — filled in the blanks: “Just like Super Mario Bros. 3 was the true successor to Super Mario Bros.“
And now here it is, and I don’t like it. I mean, I really, really, really, really don’t like it. It just about makes me nauseous how little I like it. What went wrong? Really? Oh no — I’m not asking these questions about the game’s development process. I’m asking them about myself. Why does disliking this game depress me so much? When I at first emerged on the other side of Super Mario Galaxy, feeling deflated, I thought, if I write a review of this on Action Button Dot Net, people are going to accuse us of being controversial, of hit-baiting, of attention-cravery. People are going to accuse us of trying to heck up the Metacritic score (even though we don’t submit scores to Metacritic) or trying to drum up ad revenue (even though we don’t have ads). More importantly, I’m going to get literally thousands of greasy-fingered hate mails from people telling me that I’m not human, that I have soul cancer, that I’ve forgotten how to have fun.
And maybe these things are true. Maybe I have forgotten how to have fun, though I’ll be darned if I can’t still see some flickering shadow of fun on my bedroom wall late at night, just before I fall asleep. It is the Rosebud of my every barely-waking moment. When I close my eyes, I can see the shape of how, exactly, I selfishly wanted Super Mario Galaxy to be. It would have been miraculous. At least, for me, it would have been.
Instead, we get a weird, cloying, conflicted jumble of good concepts, amazing concepts, genius concepts, brilliant concepts, and junk. When I try to focus on the game, I end up distracted by all the floating debris.
This is not “schtick”. This is not this website’s “thing”. This is just how I feel.
I had envisioned this game as a joyful rope — a straight shot from planetoid to planetoid, with multiple ways to “solve” each planetoid, resulting in varied, multiple paths through the game. I blame this impression on the ten-minute demo I was able to play at a Nintendo Wii showcase event in Tokyo just before the console’s launch in Japan. In that demo, well-placed Mushroom Retainers give you simple control instructions (jump, triple jump, squat-jump, wall-jump) as you make your way up a mountainside. Eventually, you reach a mountaintop that’s well into the stratosphere, where you choose to go left or right. Either path leads to a star that blasts you off toward a series of planetoid challenges.
This left a strong impression on me; I was instantly fascinated with the game’s subtlety. Maybe this could have been the “difficulty selection” — maybe the only place to learn that the left path was “hard” and the right path was “easy” would be to look it up in the instruction manual? In this day and age of non-gamers welcoming Nintendo back with opened wallets, who knows what craziness is in the air? Maybe people can actually be trusted to read instruction manuals again?
In an interview some nine months after my initial, overjoyed impressions of the game, Shigeru Miyamoto told Weekly Famitsu‘s editor-in-chief Hirokazu Hamamura that his team’s “main goal” in Super Mario Galaxy was to make a game that was easy enough for anyone to pick up and play — a game that could be embraced and played to completion by non-gamers, all while never once making the hardcore gamers feel like they’re being “patronized”. He actually used the Japanese verb “being licked” (like a mommy kitty licks a baby kitty, to help the image along) — he was well into meaning-business mode. Maybe he’d played the latest Zelda games, where a blasted text box will scream at you about the function of a key every single god damned time you pick up a key: “You got a magic key! . . . This is a magic key! . . . It can be used to unlock one door! After unlocking one door, this magic key will vanish!”
I took Miyamoto’s “No Licking” stance to mean that he was against the source of the licking as well as the act of licking itself. Maybe he’d stopped and asked himself two questions, regarding the keys in Zelda: number one, why can’t the game show you what a key does? When you use a key to unlock a door, maybe we could just see the key hover up above the hero’s head, fly into the lock, click, turn, and vanish into a puff of smoke as the door rumbles open? Then we’d know, deep down, “Hey, that key’s gone now.” Number two: why does the key have to disappear after we use it? The answer to the second question has something to do with how the key isn’t a “key” so much as it’s just “something to do” in order to progress deeper into a dungeon. On a deeper, weirder psychological level, the key is imprinting our children with obsessive urges to always look for the solution to the problem before their eyes in the most far-flung place. In this way, it can be construed that games aren’t running parallel to real-world logic so much as they’re scribbling poisonous crayon circles anywhere they please.
Yet Super Mario Galaxy licked me plenty of times, up and down, all over. At a certain point about three-quarters of the way through the game — this almost scarred me for life — I was swimming in a giant liquid sphere toward a floating tower, when a penguin sidled up to me out of nowhere and with a hateful snippet of a sound effect, his text box took up the greater part of the center of the screen: “PRESS THE A BUTTON TO SWIM”.
It occurs to me once again that no one in any Japanese office anywhere, precisely, has yet been able to construct a Powerpoint presentation that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that though the people who forget to use the one button on the controller to do almost everything, or else forget that keys unlock doors are forgetful enough to also have lost the instruction manual (and possibly box) of every game they own, they are probably also forgetful enough to misplace the game disc and/or the console.
Someone should really get on that proof. This could be the Pythagorean Theorem of the 21st Century.
The cloying and the down-talking penetrates to only the most bizarre strata of Super Mario Galaxy. The hub world is the most visible offender. In Super Mario 64, we had a castle, where everything was laid-out in an easily understandable fashion: the first mission you complete nets you a Power Star; you remember a door with a star logo and a numeral “1” on it, you stand near the door, Mario yields a star in his hand, and the door opens. Many doors with stars and numerals exist; each stage has seven stars for you to earn; from so very close to the beginning, you’re on your own.
Super Mario 64, though purchased at a one-to-one attach rate with the Nintendo 64 hardware, was not considered a success in Japan, because the Nintendo 64 hardware was not considered a success. A Nintendo fanboy could tell you that this is because the World Was Wrong, that They didn’t know what was Good for Them. Nintendo took a bath on the Gamecube as well; some would say that they decided to change their policies after that, though I would argue that they didn’t. I would argue that the success of the DS, of the Wii, and of new president Satoru Iwata is grounded firmly in Iwata’s bold decision to stick with the company’s guns, to emphasize rather than mute the little conceptual quirks (like connecting your Gameboy Advance to your Gamecube so each player has his own little handheld screen) that had possibly turned off the gaming populace. The Wii remote is very much a direct continuation of the DS stylus, et cetera. And if Wii Sports has proven anything, it’s that Nintendo’s games are successful with non-gamers because they’re presented and packaged well, not because they’re more simple than other games or because they’re similar to real-life actions — or even because they’re actually fun.
In other words, I find it vaguely unsettling that one of Nintendo’s ideas for making the game “simple” enough for the “wider audience” to “understand” involved gutting the hands-on “exploration” element out of the hub world; instead of a living, breathing (yet empty — for a reason) castle, we’ve got a floating fortress / spaceship thing with loud creatures buzzing all around and these ugly rooms with fixed camera angles, where all of the levels are contained. Clear a mission, and you’ll see a load-masking cut-scene of Mario flying back to the hub; he’ll land, and the Burnoutitis will commence: a big menu pops up, telling you “NEW HIGH SCORE”; it counts down how many coins you earned, then it switches to another menu, and tells you how many star bits you picked up, then it switches to another menu to tell you you’ve opened a new stage, then a map pops up, and a star logo in one of the various rooms of the ship blinks loudly. Go inside a room — say, the kitchen — and arbitrarily point the remote at a blue star and press the A button, which will pull Mario toward it; the screen switches to a planetarium view; select the galaxy you want to fly to — galaxies you can’t enter are marked by a star icon and a numeral (the number of stars needed to unlock it) — click on it, and you’ll see a little cut-scene of Mario flying out in space. Now a screen pops up with a list of star goals for the selected galaxy. Choose the one you want, and there’s another triumphant “WAHOO”. With a “YES!”, Mario lands in the galaxy, and there you have it: you’re finally playing a videogame.
Why put all this bullstuff between the action set-pieces? I mean, at the very least, could we not have the “YAY! Look at this numeric representation of how YOU’RE SUCH A GOOD BOY“? All the original Super Mario Bros. had was the timer countdown and the fireworks; that seemed to do pretty nicely for most people. That game sold, like, literally 20 million copies! Here we are in the twenty-first century, and here we are with all this stopping and starting. I wanted to play a rope. I wanted the game to just keep going, keep evolving, keep crunching. I wanted it to be a delicious buffet dinner, not a room full of bottles of multi-vitamins.
To be both more concrete and more abstract, I wanted the game to get more difficult as it went along. Instead, the game’s difficulty level stays numbingly even from beginning to end. The bosses are all little puzzles with obvious solutions. (It usually involves using the spin attack to knock back a projectile.)
The thing is, if you want Super Mario Galaxy to be challenging, you have to want it to be challenging. You only need sixty stars to complete the “main” game, though if you’re an acquitted kleptomaniac, you can get sixty more, and then a nifty little reward.
And this isn’t the most of it. I’ll tell you what’s the worst. The game, as a series of challenges, isn’t even about anything so much as it’s about itself. Literally halfway through the game, you arrive in a “galaxy” that you need thirty stars to unlock (you can complete the game with as few as sixty stars). The first mission in the galaxy is called “The Rabbits Are Looking For Something”. You land in the galaxy, where a big, fuzzy bee immediately gets all up in your face. “The rabbits are looking for something!” he says. Walk down the only path before you, and you’ll come up to a rabbit who is, maybe, looking for something. Get too close to the rabbit, and he automatically talks to you. “Where could that [STAR CHIP] be?” In place of the “[STAR CHIP]” is a Star Chip icon. Star Chips are these blue fragment things; if you collect five of them, they join together to make a star-thing that teleports you somewhere else, so you can once again feel the orgasm of progress. The camera floats up softly. We see a Star Chip floating high above the ground. The rabbit remains oblivious. (Compelling side-question: is Mario, too, oblivious?) We now notice that the rabbit is standing in the middle of a peculiar arrangement of three wooden posts. We may remember, from earlier missions or worlds or galaxies, that Mario can perform a hip-drop if we press the Z button while jumping. Do a hip drop on a wooden post, and you can hammer it into the ground. We see these three posts, and we hammer them all in. Out of nowhere, a rotating star-gate-thing appears. We stand in it, remember that we have to shake the remote to use it, shake the remote, and Mario flies up just high enough to grab the Star Chip. He doesn’t not inform the rabbit that he found the Star Chip. (This is crucial.) The next rabbit we find is standing near a large wooden box. “I can almost smell a [STAR CHIP ICON]”. The camera pans slyly right, highlighting the wooden box. We might remember from earlier missions that we can shake the remote to make Mario do a spin attack move. Spin attacks can break boxes. We break the box. We collect the Star Chip that had been inside. Again, Mario does not inform the rabbit that he has found the Star Chip (double crucial). The other challenges in this mission require you to remember how to jump on enemies or remember that Mario has to ability to perform a wall jump. None of these challenges are laid-out as set pieces. They just wobble there, hunks of pineapple in lime Jell-O. When at last you assemble the Star Gate Thing and blast off to the final portion of the stage, there’s Mario on a planetoid with a rabbit. The rabbit has the star. He says he’ll give it to you, if you can beat him in a race.
. . . Like, what the heck? Are these rabbits not all on the same side? If this rabbit had the star from the beginning, why were the other rabbits looking for star chips? Is he a rogue rabbit? This is why Shigeru Miyamoto says they shouldn’t put stories in these things.
The important analysis to make of the above example is that Super Mario Galaxy is a game that, as far as halfway into its duration, continually rewards the player with something the game has contrived the player to need after the player remembers a thing that he can do, and then does it.
You might remember the first time you walked into a room in a Zelda game to see a locked door and four unlit torches. In your inventory you had a lantern that was capable of lighting torches. Somewhere deep down, you knew the truth, only you would never be able to put it into words: “If I light those four torches, that door is going to open”. Sometimes, the door would just open by magic; sometimes, a key would fall from the sky. Sometimes, you’d light the four torches, and enemies would fall into the room: kill them, and the door opened magically. This is sick, people. This is a mind-killer. Grand Theft Auto doesn’t turn kids into prostitute-killing car-jackers, because it looks real enough to be ridiculous. Super Mario Galaxy, however, with its slick, abstract, kid-friendly cartoon exterior, stands a pretty good chance of turning all of our children into kleptomaniacs (or, at the very least, obsessive-compulsives).
Most reviews of this game cite this as a sign of its generosity, of its deep bounty. I’ll admit that some of the harder missions are indeed What I Crave when it comes to platform games — time attacks, speed collection, more enemies — though they really are just rehashes of the same levels you’ve already played. And some of those levels are terrorism; replaying those levels for time is about as much fun as organizing data into a spreadsheet while riding the fastest train in the world. I’m not saying that reusing / rehashing is the devil, necessarily, just that I kind of miss the days when the difficult parts of a game were, you know, actually included in the game. For example, in Super Mario Bros. 3, if you wanted to finish the game, you had no choice: you’re going to have to go through that amazingly tough castle. You’re going to have to platform-hop across that ridiculous fleet of jet-plane airships.
Now, though, when we’ve invited grandma into the living room, games have to act civilized. Everyone has the right to witness the full curve of a game’s content, these days. To be fair, Nintendo’s been moving this way ever since Super Mario World, where the best part of the game, the Special World, is very difficult, quite hidden, extremely optional, and rewards you, when you complete it, only by making the game graphically hideous. Sunshine only turned the gain up (that’s a guitar term) on certain missions within each level, though with the way the game was structured, you didn’t always have to play them. If you did, though, it’d put you in a better position for progressing through the main game. Nonetheless, the hard parts of Sunshine were immediately visible as such: Mario was stripped of the water-blasting backpack that served as the game’s main gimmick, and the background music switched to an a cappella riff on the original Super Mario Bros. theme. And there you were, alone with floating platforms, tricky jumps, and a relentlessly all-encompassing deathvoid.
The high-difficulty segments of Sunshine were amazingly brilliant, most of the time, and Shigeru Miyamoto, himself, was quoted shortly after the game’s release as saying he’d love to make a whole game in that style. (I really wish he would.) What’s most important here is that they were all new and unique parts of the game. It seems, now, that Nintendo’s design philosophy has shifted: to deny anyone, even grandpa, a chance to romp around without fear of death in any unique part of the game is a serious crime. (Or, perhaps, judging by the fact that you can’t skip the “How to Fasten the Wii Remote Strap” screen until it’s been displayed for ten whole seconds, maybe the legal team advised them of the danger of a class-action lawsuit from widows of old men with overloaded pacemakers.)
(At any rate, at least Super Mario Galaxy‘s optional difficult segments are better presented than the “hidden” worlds of New Super Mario Bros. You know, how you have to take it upon yourself to defeat a boss The Hard Way just so you can be slotted down a path to a slightly different, maybe-more-difficult world. Like, why should World 6 be harder than World 7, really?)
The phantom lurking behind all this is called “Story”. Galaxy‘s developers knew that they couldn’t make a Mario game without a story, even though the story would have to be the same old thing it always is. Any deviation would result in tired groans all around the internet: Bowser has kidnapped the princess. Go get her back. The ending is no secret from the very beginning: Mario’s going to beat Bowser, get the princess back, and save the day. (And he’s so obviously not going to get laid.)
People of all ages loved Super Mario Bros., way back in the day, regardless of their grasp of the story. All they had to know was that this little guy had a quest, a quest that lurked somewhere to the right of where he is when we first meet him. Maybe they read the full story in the instruction manual, or maybe the neighbor kid explained it to them: “This dragon kidnapped a princess, and you’ve got to save her.” Whether you know the story or not, the enigmatic “Our Princess is in Another Castle” at the end of every four stages has never not been something pop-cultural enough to put on a T-shirt. There’s nothing similarly pop-culture-event-like about Super Mario Galaxy; just a fetishistic puppet show of squealing CG and mishmashed production values. Like, why have CG cut-scenes, if the characters aren’t going to talk? The first three seconds of Bowser’s “speech” in the opening scene are cute: he’s making this huge robo-dragon grumbling sound, while subtitles indicate that he’s speaking actual words. Then, once the grumble has looped for maybe the sixth time, it starts to get disturbing. Your ear becomes accustomed to the peaks and valleys in the individual sound waves, and maybe it all starts to seem a little off. Princess Peach, who is offered the courtesy of the only full sentence of dialogue in the game (in her letter at the very beginning), is revealed as typically speaking a language consisting of high-pitched pouts; Bowser’s right-hand magician speaks entirely in hyecking cackles.
Why not put voice-acting in? It’s a tiny, trite issue, I’ll admit, though really, why not go the extra step? It seems to me that Nintendo knew the story to Super Mario Galaxy was so totally not the point, and didn’t want to bother putting too much effort into the cut-scenes. Why have them in the first place, then? My dad taught me long ago: even if he knows the right fielder is going to catch that pop fly, Pete Rose keeps running for first base, and he doesn’t stop there. That’s why they called him “Charlie Hustle” — because he hustled (ironically, his name wasn’t Charlie) no matter what the circumstances. In other words, yes, maybe Nintendo should have just gone ahead and put voice-acting into Super Mario Galaxy, even if they were convinced that the story was filler nonsense; or maybe they should have just not put any story into it at all. Or at least no dialogue — do we really need subtitles to know that Bowser is threatening Peach, or that his assistant is threatening Mario? Pictures speak a thousand words, and CG — especially when it’s as colorful and sweet as in Super Mario Galaxy — speaks a million. Right?
One thing we don’t need, for sure, is the mysterious Princess Rosalina, who has absolutely no function in the story other than to stand around and explain the mechanics of the game — over and over and over again. I don’t get it — I kept thinking that maybe she had some sinister motive, though by the end of the game, when it’s revealed that there’s nothing to reveal, I was scratching my head. It was something like the end of Dragon Quest VII, during the course of which you can build a huge casino-centric metropolis on a tropical island as a side-quest, though no matter how awesome the city is, the main character goes back to being his fisherman father’s assistant at the end of the game. Princess Rosalina is a lot like that — too much time was spent designing her character, with no payoff. And all she does, for the most part, is recite lines from the instruction manual, or else describe things that the cut-scenes have already pretty much succeeded at getting across: every single time we earn a “Grand Star” from beating a boss, the Grand Star flies into the core of the hub, thus increasing the size and color of the core; a quick look-around scene shows energy flowing through the veins on the floor, demonstrating that power is being restored to another part of the hub. Why, then, must Princess Rosalina tell us, “The Grand Star has powered up the core, restoring energy to The Kitchen!” Why tell us that the room we’re about to go check out is a kitchen? For god’s sake, let us figure it out for ourselves; Grandpa’s Pacemaker isn’t going to explode because “Holy stuff no one told me it was gonna be a kitchen!!” Princess Rosalina feels simultaneously underused and tacked-on — which I guess isn’t all that amazing. Someone at Nintendo designed her, and they figured, hey, let’s put her into this game. What you end up with, though, is a symptom of the weird non-terminal illness infecting every Nintendo universe these days: hundreds of man-hours spilled into the task of painting a sign. Assigning a police officer to every STOP sign in town, so he can remind every motorist personally that “STOP” means “Stop”. Et cetera. Princess Rosalina is Nintendo using their assets because their assets are their assets. It’s the same thing they were doing back with Super Mario Stadium baseball, when they let Goomba be a selectable player even though Goombas have no hands and therefore can’t hold a baseball bat. It’s a spliter of the weird fever that gave birth to The Lightning Bolt in Super Mario Kart — a power-up that the person in last place, who is in last place for a reason (the reason being that he sucks at playing the game), has a much higher probability of receiving than anyone else. The Lightning Bolt will shrink and severely handicap every other racer, so that the person in last place might catch up. What happens when the Lightning Bolt wears off? We can say that, most of the time, the sucky player is surpassed once again. Why offer them that hope, then? Isn’t that kind of, you know, sick? Why not teach people to live with their mistakes, and regain their footing thanks to actual skill? Someone at Nintendo must have recently made a similarly pointed hypothesis, resulting in muted difficulty curves and more screen-filling help messages. Princess Rosalina is a lingering figment of Nintendo’s “let everyone play” mentality, only she’s not a real human being, and she’s not serving any purpose.
She certainly is, however, a lot hotter than Princess Peach. Why bother rescuing Peach, if you’ve got a hotter Princess right here? Go ahead and accuse me of being shallow, if you want, though really, how much do we know about Princess Peach and Mario’s relationship? Under the best circumstances, the earliest players of Super Mario Bros. didn’t know what the princess looked like until they got to the very, very end of the game. It would have surprised them if there hadn’t been a princess, though only because they’d been expecting one, even if the promise had never had any visual confirmation. If Super Mario Galaxy were made perfectly — and it’s not perfect — we would need no dialogue, no hub world, no Princess Rosalina: just a look at Princess Peach, a visual confirmation of the tyranny of the dragon, an unassuming launch into outer space, and it’d be hard not to hit the ground running from there. Instead, when the game opens, we’re chasing rabbits on a little planetoid, rabbits who, though they don’t want to be caught, are also telling us to “Press the A button to jump!” Whatever happened to teaching the player how to play through context? In Super Mario Bros., there’s a Goomba right there in front of us. There are blocks with question marks, which produce shiny things when hit, there’s a mushroom we can eat to grow large, there’s a pipe we can’t progress over without jumping. There you have it: crushing enemies, breaking blocks, earning coins, surpassing obstacles, all taught to us right at the beginning. Mario’s been likened to Charlie Chaplin before; why not make his games play like silent films? If there absolutely must be a tutorial involving a hecking rabbit, why not make the rabbit show us how to jump instead of tell us? Again, when the controller has only one button, it’s kind of unforgivable. Let’s watch the rabbit jump, once, twice, three times. He can teach us how to wall-jump, all on the way up a mountain, like in that demo I played last year. And then the game can commence, the beautiful rope I yearn for even now, the beautiful rope I cannot have.
Instead, Nintendo’s way of supposedly making the game more friendly to the mainstream is to give Mario as many complicated moves as possible. Shake the Wii remote to initiate Mario’s ridiculous spin attack, because
1. Mario needs an attack
2. it’s not a real Wii game if you don’t have to shake the remote.
For God’s sake, that the current most-anticipated Wii game is Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which will not use the Wii’s motion-sensing functionality, should probably say something, though I’m not totally sure what.
Mario’s spin attack is a real limp noodle stuck to the center of your TV screen. I could never shake (no pun intended) the tackiness of it. After Mario spins, there’s a lull, during which he can’t spin again. This is clearly to limit the player’s ability to shake the controller like crazy, so that Mario is always attacking, wherever he goes, which would make any “advanced” playing session of the game look even less like art. You’ll know Mario is able to attack again when the little star pops out from under Mario’s hat and makes a little doggie chew-toy noise. The little star exists mainly so that the player can feel some tiny intangible debt to Princess Rosalina, thus validating her existence as a character: see, it’s Rosalina that gives us the little magic star, which grants us the spin attack and the ability to fly through space. Personally, I would rather none of this be explained at all, though clearly Nintendo continuity fetishists would fall apart at the seams if there weren’t plenty of slow-moving dialogue windows to seal all the holes, to keep it all air-tight — never mind that the explanation is a flaming load of bullstuff, if a guy with a mushroom for a head says it, it must be true.
I would rather Mario just punch and kick the enemies in the face, the way he did in Super Mario 64. Maybe that was considered Way Too Violent for Grandpa’s Pacemaker, I don’t know. Either way, I hereby declare my strict stance against normal attack actions that require the player to shake the Wii remote.
Besides, there’s the cute little star-bit-collecting/shooting thing to fill the waggle quota.
Before playing the game, I remember thinking that man, it looks like it’d be a lot of fun with a Dual Shock. Now that I’ve played it and experienced the star-bit collection firsthand, I have to say it’s kind of nice — in concept. I’ve always fantasized about a game where you control two characters at once — part of the reason I love the right-analog-stick controlled RC car in Ape Escape — so the extra-peripheral weirdness of collecting star-bits with the pointer while running Mario around is really welcome for me. All throughout Twilight Princess, I was wishing there was something to do with the fairy pointer as Link was running around. (Speaking of Twilight Princess — I suppose enough people complained about the ear-grating tinkling sound of the pointer moving for Nintendo to make Super Mario Galaxy‘s pointer gracefully silent.) Then we have the star-bit-shooting function: aim the pointer and press the B button to launch a star-bit at an enemy to stun — or possibly kill — it. There’s a precious little disconnect between pressing the fire button and the launching of the star-bit; the angle at which the star-bit enters the screen is ever-so-quaintly off; this functions a lot like the momentum of old-school Mario’s run: it’s a quirk that for some reason makes perfect sense, and getting used to it is ninety-something-percent part of the fun. It’s more than clever enough to fill the waggle quota, though I guess the design document template for a flagship title demands both Wiimote shaking and precision pointing.
Either way, there’s not enough execution of the star-bit-shooting. If used effectively, it could make the game like a Gyromite where you control the professor and the platforms at the same time. As-is, it’s too optional. It’s something you can do if you feel like it, or forget about if it’s too hard for you. It’s also the sole duty of the second player — Japanese Housewife Mode — and probably the feature Weekly Famitsu had in mind when they said “It’s even fun just to watch!” I’m all for Active Watching as a trend in future videogames; its infancy, as seen in Super Mario Galaxy, is intriguing, though ultimately kind of empty. Then again, I guess, if you’re, like, actually mentally handicapped, shooting stars as player two could be the most fun you ever have in your life. For me — I wrote off the validity of the mode the second I saw that player two’s pointer — which is a very different color from player one’s (play the game to find out which color!) — has a very large “2P” attached to it. The presence of 2P also means that player one’s pointer now gets a “1P” by it. Obviously, this hasn’t been thought through very well. Seriously, people.
Though there are just-about-breathtaking moments in almost every other stage of Super Mario Galaxy, the overall amount of standing around and waiting (or otherwise dinking around) involved ultimately crushed my fun factor. Before the game’s release, I saw an amazing screenshot of Mario walking on a floating stone corkscrew, with giant Thwomp blocks grimacing down at him; when actually playing this part of the game, I was dumbfounded by how slowly the giant blocks move up and down, by how the only “solution” to the “puzzle” of the moment is to stand there and wait for the block to stand there in the down position for several seconds before slowwwwwwwwly going back up. Huge safe zones in the obstacle courses make a majority of the platform segments feel weirdly jerky and redundant.
And then there are the floaty parts.
Early on, there’s a “Wind Garden” galaxy, where the very first thing you’re expected to do is perform a spin attack to knock these dandelion spore things into the air. Then you jump up and grab one, and now Mario is floating on wind currents. Line yourself up with the right wind current, and be prepared to switch to another one within ten seconds. The thing is, if you’re going to fail, you’ll know it maybe ten seconds ahead of time. There’s no split-second action that can be employed to avoid it. It’s all just a matter of waiting. (Spur-of-the-moment game idea: survival horror story where the main character is locked in a solid granite room just before what would be the final boss; the room very slowly begins to fill with water. The character screams at the top of his or her lungs while the player tries in vain to escape. An hour later, the main character is dead.) In the pyramid world, there’s a similar part where you have to keep jumping into tornadoes, sending Mario spinning through the air very, very, very, very, very slowly. Line him up with the platform and do a hip drop to land — or else, if you miss the mark, just float helplessly until you’re dead, or else do a hip drop to give up already. I don’t like any game — especially Mario — having “just give up already” situations.
The game shines brightest in retro-style 2D segments, which is kind of ironic, and kind of sad, though ultimately the retro-2D segments made the hemispheres of my brain figuratively rotate in place, grinding against one another loudly, because for some reason, though the perspective switches to 2D, the controls are still 3D, meaning that if you’re tilting the stick a tiny bit upward, Mario will get stuck to walls, though only just as he’s about to jump. This level of imprecision — in addition to Mario’s overall amazingly slow movement speed — is kind of just not allowed in a platform game if you expect me to take it seriously.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was just . . . so sharp. It had perfected Mario’s nuanced momentum, in addition to birthing a handful of power-ups with their own nuances. The awkward hopping of the frog suit made it horribly difficult to play on land, though swimming was a breeze. Raccoon Mario had the series’ first head-to-head melee attack (the tail attack). Tanooki Mario could turn to stone, avoiding damage from enemies. Hammer Mario’s deadly hammers flew at a curious, difficult-to-master angle, and his shell (when ducking) was impervious to fire.
In Super Mario Galaxy, a game conceived on the notion of Mario having no power-ups at all, all we get is hecking Bee Mario and hecking Boo Mario. Bee Mario can fly. You just hold down the A button and YIPPEE, that abstract representation of you, on the television screen, is flying. Boo Mario — oh my god, he can fly too, and also pass through walls, because he’s a ghost, a hideous ghost.
Ice Mario can walk on water, and his ice-skating (which makes Mario move at double his top speed) is actually the most finely nuanced movement in the game, by far. However, that the power-up is only usable for a limited time — and that each time you use it, the goal is merely get somewhere you couldn’t get otherwise, in a short amount of time (which is usually way too long) — makes it kind of useless in the long run. And unlike Super Mario Bros. 3, power-ups don’t carry over between levels, which is a real let-down, because it’d be really awesome to try to play other levels as Ice Mario. Everything has to be time-based now, and of course, if you run out of time, you just go back to the respawn point for the power-up.
Fire Mario — another time-limited powerup — is so nuanced he’s a mess. The only goal you’ll ever have as Fire Mario is the ridiculously Zelda-esque and touchy task of lighting two torches with his fireballs, which bounce like ping-pong balls on a bed of mousetraps. The only way to truly ensure you’re going to hit the target is to stand as close to it as you can before shaking the controller. Trying to hit the torches from a distance of more than two scale feet is like giving your last hundred dollars to a puppy and telling him to go play blackjack. You never know — the little bastard might make you a millionaire.
The best parts of Super Mario Galaxy are the wholly optional segments where you’re tilting the controller to steer a manta ray down a fast-paced waterslide, or where you’re rolling on top of a ball, down a huge playing field littered with holes. These games are so pure, and so technical, that I really wish these, Nintendo’s highest-paid game designers, would just make me a full game out of the slide segments from Super Mario 64, or the deathvoid stages from Super Mario Sunshine, already.
Instead, we get a game where large segments of the action involve pointing the remote at a little blue star, holding down the A button, and watching Mario get sucked in. Keep pointing at the next star and clicking — sometimes quickly — to keep moving. (It’s also very similar to Donkey Kong: King of Swing, which was made by the same developers.)
There you are, floating in space. How do you feel? Do you feel like you’re in space?
Eventually, my ability to enjoy Super Mario Galaxy withered away under the iron fist of the maybes. The first time I saw one of those blazing black-hole cores, my eyes popped open — so that’s how you do a bottomless pit in zero-gravity. The first time I saw a rubber ball at the core of a planetoid, half of my brain exploded. So, so many times, I kept thinking: “This would be so awesome if it were in a videogame”. And by the end of the experience, I had a flickering reflection in the back of my brain of the game I had wanted to play:
Call it Super Mario Acid. Here’s Mario, on a sphere made of acid, floating in space. He’s standing on a block. The block is being eaten by the acid. Where’s he going to go after the block completely sinks into the acid? you wonder, just as another block, sucked in by gravity, slams into the acid planetoid. This repeats for eternity — sometimes the blocks have flagpoles on them, sometimes it’s ladders, sometimes they’re long enough to get a running start so you can do a long jump or a triple jump, sometimes they have little overhangs to get caught under if you’re not careful. As you play, the speed of the blocks’ appearance gently increases, though the goal never changes: get to the high ground, whatever the high ground is.
Or maybe it’s just Super Mario standing on a block, floating in space around a black hole. Yeah, maybe that’s better — that way, you’d be able to see all of the orbiting platforms at once. Platforms keep entering the orbit of the black hole, and you have to keep jumping on them. You know a block is about to get sucked into the black hole because it starts shaking, faster and faster.
There’d be no way to win; like in Tetris, the only way to “win” is to be still playing the game. The existential dread and lack of a story didn’t stop Tetris from becoming the most popular videogame of all-time, you know, even among housewives. (Maybe it had something to do with the lack of a human protagonist. (Though in a way, we can say that the player is the protagonist, and GAME OVER represents their failure to live forever, which is kind of a lot more creepy than merely witnessing third-person the torment of a cartoon character. (Especially one with a mustache and overalls.))
The game would, ultimately, be a celebration of Mario Physics: the only true goal would be to enjoy existing in the world.
Instead, with Super Mario Galaxy, we get a load of filler leading up to a too-late climax; we get penguins teaching humans how to ride manta rays — animals teaching humans how to ride other animals — and all the half-assed production value that entails — no voice acting, a story that fully understands its own insignificance, lavish orchestral recordings of banal one-note compositions, and a “new” Mario voice from Charles Martinet, which I suppose is meant to represent Mario’s thrill upon finding himself in outer space. It ends up sounding more like cocaine hitting a ceiling fan. Then the terrible aspects: the music ranges from evocative of the image of ritualistically defecating Teletubbies to post-Jock-Jam, pre-apocalyptic trash that plays when you pick up the Ice or Fire Mario power-ups (it sounds like the song that’s playing on the radio the night you drive home from an overtime shift and find your refrigerator full of cockroaches), and the absolute terror of the washing-machine-buzzer-like sound that indicates MARIO IS ABOUT TO DIE. I’ve always despised such sound effects. Whatever happened to Super Mario? The only power-up mushroom in Super Mario Galaxy that makes Mario stronger just increases his ethereal “life” meter from a “3” numeral to a “6”. Maybe that says everything, right there.
Now that I think about it — really, what did happen to Super Mario? In this age of Katamari and Shadow of the Colossus, why not make a 3D Super Mario game where you can eat a mushroom that makes you bigger? Eat one to grow twice as big, eat two to grow four times as big, et cetera. Each one you eat makes you bigger, makes more areas of each stage accessible to you. Every time you get hit, you drop one size. Where’s this kind of thinking, in Super Mario Galaxy? Sure, planetoids represent a significant challenge for programmers and designers, and I respect that, though I’d appreciate either some actual originality or (not “and”) some really tight focus. This right here is a big jumble of yammering parts, and it could have been absolutely perfect if only someone knew how to apply a god damned scientific calculator. It could have been a rope, it could have had flow. It could have been gorgeous.
It could have been a cultural event, like the original Super Mario Bros. As what it is, though, it’s just another videogame.
Not that I have anything against videogames.
Just recently, though, I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles. No guard rails, no lights, no reflectors, a brilliant ocean pounding on rocks 2,000 feet below, stars filling the sky late at night. It was terrifying and visceral. A sign at one point in the road showed a squiggly arrow — used to indicate bendy roads — and a sign beneath it read: “NEXT 74 MILES”. Nine hours later, we were on Hollywood Boulevard, looking for a parking space for a half an hour. What I’m saying is, we need more games that are about driving down the Pacific Coast Highway with a hot blonde, and less games that are about looking for parking spaces. Super Mario Galaxy is ultimately a blue-baller; I will never play it again. I’ve parked that car two hundred and forty times, and eaten the keys.
And that’s it, people. We’re done. And more importantly, we’re also adults. Go home, tape some glow-in-the-dark plastic dolphins to the walls, and make heroic love to your wives, for God’s sake.
★★⋆☆
“NOT A CULTURAL EVENT -- IT'S JUST A VIDEOGAME.”
There comes a point in every high-profile game-reviewer’s life when he has to put down that can of Red Bull (which has likely been empty for minutes now) and start banging out the words. Here at Action Button Dot Net, we don’t have the rigorous deadlines and tight schedules of videogame magazines, who employ what must be the hardest-working souls on earth; without them, we wouldn’t exist, for better or for worse, though forget about that. This paragraph is meant to indicate that it is only after great consideration and much stewing in my own juices that I finally decide to talk about Super Mario Galaxy, a month after tearing all the way through it from start to finish, a year and a day after the Wii’s launch in Japan, a year and two days after deciding that it couldn’t be released any sooner, and nearly twelve years of praying that, some day, it would come, and that it would be great.
Though I was yet a teenager at a time, Super Mario 64 did not excite me precisely in the way it excited Chris Slate of Ultra Game Players, who said (and this is off the top of my head) “Right now, today, Super Mario 64 is the best game I’ve ever played”. I appreciated his use of the commas around the word “today” — very literesque — though I didn’t quite share his enthusiasm. I was a boy gifted with the experience of having played Super Mario Bros. for only a few short months before God brought us Super Mario Bros. 3. I hadn’t had years of habitual Super Mario Bros. under my belt, and if anything, this made the refinements of Super Mario Bros. 3 all the more crisp.
In other words, upon playing Super Mario 64 for ten minutes, I was already anticipating the game that would play Super Mario Bros. 3 to its Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Sunshine, released for the Gamecube, was more or less a one-off. Around the time of its release, Nintendo had already been parading Super Mario left and right, in party games, puzzle games, golf games, tennis games. Sunshine seemingly existed to prove that Nintendo could put Super Mario into another action-platform game, if they wanted. It was like they were saying, see, we’re not scared to make another Super Mario game. I’ll admit that I was rather crushed with how just-decent it was, though now that I look back, I wish that people like me had just let it slide. What Mario — the person — needed was a bloodletting. He needed to cool his jets. He needed to star in one action-platform game a year for, I don’t know, five years. Sunshine had the tropical island theme. Maybe they could have set the next one at a ski resort, had Mario sliding down lots of hills.
Instead, a million slighted fanboy hearts beat in unison; the drumming on the horizon scared Nintendo’s creative geniuses back into their shells. When, eventually, Super Mario Galaxy was announced, Nintendo’s American face kept no secrets: lovable buffoon president Reggie Fils-Aime was proud to say that Galaxy would be the “true successor to Super Mario 64“. We — the proverbial “kids at home” — filled in the blanks: “Just like Super Mario Bros. 3 was the true successor to Super Mario Bros.“
And now here it is, and I don’t like it. I mean, I really, really, really, really don’t like it. It just about makes me nauseous how little I like it. What went wrong? Really? Oh no — I’m not asking these questions about the game’s development process. I’m asking them about myself. Why does disliking this game depress me so much? When I at first emerged on the other side of Super Mario Galaxy, feeling deflated, I thought, if I write a review of this on Action Button Dot Net, people are going to accuse us of being controversial, of hit-baiting, of attention-cravery. People are going to accuse us of trying to heck up the Metacritic score (even though we don’t submit scores to Metacritic) or trying to drum up ad revenue (even though we don’t have ads). More importantly, I’m going to get literally thousands of greasy-fingered hate mails from people telling me that I’m not human, that I have soul cancer, that I’ve forgotten how to have fun.
And maybe these things are true. Maybe I have forgotten how to have fun, though I’ll be darned if I can’t still see some flickering shadow of fun on my bedroom wall late at night, just before I fall asleep. It is the Rosebud of my every barely-waking moment. When I close my eyes, I can see the shape of how, exactly, I selfishly wanted Super Mario Galaxy to be. It would have been miraculous. At least, for me, it would have been.
Instead, we get a weird, cloying, conflicted jumble of good concepts, amazing concepts, genius concepts, brilliant concepts, and junk. When I try to focus on the game, I end up distracted by all the floating debris.
This is not “schtick”. This is not this website’s “thing”. This is just how I feel.
I had envisioned this game as a joyful rope — a straight shot from planetoid to planetoid, with multiple ways to “solve” each planetoid, resulting in varied, multiple paths through the game. I blame this impression on the ten-minute demo I was able to play at a Nintendo Wii showcase event in Tokyo just before the console’s launch in Japan. In that demo, well-placed Mushroom Retainers give you simple control instructions (jump, triple jump, squat-jump, wall-jump) as you make your way up a mountainside. Eventually, you reach a mountaintop that’s well into the stratosphere, where you choose to go left or right. Either path leads to a star that blasts you off toward a series of planetoid challenges.
This left a strong impression on me; I was instantly fascinated with the game’s subtlety. Maybe this could have been the “difficulty selection” — maybe the only place to learn that the left path was “hard” and the right path was “easy” would be to look it up in the instruction manual? In this day and age of non-gamers welcoming Nintendo back with opened wallets, who knows what craziness is in the air? Maybe people can actually be trusted to read instruction manuals again?
In an interview some nine months after my initial, overjoyed impressions of the game, Shigeru Miyamoto told Weekly Famitsu‘s editor-in-chief Hirokazu Hamamura that his team’s “main goal” in Super Mario Galaxy was to make a game that was easy enough for anyone to pick up and play — a game that could be embraced and played to completion by non-gamers, all while never once making the hardcore gamers feel like they’re being “patronized”. He actually used the Japanese verb “being licked” (like a mommy kitty licks a baby kitty, to help the image along) — he was well into meaning-business mode. Maybe he’d played the latest Zelda games, where a blasted text box will scream at you about the function of a key every single god damned time you pick up a key: “You got a magic key! . . . This is a magic key! . . . It can be used to unlock one door! After unlocking one door, this magic key will vanish!”
I took Miyamoto’s “No Licking” stance to mean that he was against the source of the licking as well as the act of licking itself. Maybe he’d stopped and asked himself two questions, regarding the keys in Zelda: number one, why can’t the game show you what a key does? When you use a key to unlock a door, maybe we could just see the key hover up above the hero’s head, fly into the lock, click, turn, and vanish into a puff of smoke as the door rumbles open? Then we’d know, deep down, “Hey, that key’s gone now.” Number two: why does the key have to disappear after we use it? The answer to the second question has something to do with how the key isn’t a “key” so much as it’s just “something to do” in order to progress deeper into a dungeon. On a deeper, weirder psychological level, the key is imprinting our children with obsessive urges to always look for the solution to the problem before their eyes in the most far-flung place. In this way, it can be construed that games aren’t running parallel to real-world logic so much as they’re scribbling poisonous crayon circles anywhere they please.
Yet Super Mario Galaxy licked me plenty of times, up and down, all over. At a certain point about three-quarters of the way through the game — this almost scarred me for life — I was swimming in a giant liquid sphere toward a floating tower, when a penguin sidled up to me out of nowhere and with a hateful snippet of a sound effect, his text box took up the greater part of the center of the screen: “PRESS THE A BUTTON TO SWIM”.
It occurs to me once again that no one in any Japanese office anywhere, precisely, has yet been able to construct a Powerpoint presentation that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that though the people who forget to use the one button on the controller to do almost everything, or else forget that keys unlock doors are forgetful enough to also have lost the instruction manual (and possibly box) of every game they own, they are probably also forgetful enough to misplace the game disc and/or the console.
Someone should really get on that proof. This could be the Pythagorean Theorem of the 21st Century.
The cloying and the down-talking penetrates to only the most bizarre strata of Super Mario Galaxy. The hub world is the most visible offender. In Super Mario 64, we had a castle, where everything was laid-out in an easily understandable fashion: the first mission you complete nets you a Power Star; you remember a door with a star logo and a numeral “1” on it, you stand near the door, Mario yields a star in his hand, and the door opens. Many doors with stars and numerals exist; each stage has seven stars for you to earn; from so very close to the beginning, you’re on your own.
Super Mario 64, though purchased at a one-to-one attach rate with the Nintendo 64 hardware, was not considered a success in Japan, because the Nintendo 64 hardware was not considered a success. A Nintendo fanboy could tell you that this is because the World Was Wrong, that They didn’t know what was Good for Them. Nintendo took a bath on the Gamecube as well; some would say that they decided to change their policies after that, though I would argue that they didn’t. I would argue that the success of the DS, of the Wii, and of new president Satoru Iwata is grounded firmly in Iwata’s bold decision to stick with the company’s guns, to emphasize rather than mute the little conceptual quirks (like connecting your Gameboy Advance to your Gamecube so each player has his own little handheld screen) that had possibly turned off the gaming populace. The Wii remote is very much a direct continuation of the DS stylus, et cetera. And if Wii Sports has proven anything, it’s that Nintendo’s games are successful with non-gamers because they’re presented and packaged well, not because they’re more simple than other games or because they’re similar to real-life actions — or even because they’re actually fun.
In other words, I find it vaguely unsettling that one of Nintendo’s ideas for making the game “simple” enough for the “wider audience” to “understand” involved gutting the hands-on “exploration” element out of the hub world; instead of a living, breathing (yet empty — for a reason) castle, we’ve got a floating fortress / spaceship thing with loud creatures buzzing all around and these ugly rooms with fixed camera angles, where all of the levels are contained. Clear a mission, and you’ll see a load-masking cut-scene of Mario flying back to the hub; he’ll land, and the Burnoutitis will commence: a big menu pops up, telling you “NEW HIGH SCORE”; it counts down how many coins you earned, then it switches to another menu, and tells you how many star bits you picked up, then it switches to another menu to tell you you’ve opened a new stage, then a map pops up, and a star logo in one of the various rooms of the ship blinks loudly. Go inside a room — say, the kitchen — and arbitrarily point the remote at a blue star and press the A button, which will pull Mario toward it; the screen switches to a planetarium view; select the galaxy you want to fly to — galaxies you can’t enter are marked by a star icon and a numeral (the number of stars needed to unlock it) — click on it, and you’ll see a little cut-scene of Mario flying out in space. Now a screen pops up with a list of star goals for the selected galaxy. Choose the one you want, and there’s another triumphant “WAHOO”. With a “YES!”, Mario lands in the galaxy, and there you have it: you’re finally playing a videogame.
Why put all this bullstuff between the action set-pieces? I mean, at the very least, could we not have the “YAY! Look at this numeric representation of how YOU’RE SUCH A GOOD BOY“? All the original Super Mario Bros. had was the timer countdown and the fireworks; that seemed to do pretty nicely for most people. That game sold, like, literally 20 million copies! Here we are in the twenty-first century, and here we are with all this stopping and starting. I wanted to play a rope. I wanted the game to just keep going, keep evolving, keep crunching. I wanted it to be a delicious buffet dinner, not a room full of bottles of multi-vitamins.
To be both more concrete and more abstract, I wanted the game to get more difficult as it went along. Instead, the game’s difficulty level stays numbingly even from beginning to end. The bosses are all little puzzles with obvious solutions. (It usually involves using the spin attack to knock back a projectile.)
The thing is, if you want Super Mario Galaxy to be challenging, you have to want it to be challenging. You only need sixty stars to complete the “main” game, though if you’re an acquitted kleptomaniac, you can get sixty more, and then a nifty little reward.
And this isn’t the most of it. I’ll tell you what’s the worst. The game, as a series of challenges, isn’t even about anything so much as it’s about itself. Literally halfway through the game, you arrive in a “galaxy” that you need thirty stars to unlock (you can complete the game with as few as sixty stars). The first mission in the galaxy is called “The Rabbits Are Looking For Something”. You land in the galaxy, where a big, fuzzy bee immediately gets all up in your face. “The rabbits are looking for something!” he says. Walk down the only path before you, and you’ll come up to a rabbit who is, maybe, looking for something. Get too close to the rabbit, and he automatically talks to you. “Where could that [STAR CHIP] be?” In place of the “[STAR CHIP]” is a Star Chip icon. Star Chips are these blue fragment things; if you collect five of them, they join together to make a star-thing that teleports you somewhere else, so you can once again feel the orgasm of progress. The camera floats up softly. We see a Star Chip floating high above the ground. The rabbit remains oblivious. (Compelling side-question: is Mario, too, oblivious?) We now notice that the rabbit is standing in the middle of a peculiar arrangement of three wooden posts. We may remember, from earlier missions or worlds or galaxies, that Mario can perform a hip-drop if we press the Z button while jumping. Do a hip drop on a wooden post, and you can hammer it into the ground. We see these three posts, and we hammer them all in. Out of nowhere, a rotating star-gate-thing appears. We stand in it, remember that we have to shake the remote to use it, shake the remote, and Mario flies up just high enough to grab the Star Chip. He doesn’t not inform the rabbit that he found the Star Chip. (This is crucial.) The next rabbit we find is standing near a large wooden box. “I can almost smell a [STAR CHIP ICON]”. The camera pans slyly right, highlighting the wooden box. We might remember from earlier missions that we can shake the remote to make Mario do a spin attack move. Spin attacks can break boxes. We break the box. We collect the Star Chip that had been inside. Again, Mario does not inform the rabbit that he has found the Star Chip (double crucial). The other challenges in this mission require you to remember how to jump on enemies or remember that Mario has to ability to perform a wall jump. None of these challenges are laid-out as set pieces. They just wobble there, hunks of pineapple in lime Jell-O. When at last you assemble the Star Gate Thing and blast off to the final portion of the stage, there’s Mario on a planetoid with a rabbit. The rabbit has the star. He says he’ll give it to you, if you can beat him in a race.
. . . Like, what the heck? Are these rabbits not all on the same side? If this rabbit had the star from the beginning, why were the other rabbits looking for star chips? Is he a rogue rabbit? This is why Shigeru Miyamoto says they shouldn’t put stories in these things.
The important analysis to make of the above example is that Super Mario Galaxy is a game that, as far as halfway into its duration, continually rewards the player with something the game has contrived the player to need after the player remembers a thing that he can do, and then does it.
You might remember the first time you walked into a room in a Zelda game to see a locked door and four unlit torches. In your inventory you had a lantern that was capable of lighting torches. Somewhere deep down, you knew the truth, only you would never be able to put it into words: “If I light those four torches, that door is going to open”. Sometimes, the door would just open by magic; sometimes, a key would fall from the sky. Sometimes, you’d light the four torches, and enemies would fall into the room: kill them, and the door opened magically. This is sick, people. This is a mind-killer. Grand Theft Auto doesn’t turn kids into prostitute-killing car-jackers, because it looks real enough to be ridiculous. Super Mario Galaxy, however, with its slick, abstract, kid-friendly cartoon exterior, stands a pretty good chance of turning all of our children into kleptomaniacs (or, at the very least, obsessive-compulsives).
Most reviews of this game cite this as a sign of its generosity, of its deep bounty. I’ll admit that some of the harder missions are indeed What I Crave when it comes to platform games — time attacks, speed collection, more enemies — though they really are just rehashes of the same levels you’ve already played. And some of those levels are terrorism; replaying those levels for time is about as much fun as organizing data into a spreadsheet while riding the fastest train in the world. I’m not saying that reusing / rehashing is the devil, necessarily, just that I kind of miss the days when the difficult parts of a game were, you know, actually included in the game. For example, in Super Mario Bros. 3, if you wanted to finish the game, you had no choice: you’re going to have to go through that amazingly tough castle. You’re going to have to platform-hop across that ridiculous fleet of jet-plane airships.
Now, though, when we’ve invited grandma into the living room, games have to act civilized. Everyone has the right to witness the full curve of a game’s content, these days. To be fair, Nintendo’s been moving this way ever since Super Mario World, where the best part of the game, the Special World, is very difficult, quite hidden, extremely optional, and rewards you, when you complete it, only by making the game graphically hideous. Sunshine only turned the gain up (that’s a guitar term) on certain missions within each level, though with the way the game was structured, you didn’t always have to play them. If you did, though, it’d put you in a better position for progressing through the main game. Nonetheless, the hard parts of Sunshine were immediately visible as such: Mario was stripped of the water-blasting backpack that served as the game’s main gimmick, and the background music switched to an a cappella riff on the original Super Mario Bros. theme. And there you were, alone with floating platforms, tricky jumps, and a relentlessly all-encompassing deathvoid.
The high-difficulty segments of Sunshine were amazingly brilliant, most of the time, and Shigeru Miyamoto, himself, was quoted shortly after the game’s release as saying he’d love to make a whole game in that style. (I really wish he would.) What’s most important here is that they were all new and unique parts of the game. It seems, now, that Nintendo’s design philosophy has shifted: to deny anyone, even grandpa, a chance to romp around without fear of death in any unique part of the game is a serious crime. (Or, perhaps, judging by the fact that you can’t skip the “How to Fasten the Wii Remote Strap” screen until it’s been displayed for ten whole seconds, maybe the legal team advised them of the danger of a class-action lawsuit from widows of old men with overloaded pacemakers.)
(At any rate, at least Super Mario Galaxy‘s optional difficult segments are better presented than the “hidden” worlds of New Super Mario Bros. You know, how you have to take it upon yourself to defeat a boss The Hard Way just so you can be slotted down a path to a slightly different, maybe-more-difficult world. Like, why should World 6 be harder than World 7, really?)
The phantom lurking behind all this is called “Story”. Galaxy‘s developers knew that they couldn’t make a Mario game without a story, even though the story would have to be the same old thing it always is. Any deviation would result in tired groans all around the internet: Bowser has kidnapped the princess. Go get her back. The ending is no secret from the very beginning: Mario’s going to beat Bowser, get the princess back, and save the day. (And he’s so obviously not going to get laid.)
People of all ages loved Super Mario Bros., way back in the day, regardless of their grasp of the story. All they had to know was that this little guy had a quest, a quest that lurked somewhere to the right of where he is when we first meet him. Maybe they read the full story in the instruction manual, or maybe the neighbor kid explained it to them: “This dragon kidnapped a princess, and you’ve got to save her.” Whether you know the story or not, the enigmatic “Our Princess is in Another Castle” at the end of every four stages has never not been something pop-cultural enough to put on a T-shirt. There’s nothing similarly pop-culture-event-like about Super Mario Galaxy; just a fetishistic puppet show of squealing CG and mishmashed production values. Like, why have CG cut-scenes, if the characters aren’t going to talk? The first three seconds of Bowser’s “speech” in the opening scene are cute: he’s making this huge robo-dragon grumbling sound, while subtitles indicate that he’s speaking actual words. Then, once the grumble has looped for maybe the sixth time, it starts to get disturbing. Your ear becomes accustomed to the peaks and valleys in the individual sound waves, and maybe it all starts to seem a little off. Princess Peach, who is offered the courtesy of the only full sentence of dialogue in the game (in her letter at the very beginning), is revealed as typically speaking a language consisting of high-pitched pouts; Bowser’s right-hand magician speaks entirely in hyecking cackles.
Why not put voice-acting in? It’s a tiny, trite issue, I’ll admit, though really, why not go the extra step? It seems to me that Nintendo knew the story to Super Mario Galaxy was so totally not the point, and didn’t want to bother putting too much effort into the cut-scenes. Why have them in the first place, then? My dad taught me long ago: even if he knows the right fielder is going to catch that pop fly, Pete Rose keeps running for first base, and he doesn’t stop there. That’s why they called him “Charlie Hustle” — because he hustled (ironically, his name wasn’t Charlie) no matter what the circumstances. In other words, yes, maybe Nintendo should have just gone ahead and put voice-acting into Super Mario Galaxy, even if they were convinced that the story was filler nonsense; or maybe they should have just not put any story into it at all. Or at least no dialogue — do we really need subtitles to know that Bowser is threatening Peach, or that his assistant is threatening Mario? Pictures speak a thousand words, and CG — especially when it’s as colorful and sweet as in Super Mario Galaxy — speaks a million. Right?
One thing we don’t need, for sure, is the mysterious Princess Rosalina, who has absolutely no function in the story other than to stand around and explain the mechanics of the game — over and over and over again. I don’t get it — I kept thinking that maybe she had some sinister motive, though by the end of the game, when it’s revealed that there’s nothing to reveal, I was scratching my head. It was something like the end of Dragon Quest VII, during the course of which you can build a huge casino-centric metropolis on a tropical island as a side-quest, though no matter how awesome the city is, the main character goes back to being his fisherman father’s assistant at the end of the game. Princess Rosalina is a lot like that — too much time was spent designing her character, with no payoff. And all she does, for the most part, is recite lines from the instruction manual, or else describe things that the cut-scenes have already pretty much succeeded at getting across: every single time we earn a “Grand Star” from beating a boss, the Grand Star flies into the core of the hub, thus increasing the size and color of the core; a quick look-around scene shows energy flowing through the veins on the floor, demonstrating that power is being restored to another part of the hub. Why, then, must Princess Rosalina tell us, “The Grand Star has powered up the core, restoring energy to The Kitchen!” Why tell us that the room we’re about to go check out is a kitchen? For god’s sake, let us figure it out for ourselves; Grandpa’s Pacemaker isn’t going to explode because “Holy stuff no one told me it was gonna be a kitchen!!” Princess Rosalina feels simultaneously underused and tacked-on — which I guess isn’t all that amazing. Someone at Nintendo designed her, and they figured, hey, let’s put her into this game. What you end up with, though, is a symptom of the weird non-terminal illness infecting every Nintendo universe these days: hundreds of man-hours spilled into the task of painting a sign. Assigning a police officer to every STOP sign in town, so he can remind every motorist personally that “STOP” means “Stop”. Et cetera. Princess Rosalina is Nintendo using their assets because their assets are their assets. It’s the same thing they were doing back with Super Mario Stadium baseball, when they let Goomba be a selectable player even though Goombas have no hands and therefore can’t hold a baseball bat. It’s a spliter of the weird fever that gave birth to The Lightning Bolt in Super Mario Kart — a power-up that the person in last place, who is in last place for a reason (the reason being that he sucks at playing the game), has a much higher probability of receiving than anyone else. The Lightning Bolt will shrink and severely handicap every other racer, so that the person in last place might catch up. What happens when the Lightning Bolt wears off? We can say that, most of the time, the sucky player is surpassed once again. Why offer them that hope, then? Isn’t that kind of, you know, sick? Why not teach people to live with their mistakes, and regain their footing thanks to actual skill? Someone at Nintendo must have recently made a similarly pointed hypothesis, resulting in muted difficulty curves and more screen-filling help messages. Princess Rosalina is a lingering figment of Nintendo’s “let everyone play” mentality, only she’s not a real human being, and she’s not serving any purpose.
She certainly is, however, a lot hotter than Princess Peach. Why bother rescuing Peach, if you’ve got a hotter Princess right here? Go ahead and accuse me of being shallow, if you want, though really, how much do we know about Princess Peach and Mario’s relationship? Under the best circumstances, the earliest players of Super Mario Bros. didn’t know what the princess looked like until they got to the very, very end of the game. It would have surprised them if there hadn’t been a princess, though only because they’d been expecting one, even if the promise had never had any visual confirmation. If Super Mario Galaxy were made perfectly — and it’s not perfect — we would need no dialogue, no hub world, no Princess Rosalina: just a look at Princess Peach, a visual confirmation of the tyranny of the dragon, an unassuming launch into outer space, and it’d be hard not to hit the ground running from there. Instead, when the game opens, we’re chasing rabbits on a little planetoid, rabbits who, though they don’t want to be caught, are also telling us to “Press the A button to jump!” Whatever happened to teaching the player how to play through context? In Super Mario Bros., there’s a Goomba right there in front of us. There are blocks with question marks, which produce shiny things when hit, there’s a mushroom we can eat to grow large, there’s a pipe we can’t progress over without jumping. There you have it: crushing enemies, breaking blocks, earning coins, surpassing obstacles, all taught to us right at the beginning. Mario’s been likened to Charlie Chaplin before; why not make his games play like silent films? If there absolutely must be a tutorial involving a hecking rabbit, why not make the rabbit show us how to jump instead of tell us? Again, when the controller has only one button, it’s kind of unforgivable. Let’s watch the rabbit jump, once, twice, three times. He can teach us how to wall-jump, all on the way up a mountain, like in that demo I played last year. And then the game can commence, the beautiful rope I yearn for even now, the beautiful rope I cannot have.
Instead, Nintendo’s way of supposedly making the game more friendly to the mainstream is to give Mario as many complicated moves as possible. Shake the Wii remote to initiate Mario’s ridiculous spin attack, because
1. Mario needs an attack
2. it’s not a real Wii game if you don’t have to shake the remote.
For God’s sake, that the current most-anticipated Wii game is Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which will not use the Wii’s motion-sensing functionality, should probably say something, though I’m not totally sure what.
Mario’s spin attack is a real limp noodle stuck to the center of your TV screen. I could never shake (no pun intended) the tackiness of it. After Mario spins, there’s a lull, during which he can’t spin again. This is clearly to limit the player’s ability to shake the controller like crazy, so that Mario is always attacking, wherever he goes, which would make any “advanced” playing session of the game look even less like art. You’ll know Mario is able to attack again when the little star pops out from under Mario’s hat and makes a little doggie chew-toy noise. The little star exists mainly so that the player can feel some tiny intangible debt to Princess Rosalina, thus validating her existence as a character: see, it’s Rosalina that gives us the little magic star, which grants us the spin attack and the ability to fly through space. Personally, I would rather none of this be explained at all, though clearly Nintendo continuity fetishists would fall apart at the seams if there weren’t plenty of slow-moving dialogue windows to seal all the holes, to keep it all air-tight — never mind that the explanation is a flaming load of bullstuff, if a guy with a mushroom for a head says it, it must be true.
I would rather Mario just punch and kick the enemies in the face, the way he did in Super Mario 64. Maybe that was considered Way Too Violent for Grandpa’s Pacemaker, I don’t know. Either way, I hereby declare my strict stance against normal attack actions that require the player to shake the Wii remote.
Besides, there’s the cute little star-bit-collecting/shooting thing to fill the waggle quota.
Before playing the game, I remember thinking that man, it looks like it’d be a lot of fun with a Dual Shock. Now that I’ve played it and experienced the star-bit collection firsthand, I have to say it’s kind of nice — in concept. I’ve always fantasized about a game where you control two characters at once — part of the reason I love the right-analog-stick controlled RC car in Ape Escape — so the extra-peripheral weirdness of collecting star-bits with the pointer while running Mario around is really welcome for me. All throughout Twilight Princess, I was wishing there was something to do with the fairy pointer as Link was running around. (Speaking of Twilight Princess — I suppose enough people complained about the ear-grating tinkling sound of the pointer moving for Nintendo to make Super Mario Galaxy‘s pointer gracefully silent.) Then we have the star-bit-shooting function: aim the pointer and press the B button to launch a star-bit at an enemy to stun — or possibly kill — it. There’s a precious little disconnect between pressing the fire button and the launching of the star-bit; the angle at which the star-bit enters the screen is ever-so-quaintly off; this functions a lot like the momentum of old-school Mario’s run: it’s a quirk that for some reason makes perfect sense, and getting used to it is ninety-something-percent part of the fun. It’s more than clever enough to fill the waggle quota, though I guess the design document template for a flagship title demands both Wiimote shaking and precision pointing.
Either way, there’s not enough execution of the star-bit-shooting. If used effectively, it could make the game like a Gyromite where you control the professor and the platforms at the same time. As-is, it’s too optional. It’s something you can do if you feel like it, or forget about if it’s too hard for you. It’s also the sole duty of the second player — Japanese Housewife Mode — and probably the feature Weekly Famitsu had in mind when they said “It’s even fun just to watch!” I’m all for Active Watching as a trend in future videogames; its infancy, as seen in Super Mario Galaxy, is intriguing, though ultimately kind of empty. Then again, I guess, if you’re, like, actually mentally handicapped, shooting stars as player two could be the most fun you ever have in your life. For me — I wrote off the validity of the mode the second I saw that player two’s pointer — which is a very different color from player one’s (play the game to find out which color!) — has a very large “2P” attached to it. The presence of 2P also means that player one’s pointer now gets a “1P” by it. Obviously, this hasn’t been thought through very well. Seriously, people.
Though there are just-about-breathtaking moments in almost every other stage of Super Mario Galaxy, the overall amount of standing around and waiting (or otherwise dinking around) involved ultimately crushed my fun factor. Before the game’s release, I saw an amazing screenshot of Mario walking on a floating stone corkscrew, with giant Thwomp blocks grimacing down at him; when actually playing this part of the game, I was dumbfounded by how slowly the giant blocks move up and down, by how the only “solution” to the “puzzle” of the moment is to stand there and wait for the block to stand there in the down position for several seconds before slowwwwwwwwly going back up. Huge safe zones in the obstacle courses make a majority of the platform segments feel weirdly jerky and redundant.
And then there are the floaty parts.
Early on, there’s a “Wind Garden” galaxy, where the very first thing you’re expected to do is perform a spin attack to knock these dandelion spore things into the air. Then you jump up and grab one, and now Mario is floating on wind currents. Line yourself up with the right wind current, and be prepared to switch to another one within ten seconds. The thing is, if you’re going to fail, you’ll know it maybe ten seconds ahead of time. There’s no split-second action that can be employed to avoid it. It’s all just a matter of waiting. (Spur-of-the-moment game idea: survival horror story where the main character is locked in a solid granite room just before what would be the final boss; the room very slowly begins to fill with water. The character screams at the top of his or her lungs while the player tries in vain to escape. An hour later, the main character is dead.) In the pyramid world, there’s a similar part where you have to keep jumping into tornadoes, sending Mario spinning through the air very, very, very, very, very slowly. Line him up with the platform and do a hip drop to land — or else, if you miss the mark, just float helplessly until you’re dead, or else do a hip drop to give up already. I don’t like any game — especially Mario — having “just give up already” situations.
The game shines brightest in retro-style 2D segments, which is kind of ironic, and kind of sad, though ultimately the retro-2D segments made the hemispheres of my brain figuratively rotate in place, grinding against one another loudly, because for some reason, though the perspective switches to 2D, the controls are still 3D, meaning that if you’re tilting the stick a tiny bit upward, Mario will get stuck to walls, though only just as he’s about to jump. This level of imprecision — in addition to Mario’s overall amazingly slow movement speed — is kind of just not allowed in a platform game if you expect me to take it seriously.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was just . . . so sharp. It had perfected Mario’s nuanced momentum, in addition to birthing a handful of power-ups with their own nuances. The awkward hopping of the frog suit made it horribly difficult to play on land, though swimming was a breeze. Raccoon Mario had the series’ first head-to-head melee attack (the tail attack). Tanooki Mario could turn to stone, avoiding damage from enemies. Hammer Mario’s deadly hammers flew at a curious, difficult-to-master angle, and his shell (when ducking) was impervious to fire.
In Super Mario Galaxy, a game conceived on the notion of Mario having no power-ups at all, all we get is hecking Bee Mario and hecking Boo Mario. Bee Mario can fly. You just hold down the A button and YIPPEE, that abstract representation of you, on the television screen, is flying. Boo Mario — oh my god, he can fly too, and also pass through walls, because he’s a ghost, a hideous ghost.
Ice Mario can walk on water, and his ice-skating (which makes Mario move at double his top speed) is actually the most finely nuanced movement in the game, by far. However, that the power-up is only usable for a limited time — and that each time you use it, the goal is merely get somewhere you couldn’t get otherwise, in a short amount of time (which is usually way too long) — makes it kind of useless in the long run. And unlike Super Mario Bros. 3, power-ups don’t carry over between levels, which is a real let-down, because it’d be really awesome to try to play other levels as Ice Mario. Everything has to be time-based now, and of course, if you run out of time, you just go back to the respawn point for the power-up.
Fire Mario — another time-limited powerup — is so nuanced he’s a mess. The only goal you’ll ever have as Fire Mario is the ridiculously Zelda-esque and touchy task of lighting two torches with his fireballs, which bounce like ping-pong balls on a bed of mousetraps. The only way to truly ensure you’re going to hit the target is to stand as close to it as you can before shaking the controller. Trying to hit the torches from a distance of more than two scale feet is like giving your last hundred dollars to a puppy and telling him to go play blackjack. You never know — the little bastard might make you a millionaire.
The best parts of Super Mario Galaxy are the wholly optional segments where you’re tilting the controller to steer a manta ray down a fast-paced waterslide, or where you’re rolling on top of a ball, down a huge playing field littered with holes. These games are so pure, and so technical, that I really wish these, Nintendo’s highest-paid game designers, would just make me a full game out of the slide segments from Super Mario 64, or the deathvoid stages from Super Mario Sunshine, already.
Instead, we get a game where large segments of the action involve pointing the remote at a little blue star, holding down the A button, and watching Mario get sucked in. Keep pointing at the next star and clicking — sometimes quickly — to keep moving. (It’s also very similar to Donkey Kong: King of Swing, which was made by the same developers.)
There you are, floating in space. How do you feel? Do you feel like you’re in space?
Eventually, my ability to enjoy Super Mario Galaxy withered away under the iron fist of the maybes. The first time I saw one of those blazing black-hole cores, my eyes popped open — so that’s how you do a bottomless pit in zero-gravity. The first time I saw a rubber ball at the core of a planetoid, half of my brain exploded. So, so many times, I kept thinking: “This would be so awesome if it were in a videogame”. And by the end of the experience, I had a flickering reflection in the back of my brain of the game I had wanted to play:
Call it Super Mario Acid. Here’s Mario, on a sphere made of acid, floating in space. He’s standing on a block. The block is being eaten by the acid. Where’s he going to go after the block completely sinks into the acid? you wonder, just as another block, sucked in by gravity, slams into the acid planetoid. This repeats for eternity — sometimes the blocks have flagpoles on them, sometimes it’s ladders, sometimes they’re long enough to get a running start so you can do a long jump or a triple jump, sometimes they have little overhangs to get caught under if you’re not careful. As you play, the speed of the blocks’ appearance gently increases, though the goal never changes: get to the high ground, whatever the high ground is.
Or maybe it’s just Super Mario standing on a block, floating in space around a black hole. Yeah, maybe that’s better — that way, you’d be able to see all of the orbiting platforms at once. Platforms keep entering the orbit of the black hole, and you have to keep jumping on them. You know a block is about to get sucked into the black hole because it starts shaking, faster and faster.
There’d be no way to win; like in Tetris, the only way to “win” is to be still playing the game. The existential dread and lack of a story didn’t stop Tetris from becoming the most popular videogame of all-time, you know, even among housewives. (Maybe it had something to do with the lack of a human protagonist. (Though in a way, we can say that the player is the protagonist, and GAME OVER represents their failure to live forever, which is kind of a lot more creepy than merely witnessing third-person the torment of a cartoon character. (Especially one with a mustache and overalls.))
The game would, ultimately, be a celebration of Mario Physics: the only true goal would be to enjoy existing in the world.
Instead, with Super Mario Galaxy, we get a load of filler leading up to a too-late climax; we get penguins teaching humans how to ride manta rays — animals teaching humans how to ride other animals — and all the half-assed production value that entails — no voice acting, a story that fully understands its own insignificance, lavish orchestral recordings of banal one-note compositions, and a “new” Mario voice from Charles Martinet, which I suppose is meant to represent Mario’s thrill upon finding himself in outer space. It ends up sounding more like cocaine hitting a ceiling fan. Then the terrible aspects: the music ranges from evocative of the image of ritualistically defecating Teletubbies to post-Jock-Jam, pre-apocalyptic trash that plays when you pick up the Ice or Fire Mario power-ups (it sounds like the song that’s playing on the radio the night you drive home from an overtime shift and find your refrigerator full of cockroaches), and the absolute terror of the washing-machine-buzzer-like sound that indicates MARIO IS ABOUT TO DIE. I’ve always despised such sound effects. Whatever happened to Super Mario? The only power-up mushroom in Super Mario Galaxy that makes Mario stronger just increases his ethereal “life” meter from a “3” numeral to a “6”. Maybe that says everything, right there.
Now that I think about it — really, what did happen to Super Mario? In this age of Katamari and Shadow of the Colossus, why not make a 3D Super Mario game where you can eat a mushroom that makes you bigger? Eat one to grow twice as big, eat two to grow four times as big, et cetera. Each one you eat makes you bigger, makes more areas of each stage accessible to you. Every time you get hit, you drop one size. Where’s this kind of thinking, in Super Mario Galaxy? Sure, planetoids represent a significant challenge for programmers and designers, and I respect that, though I’d appreciate either some actual originality or (not “and”) some really tight focus. This right here is a big jumble of yammering parts, and it could have been absolutely perfect if only someone knew how to apply a god damned scientific calculator. It could have been a rope, it could have had flow. It could have been gorgeous.
It could have been a cultural event, like the original Super Mario Bros. As what it is, though, it’s just another videogame.
Not that I have anything against videogames.
Just recently, though, I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles. No guard rails, no lights, no reflectors, a brilliant ocean pounding on rocks 2,000 feet below, stars filling the sky late at night. It was terrifying and visceral. A sign at one point in the road showed a squiggly arrow — used to indicate bendy roads — and a sign beneath it read: “NEXT 74 MILES”. Nine hours later, we were on Hollywood Boulevard, looking for a parking space for a half an hour. What I’m saying is, we need more games that are about driving down the Pacific Coast Highway with a hot blonde, and less games that are about looking for parking spaces. Super Mario Galaxy is ultimately a blue-baller; I will never play it again. I’ve parked that car two hundred and forty times, and eaten the keys.
And that’s it, people. We’re done. And more importantly, we’re also adults. Go home, tape some glow-in-the-dark plastic dolphins to the walls, and make heroic love to your wives, for God’s sake.
text by Theodore Troops
★★☆☆
“ABOUT AS GOOD AN INTERACTIVE REPLICA OF A 30'S PULPY ADVENTURE SERIAL AS ROGUE SQUADRON IS OF A STAR WARS FILM.”
With Uncharted, Naughty Dog lays its cards on the table, and hedges (or at least shrubs) its bets that this moment in history, right now, is the one when realistically proportioned, ordinary human beings can exist in a videogame without shame, after years of spinning orange dreidel dogs and elves with limbs of a strange elastic composition. Squaresoft laid those cards in 1999 with Final Fantasy VIII, and swept them away in 2000 with Final Fantasy IX. Valve laid them in 2004 with Half-Life 2, and did their sweeping in 2007 with Team Fortress 2. (Well, Valve never actually removes any of their cards. They’re the kind of players with multiple decks, if you know what I mean.) Even now, with five hundred and twelve whole megabytes of RAM, and more cores than an applesauce factory, there’s a certain god-defying arrogance in men making men out of polygons. Consider that Pixar, a company housing the finest animators on earth, equipped with its near-unlimited computational and financial resources –– render farms that probably stretch farther than some real ones –– still hasn’t attempted to depict lifelike human beings with computer animation, so many years after The Spirits Within. I suppose the argument can be made, why spend ten million dollars per scene making what is essentially possible with a twenty-thousand-dollar camera and some million-dollar actors, and I suppose that argument would win out with just about everyone, including me.
If Uncharted were a movie, it would not be CG. It would be made with the filmiest film, all the stunts would be real, and the sets would be honest-to-god jungles and temples and airplanes. It would probably be a better Indiana Jones movie than that new one that’s coming up around the bend. But alas, it is a videogame. Thus it is about as good an interactive replica of a 30’s pulpy adventure serial as Rogue Squadron is of a Star Wars film. You’ll shoot a small country’s worth of pirates in this game. You’ll scuffle across chasms, and you’ll die half-way through and break the pacing because Ubisoft has a patent on The Dagger of Time®. There are gates to be opened by hammering Triangle. There are puzzles with statues to rotate between trips to GameFAQs. It all feels like it belongs, because the story is telling you what you should be doing at this moment or that, but we can’t help but wish the game would play itself for us; eventually, we wish it wasn’t a game at all.
The combat is a more desperate, slippery, improvised take on Gears of War‘s soldierly, methodical, almost Tetris-like, take-cover-and-kill mechanic. Nathan Drake is an ordinary man, an adjective so crucial to this game’s success that it’s there in big letters on the back of the box. He wears a white shirt and jeans, his hair is just kind of there. All his moves have little imperfections in them: he leaps onto ledges and scrapes his forearms, he flinches and winces when bullets puncture the rock he’s hiding behind. He peers out from safety, releases a few nine-millimeter clacks with the R1 button, and snaps back, amazed he’s still alive, as South Pacific accents taunt him with one of ten cocky phrases.
SCEA’s marketing department had the unenviable job of making this everyman character cool. We are used to commercials telling us YOU ARE THE PUNISHER, and “supersoldier” is, to us, as common a compound noun as “salaryman.” When the first trailer of Uncharted was released, back when it had no name, I read a post in which someone called the protagonist a “bland, candybar-looking motherhecker.” Maybe they were expecting the kind of half-knight, half-marine, half-quarterback heroes of Gears of War (three halves a man)? Maybe they just didn’t see enough zippers and buckles and asymmetry. (“Character Design” is an awfully limiting term. It reduces people to pewter statues.) Everyone in this game is as ordinary, and genuinely relatable, as Drake. There’s Elena, a videojournalist who’s chasing the story of her career, and Sullivan, Drake’s gentlemanly adventure buddy, with a mustache and a cigar, and debt. They are all perfectly cast, and act almost alarmingly like actual human beings. When Elena drops her camera into the abyss, the one that had been preserving hours of discoveries of El Goddamn Dorado, you can hear the frustration simmer in her teeth, before she just lets out an agonized “Shit!”
We don’t doubt for a moment that these are real people, and, more than anything, we wish the game wouldn’t keep throwing these gamey constructs at us so that we could just chill with them. Even just to walk from place to place, looking around. After all, the subtlety of just the walking in this game is breathtaking. (It makes jealous all those MMORPG’s in which walking comprises half of the gameplay.) With people and places that come off as so natural, it’s the game itself that gives off the biggest stink of artificiality. It’s not like removing the HUD would’ve made things any better. The constant need for twitchy little challenges and two-bit puzzles just isn’t realistic. Even on a cursed island. Even in an Indiana Jones movie.
Interestingly, all the cutscenes are of realtime footage, but exist in the form of compressed FMV. I understand they needed to fill the Blu-ray Disc, and this helps to reduce load times, with the bonus of making them all selectable from a menu after you’ve finished the game (effectively turning it into a movie). But seriously. In a game that’s already so disconnected from itself, it begs the question, why not just use some beautiful, beautiful CG. heck, why not use real actors, like they used to do back in the Command and Conquer days? Of course, going that far threatens to reduce this $25 million production to complete irrelevance. (It also makes the guy working on rock shaders really angry.)
To turn this game off after the credits and go play Team Fortress 2 to blow off some Steam is kind of a revelation. TF2 was built in the Valve tradition of functionalism: it was cartoon-like because online players do hilarious things to each other in multiplayer matches. The exaggerated proportions help players pick out silhouettes of the characters. They know big characters move slow and take a lot of damage, and thin ones can run really fast. All the characters were designed in such a way that the player is able to instantly see what team they’re on, and their eyes are drawn to the weapon they’re carrying. Only once they were all established as iconic little stamps, as elements of a videogame, did Valve go embellishing them with voices and animated personalities. It’s a bottom-up approach.
The best games are drawn this way. Mario’s design is a direct result of pixel limitations. In Halo, the grunts are tiny triangles with smurf voices to contrast them against their larger masters (whose deaths will send them scattering); the sniping jackels have big neon circle shields so that you can spot them at a distance. The very idea of cyborg player characters was done to excuse statistical elements on the screen — lifebars, radars — and things like batteries and recharging shields grew directly out of that. The Gears have weapon slots in the back of their armor that mirrors their D-pad assignment; their big meaty shape is such to imply that they can take so many bullets, and also so that they fit snugly in the blocky, geometric world in which they exist; their little blue lightbright highlights on their chestplates is so you can tell what team they’re on even in the shadows of the highest dynamic ranges. And their selectable races — The Nigger, The Spic, The Chink, The Supposed Midwest Racist, et cetera — are direct concessions to the Xbox Live userbase. (There’s no Jew, though. Gears of War 2 should give us a big-nosed, big-bearded Othodox Jew who says “Shalom, bitches!” when he curb stomps.) Even old fantasy archetypes like rogue, orc, wizard, and the like have staying power precisely because they are readable and understandable in an abstracted reality, whether textual or graphical.
Uncharted is a game that dares not to think about decades of videogame design heritage, and there’s no question that it’s worse-off because of it. Apparently, they’re working on a sequel. Maybe it should be direct-to-theater.
★★☆☆
“ABOUT AS GOOD AN INTERACTIVE REPLICA OF A 30'S PULPY ADVENTURE SERIAL AS ROGUE SQUADRON IS OF A STAR WARS FILM.”
With Uncharted, Naughty Dog lays its cards on the table, and hedges (or at least shrubs) its bets that this moment in history, right now, is the one when realistically proportioned, ordinary human beings can exist in a videogame without shame, after years of spinning orange dreidel dogs and elves with limbs of a strange elastic composition. Squaresoft laid those cards in 1999 with Final Fantasy VIII, and swept them away in 2000 with Final Fantasy IX. Valve laid them in 2004 with Half-Life 2, and did their sweeping in 2007 with Team Fortress 2. (Well, Valve never actually removes any of their cards. They’re the kind of players with multiple decks, if you know what I mean.) Even now, with five hundred and twelve whole megabytes of RAM, and more cores than an applesauce factory, there’s a certain god-defying arrogance in men making men out of polygons. Consider that Pixar, a company housing the finest animators on earth, equipped with its near-unlimited computational and financial resources –– render farms that probably stretch farther than some real ones –– still hasn’t attempted to depict lifelike human beings with computer animation, so many years after The Spirits Within. I suppose the argument can be made, why spend ten million dollars per scene making what is essentially possible with a twenty-thousand-dollar camera and some million-dollar actors, and I suppose that argument would win out with just about everyone, including me.
If Uncharted were a movie, it would not be CG. It would be made with the filmiest film, all the stunts would be real, and the sets would be honest-to-god jungles and temples and airplanes. It would probably be a better Indiana Jones movie than that new one that’s coming up around the bend. But alas, it is a videogame. Thus it is about as good an interactive replica of a 30’s pulpy adventure serial as Rogue Squadron is of a Star Wars film. You’ll shoot a small country’s worth of pirates in this game. You’ll scuffle across chasms, and you’ll die half-way through and break the pacing because Ubisoft has a patent on The Dagger of Time®. There are gates to be opened by hammering Triangle. There are puzzles with statues to rotate between trips to GameFAQs. It all feels like it belongs, because the story is telling you what you should be doing at this moment or that, but we can’t help but wish the game would play itself for us; eventually, we wish it wasn’t a game at all.
The combat is a more desperate, slippery, improvised take on Gears of War‘s soldierly, methodical, almost Tetris-like, take-cover-and-kill mechanic. Nathan Drake is an ordinary man, an adjective so crucial to this game’s success that it’s there in big letters on the back of the box. He wears a white shirt and jeans, his hair is just kind of there. All his moves have little imperfections in them: he leaps onto ledges and scrapes his forearms, he flinches and winces when bullets puncture the rock he’s hiding behind. He peers out from safety, releases a few nine-millimeter clacks with the R1 button, and snaps back, amazed he’s still alive, as South Pacific accents taunt him with one of ten cocky phrases.
SCEA’s marketing department had the unenviable job of making this everyman character cool. We are used to commercials telling us YOU ARE THE PUNISHER, and “supersoldier” is, to us, as common a compound noun as “salaryman.” When the first trailer of Uncharted was released, back when it had no name, I read a post in which someone called the protagonist a “bland, candybar-looking motherhecker.” Maybe they were expecting the kind of half-knight, half-marine, half-quarterback heroes of Gears of War (three halves a man)? Maybe they just didn’t see enough zippers and buckles and asymmetry. (“Character Design” is an awfully limiting term. It reduces people to pewter statues.) Everyone in this game is as ordinary, and genuinely relatable, as Drake. There’s Elena, a videojournalist who’s chasing the story of her career, and Sullivan, Drake’s gentlemanly adventure buddy, with a mustache and a cigar, and debt. They are all perfectly cast, and act almost alarmingly like actual human beings. When Elena drops her camera into the abyss, the one that had been preserving hours of discoveries of El Goddamn Dorado, you can hear the frustration simmer in her teeth, before she just lets out an agonized “Shit!”
We don’t doubt for a moment that these are real people, and, more than anything, we wish the game wouldn’t keep throwing these gamey constructs at us so that we could just chill with them. Even just to walk from place to place, looking around. After all, the subtlety of just the walking in this game is breathtaking. (It makes jealous all those MMORPG’s in which walking comprises half of the gameplay.) With people and places that come off as so natural, it’s the game itself that gives off the biggest stink of artificiality. It’s not like removing the HUD would’ve made things any better. The constant need for twitchy little challenges and two-bit puzzles just isn’t realistic. Even on a cursed island. Even in an Indiana Jones movie.
Interestingly, all the cutscenes are of realtime footage, but exist in the form of compressed FMV. I understand they needed to fill the Blu-ray Disc, and this helps to reduce load times, with the bonus of making them all selectable from a menu after you’ve finished the game (effectively turning it into a movie). But seriously. In a game that’s already so disconnected from itself, it begs the question, why not just use some beautiful, beautiful CG. heck, why not use real actors, like they used to do back in the Command and Conquer days? Of course, going that far threatens to reduce this $25 million production to complete irrelevance. (It also makes the guy working on rock shaders really angry.)
To turn this game off after the credits and go play Team Fortress 2 to blow off some Steam is kind of a revelation. TF2 was built in the Valve tradition of functionalism: it was cartoon-like because online players do hilarious things to each other in multiplayer matches. The exaggerated proportions help players pick out silhouettes of the characters. They know big characters move slow and take a lot of damage, and thin ones can run really fast. All the characters were designed in such a way that the player is able to instantly see what team they’re on, and their eyes are drawn to the weapon they’re carrying. Only once they were all established as iconic little stamps, as elements of a videogame, did Valve go embellishing them with voices and animated personalities. It’s a bottom-up approach.
The best games are drawn this way. Mario’s design is a direct result of pixel limitations. In Halo, the grunts are tiny triangles with smurf voices to contrast them against their larger masters (whose deaths will send them scattering); the sniping jackels have big neon circle shields so that you can spot them at a distance. The very idea of cyborg player characters was done to excuse statistical elements on the screen — lifebars, radars — and things like batteries and recharging shields grew directly out of that. The Gears have weapon slots in the back of their armor that mirrors their D-pad assignment; their big meaty shape is such to imply that they can take so many bullets, and also so that they fit snugly in the blocky, geometric world in which they exist; their little blue lightbright highlights on their chestplates is so you can tell what team they’re on even in the shadows of the highest dynamic ranges. And their selectable races — The Nigger, The Spic, The Chink, The Supposed Midwest Racist, et cetera — are direct concessions to the Xbox Live userbase. (There’s no Jew, though. Gears of War 2 should give us a big-nosed, big-bearded Othodox Jew who says “Shalom, bitches!” when he curb stomps.) Even old fantasy archetypes like rogue, orc, wizard, and the like have staying power precisely because they are readable and understandable in an abstracted reality, whether textual or graphical.
Uncharted is a game that dares not to think about decades of videogame design heritage, and there’s no question that it’s worse-off because of it. Apparently, they’re working on a sequel. Maybe it should be direct-to-theater.
text by tim rogers
★★★☆
“THE BEST GAME EVER MADE ABOUT A DUDE IN A T-SHIRT AND JEANS.”
I can’t precisely say that it doesn’t make me a tiny bit uncomfortable to admit that I so totally have nothing against actual dudes starring in videogames. The hero of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a Guy in a T-shirt and jeans, with gun holsters over his shoulders. He jumps and climbs and shoots guys in the face. He never expresses guilt when he kills anyone, which leads us to believe that he might actually kill people all the time, which I suppose makes me feel a tiny bit like a Barbie-owning teenage girl must feel when her first boyfriend nonchalantly mentions after her first sexual encounter that the last condoms he used weren’t quite so tight.
Nathan Drake may or may not be the distant descendant of historical legendary explorer Sir Francis Drake; the game starts with him excavating a sarcophagus from the depths of the ocean at the precise point where Sir Francis Drake was apparently buried at sea. It doesn’t entirely make sense, though it turns out that Drake had faked his own death. There’s a girl there, whose voice-actor is not a professional by any stretch (every time she says “damn” or “hell” it’s like watching a whole little girls’ soccer team spontaneously combust seconds before the final whistle), and she complains a little bit. She’s filming a documentary or something. Seconds later, there are modern-day sea pirates shooting at you, so you’re shooting at them. There are a couple of cut-scenes, each of them directed competently, gently unfolding the B-minus-movie plot, and soon you’re on an island, with a jungle, and sunlight, and textures that look vaguely delicious, as much a treat to the refined eyes of an adult with a vintage AC/DC T-shirt collection as a bowl of Froot Loops was to the tongue of a fat ten-year-old; if you have a Very Expensive Television, you may soon be tempted, as I was, to finally remove the little strips of “protective” blue Scotch tape that were stuck to the corners of the display when the deliverymen dropped it off in your living room two years ago. Minutes after this epiphany, you’ve learned to play the game, and minutes later, you’ve sunk hours into it.
I heard someone call this a “videogame mix-tape”. I guess that’s right. Though everyone and their three-year-old sister are rushing to call it “Tomb Raider with a Dude” — or even “Dude Raider” — Uncharted is distinctly post-Gears (yes, we still consider Gears the Game of the Decade). It uses the Unreal Engine, it puts level design above all else, it has intense, cover-based firefights, and, more than anything, it stays heroically focused on and convinced in its hammy plot from beginning to end. That it also includes Prince-of-Persia-like climbing and platform sequences is absolutely essential to a post-Gears game design: you have to put something on the table. (When all is said and done, the third Prince of Persia game is still the king of tricky jumping puzzles. I’d love to see those guys make a game called “The Tower of Babel”, where all you have to do is climb to the top of one enormous tower. I’m sure they could make it work.) Uncharted also adds a nifty (mostly original) semi-rhythm-based melee combat system to the mix. It makes me think, man, as soon as someone makes a Dynasty-Warriors-style battlefield brawler with awesome music and rhythm elements in the fighting, the gaming press is going to stuff aluminum bricks and spray-paint them silver.
There’s really very little Tomb Raider influence to speak of, really. If you say Tomb Raider, I only have it in me to think of the first two, which were, if nothing else, enthralling (at the right time of year / lapses in medication) in the structure of their cavernous, empty, echo-y, massively puzzle-heavy dungeons. If Tomb Raider is “Indiana Jones”, Uncharted is “Planet Terror” — every time a puzzle comes up, Drake flips open Sir Francis Drake’s old notebook, and there’s the solution. Half of me wants to groan like a man groans when his daughter announces she’s getting married to a hobo; the other half admires the gall: because you know what? If big arcane tombs housing phenomenal treasure hordes were actually real, do you seriously think that you’d be able to get to the gold just by pushing a couple of blocks and lighting a couple of hecking torches? No, of course the solution is going to be literally impossible to figure out on your own, and if Nate Drake didn’t have that little notebook (must not wonder how Sir Francis Drake was able to figure out the puzzles in the first place), we wouldn’t have a videogame. Either way, you’ve got to really question the psychology of a person who would lock up a treasure horde in some big fascinating structure. It’s unthinkable in modern times, I guess — maybe way back before YouTube and “People’s Court” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” the human race was graced with a significantly higher percentage of people who wanted to bequeath their legacy to someone who was smart enough to pull only the levers with star marks on them. What kind of evil, stupid, gimp-ass sons did some of these ancient kings have, I wonder? Either way, I’ve noticed that, more often than not, the fantastic artifacts are always hidden in such impregnable fortresses or tombs because someone genuinely wanted to keep the ancient artifact out of reach of future generations because it was dangerous. Microsoft Excel didn’t exist back in the days of El Dorado, so no one was able to plan up a schedule to illustrate that destroying the dangerous artifact (or maybe just dumping it into the infinite expanse of the sea) would actually take less time than enslaving a couple thousand heretics and forcing them at spear-point to build an elaborate temple dungeon.
I can forgive any loop holes in the plot because I loved Indiana Jones as a kid, even though my brother insisted that he was going to grow up to be Indiana Jones, so I had to settle for James Bond, which was, believe it or not, the short end of the stick (it’d take a PhD thesis to explain why). My brother has three kids and two cars now, and I’m a videogame designer in a punk rock band that has actually never finished a song that’s less than seven minutes long, so I guess neither one of us is living the life of death-defying archaeologist. Either way, I can appreciate the jungly context in Uncharted. I see Nathan Drake as the kind of adult-looking guy who might have sighed and looked out the window when the big dude sitting behind me in algebra class slapped a fat wad of gum onto the back of my hair. He would have never kicked me down the stairs, though he wouldn’t have helped me up, either. He wouldn’t even think, “That kid’s got to fight for himself.” He would just turn away and keep walking. He’s the kind of guy who lacks crucial contextual tidbits, and he’s all the more of a dude for it. When Drake has his back to a big stone pillar and there are dudes shooting at him, he gets this look on his face — console games are still three or four hardware generations far from perfect photo-realism, though none of that matters to Naughty Dog: they give Drake actual expressions, and at moments, whether it’s one of the dozen or so unique stumbling animations that will occasionally occur as you climb stairs or the truly terrified look on his face while he’s being shot at, Nathan Drake rises above other videogame characters. He’s more than just a polygon man — he’s, like, the son of a real dude and a woman whose father was half-cartoon. And, whether he knows it or not, he is afraid of death. And not just in a “videogame character breaking the fourth wall” kind of fear of death. It’s just right there on his face. The game rolls right on to its conclusion, through spectacular yet reined-in vistas, increasingly difficult gun battles, tricky jumping puzzles, and even difficult battles while navigating tricky jumping puzzles (though I could honestly do with a little bit more of that last one). When the story manages to spring its “big reveal” on the player, it’s done with amazing nobility. It pulls no punches and makes no excuses. It’s just like, “There it is. Now keep playing.” And that’s what you do. It’s awfully sweet and kind of the game. There’s absolutely no shame about the open-ended ending, either. There’s no groan-worthy bad-guy hand reaching out from beneath the waves, triumphantly clutching air. It’s basically like, the girl says “That adventure was fun let’s go on another” and the hero’s like “Yeah sure”. I, too, was like “Yeah sure”. It’d be really nice if they could maybe write truly excellent dialogue for the next one, though I’m far from worried — if Uncharted is Naughty Dog’s Jak and Daxter for the PlayStation 3, I have high hopes for their Jak 2. I give their first attempt a healthy score of three stars instead of the two-and-a-half it probably deserves because I appreciate its awesome thoughtfulness, and I don’t want to be caught with my pants down when the sequel turns out to be truly excellent. In the meantime, hey, Naughty Dog: thanks for caring.
I played the region-free US version of Uncharted on my Japanese PlayStation 3, and I didn’t notice that the game had been “heavily censored” until my friend Spencer Yip pointed it out to me. How weird is that? Apparently the Japanese version of the game manages to scoop out all of the blood, gore, “impaling deaths”, and even the god damned rag doll physics — and even if you play the uncensored American version of the game on a Japanese PlayStation 3, it somehow manages to censor the game just as though you were playing the Japanese version. Curious! Before learning this factoid, I had played the game for four hours, and never once thirsted animalistically for blood, nor had I even once wondered why people weren’t gushing gel-like red ooze all over the place whenever I touched them. I had, however — only twice — wondered why the enemies all do the exact same “Matrix”-ish arm-flail-swooping animation whenever they get shot. Where’s the real-time flinching, popularized by such games as Turok 2 on the Nintendo 64? At first, I thought it was a design choice — and I managed to applaud it. (This happened late at night.) In Gears of War, your character can completely heal to full health after being shot something like thirty times. All he has to do is crouch by a wall and wait, and then he’s healed. This makes the game about moments, yes — about staying in the zone, about multiplying the rush as you stay in that zone. Though ultimately, if you suck at the game, it comes to look exceedingly silly. If you’re careful enough to survive through three staight levels, you have to wonder how a guy can keep running like that — he must have at least a thousand rounds of ammo embedded in his muscles. The weight in lead alone should keep him pinned to the floor. Yet Gears was — as Uncharted is — a game where the idea of “suppressing fire” works as both a concept and a method — it’s not like Brothers in Arms, where the enemies’ “suppressed” circle turns red if you shoot in their general direction enough. The abstraction is kept to a minimum by the sheer power of the concept, uh, literally working. Here I was thinking of how clever it was that neither Drake nor his bad guys ever got hit by a bullet unless that bullet was the killing bullet. I mean, it’s a pretty brilliant concept. It’s like, as the look of fear grows to encompass Drake’s face, it’s not because he’s getting hurt, it’s because he’s getting scared, and thus getting sloppy, and that’s why that last bullet — that last tick off the hidden “life meter” in the sky — manages to hit, and kill. This was a really healthy way to think until, well, I looked up some videos on YouTube and was like, dude, it actually looks cool when people are getting shot. You have to wonder, why allow people to die in a game at all if they’re not going to at least look a little dead? I mean, why not just make them throw down their guns, surrender, and run off into the jungle with their hands gripping the backs of their trousers whenever the PlayStation 3’s CPU registers a “killing shot”? I could be a millionaire with these ideas.
★★★☆
“THE BEST GAME EVER MADE ABOUT A DUDE IN A T-SHIRT AND JEANS.”
I can’t precisely say that it doesn’t make me a tiny bit uncomfortable to admit that I so totally have nothing against actual dudes starring in videogames. The hero of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a Guy in a T-shirt and jeans, with gun holsters over his shoulders. He jumps and climbs and shoots guys in the face. He never expresses guilt when he kills anyone, which leads us to believe that he might actually kill people all the time, which I suppose makes me feel a tiny bit like a Barbie-owning teenage girl must feel when her first boyfriend nonchalantly mentions after her first sexual encounter that the last condoms he used weren’t quite so tight.
Nathan Drake may or may not be the distant descendant of historical legendary explorer Sir Francis Drake; the game starts with him excavating a sarcophagus from the depths of the ocean at the precise point where Sir Francis Drake was apparently buried at sea. It doesn’t entirely make sense, though it turns out that Drake had faked his own death. There’s a girl there, whose voice-actor is not a professional by any stretch (every time she says “damn” or “hell” it’s like watching a whole little girls’ soccer team spontaneously combust seconds before the final whistle), and she complains a little bit. She’s filming a documentary or something. Seconds later, there are modern-day sea pirates shooting at you, so you’re shooting at them. There are a couple of cut-scenes, each of them directed competently, gently unfolding the B-minus-movie plot, and soon you’re on an island, with a jungle, and sunlight, and textures that look vaguely delicious, as much a treat to the refined eyes of an adult with a vintage AC/DC T-shirt collection as a bowl of Froot Loops was to the tongue of a fat ten-year-old; if you have a Very Expensive Television, you may soon be tempted, as I was, to finally remove the little strips of “protective” blue Scotch tape that were stuck to the corners of the display when the deliverymen dropped it off in your living room two years ago. Minutes after this epiphany, you’ve learned to play the game, and minutes later, you’ve sunk hours into it.
I heard someone call this a “videogame mix-tape”. I guess that’s right. Though everyone and their three-year-old sister are rushing to call it “Tomb Raider with a Dude” — or even “Dude Raider” — Uncharted is distinctly post-Gears (yes, we still consider Gears the Game of the Decade). It uses the Unreal Engine, it puts level design above all else, it has intense, cover-based firefights, and, more than anything, it stays heroically focused on and convinced in its hammy plot from beginning to end. That it also includes Prince-of-Persia-like climbing and platform sequences is absolutely essential to a post-Gears game design: you have to put something on the table. (When all is said and done, the third Prince of Persia game is still the king of tricky jumping puzzles. I’d love to see those guys make a game called “The Tower of Babel”, where all you have to do is climb to the top of one enormous tower. I’m sure they could make it work.) Uncharted also adds a nifty (mostly original) semi-rhythm-based melee combat system to the mix. It makes me think, man, as soon as someone makes a Dynasty-Warriors-style battlefield brawler with awesome music and rhythm elements in the fighting, the gaming press is going to stuff aluminum bricks and spray-paint them silver.
There’s really very little Tomb Raider influence to speak of, really. If you say Tomb Raider, I only have it in me to think of the first two, which were, if nothing else, enthralling (at the right time of year / lapses in medication) in the structure of their cavernous, empty, echo-y, massively puzzle-heavy dungeons. If Tomb Raider is “Indiana Jones”, Uncharted is “Planet Terror” — every time a puzzle comes up, Drake flips open Sir Francis Drake’s old notebook, and there’s the solution. Half of me wants to groan like a man groans when his daughter announces she’s getting married to a hobo; the other half admires the gall: because you know what? If big arcane tombs housing phenomenal treasure hordes were actually real, do you seriously think that you’d be able to get to the gold just by pushing a couple of blocks and lighting a couple of hecking torches? No, of course the solution is going to be literally impossible to figure out on your own, and if Nate Drake didn’t have that little notebook (must not wonder how Sir Francis Drake was able to figure out the puzzles in the first place), we wouldn’t have a videogame. Either way, you’ve got to really question the psychology of a person who would lock up a treasure horde in some big fascinating structure. It’s unthinkable in modern times, I guess — maybe way back before YouTube and “People’s Court” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” the human race was graced with a significantly higher percentage of people who wanted to bequeath their legacy to someone who was smart enough to pull only the levers with star marks on them. What kind of evil, stupid, gimp-ass sons did some of these ancient kings have, I wonder? Either way, I’ve noticed that, more often than not, the fantastic artifacts are always hidden in such impregnable fortresses or tombs because someone genuinely wanted to keep the ancient artifact out of reach of future generations because it was dangerous. Microsoft Excel didn’t exist back in the days of El Dorado, so no one was able to plan up a schedule to illustrate that destroying the dangerous artifact (or maybe just dumping it into the infinite expanse of the sea) would actually take less time than enslaving a couple thousand heretics and forcing them at spear-point to build an elaborate temple dungeon.
I can forgive any loop holes in the plot because I loved Indiana Jones as a kid, even though my brother insisted that he was going to grow up to be Indiana Jones, so I had to settle for James Bond, which was, believe it or not, the short end of the stick (it’d take a PhD thesis to explain why). My brother has three kids and two cars now, and I’m a videogame designer in a punk rock band that has actually never finished a song that’s less than seven minutes long, so I guess neither one of us is living the life of death-defying archaeologist. Either way, I can appreciate the jungly context in Uncharted. I see Nathan Drake as the kind of adult-looking guy who might have sighed and looked out the window when the big dude sitting behind me in algebra class slapped a fat wad of gum onto the back of my hair. He would have never kicked me down the stairs, though he wouldn’t have helped me up, either. He wouldn’t even think, “That kid’s got to fight for himself.” He would just turn away and keep walking. He’s the kind of guy who lacks crucial contextual tidbits, and he’s all the more of a dude for it. When Drake has his back to a big stone pillar and there are dudes shooting at him, he gets this look on his face — console games are still three or four hardware generations far from perfect photo-realism, though none of that matters to Naughty Dog: they give Drake actual expressions, and at moments, whether it’s one of the dozen or so unique stumbling animations that will occasionally occur as you climb stairs or the truly terrified look on his face while he’s being shot at, Nathan Drake rises above other videogame characters. He’s more than just a polygon man — he’s, like, the son of a real dude and a woman whose father was half-cartoon. And, whether he knows it or not, he is afraid of death. And not just in a “videogame character breaking the fourth wall” kind of fear of death. It’s just right there on his face. The game rolls right on to its conclusion, through spectacular yet reined-in vistas, increasingly difficult gun battles, tricky jumping puzzles, and even difficult battles while navigating tricky jumping puzzles (though I could honestly do with a little bit more of that last one). When the story manages to spring its “big reveal” on the player, it’s done with amazing nobility. It pulls no punches and makes no excuses. It’s just like, “There it is. Now keep playing.” And that’s what you do. It’s awfully sweet and kind of the game. There’s absolutely no shame about the open-ended ending, either. There’s no groan-worthy bad-guy hand reaching out from beneath the waves, triumphantly clutching air. It’s basically like, the girl says “That adventure was fun let’s go on another” and the hero’s like “Yeah sure”. I, too, was like “Yeah sure”. It’d be really nice if they could maybe write truly excellent dialogue for the next one, though I’m far from worried — if Uncharted is Naughty Dog’s Jak and Daxter for the PlayStation 3, I have high hopes for their Jak 2. I give their first attempt a healthy score of three stars instead of the two-and-a-half it probably deserves because I appreciate its awesome thoughtfulness, and I don’t want to be caught with my pants down when the sequel turns out to be truly excellent. In the meantime, hey, Naughty Dog: thanks for caring.
I played the region-free US version of Uncharted on my Japanese PlayStation 3, and I didn’t notice that the game had been “heavily censored” until my friend Spencer Yip pointed it out to me. How weird is that? Apparently the Japanese version of the game manages to scoop out all of the blood, gore, “impaling deaths”, and even the god damned rag doll physics — and even if you play the uncensored American version of the game on a Japanese PlayStation 3, it somehow manages to censor the game just as though you were playing the Japanese version. Curious! Before learning this factoid, I had played the game for four hours, and never once thirsted animalistically for blood, nor had I even once wondered why people weren’t gushing gel-like red ooze all over the place whenever I touched them. I had, however — only twice — wondered why the enemies all do the exact same “Matrix”-ish arm-flail-swooping animation whenever they get shot. Where’s the real-time flinching, popularized by such games as Turok 2 on the Nintendo 64? At first, I thought it was a design choice — and I managed to applaud it. (This happened late at night.) In Gears of War, your character can completely heal to full health after being shot something like thirty times. All he has to do is crouch by a wall and wait, and then he’s healed. This makes the game about moments, yes — about staying in the zone, about multiplying the rush as you stay in that zone. Though ultimately, if you suck at the game, it comes to look exceedingly silly. If you’re careful enough to survive through three staight levels, you have to wonder how a guy can keep running like that — he must have at least a thousand rounds of ammo embedded in his muscles. The weight in lead alone should keep him pinned to the floor. Yet Gears was — as Uncharted is — a game where the idea of “suppressing fire” works as both a concept and a method — it’s not like Brothers in Arms, where the enemies’ “suppressed” circle turns red if you shoot in their general direction enough. The abstraction is kept to a minimum by the sheer power of the concept, uh, literally working. Here I was thinking of how clever it was that neither Drake nor his bad guys ever got hit by a bullet unless that bullet was the killing bullet. I mean, it’s a pretty brilliant concept. It’s like, as the look of fear grows to encompass Drake’s face, it’s not because he’s getting hurt, it’s because he’s getting scared, and thus getting sloppy, and that’s why that last bullet — that last tick off the hidden “life meter” in the sky — manages to hit, and kill. This was a really healthy way to think until, well, I looked up some videos on YouTube and was like, dude, it actually looks cool when people are getting shot. You have to wonder, why allow people to die in a game at all if they’re not going to at least look a little dead? I mean, why not just make them throw down their guns, surrender, and run off into the jungle with their hands gripping the backs of their trousers whenever the PlayStation 3’s CPU registers a “killing shot”? I could be a millionaire with these ideas.