ACTIONBUTTONNET
2004
text by Ario Barzan
★★★☆
“A FULL DAY'S MEAL IN A SIX OUNCE STEAK.”
Ah – the lovers of masochism. Those who upload the fruit of their labor onto the Internet and kick bastard games into the ground with inhuman, button-pounding prowess. Our chain to their existence is their Pro Status garnered by guiding Ryu Hayabusa through primordial-stuff-fit inducing levels. Just how many tries did it take? Did they come home from work or school each day and practice ’till midnight? Have they put off Real Life for their goal? I wonder if these people aren’t just A.I., programmed to conquer pixilated hell.
Contra: Shattered Soldier, released in the early lifespan of the Playstation 2, was, as we say in the business, not hecking around: a heaven-sent for such masochists, and a destroyer of worlds for those who found Donkey Kong Country difficult. One came to either embrace the game as it gave them a heart-halting slap on the back, or despised its gleeful abrasiveness. A middle-ground did not exist, because the presentation was black and white, and hard as diamond.
That was the problem, I guess. “Hard-ass†is as far away from a title as you can give me (though I really don’t want a title). Yes, I can enjoy a challenge that, now and again, has me weeping as a denied child would, but limits do exist. For example: God Hand’s Challenge #15, where it’s you without roulette orbs or tension gauge, against three enemies on the highest difficulty – fifteen seconds to win – and enough life on your end so that a single hit kills. Thinking about it makes me want to tear a small animal in half. Shattered Soldier was not nearly so abusive. Still, you were given a constant visit by failure, and it was a bit of a downer.
So, if Shattered Soldier‘s militaristic perverseness in forcing us to dance to the beat of its death drum was the attraction, Neo Contra is more unfettered and consistently accessible – more fun. The odd thing is that no one made much of a shout, or whisper, even. A cold neglect hung around the game as the media waved a hand away at its shortness and lesser difficulty. Certainly, Shattered Soldier was nothing big, but it did have a viewable following. Neo Contra, then, is almost invisible. After going on a mission to track a copy down in its Bargain Bin home, finishing it three times with a friend in two days, and then four times by myself, my brain was . . . hot, and bothered. Hot from joy, and bothered by the bitter reality that the heaviest slice of Videogamedom’s inhabitants have turned into edacious gremlins, preferring a fat bag of chips over a delicious steak. They want seventy hours of gameplay that’s stretched like the deformed skin of plastic-surgery-addicted stars.
In such an age, Neo Contra‘s briefness is, yeah, startling. And because the challenge isn’t so damned, we can jog through most of it before the timer on the oven lets us know our deep dish pizza’s finished. Though, when it comes down to it, length is such a context sensitive thing. It’s distressing to see this mentality of believing XL is just the fit for every game under the sun. Super Mario Brothers 3‘s size is perfect for its design; and twenty years later, we can still play the thing and feel gratified. Neo Contra is itty, oh-so-bitty in the current world of “Epic” (which has all but lost its meaning), yet it is crammed with loving expertise, able to be played whenever, free of cumbersome devotional demands.
From the get-go, four stages can be completed in any order. You might want to start out on the fourth, since it’s kind of amazing. It begins by showing Bill Rizer’s upper body moving, shaking as the sky goes by – then, the camera pulls away, and you see that our friend is running on top of a helicopter’s spinning blades. A swarm of overgrown bees attack, followed by an aircraft dropping bombs all over. Trash these punks, and take on a flying battleship, which, in due time, is knocked out of commission by another that’s ten times bigger. You infiltrate this behemoth, a deliciously videogame-y war zone populated with cannons, missile launchers, sentry guns, and hordes of soldiers. And the boss, dear Lord, is a dog who hops into a water craft and shoots screen-filling laser patterns.
Yes, Neo Contra pushes Serious Business away, and it’s all the more glorious for it. Picking up the case and comparing Jim Lee’s bright art to Ashley Wood’s, you can already notice the change in tone to buttery ridiculousness. As Shattered Soldier opened with a grunge-rock-infested cinematic flashing apocalyptic Engrish across scenes of destruction, this detonated in my face with a woman wailing, “NEO CONTRAAA,†while Bill and secondary-character/black-samurai Jaguar used rocket launchers to destroy a giant robot, and – well. Get an S ranking, and witness Jaguar cut the hecking world in half, and then swim through the space debris in a loincloth to sourceless humming. As a friend put it when I sent him a link to the clip on Youtube, “There’s something very wrong, here. And, yet, at the same time, very right.â€
In concept, the game is pretty tough. As logic dictates, however, 3D movement opens wider dynamics, spreads the yellow tape out. This is not to say the design isn’t tight – it is. It’s invigorating, respectable. You will die a healthy amount of times before nailing it. If Neo Contra’s stages are Gauntlet stages – you versus the swarm in platform-less, relatively linear mazes – the difference, then, is that Neo Contra doesn’t just chuck stuff and have you mash away, forming a nihilistic space in your gut, or mindlessly set up monster-spawning pods to feign a need for strategy. Instead, each level has set-pieces that fit together like gaudy, accurate clockwork. This propulsion promises to take care of your entertainment expectations, and does. While Mission 2 has you riding on dinosaurs and taking out hover-bike guys, you’re dodging boulders on hills on Mission 3 with men atop them, performing Russian jigs. Bosses are wonderfully executed – flipping, clicking, rolling, shifting monsters of mechanic brilliance. And the soundtrack is a fist-pumping explosion of Euro-Dance, House, and other thumping things provided by synth-junkie Sota Fujimori.
Anyone I know who has played this has had a blast. Remember you and a neighborhood friend co-oping and hurriedly yelling at each other because shoot the boss in the head oh my god? Neo Contra inspires a similar giddy adrenaline. There are minor points of contention, like how the 3D isn’t always perfect, mainly at the final boss where you have to dodge spiraling balls of fire on this tiny platform. And how the extra weapons are a bit too nice, a bit too easy to get, a bit too tempting of a junk food once obtained (look – you get the Hammer of Dawn – except it’s better). At a point where my life is running on intervals of time, and videogames’ bigness muddles playability, I’m glad to have something fresh, small, and savory.
★★★☆
“A FULL DAY'S MEAL IN A SIX OUNCE STEAK.”
Ah – the lovers of masochism. Those who upload the fruit of their labor onto the Internet and kick bastard games into the ground with inhuman, button-pounding prowess. Our chain to their existence is their Pro Status garnered by guiding Ryu Hayabusa through primordial-stuff-fit inducing levels. Just how many tries did it take? Did they come home from work or school each day and practice ’till midnight? Have they put off Real Life for their goal? I wonder if these people aren’t just A.I., programmed to conquer pixilated hell.
Contra: Shattered Soldier, released in the early lifespan of the Playstation 2, was, as we say in the business, not hecking around: a heaven-sent for such masochists, and a destroyer of worlds for those who found Donkey Kong Country difficult. One came to either embrace the game as it gave them a heart-halting slap on the back, or despised its gleeful abrasiveness. A middle-ground did not exist, because the presentation was black and white, and hard as diamond.
That was the problem, I guess. “Hard-ass†is as far away from a title as you can give me (though I really don’t want a title). Yes, I can enjoy a challenge that, now and again, has me weeping as a denied child would, but limits do exist. For example: God Hand’s Challenge #15, where it’s you without roulette orbs or tension gauge, against three enemies on the highest difficulty – fifteen seconds to win – and enough life on your end so that a single hit kills. Thinking about it makes me want to tear a small animal in half. Shattered Soldier was not nearly so abusive. Still, you were given a constant visit by failure, and it was a bit of a downer.
So, if Shattered Soldier‘s militaristic perverseness in forcing us to dance to the beat of its death drum was the attraction, Neo Contra is more unfettered and consistently accessible – more fun. The odd thing is that no one made much of a shout, or whisper, even. A cold neglect hung around the game as the media waved a hand away at its shortness and lesser difficulty. Certainly, Shattered Soldier was nothing big, but it did have a viewable following. Neo Contra, then, is almost invisible. After going on a mission to track a copy down in its Bargain Bin home, finishing it three times with a friend in two days, and then four times by myself, my brain was . . . hot, and bothered. Hot from joy, and bothered by the bitter reality that the heaviest slice of Videogamedom’s inhabitants have turned into edacious gremlins, preferring a fat bag of chips over a delicious steak. They want seventy hours of gameplay that’s stretched like the deformed skin of plastic-surgery-addicted stars.
In such an age, Neo Contra‘s briefness is, yeah, startling. And because the challenge isn’t so damned, we can jog through most of it before the timer on the oven lets us know our deep dish pizza’s finished. Though, when it comes down to it, length is such a context sensitive thing. It’s distressing to see this mentality of believing XL is just the fit for every game under the sun. Super Mario Brothers 3‘s size is perfect for its design; and twenty years later, we can still play the thing and feel gratified. Neo Contra is itty, oh-so-bitty in the current world of “Epic” (which has all but lost its meaning), yet it is crammed with loving expertise, able to be played whenever, free of cumbersome devotional demands.
From the get-go, four stages can be completed in any order. You might want to start out on the fourth, since it’s kind of amazing. It begins by showing Bill Rizer’s upper body moving, shaking as the sky goes by – then, the camera pulls away, and you see that our friend is running on top of a helicopter’s spinning blades. A swarm of overgrown bees attack, followed by an aircraft dropping bombs all over. Trash these punks, and take on a flying battleship, which, in due time, is knocked out of commission by another that’s ten times bigger. You infiltrate this behemoth, a deliciously videogame-y war zone populated with cannons, missile launchers, sentry guns, and hordes of soldiers. And the boss, dear Lord, is a dog who hops into a water craft and shoots screen-filling laser patterns.
Yes, Neo Contra pushes Serious Business away, and it’s all the more glorious for it. Picking up the case and comparing Jim Lee’s bright art to Ashley Wood’s, you can already notice the change in tone to buttery ridiculousness. As Shattered Soldier opened with a grunge-rock-infested cinematic flashing apocalyptic Engrish across scenes of destruction, this detonated in my face with a woman wailing, “NEO CONTRAAA,†while Bill and secondary-character/black-samurai Jaguar used rocket launchers to destroy a giant robot, and – well. Get an S ranking, and witness Jaguar cut the hecking world in half, and then swim through the space debris in a loincloth to sourceless humming. As a friend put it when I sent him a link to the clip on Youtube, “There’s something very wrong, here. And, yet, at the same time, very right.â€
In concept, the game is pretty tough. As logic dictates, however, 3D movement opens wider dynamics, spreads the yellow tape out. This is not to say the design isn’t tight – it is. It’s invigorating, respectable. You will die a healthy amount of times before nailing it. If Neo Contra’s stages are Gauntlet stages – you versus the swarm in platform-less, relatively linear mazes – the difference, then, is that Neo Contra doesn’t just chuck stuff and have you mash away, forming a nihilistic space in your gut, or mindlessly set up monster-spawning pods to feign a need for strategy. Instead, each level has set-pieces that fit together like gaudy, accurate clockwork. This propulsion promises to take care of your entertainment expectations, and does. While Mission 2 has you riding on dinosaurs and taking out hover-bike guys, you’re dodging boulders on hills on Mission 3 with men atop them, performing Russian jigs. Bosses are wonderfully executed – flipping, clicking, rolling, shifting monsters of mechanic brilliance. And the soundtrack is a fist-pumping explosion of Euro-Dance, House, and other thumping things provided by synth-junkie Sota Fujimori.
Anyone I know who has played this has had a blast. Remember you and a neighborhood friend co-oping and hurriedly yelling at each other because shoot the boss in the head oh my god? Neo Contra inspires a similar giddy adrenaline. There are minor points of contention, like how the 3D isn’t always perfect, mainly at the final boss where you have to dodge spiraling balls of fire on this tiny platform. And how the extra weapons are a bit too nice, a bit too easy to get, a bit too tempting of a junk food once obtained (look – you get the Hammer of Dawn – except it’s better). At a point where my life is running on intervals of time, and videogames’ bigness muddles playability, I’m glad to have something fresh, small, and savory.
2007
text by tim rogers
★⋆☆☆
“A PAINLESS, FORGETTABLE LITTLE EXERCISE IN POINT-MISSING.”
As human beings blessed with remarkable patience, we here at Action Button Dot Net didn’t immediately scream ourselves into comas when we heard that an American — that is, a non-Japanese — developer was being put in charge of Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS. With Zen-like resolve, we refrained from jamming out a pre-emptive review that centered on the fact that developer WayForward Technologies’ previous effort had, for the record, been Shrek the 3rd: Ogres and Donkeys (rated E for Everyone). For one thing, as a group of individuals so convinced that half of the people who do make blockbuster videogames should probably be imprisoned for petty theft, we’re all about handing out the benefit of the doubt to anyone who actually hasn’t had the opportunity to make a game that IGN is going to pretend to give a stuff about. Furthermore, while WayForward’s Sigma Star Saga was, in execution, a piece of greasy stuff, it was so full of out-of-left-field, balls-to-floor concepts (a role-playing game where the “battle system” involves “old-school shoot-em-upping” is welcome, by default, in a world where RPG “battle systems” are normally focused on selecting “fight” from a menu and then watching your dudes fight) that it gets a miraculous passing grade. If Contra 4 is these guys’ chance to work with a budget, more power to them. What’s next, Square-Enix putting a D-team of unknowns on Final Fantasy XIII? Go right ahead! Why not put the development team who brought us Marc Ecko’s Getting Up in charge of the next Silent Hill game, while you’re at it? (Being dead serious here.) Let’s put Darth Vader into Soul Calibur, too, while we’re at it. I mean, let’s face it, when it comes to Japanese videogames, “experience” usually means little more than “an octogenarian in charge”. Well, unless you’re talking about Contra‘s esteemed director / designer Nobuya Nakazato, still alive, still kicking, still brilliant, whose latest two Contra games for the PlayStation 2 were both amazing and written off by critics the Western world over as “not exactly the same thing as the original Contra“. That man — well, simply put, he’s a genius, and we’d like to marry him. Did you know he directed Vandal Hearts, the only strategy RPG you can play from start to finish without getting hit once? (The maps are small enough so that the enemies don’t possess “AI”, they just move in pre-programmed “patterns” to accommodate for the player’s actions.) Here’s Irem making R-Type Tactics, when Nakazato had already made Contra Tactics a decade ago.
Enough about awesome stuff, though, and on with the disappointment: it’s a shame that Contra 4 kind of misses the point all around. It’s got enough flow and enough snap, for one thing, though it really just doesn’t crunch enough. It mushes along. Whereas Neo Contra is the epitome of crunch, Contra 4 is too stop-starty for its own good. Review-writers whistling, yee-hawing, moosecalling, and hi-ho-ing about the game’s “extreme difficulty” need to dump a bottle of chill pills in their tomato soup tomorrow at lunch. What are these people doing, just holding right on the control pad, and tapping the Action Button with the stylus? Contra 4 is easily playable by anyone with a cool head (and, say, the ability to win Virtua Fighter 5 tournaments despite actually, methodically sucking at Guilty Gear) if you shift your damn paradigm for three seconds, stop in place, look at where the enemies are coming from, and rush the holes. Play it like a runningback, not a linebacker, for God’s sake. (Finally! A similie everyone in our readership will understand!) I hated the game, personally, for my first two clumsy attempts, and then went on to get all the way to stage five on my next credit, and lord knows I’m not a rocket scientist. When I got to the end, I was convinced that I’d had it all wrong when I said I hated this stupid game. In the end, it’s not worth hating. It’s just there.
Contra games have always been about sadistic locomotion. Hell, all classic Konami games are about locomotion. Observe how little this skilled player stops in his entire playthrough of the original Castlevania. Now check out Contra III. Or Contra. These are speed runs by highly skilled players, though really, it’s not impossible to think that these games can’t be cleared flawlessly on a first attempt by someone who’s just really good at videogames. It’s a tenuous point we’re trying to make here: Contra 4‘s idea of “insane difficulty” comes less from the actual heart of the Contra games and more from playground rumors — about this game called Contra that’s so hard because you die in one hit and there’s even a thirty lives code because it’s that hard. Contra 4 strives to make a difficult game by flooding every corner of every stage with endlessly spawning, somersaulting enemies and furious blinking bullets. The level designers tossed off each little monsterpiece probably without bothering to play-test them. Let’s see how the jerks like this! In the end, though, the game is missing the fleeting flow and motion that previous (ahem, Japanese-developed) Contra titles had all sharpened into perfection, maybe because the (Japanese) developers had originally conceived the games as arcade entertainment devices, or maybe because the (Japanese) developers just employed a lot of common sense. If breathing deeply and rushing the holes in the enemy lines (while never letting go of the fire button) is how the (American) developer wants us to play Contra 4, however, then we’ll have to call them more clever than we might have given credit for — and then scold them for making the game otherwise kind of flat and bland.
Review-writers all over the internet were able to excuse the so-called “insane difficulty” because the game has plenty of “old-school charm”. Huh. “Old-school charm” is a tough demon to quantify, though I’m pretty sure they’re all talking about the little quippy liner notes strewn all over the game. I’ve removed the game from my DS since playing it, and there’s a copy of Dragon Quest IV lodged in the cartridge slot right now and it will require surgery to be removed, so I can’t check and make sure, though I vaguely remember the “help” text on Contra 4‘s title menu proclaiming that “Arcade Mode” is “All about beefy dudes and spread gun. Just what the Contra ordered. Heck yeah!” (Warning: embellished.) The (black-and-white) instruction manual cringingly recalls fond memories of the over-the-top, rage-against-the-Reaganomics leveling-with-the-kids Konami instruction manuals of the 1980s. It’s like, man, when we were kids, this stuff was hilarious! Now, it’s kind of like your uncle flying three thousand miles to come to your wedding, and then dying on the plane (drug overdose) while wearing a Santa Claus suit.
That’s the way Konami classics were, way back when — stone-faced beef-dudes with spread guns raging against nameless alien threats while their instruction manuals ranged from cheeky to lippy to jerky. Now, the global climate has mutated; scientists and the police have determined that precisely half of the anonymous saps stepping forward to type “lol” at the latest regurgitation of the “eternal battle between pirates and ninjas” meme as reported by Kotaku.com either played high school football or tried out for it. We’re sixteen years away from a generation of Al Bundys who would rather play Guitar Hero than watch John Wayne as “Hondo”. John Wayne never needed a hecking spread gun.
We can’t really blame WayForward for pandering to these people, anyway: they’re where the money is at — all of the money. Still, once again, an innate quality of Contra is lost on these new Western overlords: though it’s exceedingly hard to tell from the first couple of installments, the entire Contra series — big dudes, big guns, big monsters — is a gradually accelerating elbow jab directed at the ribs of American pop culture. Exhibit A would be that your dual-rifle-wielding Schwarzenegger-like hero motherhecker, arms heavier than nuclear missiles, manages to somersault no less than nine times in the air every time he jumps. Contra Hard Corps, with its ladlefuls of bizarre, should have gotten the message across that the over-the-top violence in these games was clearly a gleeful pastiche. It seems that in America, a country where half the people can’t read, 75% of the people can’t locate the North American continent on a map, and 95% couldn’t succinctly explain the difference between Jerry Lewis and Alan Greenspan, it just didn’t get through. Kids genuinely thought that “beefy dude hanging onto soaring intercontinental ballistic missile with one arm while shooting a shotgun with an endless supply of ammunition with the other arm” was a worthy role model, like they were going to be able to pick up a brochure at the career fair. (In the case of Neo Contra, the brochure’s cover would read “Beefy dude who takes on an entire air-force-worth of planes with just a machinegun while running in place atop spinning helicopter blades”.) Years later, we had the “stylish hard action” of Devil May Cry, and years after that, we had Devil May Cry 3, which kids on the internet squealed about: the hero, Dante, is such a badass, like when he surfs on that missile and stuff, though what the heck is with the pizza in the first cut-scene man that stuff is so hecking gay. Lo and behold, Devil May Cry 4 casts a CG scientologist pederast in the role of Dante and a tight-faced emomaniac in the role of the main character, Nero.
Neo Contra, most poignantly, casts a katana-wielding black samurai as one of its beefy heroes. There’s a CG cut-scene (essential viewing) where said badass black samurai cuts a group of rushing soldiers in half with his katana — “Awesome!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a Hummer comes blasting at him full-speed — with a shoulder-thrust, he knocks the hecking thing over. “BADASS!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a group of a hundred men come charging at him — with one vicious slash, he turns them into a volcano of blood. “heck YEAH!!” shouts YouTube. Then a huge, monolithic threat shows itself, and our very black, very samurai hero summons power from the depths of his soul, and unleashes a slash that cuts the very planet earth in half. “TOO heckING RADICAL!!” ejaculates YouTube. The screen grows black. Ten seconds later, we see our two heroes swimming through space in their underwear. Like, somehow, the destruction of the planet earth had also stripped them of their clothes. Suddenly, the internet is afraid — deathly so — that mass media might, as their preacher insists, be intent on turning them into homosexuals:
“WTF??! That was great up to the point those two appearing swimming in space humming. Eww.”
“WTF!? is this the reward for getting overall S rank in the game… are you kidding me!!! I lost my respect for the S rank after seeing this -_-“
“2 gay guys swimming on space WTF!!!”
“It went from pretty cool to real gay”
(Ignore the comments that call the video brilliant. Those people are obviously from the UK.)
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Contra, in the words of its most treasured (and paying) fans, “went from pretty cool to real gay“. This is why an American team was called in to handle Contra 4 — to keep this eternally told tale of shirtless men with large machine rifles as heterosexual as possible. There is to be no hecking with the average gamer’s grip on sexuality.
We could say that, ever since Nobuya Nakazato breathed life into Contra, Japanese videogame designers’ respect for the medium in general has been dwindling into a razor-sharp point. Game characters’ hairstyles come to resemble behives on top of layer cakes; robots crafted by pedophile scientists to look like little girls and wear skirts short enough to show off their panties utter bone-dry dialogue as cogs in a rat-hecking nonsense-plot machine forged by a supercomputer bent on intergalactic terrorism. Contra was too subtle for the times it occupied, and Contra 4, as a bald-faced re-painting, sure as hell isn’t any less subtle. Mind you, there’s nothing terrible about it. It’s not worth a groan — just a little, high-pitched sigh. If anything, it’s nice enough anti-proof that if ever there was a time for literature in videogames, it might as well be right now.
Reading Contra 4‘s Wikipedia page is a headache and a half. Particularly the section about unlockable characters. Apparently, when the original Contra was released in the US, Konami of America, missing the point as they would many times again in the future, altered the game’s storyline so that it took place in modern times. When Contra 3 was released, with stages that were obviously set in some far-off future, Konami of America had no choice — they had to admit to the future setting, and rename the main characters so that they were “descendents” of the main characters from the original Contra. Now we have Contra 4, with its lovingly compiled unlockable encyclopedias on the history of the series, with two playable characters named “Mad Dog” and “Scorpion”, names that were originally used in the American versions of Contra and Super C as the code names for Bill and Lance. Contrary to the game’s supposed “respect” for the series “canon”, they are treated as “new characters”. Furthermore, Mad Dog is black, which is cool, though that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just a palette-swap of all the other characters, for stuff’s sake.
In short, the missteps of Contra 4, on its short trip from concept to videogame, or bill to law, or whatever, can be summarized by this paragraph from Wikipedia:
“The continuity of Contra 4 is based on the Japanese canon that was adapted into the English localization of series with the release of Contra: Shattered Soldier. However, the game’s producers took a few mild liberties with the established canon by integrating elements of the American localizations of the older games. The alien Black Viper was originally mentioned only in the American manual of Operation C, whereas the original plot of that game was about an unnamed superpower creating new weapons using an alien cell. In the timeline presented in the manual and official website, the events of Operation C are interpreted as a previous mission of Mad Dog and Scorpion (the new characters in the game) against Black Viper (whereas the original game was a solo mission of Bill Rizer).”
The inverse erection caused by reading that has officially punctured my bladder. I just did a test urination, and I predict I will be pissing blood for six weeks at the least.
WayForward Technologies said in interviews with “gaming blogs” all over the place that they were really glad they’d been offered the chance to make a Contra game, and they promised they wouldn’t mess it up. On the surface, they kept their promise. Though we kind of wish they would have tried to, you know, make up some actual compelling game concepts instead of gazing at their shoes the whole damned time, dead scared of pissing off people who know the difference between Red Falcon and Black Viper (people who probably can’t tie their shoes, don’t have jobs, and are playing your game via an emulator and a flash cartridge, anyway). Instead, all we get is this lame little tacked-on grappling hook, which the official site proclaims “allows for new combat situations and dramatic set pieces that underscore the game’s adrenaline-soaked pedigree”. Actually, it just lets you slurm up to the top screen whenever there’s a grabbable platform up there, and usually only at points where you absolutely have to go up there, anyway.
It’d be nice to say something, right here, about the two-player co-op, though the game requires multiple god damned cartridges, so there goes that.
Really. Is “it’s old-school” or “bound not to disappoint fans of the original Contra” the best praise WayForward could have hoped for? What kind of world are we living in? For Contra‘s 20th Anniversary, if you’re not going to put something new on the table, why not just release a cartridge with all the old Contra games on it? I’d take a compilation with flawless emulations of Contra III and Hard Corps both on it over Contra 4‘s vanilla remake of the original Contra any day. Thank god MegaDrive emulation on PSP is so perfect! Hard Corps and Ranger X are probably all a man needs, to be honest.
If you arrive at the end of this still looking for the evolution of Contra, look no further than Gears of War. Remember the last stage, on the deathtrain streaking under a blood-red, post-apocalyptic sky? There’s a cut-scene where a subhumanoid alien monster berserker freak charges through a stack of crates. The crates shatter and explode, and for an instant, their contents are revealed: boxes of cereal. With 98% of the world’s population wiped out, someone is still shipping cereal from one place to another. That’s a classy little jab right there. That Cliffy B guy gets it.
–tim rogers
paragraph i couldn’t fit anywhere else: Likewise, when From Software released Metal Wolf Chaos for the Xbox — a game in which the hotshot president of the United States sets off on a continent-spanning giant robot battle against a coup-staging vice president — the internet’s children didn’t go “heck yeah! Satire!” — they went “heck yeah! Awesome!”
★⋆☆☆
“A PAINLESS, FORGETTABLE LITTLE EXERCISE IN POINT-MISSING.”
As human beings blessed with remarkable patience, we here at Action Button Dot Net didn’t immediately scream ourselves into comas when we heard that an American — that is, a non-Japanese — developer was being put in charge of Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS. With Zen-like resolve, we refrained from jamming out a pre-emptive review that centered on the fact that developer WayForward Technologies’ previous effort had, for the record, been Shrek the 3rd: Ogres and Donkeys (rated E for Everyone). For one thing, as a group of individuals so convinced that half of the people who do make blockbuster videogames should probably be imprisoned for petty theft, we’re all about handing out the benefit of the doubt to anyone who actually hasn’t had the opportunity to make a game that IGN is going to pretend to give a stuff about. Furthermore, while WayForward’s Sigma Star Saga was, in execution, a piece of greasy stuff, it was so full of out-of-left-field, balls-to-floor concepts (a role-playing game where the “battle system” involves “old-school shoot-em-upping” is welcome, by default, in a world where RPG “battle systems” are normally focused on selecting “fight” from a menu and then watching your dudes fight) that it gets a miraculous passing grade. If Contra 4 is these guys’ chance to work with a budget, more power to them. What’s next, Square-Enix putting a D-team of unknowns on Final Fantasy XIII? Go right ahead! Why not put the development team who brought us Marc Ecko’s Getting Up in charge of the next Silent Hill game, while you’re at it? (Being dead serious here.) Let’s put Darth Vader into Soul Calibur, too, while we’re at it. I mean, let’s face it, when it comes to Japanese videogames, “experience” usually means little more than “an octogenarian in charge”. Well, unless you’re talking about Contra‘s esteemed director / designer Nobuya Nakazato, still alive, still kicking, still brilliant, whose latest two Contra games for the PlayStation 2 were both amazing and written off by critics the Western world over as “not exactly the same thing as the original Contra“. That man — well, simply put, he’s a genius, and we’d like to marry him. Did you know he directed Vandal Hearts, the only strategy RPG you can play from start to finish without getting hit once? (The maps are small enough so that the enemies don’t possess “AI”, they just move in pre-programmed “patterns” to accommodate for the player’s actions.) Here’s Irem making R-Type Tactics, when Nakazato had already made Contra Tactics a decade ago.
Enough about awesome stuff, though, and on with the disappointment: it’s a shame that Contra 4 kind of misses the point all around. It’s got enough flow and enough snap, for one thing, though it really just doesn’t crunch enough. It mushes along. Whereas Neo Contra is the epitome of crunch, Contra 4 is too stop-starty for its own good. Review-writers whistling, yee-hawing, moosecalling, and hi-ho-ing about the game’s “extreme difficulty” need to dump a bottle of chill pills in their tomato soup tomorrow at lunch. What are these people doing, just holding right on the control pad, and tapping the Action Button with the stylus? Contra 4 is easily playable by anyone with a cool head (and, say, the ability to win Virtua Fighter 5 tournaments despite actually, methodically sucking at Guilty Gear) if you shift your damn paradigm for three seconds, stop in place, look at where the enemies are coming from, and rush the holes. Play it like a runningback, not a linebacker, for God’s sake. (Finally! A similie everyone in our readership will understand!) I hated the game, personally, for my first two clumsy attempts, and then went on to get all the way to stage five on my next credit, and lord knows I’m not a rocket scientist. When I got to the end, I was convinced that I’d had it all wrong when I said I hated this stupid game. In the end, it’s not worth hating. It’s just there.
Contra games have always been about sadistic locomotion. Hell, all classic Konami games are about locomotion. Observe how little this skilled player stops in his entire playthrough of the original Castlevania. Now check out Contra III. Or Contra. These are speed runs by highly skilled players, though really, it’s not impossible to think that these games can’t be cleared flawlessly on a first attempt by someone who’s just really good at videogames. It’s a tenuous point we’re trying to make here: Contra 4‘s idea of “insane difficulty” comes less from the actual heart of the Contra games and more from playground rumors — about this game called Contra that’s so hard because you die in one hit and there’s even a thirty lives code because it’s that hard. Contra 4 strives to make a difficult game by flooding every corner of every stage with endlessly spawning, somersaulting enemies and furious blinking bullets. The level designers tossed off each little monsterpiece probably without bothering to play-test them. Let’s see how the jerks like this! In the end, though, the game is missing the fleeting flow and motion that previous (ahem, Japanese-developed) Contra titles had all sharpened into perfection, maybe because the (Japanese) developers had originally conceived the games as arcade entertainment devices, or maybe because the (Japanese) developers just employed a lot of common sense. If breathing deeply and rushing the holes in the enemy lines (while never letting go of the fire button) is how the (American) developer wants us to play Contra 4, however, then we’ll have to call them more clever than we might have given credit for — and then scold them for making the game otherwise kind of flat and bland.
Review-writers all over the internet were able to excuse the so-called “insane difficulty” because the game has plenty of “old-school charm”. Huh. “Old-school charm” is a tough demon to quantify, though I’m pretty sure they’re all talking about the little quippy liner notes strewn all over the game. I’ve removed the game from my DS since playing it, and there’s a copy of Dragon Quest IV lodged in the cartridge slot right now and it will require surgery to be removed, so I can’t check and make sure, though I vaguely remember the “help” text on Contra 4‘s title menu proclaiming that “Arcade Mode” is “All about beefy dudes and spread gun. Just what the Contra ordered. Heck yeah!” (Warning: embellished.) The (black-and-white) instruction manual cringingly recalls fond memories of the over-the-top, rage-against-the-Reaganomics leveling-with-the-kids Konami instruction manuals of the 1980s. It’s like, man, when we were kids, this stuff was hilarious! Now, it’s kind of like your uncle flying three thousand miles to come to your wedding, and then dying on the plane (drug overdose) while wearing a Santa Claus suit.
That’s the way Konami classics were, way back when — stone-faced beef-dudes with spread guns raging against nameless alien threats while their instruction manuals ranged from cheeky to lippy to jerky. Now, the global climate has mutated; scientists and the police have determined that precisely half of the anonymous saps stepping forward to type “lol” at the latest regurgitation of the “eternal battle between pirates and ninjas” meme as reported by Kotaku.com either played high school football or tried out for it. We’re sixteen years away from a generation of Al Bundys who would rather play Guitar Hero than watch John Wayne as “Hondo”. John Wayne never needed a hecking spread gun.
We can’t really blame WayForward for pandering to these people, anyway: they’re where the money is at — all of the money. Still, once again, an innate quality of Contra is lost on these new Western overlords: though it’s exceedingly hard to tell from the first couple of installments, the entire Contra series — big dudes, big guns, big monsters — is a gradually accelerating elbow jab directed at the ribs of American pop culture. Exhibit A would be that your dual-rifle-wielding Schwarzenegger-like hero motherhecker, arms heavier than nuclear missiles, manages to somersault no less than nine times in the air every time he jumps. Contra Hard Corps, with its ladlefuls of bizarre, should have gotten the message across that the over-the-top violence in these games was clearly a gleeful pastiche. It seems that in America, a country where half the people can’t read, 75% of the people can’t locate the North American continent on a map, and 95% couldn’t succinctly explain the difference between Jerry Lewis and Alan Greenspan, it just didn’t get through. Kids genuinely thought that “beefy dude hanging onto soaring intercontinental ballistic missile with one arm while shooting a shotgun with an endless supply of ammunition with the other arm” was a worthy role model, like they were going to be able to pick up a brochure at the career fair. (In the case of Neo Contra, the brochure’s cover would read “Beefy dude who takes on an entire air-force-worth of planes with just a machinegun while running in place atop spinning helicopter blades”.) Years later, we had the “stylish hard action” of Devil May Cry, and years after that, we had Devil May Cry 3, which kids on the internet squealed about: the hero, Dante, is such a badass, like when he surfs on that missile and stuff, though what the heck is with the pizza in the first cut-scene man that stuff is so hecking gay. Lo and behold, Devil May Cry 4 casts a CG scientologist pederast in the role of Dante and a tight-faced emomaniac in the role of the main character, Nero.
Neo Contra, most poignantly, casts a katana-wielding black samurai as one of its beefy heroes. There’s a CG cut-scene (essential viewing) where said badass black samurai cuts a group of rushing soldiers in half with his katana — “Awesome!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a Hummer comes blasting at him full-speed — with a shoulder-thrust, he knocks the hecking thing over. “BADASS!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a group of a hundred men come charging at him — with one vicious slash, he turns them into a volcano of blood. “heck YEAH!!” shouts YouTube. Then a huge, monolithic threat shows itself, and our very black, very samurai hero summons power from the depths of his soul, and unleashes a slash that cuts the very planet earth in half. “TOO heckING RADICAL!!” ejaculates YouTube. The screen grows black. Ten seconds later, we see our two heroes swimming through space in their underwear. Like, somehow, the destruction of the planet earth had also stripped them of their clothes. Suddenly, the internet is afraid — deathly so — that mass media might, as their preacher insists, be intent on turning them into homosexuals:
“WTF??! That was great up to the point those two appearing swimming in space humming. Eww.”
“WTF!? is this the reward for getting overall S rank in the game… are you kidding me!!! I lost my respect for the S rank after seeing this -_-“
“2 gay guys swimming on space WTF!!!”
“It went from pretty cool to real gay”
(Ignore the comments that call the video brilliant. Those people are obviously from the UK.)
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Contra, in the words of its most treasured (and paying) fans, “went from pretty cool to real gay“. This is why an American team was called in to handle Contra 4 — to keep this eternally told tale of shirtless men with large machine rifles as heterosexual as possible. There is to be no hecking with the average gamer’s grip on sexuality.
We could say that, ever since Nobuya Nakazato breathed life into Contra, Japanese videogame designers’ respect for the medium in general has been dwindling into a razor-sharp point. Game characters’ hairstyles come to resemble behives on top of layer cakes; robots crafted by pedophile scientists to look like little girls and wear skirts short enough to show off their panties utter bone-dry dialogue as cogs in a rat-hecking nonsense-plot machine forged by a supercomputer bent on intergalactic terrorism. Contra was too subtle for the times it occupied, and Contra 4, as a bald-faced re-painting, sure as hell isn’t any less subtle. Mind you, there’s nothing terrible about it. It’s not worth a groan — just a little, high-pitched sigh. If anything, it’s nice enough anti-proof that if ever there was a time for literature in videogames, it might as well be right now.
Reading Contra 4‘s Wikipedia page is a headache and a half. Particularly the section about unlockable characters. Apparently, when the original Contra was released in the US, Konami of America, missing the point as they would many times again in the future, altered the game’s storyline so that it took place in modern times. When Contra 3 was released, with stages that were obviously set in some far-off future, Konami of America had no choice — they had to admit to the future setting, and rename the main characters so that they were “descendents” of the main characters from the original Contra. Now we have Contra 4, with its lovingly compiled unlockable encyclopedias on the history of the series, with two playable characters named “Mad Dog” and “Scorpion”, names that were originally used in the American versions of Contra and Super C as the code names for Bill and Lance. Contrary to the game’s supposed “respect” for the series “canon”, they are treated as “new characters”. Furthermore, Mad Dog is black, which is cool, though that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just a palette-swap of all the other characters, for stuff’s sake.
In short, the missteps of Contra 4, on its short trip from concept to videogame, or bill to law, or whatever, can be summarized by this paragraph from Wikipedia:
“The continuity of Contra 4 is based on the Japanese canon that was adapted into the English localization of series with the release of Contra: Shattered Soldier. However, the game’s producers took a few mild liberties with the established canon by integrating elements of the American localizations of the older games. The alien Black Viper was originally mentioned only in the American manual of Operation C, whereas the original plot of that game was about an unnamed superpower creating new weapons using an alien cell. In the timeline presented in the manual and official website, the events of Operation C are interpreted as a previous mission of Mad Dog and Scorpion (the new characters in the game) against Black Viper (whereas the original game was a solo mission of Bill Rizer).”
The inverse erection caused by reading that has officially punctured my bladder. I just did a test urination, and I predict I will be pissing blood for six weeks at the least.
WayForward Technologies said in interviews with “gaming blogs” all over the place that they were really glad they’d been offered the chance to make a Contra game, and they promised they wouldn’t mess it up. On the surface, they kept their promise. Though we kind of wish they would have tried to, you know, make up some actual compelling game concepts instead of gazing at their shoes the whole damned time, dead scared of pissing off people who know the difference between Red Falcon and Black Viper (people who probably can’t tie their shoes, don’t have jobs, and are playing your game via an emulator and a flash cartridge, anyway). Instead, all we get is this lame little tacked-on grappling hook, which the official site proclaims “allows for new combat situations and dramatic set pieces that underscore the game’s adrenaline-soaked pedigree”. Actually, it just lets you slurm up to the top screen whenever there’s a grabbable platform up there, and usually only at points where you absolutely have to go up there, anyway.
It’d be nice to say something, right here, about the two-player co-op, though the game requires multiple god damned cartridges, so there goes that.
Really. Is “it’s old-school” or “bound not to disappoint fans of the original Contra” the best praise WayForward could have hoped for? What kind of world are we living in? For Contra‘s 20th Anniversary, if you’re not going to put something new on the table, why not just release a cartridge with all the old Contra games on it? I’d take a compilation with flawless emulations of Contra III and Hard Corps both on it over Contra 4‘s vanilla remake of the original Contra any day. Thank god MegaDrive emulation on PSP is so perfect! Hard Corps and Ranger X are probably all a man needs, to be honest.
If you arrive at the end of this still looking for the evolution of Contra, look no further than Gears of War. Remember the last stage, on the deathtrain streaking under a blood-red, post-apocalyptic sky? There’s a cut-scene where a subhumanoid alien monster berserker freak charges through a stack of crates. The crates shatter and explode, and for an instant, their contents are revealed: boxes of cereal. With 98% of the world’s population wiped out, someone is still shipping cereal from one place to another. That’s a classy little jab right there. That Cliffy B guy gets it.
–tim rogers
paragraph i couldn’t fit anywhere else: Likewise, when From Software released Metal Wolf Chaos for the Xbox — a game in which the hotshot president of the United States sets off on a continent-spanning giant robot battle against a coup-staging vice president — the internet’s children didn’t go “heck yeah! Satire!” — they went “heck yeah! Awesome!”
text by Brandon Parker
★★★★
“FROM BACK WHEN PEOPLE READ BOOKS INSTEAD OF POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS TO MAKE THESE THINGS.”
Conquests of the Longbow was to adventure games what Myth was to real-time strategy, what River City Ransom was to side scrolling “beat them ups” (called so because you scroll to the side while beating “them” up, “them” being every man, woman and child who crosses your path). Nice innovational little games that nobody gave a stuff about. Hey, that was neat, now let’s move people we need to get the same-old-stuff assembly line up and running again. We’ve got status quos to meet, genre’s to stagnate, envelopes to pull, bars to lower, let’s get busy.
Compare King’s Quest V to Conquests of the Longbow. There’s only a year’s difference between the two yet the difference is, well, somewhat frightening. If we had continued evolving along this path I imagine we would be nothing but disembodied brains controlling our giant armored robot spider carapaces by now.
Meanwhile, have a look over here at Command & Conquer and Supreme Commander, there’s a whole 12 years difference between the two and they are practically the same damn game, they even both have the word command in the title! Although at least of strategy games you can say they have either narrowed in focus or increased in size and scale over time, however slightly. Over in adventure game land I don’t think they’ve figured out that newfangled “3d” thing yet.
In Conquests of the Longbow, you play as Robin Hood. He wakes up every morning at his hidden outlaw camp. He talks with his band of outlaws about what they plan on doing that day. If you’re in trouble out in the woods, you can blow on your hunting horn and summon your men to your aid. You and your men have got their own little hill out in the woods that offers a good vantage point of the highway running through Sherwood. From there you can commit your illegal banditry and highwayman activities. You can get disguises and sneak into Nottingham. If you want you can just wander around the woods, which are just a handful of different screens with randomized trees and foliage repeated over and over, but it’s beautiful. It’s green as hell, and it’s got birds chirping and at least they bothered to let you do that. I love the color green.
Early on, there’s a part where some young pro-Robin Hood kid’s get caught acting like hooligans in Nottingham and are to be executed by the end of the day. Playing the game as a kid, I got frustrated trying to figure out what to do here, I wandered around for hours. Eventually, Little John just showed up and told me, “I’ll take care of it.” And he did, although his method of open attack gets a few of your outlaws killed, but how about that? I had always figured that and sneaking in disguised were the only options, and that was it. Not so! Just the other day I found out you can go to the camp, blow on your horn and all your men show up and each offer their own different plan for you to try out. What the hell!? It just might be the best game ever, that’s what the hell. Wish I had known that 16 years ago though.
You’re thinking, well golly this game does sound kinda neat! Too bad it’s so old, if only they remade it, then maybe I could give muster enough give-a-stuff to play it. Well I mean to tell you that you are wrong, it would no longer be neat if it were made with nowadays game making techniques. It’d be a real goddamn tragedy is what it’d be, in addition to being a 3rd person action-adventure game, probably called Hood or Locksley. There’d be levels or ‘missions’ and the first one would be an unskipable tutorial for anyone who has never played a video game, used a cell phone, watched a DVD or fed themselves before. The controls and interface will be dumbed down for the 360 port and selecting the option to use a 360 controller on the PC version will literally lobotomize the game right in front of you. Golden arrows will be scattered around Sherwood Forest for no real logical reason, but collect 100/100 and you Unlock an Achievement. Also littering the forest for no reason other than it being video game logic are hundreds of monsters to kill with your sword, bow or Bitchin’ Druid Magic Attacks. The Merry Men are now idiotic AI companions you direct and give commands to with the directional pad. Robin Hood will have a rugged five o’clock shadow at all times.
That’s the difference between someone back in 1990 wanting to turn the Robin Hood myth they’ve read and researched into a sort of interactive experience, and someone in 2007 trying to come up with a Hot New “IP” for The Company. In the instruction manual for Longbow, there’s a bibliography at the back. This is where they tell you every book they read to come up with the game, because that is what they used to do, they read books instead of PowerPoint presentations and talked to human beings instead of focus groups to help come up with these things. Amazing! Incredible!
ACTION BUTTON MEETINGIf you’ve ever wondered why there aren’t very many Robin Hood games, this is why. After Longbow, there just wasn’t any point. Maybe someone could make a better Robin Hood film, book, or puppet show but a videogame? Forget it, it’s been done, and even pursuing Robin Hood in another field is questionable, that’s how good this game is.
And forget that trial in Chrono Trigger, this game was way ahead of that bullstuff. In this one if you lose the trial, instead of the Merry Men coming to rescue you then escaping through a time portal after killing a giant dragon tank, they just hang Robin and he dies. So in some ways it’s an improvement and in some other ways it’s not quite as awesome and sort of a downer actually.
In King’s Quest V, King Graham is out for a walk one day when he comes back home to find that his castle has disappeared. “Holy stuff” he must be thinking. “Where has my house gone off to?” So he goes questing to look for his castle, and on the way he has to go through some mountains. There’s a problem though, there’s a rattlesnake in the way. No, you can’t walk around it, you can’t wait for it to leave and you can’t find another path up the mountain. To get through these mountains in the east you have to go west into a desert. Then it’s to some woods to the north, then underground to where some gnomes live, then you talk to some bees, get tied up and locked in someones basement, etc., all to get a goddamn tambourine just to scare that snake away.
Now, that’s all fine and dandy for a King’s Quest game where abstract tomfoolery and obtuse puzzle solving is to be expected I guess. But you don’t want that in a Robin Hood game. You want to do Robin Hood things. In Longbow, instead of putting a rattlesnake in your path they would have just said “there’s snow blocking the mountain pass, wait for the spring thaw in a few days. In the meantime you can investigate the area, prepare for your journey, etc.”
There are no snakes in the path in Conquests of the Longbow, it all makes sense, except for the part where you have to turn into a tree, but oh well. Robin Hood, although a merry man, is also a serious one and on an important quest. He doesn’t have time to worry about bored rattlesnakes and in case you were wondering he never throws a pie in a yeti’s face. They could have just changed up King Graham’s palette a bit, drew a bow and quiver onto him and made a King’s Quest game with Robin Hood, but they didn’t, they made a real damn Robin Hood game with Robin Hood in it, and they also happened to make one of the better retellings of the Robin Hood myth to have ever been retold.
★★★★
“FROM BACK WHEN PEOPLE READ BOOKS INSTEAD OF POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS TO MAKE THESE THINGS.”
Conquests of the Longbow was to adventure games what Myth was to real-time strategy, what River City Ransom was to side scrolling “beat them ups” (called so because you scroll to the side while beating “them” up, “them” being every man, woman and child who crosses your path). Nice innovational little games that nobody gave a stuff about. Hey, that was neat, now let’s move people we need to get the same-old-stuff assembly line up and running again. We’ve got status quos to meet, genre’s to stagnate, envelopes to pull, bars to lower, let’s get busy.
Compare King’s Quest V to Conquests of the Longbow. There’s only a year’s difference between the two yet the difference is, well, somewhat frightening. If we had continued evolving along this path I imagine we would be nothing but disembodied brains controlling our giant armored robot spider carapaces by now.
Meanwhile, have a look over here at Command & Conquer and Supreme Commander, there’s a whole 12 years difference between the two and they are practically the same damn game, they even both have the word command in the title! Although at least of strategy games you can say they have either narrowed in focus or increased in size and scale over time, however slightly. Over in adventure game land I don’t think they’ve figured out that newfangled “3d” thing yet.
In Conquests of the Longbow, you play as Robin Hood. He wakes up every morning at his hidden outlaw camp. He talks with his band of outlaws about what they plan on doing that day. If you’re in trouble out in the woods, you can blow on your hunting horn and summon your men to your aid. You and your men have got their own little hill out in the woods that offers a good vantage point of the highway running through Sherwood. From there you can commit your illegal banditry and highwayman activities. You can get disguises and sneak into Nottingham. If you want you can just wander around the woods, which are just a handful of different screens with randomized trees and foliage repeated over and over, but it’s beautiful. It’s green as hell, and it’s got birds chirping and at least they bothered to let you do that. I love the color green.
Early on, there’s a part where some young pro-Robin Hood kid’s get caught acting like hooligans in Nottingham and are to be executed by the end of the day. Playing the game as a kid, I got frustrated trying to figure out what to do here, I wandered around for hours. Eventually, Little John just showed up and told me, “I’ll take care of it.” And he did, although his method of open attack gets a few of your outlaws killed, but how about that? I had always figured that and sneaking in disguised were the only options, and that was it. Not so! Just the other day I found out you can go to the camp, blow on your horn and all your men show up and each offer their own different plan for you to try out. What the hell!? It just might be the best game ever, that’s what the hell. Wish I had known that 16 years ago though.
You’re thinking, well golly this game does sound kinda neat! Too bad it’s so old, if only they remade it, then maybe I could give muster enough give-a-stuff to play it. Well I mean to tell you that you are wrong, it would no longer be neat if it were made with nowadays game making techniques. It’d be a real goddamn tragedy is what it’d be, in addition to being a 3rd person action-adventure game, probably called Hood or Locksley. There’d be levels or ‘missions’ and the first one would be an unskipable tutorial for anyone who has never played a video game, used a cell phone, watched a DVD or fed themselves before. The controls and interface will be dumbed down for the 360 port and selecting the option to use a 360 controller on the PC version will literally lobotomize the game right in front of you. Golden arrows will be scattered around Sherwood Forest for no real logical reason, but collect 100/100 and you Unlock an Achievement. Also littering the forest for no reason other than it being video game logic are hundreds of monsters to kill with your sword, bow or Bitchin’ Druid Magic Attacks. The Merry Men are now idiotic AI companions you direct and give commands to with the directional pad. Robin Hood will have a rugged five o’clock shadow at all times.
That’s the difference between someone back in 1990 wanting to turn the Robin Hood myth they’ve read and researched into a sort of interactive experience, and someone in 2007 trying to come up with a Hot New “IP” for The Company. In the instruction manual for Longbow, there’s a bibliography at the back. This is where they tell you every book they read to come up with the game, because that is what they used to do, they read books instead of PowerPoint presentations and talked to human beings instead of focus groups to help come up with these things. Amazing! Incredible!
ACTION BUTTON MEETINGIf you’ve ever wondered why there aren’t very many Robin Hood games, this is why. After Longbow, there just wasn’t any point. Maybe someone could make a better Robin Hood film, book, or puppet show but a videogame? Forget it, it’s been done, and even pursuing Robin Hood in another field is questionable, that’s how good this game is.
And forget that trial in Chrono Trigger, this game was way ahead of that bullstuff. In this one if you lose the trial, instead of the Merry Men coming to rescue you then escaping through a time portal after killing a giant dragon tank, they just hang Robin and he dies. So in some ways it’s an improvement and in some other ways it’s not quite as awesome and sort of a downer actually.
In King’s Quest V, King Graham is out for a walk one day when he comes back home to find that his castle has disappeared. “Holy stuff” he must be thinking. “Where has my house gone off to?” So he goes questing to look for his castle, and on the way he has to go through some mountains. There’s a problem though, there’s a rattlesnake in the way. No, you can’t walk around it, you can’t wait for it to leave and you can’t find another path up the mountain. To get through these mountains in the east you have to go west into a desert. Then it’s to some woods to the north, then underground to where some gnomes live, then you talk to some bees, get tied up and locked in someones basement, etc., all to get a goddamn tambourine just to scare that snake away.
Now, that’s all fine and dandy for a King’s Quest game where abstract tomfoolery and obtuse puzzle solving is to be expected I guess. But you don’t want that in a Robin Hood game. You want to do Robin Hood things. In Longbow, instead of putting a rattlesnake in your path they would have just said “there’s snow blocking the mountain pass, wait for the spring thaw in a few days. In the meantime you can investigate the area, prepare for your journey, etc.”
There are no snakes in the path in Conquests of the Longbow, it all makes sense, except for the part where you have to turn into a tree, but oh well. Robin Hood, although a merry man, is also a serious one and on an important quest. He doesn’t have time to worry about bored rattlesnakes and in case you were wondering he never throws a pie in a yeti’s face. They could have just changed up King Graham’s palette a bit, drew a bow and quiver onto him and made a King’s Quest game with Robin Hood, but they didn’t, they made a real damn Robin Hood game with Robin Hood in it, and they also happened to make one of the better retellings of the Robin Hood myth to have ever been retold.
2007
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE PRECISE REASON KIDS DON'T PLAY WITH G.I. JOES ANYMORE.”
Halo 3 is one of the best videogames of 2007 for many of the same reasons that doing push-ups is better than not doing pushups. It’s a game about a human man in a robot battle suit; armed with pistols and rifles, he shoots inhuman alien freak bastards in the head; he rides bitching all-terrain vehicles at high speeds, ramping off the peaks of a construction site, landing atop giant enemy robotic spiders. He snipes dudes, he overcomes odds, and by the end of the game he saves the universe and finishes a fight. Just about everyone — TIME magazine and Newsweek and The New York Times and every other major news publication in North America — ran a feature-length article on the Halo phenomenon, calling it “certifiably huge” and going on to detail, using diction reminiscent of a Catholic priest denying rape charges, that there are action figures and novels already on sale, and a major motion picture in the works. One writer admirably went so far as to actually play the game, and came out convinced that, among other things, videogames are not movies, nor are they literature. We here at Action Button Dot Net wish to salute that guy, whoever he is: Duh. We wholly acknowledge that Halo 3‘s musical score is likely based on the sound of trash collectors emptying the bin outside a small-town symphony orchestra, that its screenplay of rhythmic grunts and screams is about as entertaining, at face value, as a play starring fourth-graders in crocodile costumes.
Still, Halo isn’t about all that, man. It’s about shooting stuff – and more than that, it’s about shooting stuff brilliantly. Halo wins its bet by not being an asshole. Unlike other games with tacked-on husks for storylines (Super Mario Galaxy, for example), Halo 3 manages to focus, 99% of the time, on the construction and flow of its stages. When a guy screams at us about how the enemies are coming, he’s serious as a heart-attack, and we have to kill those enemies or we’re going to die. Sometimes there’s a vehicle to get in, and you get in it and drive it, down a big tunnel or a picturesque beach. If you die, you kind of start back just seconds before you died. The game doesn’t have “extra lives”, and it doesn’t ever ask you if you want to continue. It knows, at all times, that the fact that the console’s power is engaged means that the player is willing to play. It leaves the decision to stop playing entirely outside the realm of its menus and on-screen prompts.
Prior to playing Halo 3, I played through Halo 2 for the first time — it was released in extremely limited quantities in the country where I live, and it only saw a wide release years later, as part of a two-pack commemorating Halo 3‘s launch. I found Halo 2‘s single-player mode to be rambling and occasionally desolate. I can’t be too sure, though I think the final boss accidentally killed himself around thirty seconds into the battle. The story was, as far as I could tell, a collection of the scenes in “Star Wars” episodes one through three where morbidly boring aliens with faux Korean accents argue with each other about space taxes, space tariffs, and space embargoes, plus the sound of realistic machine-gun fire. Halo 3, played alone, would probably be no less desolate and scoff-worthy, though thanks to the power of the internet, I was able to tear through the campaign mode with an actual real-life friend who lives halfway around the world. In this day and age of AI engineers teaching robots to play Ms. Pac-Man, it is still amazingly, gloriously more fun to play with actual people. A robot might be able to pull a headshot, sure, though can it share feta cheese recipes or spread rumors about which professional wrestlers are actually, really, truly gay? You can add two more players to the game, which is more dudes than you can fit in a Warthog; four-player co-op, if it’s with people you know and like, ranges from hilarious to visceral and over-competitive. I’ve found, in fact, that playing campaign mode with three actual friends will result in surprisingly more spur-of-the-moment slander than playing a deathmatch against people you don’t know. For me, two or three is enough. Having a relaxing conversation with two friends is one thing; having a relaxing conversation with two friends while driving Future Jeeps and firing Future Rifles is another thing. If one of you sucks at videogames, it’s still cool. Who really cares about the story, anyway? Halo is all about the moment-to-moment skirmishes, the shooting, the halting in a monologue about modern rock music to say “Okay, seriously, you take the guys on the left this time”, and the big action set-pieces — bigger, longer, harder, and more relentless than the shiniest firefights in the movies. The set-pieces are thrilling even from a logistical standpoint: here, at last, you get to live out a movie action scene where the slow parts aren’t cut out. And so the game pumps and chugs along. Maybe, this time, you’ll be the one to destroy the big ominous weapon at the end of that one stage, or maybe not — though individual set-pieces and stages occasionally stand out, Halo 3 is clearly a game about moments, about playing.
One of the more outstanding of the set-pieces is the thrilling escape at the end: it’s just you (and your buddies, if you’re doing co-op) in a Warthog, driving at top speed across a mega-huge, collapsing . . . something. Maybe it’s a space station. Who knows what it is! Whatever it is, it’s huge, and it’s falling apart. There are second-hand-ticks where the game’s physics engine struggles under the weight of such bold-faced execution — you might steer wrong, and now the front of your Space Hummer is chacking uncomfortably against the edge of a fragment of crumbling floor, and seconds later, you’re dead, and you’re starting over — and the tacky music doesn’t stop pumping. This is the way the best videogames (like Sin and Punishment) end — like old-school videogame tournaments (which might not have existed outside of “The Wizard”): the game acknowledges the reality that you have mastered it, grins, and says, “Yes, you’ve mastered the game — now, to complete the challenge, try this game you’ve never played“. This kind of attitude is half throwback to Halo 1‘s final escape sequence and half the very essence of Halo: more than a “multimedia franchise spanning novels and videogames, with a feature film in the works” or whatever other bullstuff the PR guys ask their wives to whisper to them every night, Halo is the precise reason kids don’t play with G.I. Joes anymore. Why use your imagination to think up situations in which Duke and Cobra Commander would need to team up to tackle Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (must also think up reason for Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader to be working together)? Why bother to fill that Tonka dump truck with “explosive” Troll dolls and send it crashing at Darth Vader’s Lego Medieval Knights Castle? You’re just going to have to clean up afterward. Besides, is it really healthy for a young mind to butcher continuity in the name of fun? Really? With Halo, a child can be no less and no more violent than he would be with a fistful of G.I. Joes, only now he’s forced to stick to the plot — and he doesn’t mind sticking to the plot. It’s all eyes-forward, here. Move forward to keep blowing stuff up, utilizing virtually untraceable problem-solving skills. The kids won’t even have to know that their critical thinking skills are expanding gradually. It’s a bit of a shame that imaginary guns seem to be more educational than textbooks these days, though why not? Simulations of death are pretty much the only thing that’s entertained or educated anyone in civilized history. Ask Shakespeare.
I had a chance to sit down with a man from Bungie at Tokyo Game Show last year. I’m not really sure what his name or position in the company was, though he was just about award-winningly British. Inspired by a blinking, possibly narcoleptic limey who had, earlier in the day, after witnessing a ten-minute demonstration playthrough of Ninja Gaiden II, dared to begin a question with “We’ve read that the game is quite violent” — no stuff, Sherlock! — I asked this British man from Bungie about violence in Halo. The games consistently get an “M” rating despite there being no blood, no profanity, and no human-killing. Even the “Star Wars” movies have featured actual human dismemberment in semi-graphic detail, and only one of them cracked “PG”. The British man gave me a suitably vague (and therefore British) answer: Well, there’s the Flood, who kind of somewhat resemble humans. Zombies are kind of a hot button, you see. I’d really hoped he would have gone out and just told the truth; I’m going to tell the truth here, and say that he said it (even though he didn’t): “Older gamers wouldn’t want to play a game that kids are specifically allowed to play, and younger kids are certain that any game not intended strictly for adults will turn them into hydrophobic homosexuals.”
The weird pathological zeitgeist of Bush-loving America penetrates Halo 3 in all legal orificies; the laws of the internet hold stone-faced, iron-fisted rule. That the only way to verbally communicate with the opposing team in an online deathmatch requires you to be standing quite close to them is many things: an appreciated riff on reality, for starters. It might perhaps be a well-meaning device intended to cut down on trash talk between players, though in my experience it seems to only sharpen rage to a sucked-on candy-cane point. Halo players with testicles nestled firmly beneath their kidneys know, above all else, one thing: Must Hate the faceless motherheckers of the other color; if hate does not happen, commence sliding down the slippery slope toward Hell, toward being an actual anus-loving queer. The existence of proximity chat only fills the young boys of America with the urge to get as close as possible, to pistol whip, while shouting the most potent one or two syllables that pop to mind. Their message will be heard, and it will be heard in its entirety, before the dead player’s corpse disappears and they re-spawn somewhere else. Is there any hate greater than that that can be summed up, however subconsciously, in one syllable? It wasn’t three seconds into my first-ever Halo 3 online deathmatch before someone had cold-cocked me (female covenant, just for the hell of it) with a shotgun and then screamed my least-favorite synonym for “Black Person”. Wow! The next time he killed me, he called me my least-favorite synonym for “Gay”. His voice sounded like he had braces. At the end of the match, he called me “Sivvy” (my Xbox Live name is “cviii”, add me if you like) and asked me how I like chugging on my least favorite synonym for penis. It was then that I spoke to him the first time. “Does your mom restrict profanity to the basement?” I don’t think he understood the question, because he started sending me hateful voice messages with diarrhea frequency for something like six hours after that, as I played through campaign mode with a friend. Eventually, he sounded like he was simultaneously drunk, thirteen, and with braces. That’s got to be at least a misdemeanor. His most well-constructed argument, eventually, was that I couldn’t get a girlfriend — because I was gay. At that, his sixty-somethingth message, I graced him with a response — “Well, I guess if I was gay I wouldn’t want a girlfriend, though, would I?” His reply was that oh my god I actually sound gay, too. (I’ll admit, I’m not Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or Barrack Obama!) He didn’t send a single message after that, though an hour later he did invite me to join a game. The moment his invite came, that almost made me think Halo 3 was the game of the year, right there. Perhaps I’d been the only person to give that kid the time of day and actually respond to his fetal hatred. That he invited me to a game — and that I quietly refused his request — gives me hope that some day, he might grow up, and the rest of the world might grow up with him. And maybe that Halo movie will get made, you know, the one produced by Peter Jackson and directed by a man with actual talent and vision. I must admit, in a world where even the game producers acknowledge that the plot of their game is a whole load of balls, it’s simultaneously weird and not for the executive producers to shrug off a game-based film because it’s based on a game and films based on games tend to suck, despite the fact that this particular game is pretty much a blank slate and we have two very talented artists willing to pick up the chalk.
Recently, I read a story on the internet about how the producers of the “Halo” movie would want to make Master Chief not the main character. It’s kind of hilarious how many people find this idea terrible. Master Chief isn’t a character or a person — he’s an icon. He never takes off his mask, because, as one of Halo 3‘s producers said, “if he took off that helmet, it’d be you inside”. A “Halo” movie presents an opportunity to make a fresh new story about humans fighting aliens; why not make Master Chief an object of wonder, like the aliens themselves? In a movie, we’re always looking at the character; would Halo be as popular if we had to stare at Master Chief the whole time, rather than see it through his eyes?
At the end of the day, Halo 3 is both a videogame — a great videogame, even — and a whole class of hobby in and of itself. Like Halo 2 before it, it will be the only game that some people ever play. Only, unlike Halo 2, Halo 3 is complete: it has four-player online co-op, it has a brilliant “Forge” mode for tweaking deathmatch stages (more of a “sandbox” than Grand Theft Auto, in the most basic sense), and it has the most awesome movie playback feature. When a man from Bungie first introduced me to this feature, showing how far you can scale back the camera from the playing stage, I was kind of stupidly amazed. When he said you could save multiple playthroughs of the entire campaign mode, I was shocked for a second, and asked him how. He said well, it’s not really that complicated: it just saves button inputs. That kind of burst my bubble for a second, like the time I realized that Hot Shots Golf‘s replay-saving feature was only memorizing the just-entered club, wind, and shot angle configurations and playing itself. In practice, though, Halo 3‘s playback mode is an eerie out-of-body experience. It gives you time to look at everything freely. To appreciate the world, and the context of the violence more thoroughly. It’s inevitable that the average human will find playing the game more rewarding, though much like the game itself, as what it is, hell if it isn’t an awesome little toy.
★★★★
“THE PRECISE REASON KIDS DON'T PLAY WITH G.I. JOES ANYMORE.”
Halo 3 is one of the best videogames of 2007 for many of the same reasons that doing push-ups is better than not doing pushups. It’s a game about a human man in a robot battle suit; armed with pistols and rifles, he shoots inhuman alien freak bastards in the head; he rides bitching all-terrain vehicles at high speeds, ramping off the peaks of a construction site, landing atop giant enemy robotic spiders. He snipes dudes, he overcomes odds, and by the end of the game he saves the universe and finishes a fight. Just about everyone — TIME magazine and Newsweek and The New York Times and every other major news publication in North America — ran a feature-length article on the Halo phenomenon, calling it “certifiably huge” and going on to detail, using diction reminiscent of a Catholic priest denying rape charges, that there are action figures and novels already on sale, and a major motion picture in the works. One writer admirably went so far as to actually play the game, and came out convinced that, among other things, videogames are not movies, nor are they literature. We here at Action Button Dot Net wish to salute that guy, whoever he is: Duh. We wholly acknowledge that Halo 3‘s musical score is likely based on the sound of trash collectors emptying the bin outside a small-town symphony orchestra, that its screenplay of rhythmic grunts and screams is about as entertaining, at face value, as a play starring fourth-graders in crocodile costumes.
Still, Halo isn’t about all that, man. It’s about shooting stuff – and more than that, it’s about shooting stuff brilliantly. Halo wins its bet by not being an asshole. Unlike other games with tacked-on husks for storylines (Super Mario Galaxy, for example), Halo 3 manages to focus, 99% of the time, on the construction and flow of its stages. When a guy screams at us about how the enemies are coming, he’s serious as a heart-attack, and we have to kill those enemies or we’re going to die. Sometimes there’s a vehicle to get in, and you get in it and drive it, down a big tunnel or a picturesque beach. If you die, you kind of start back just seconds before you died. The game doesn’t have “extra lives”, and it doesn’t ever ask you if you want to continue. It knows, at all times, that the fact that the console’s power is engaged means that the player is willing to play. It leaves the decision to stop playing entirely outside the realm of its menus and on-screen prompts.
Prior to playing Halo 3, I played through Halo 2 for the first time — it was released in extremely limited quantities in the country where I live, and it only saw a wide release years later, as part of a two-pack commemorating Halo 3‘s launch. I found Halo 2‘s single-player mode to be rambling and occasionally desolate. I can’t be too sure, though I think the final boss accidentally killed himself around thirty seconds into the battle. The story was, as far as I could tell, a collection of the scenes in “Star Wars” episodes one through three where morbidly boring aliens with faux Korean accents argue with each other about space taxes, space tariffs, and space embargoes, plus the sound of realistic machine-gun fire. Halo 3, played alone, would probably be no less desolate and scoff-worthy, though thanks to the power of the internet, I was able to tear through the campaign mode with an actual real-life friend who lives halfway around the world. In this day and age of AI engineers teaching robots to play Ms. Pac-Man, it is still amazingly, gloriously more fun to play with actual people. A robot might be able to pull a headshot, sure, though can it share feta cheese recipes or spread rumors about which professional wrestlers are actually, really, truly gay? You can add two more players to the game, which is more dudes than you can fit in a Warthog; four-player co-op, if it’s with people you know and like, ranges from hilarious to visceral and over-competitive. I’ve found, in fact, that playing campaign mode with three actual friends will result in surprisingly more spur-of-the-moment slander than playing a deathmatch against people you don’t know. For me, two or three is enough. Having a relaxing conversation with two friends is one thing; having a relaxing conversation with two friends while driving Future Jeeps and firing Future Rifles is another thing. If one of you sucks at videogames, it’s still cool. Who really cares about the story, anyway? Halo is all about the moment-to-moment skirmishes, the shooting, the halting in a monologue about modern rock music to say “Okay, seriously, you take the guys on the left this time”, and the big action set-pieces — bigger, longer, harder, and more relentless than the shiniest firefights in the movies. The set-pieces are thrilling even from a logistical standpoint: here, at last, you get to live out a movie action scene where the slow parts aren’t cut out. And so the game pumps and chugs along. Maybe, this time, you’ll be the one to destroy the big ominous weapon at the end of that one stage, or maybe not — though individual set-pieces and stages occasionally stand out, Halo 3 is clearly a game about moments, about playing.
One of the more outstanding of the set-pieces is the thrilling escape at the end: it’s just you (and your buddies, if you’re doing co-op) in a Warthog, driving at top speed across a mega-huge, collapsing . . . something. Maybe it’s a space station. Who knows what it is! Whatever it is, it’s huge, and it’s falling apart. There are second-hand-ticks where the game’s physics engine struggles under the weight of such bold-faced execution — you might steer wrong, and now the front of your Space Hummer is chacking uncomfortably against the edge of a fragment of crumbling floor, and seconds later, you’re dead, and you’re starting over — and the tacky music doesn’t stop pumping. This is the way the best videogames (like Sin and Punishment) end — like old-school videogame tournaments (which might not have existed outside of “The Wizard”): the game acknowledges the reality that you have mastered it, grins, and says, “Yes, you’ve mastered the game — now, to complete the challenge, try this game you’ve never played“. This kind of attitude is half throwback to Halo 1‘s final escape sequence and half the very essence of Halo: more than a “multimedia franchise spanning novels and videogames, with a feature film in the works” or whatever other bullstuff the PR guys ask their wives to whisper to them every night, Halo is the precise reason kids don’t play with G.I. Joes anymore. Why use your imagination to think up situations in which Duke and Cobra Commander would need to team up to tackle Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (must also think up reason for Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader to be working together)? Why bother to fill that Tonka dump truck with “explosive” Troll dolls and send it crashing at Darth Vader’s Lego Medieval Knights Castle? You’re just going to have to clean up afterward. Besides, is it really healthy for a young mind to butcher continuity in the name of fun? Really? With Halo, a child can be no less and no more violent than he would be with a fistful of G.I. Joes, only now he’s forced to stick to the plot — and he doesn’t mind sticking to the plot. It’s all eyes-forward, here. Move forward to keep blowing stuff up, utilizing virtually untraceable problem-solving skills. The kids won’t even have to know that their critical thinking skills are expanding gradually. It’s a bit of a shame that imaginary guns seem to be more educational than textbooks these days, though why not? Simulations of death are pretty much the only thing that’s entertained or educated anyone in civilized history. Ask Shakespeare.
I had a chance to sit down with a man from Bungie at Tokyo Game Show last year. I’m not really sure what his name or position in the company was, though he was just about award-winningly British. Inspired by a blinking, possibly narcoleptic limey who had, earlier in the day, after witnessing a ten-minute demonstration playthrough of Ninja Gaiden II, dared to begin a question with “We’ve read that the game is quite violent” — no stuff, Sherlock! — I asked this British man from Bungie about violence in Halo. The games consistently get an “M” rating despite there being no blood, no profanity, and no human-killing. Even the “Star Wars” movies have featured actual human dismemberment in semi-graphic detail, and only one of them cracked “PG”. The British man gave me a suitably vague (and therefore British) answer: Well, there’s the Flood, who kind of somewhat resemble humans. Zombies are kind of a hot button, you see. I’d really hoped he would have gone out and just told the truth; I’m going to tell the truth here, and say that he said it (even though he didn’t): “Older gamers wouldn’t want to play a game that kids are specifically allowed to play, and younger kids are certain that any game not intended strictly for adults will turn them into hydrophobic homosexuals.”
The weird pathological zeitgeist of Bush-loving America penetrates Halo 3 in all legal orificies; the laws of the internet hold stone-faced, iron-fisted rule. That the only way to verbally communicate with the opposing team in an online deathmatch requires you to be standing quite close to them is many things: an appreciated riff on reality, for starters. It might perhaps be a well-meaning device intended to cut down on trash talk between players, though in my experience it seems to only sharpen rage to a sucked-on candy-cane point. Halo players with testicles nestled firmly beneath their kidneys know, above all else, one thing: Must Hate the faceless motherheckers of the other color; if hate does not happen, commence sliding down the slippery slope toward Hell, toward being an actual anus-loving queer. The existence of proximity chat only fills the young boys of America with the urge to get as close as possible, to pistol whip, while shouting the most potent one or two syllables that pop to mind. Their message will be heard, and it will be heard in its entirety, before the dead player’s corpse disappears and they re-spawn somewhere else. Is there any hate greater than that that can be summed up, however subconsciously, in one syllable? It wasn’t three seconds into my first-ever Halo 3 online deathmatch before someone had cold-cocked me (female covenant, just for the hell of it) with a shotgun and then screamed my least-favorite synonym for “Black Person”. Wow! The next time he killed me, he called me my least-favorite synonym for “Gay”. His voice sounded like he had braces. At the end of the match, he called me “Sivvy” (my Xbox Live name is “cviii”, add me if you like) and asked me how I like chugging on my least favorite synonym for penis. It was then that I spoke to him the first time. “Does your mom restrict profanity to the basement?” I don’t think he understood the question, because he started sending me hateful voice messages with diarrhea frequency for something like six hours after that, as I played through campaign mode with a friend. Eventually, he sounded like he was simultaneously drunk, thirteen, and with braces. That’s got to be at least a misdemeanor. His most well-constructed argument, eventually, was that I couldn’t get a girlfriend — because I was gay. At that, his sixty-somethingth message, I graced him with a response — “Well, I guess if I was gay I wouldn’t want a girlfriend, though, would I?” His reply was that oh my god I actually sound gay, too. (I’ll admit, I’m not Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or Barrack Obama!) He didn’t send a single message after that, though an hour later he did invite me to join a game. The moment his invite came, that almost made me think Halo 3 was the game of the year, right there. Perhaps I’d been the only person to give that kid the time of day and actually respond to his fetal hatred. That he invited me to a game — and that I quietly refused his request — gives me hope that some day, he might grow up, and the rest of the world might grow up with him. And maybe that Halo movie will get made, you know, the one produced by Peter Jackson and directed by a man with actual talent and vision. I must admit, in a world where even the game producers acknowledge that the plot of their game is a whole load of balls, it’s simultaneously weird and not for the executive producers to shrug off a game-based film because it’s based on a game and films based on games tend to suck, despite the fact that this particular game is pretty much a blank slate and we have two very talented artists willing to pick up the chalk.
Recently, I read a story on the internet about how the producers of the “Halo” movie would want to make Master Chief not the main character. It’s kind of hilarious how many people find this idea terrible. Master Chief isn’t a character or a person — he’s an icon. He never takes off his mask, because, as one of Halo 3‘s producers said, “if he took off that helmet, it’d be you inside”. A “Halo” movie presents an opportunity to make a fresh new story about humans fighting aliens; why not make Master Chief an object of wonder, like the aliens themselves? In a movie, we’re always looking at the character; would Halo be as popular if we had to stare at Master Chief the whole time, rather than see it through his eyes?
At the end of the day, Halo 3 is both a videogame — a great videogame, even — and a whole class of hobby in and of itself. Like Halo 2 before it, it will be the only game that some people ever play. Only, unlike Halo 2, Halo 3 is complete: it has four-player online co-op, it has a brilliant “Forge” mode for tweaking deathmatch stages (more of a “sandbox” than Grand Theft Auto, in the most basic sense), and it has the most awesome movie playback feature. When a man from Bungie first introduced me to this feature, showing how far you can scale back the camera from the playing stage, I was kind of stupidly amazed. When he said you could save multiple playthroughs of the entire campaign mode, I was shocked for a second, and asked him how. He said well, it’s not really that complicated: it just saves button inputs. That kind of burst my bubble for a second, like the time I realized that Hot Shots Golf‘s replay-saving feature was only memorizing the just-entered club, wind, and shot angle configurations and playing itself. In practice, though, Halo 3‘s playback mode is an eerie out-of-body experience. It gives you time to look at everything freely. To appreciate the world, and the context of the violence more thoroughly. It’s inevitable that the average human will find playing the game more rewarding, though much like the game itself, as what it is, hell if it isn’t an awesome little toy.
2007
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“SO MUCH BETTER THAN GUITAR HERO.”
Yes. Yesss. YESSSSSSS. Stunmant: Ignition is the underrated hero of 2007, a videogame so big, so generous, so complicated, so simple, so gorgeous, and so ridiculous that those who truly “get” it have every right to disown their blood relations if said blood relations would rather play Guitar Hero.
Essentially, Stuntman: Ignition is a videogame about being a stuntman, though not the type of stuntman who jumps off buildings. You’re the type of stuntman who drives a car. I suppose they could have called the game “Stunt Driver“, though seeing as the series was originally created by the makers of the game series Driver, that might have looked kind of tacky. Especially in this day and age, where marketing geniuses would have us believe that if you put two games side-by-side and both of them feature the same word in the title, the consumer would, without a doubt, buy the one with more words in the title. (They must have also done this same test with one-colon titles versus two-colon titles.)
The original Driver game had a couple of tutorial missions, during which you proved to your employers that you knew how to handle a car. Though most of these moves were useful, you didn’t really have to use all of them in the course of the game. The idea for Stuntman was instantly born in hundreds of thousands of gamers’ heads when they played those training missions in Driver, and then solidified the first time they saw themselves do something awesome in mid-mission. Why not make a game that forces us to do these stunts, over and over, a game that forces us to drive awesomely? The same idea had no doubt been born in the heads of the game designers of Driver as well, though seeing as those people changed the original concept of Driver so that your main character was an undercover cop instead of an actual criminal so as to avoid controversy, and then went on to make the psychotically violent Driv3r, which still remains the worst title anything’s ever had, I wouldn’t give them too much credit.
The Driver series spun out of control after the first installment; the producers got hopped-up on me-too-ism, and began to aspire to something of a Grand Theft Auto clone with slightly heavier cars. The original Stuntman game was a splinter project, a gleefully sadistic exploration into how heavy, exactly, they could make those cars. They made them pretty heavy. The challenges were also laid out in kind of sinisterly boring stages. Furthermore, the difficulty was punishing, and one mistake in the very beginning would most likely ruin your chances of getting any further into the mission.
I’m just basing all of these comments on reviews on the internet which I looked up in the last five minutes; I never played the original Stuntman more than a half an hour because it really just didn’t do anything for me.
The reason the original Stuntman didn’t do anything for me is because it was too unbelievable. I mean, just everything about it was unbelievable. You had to race through these crazy stunt sequences for . . . what, exactly? You were a movie stunt driver, only the stages were so sparsely populated that you probably wouldn’t even watch this movie if you found a VHS tape of it in your mailbox on the day of its theatrical release. The idea of playing a game in which you played the part of a stunt double for an actor in a movie felt too sneeringly abstract, like just off-camera, the whole time, was a guy who had actually found proof of the nonexistence of God in a box of Corn Pops. Add to this the leering disbelief cultivated by the game’s nonchalant insistence that movie stunt-driving sequences are shot in three minutes, in real time, and not by literally a hundred takes of three-second bursts, and you end up with what we call an impossible videogame to call the best videogame of all time.
The new Stuntman, with a subtitle they call Ignition, in addition to being a much better game than its predecessor, is also a phenomenal game. It plays great — heavy cars and all — and looks so great, with so much happening all around you as you drive through burning houses and under falling lava boulders and ramp out of parking garages, that you can forgive it for insisting that movie stunt sequences are shot in real-time. Imagine that: a videogame paying homage to movies, and you can respect it all the more precisely because it’s a videogame.
It helps that the makers of this game, Paradigm Entertainment, were once called Paradigm Simulations, and dealt extensively with trying to transform real things into realistically controllable representations on television screens. Their first and most famous attempt at making a videogame was also a sequel to something made by an established developer — it was Pilotwings 64, released alongside Super Mario 64 and the Nintendo 64 console. Way back then, way back in Pilotwings 64 was Stuntman Ignition in its most embryonic form. Back then, the simulation bits and the videogamey bits clung to one another as though in a freezing breeze. It was ultimately too simmy, because when worse comes to worst, realism tends to always convince people, somehow; now here’s Stuntman Ignition, wherein realism and videogames walk hand-in-hand through a county fair on a summer night, and videogames have finally succeeded in ramming a large scepter of cotton-candy down realism’s throat. The result is fantastic, spectacular, commendable. The very least you can say about Stuntman Ignition is that, in this world where people who understand quality do exist, whether Stuntman Ignition sold well or not doesn’t matter, because the people who scripted the events in this game will never — never — find themselves out of work, and should never expect to earn less than $70K a year. If, truly, games are to move forward and heck Hollywood in the back of the head with a basketball pump, these master Rube-Goldberg device craftsmen are the people who will, at last, make it all convincing.
I bet you’re wondering by now, what makes this game so good? Here’s where I finally tell you: everything! (That’s where my “template for review of great game” ends.) Just as in Stuntman (described somewhere up there), you’re a stunt driver in movies. There are six “movies” in the game — a James Bond-like spy movie, a police comedy, a volcano disaster flick, a British gangster film, a military B-movie, a 70s cop thriller, and a superhero blockbuster. (See all the synonyms for “movie” up there? We call that journalism school.) Each “movie” has six “scenes” for you to play out. The director and stunt coordinator describe the scenes for you using such pointed words as “In this scene, you’ll be driving a motorcycle while on fire”. And then, essentially, that’s what you do: you drive that motorcycle while it’s on fire.
The game that ensues is like Burnout 3 meets Parappa the Rapper. You’re going to slam people and crash through buildings, though you’re going to do it according to a strict schedule. Never before have big green flashing arrows indicating which direction to turn made so much sense in a driving game: in other driving games, you’re pretending to be racing a real race; in Stuntman: Ignition, you’re a person (possibly a jerkoff) with a videogame controller, pretending to be a person who’s pretending to be an actor who’s pretending to escape from an exploding city. That is, officially, enough layers of abstraction to initiate the brain’s “heck it, let’s just have fun” reflex.
When a “race” is over, you’re going to see a replay, and magically, all of the green arrows and gadgets will have disappeared. It’s just you, the car, the pumping (cheesy) music score, hundreds of carefully scripted events, and lots of graphics. If it looks cool though not cool enough, you might want to play it again. Unlike other perfectionism-inducing games (like Guitar Hero), you’re allowed some improvisation; the only way you can get actually penalized is to miss one of the landmark tricks that the director has decided ahead of time. What you do is you play these little three-minute segments over and over again, learning all the points you have to hit; then you race them over and over again all over again trying to perfect the hit points and scope out all of the “air pockets” for improvisation.
Stuntman: Ignition proceeds to actually reward you for your adventurous spirit, both by giving you more points (YESSSSSS) and by, well, making your replay look a lot cooler. You don’t even need points, though: when you’re playing this game well, you know. That thrusts it right up there with Metal Gear Solid 3, in my book.
According to Metacritic, this game is somewhat below-average because most reviewers find it “difficult” and “repetitive”. These are words that game reviewers probably shouldn’t be allowed to use. Some reviewers say that the game is only entertaining to people who obsessively pursue perfection, which I guess might be right, though I wouldn’t call myself obsessive about perfection, and I still love this game. I love the repetition of it. Shouldn’t a good game make you want to play it over and over and over again? (Ignore what I said in my Portal review!) It’s actually kind of a shame that websites like IGN groaned at this game; THQ’s PR should have got the word out that the game was made by the makers of Pilotwings 64 — all morbidly obese people on the internet seem to jump at the opportunity to glow all over anything touched by anything by anyone who’s ever been “first-party” with Nintendo. (Denis Dyack, et cetera.)
Okay, what I really mean is that this game is better than Guitar Hero. I’m not even going to say anything about how Guitar Hero isn’t as good as playing a real guitar, because I realize that’s an uppity thing to say. Instead, I’m going to say that Stuntman: Ignition is better, because it represents a greater realm of possibilities attainable by reaching for perfection. Guitar Hero, as what it is, does not simulate a musical performance so much as it puts numbers on it. If you make a mistake in Guitar Hero, you start over. Start over with what, though? You start over pretending to play a song. And when it’s over, what do you get? A number, a tiny bit of rhythm training, and a friend calling you an asshole. With Stuntman: Ignition, your quest for perfection is represented by a replay of your performance. A “replay” of your “performance” with Guitar Hero would just consist of a song that you’ve heard before. In other words, it’s about context. The context of Stuntman is that you’re driving a car for a movie; the context of Guitar Hero is that you’re playing a guitar in a concert. Contextually, playing a guitar is a harder fantasy for someone who’s only pretending to play a guitar by holding a plastic fake guitar; however, driving a pretend car is an easy fantasy for someone who’s pretending to drive a car using an abstract videogame controller. If that doesn’t make perfect sense, put it this way: in Guitar Hero, the “guitar” on the screen is just a big flowing abstract bar; in Stuntman, the car on the screen looks like a car. That sort of thing goes a long way!
click for super-hi-res desktop wallpaper version
On a more molecular level, this game is excellent because of what it does for the art of performance playing. Never before has the performance of a videogame actually looked so . . . real. For years, the art of “superplaying” or “speedrunning” a game has inspired many young people who could be applying that energy into studying to be a doctor to make videos of themselves breaking videogames brutally and carefully. Any speed run of Super Metroid available on YouTube is about as entertaining to watch as a film in which a kid in toothpaste-stained purple sweatpants and “Eraserhead” hair cartwheels into a room, does a pee-pee dance in front of a man delivering a Shakespearean monologue, withdraws a .45 from his waistband, shoots the man in the throat before he can finish speaking, and cartwheels into the next room, where a different man attempting the same monologue waits. Any super play of a hardcore 2D shooting game like Mushihimesama will look like complete utter clusterhecking nonsense to anyone who doesn’t actually like these games. So the guy never lets go of the fire button, and knows exactly where the holes are in this boss’s same-every-time pattern, and is very skilled at staying as close to the bottom of the screen and moving as little as possible while mathematical chaos breaks out around him. So what? In short, super plays and speed runs are ways of playing videogames well, which seems to kind of (maybe) be something that game designers don’t entirely think about when designing games.
It’s actually kind of a glaring problem: why does no one think, “Will our game look more or less like a glue-sniffing ostrich on hot sand when someone plays it as well as they can?” With Stuntman: Ignition, the only way to play is to superplay; the only way to superplay is to play brilliantly. When you’ve done good, you know. When you do awesome and then lose right at the very end — that’s what we call bowing down before the boss. The game is packed with a crude, pure justice. Get a couple of friends over, and pass the controller.
As with all videogames involving automobiles, this one is perhaps better on the Xbox 360, because you can use custom soundtracks so that you’re always driving to Nirvana’s “Breed”. Then again, Motorstorm for the PS3 actually has the song “Breed” in it, though it’s mostly surrounded by blaring filth, so who knows.
Oh well, here’s hoping that in an attempt to appeal to dull critics they don’t make Stuntman 3 a game in which you use the Guitar Hero controller to simulate mouse clicks as your on-screen hand-avatar scripts exploding traffic events in the Unreal Engine for a game about making a pretend race track for a pretend car being driven in real-time by a guy pretending to be an actor who’s pretending to be someone else.
★★★★
“SO MUCH BETTER THAN GUITAR HERO.”
Yes. Yesss. YESSSSSSS. Stunmant: Ignition is the underrated hero of 2007, a videogame so big, so generous, so complicated, so simple, so gorgeous, and so ridiculous that those who truly “get” it have every right to disown their blood relations if said blood relations would rather play Guitar Hero.
Essentially, Stuntman: Ignition is a videogame about being a stuntman, though not the type of stuntman who jumps off buildings. You’re the type of stuntman who drives a car. I suppose they could have called the game “Stunt Driver“, though seeing as the series was originally created by the makers of the game series Driver, that might have looked kind of tacky. Especially in this day and age, where marketing geniuses would have us believe that if you put two games side-by-side and both of them feature the same word in the title, the consumer would, without a doubt, buy the one with more words in the title. (They must have also done this same test with one-colon titles versus two-colon titles.)
The original Driver game had a couple of tutorial missions, during which you proved to your employers that you knew how to handle a car. Though most of these moves were useful, you didn’t really have to use all of them in the course of the game. The idea for Stuntman was instantly born in hundreds of thousands of gamers’ heads when they played those training missions in Driver, and then solidified the first time they saw themselves do something awesome in mid-mission. Why not make a game that forces us to do these stunts, over and over, a game that forces us to drive awesomely? The same idea had no doubt been born in the heads of the game designers of Driver as well, though seeing as those people changed the original concept of Driver so that your main character was an undercover cop instead of an actual criminal so as to avoid controversy, and then went on to make the psychotically violent Driv3r, which still remains the worst title anything’s ever had, I wouldn’t give them too much credit.
The Driver series spun out of control after the first installment; the producers got hopped-up on me-too-ism, and began to aspire to something of a Grand Theft Auto clone with slightly heavier cars. The original Stuntman game was a splinter project, a gleefully sadistic exploration into how heavy, exactly, they could make those cars. They made them pretty heavy. The challenges were also laid out in kind of sinisterly boring stages. Furthermore, the difficulty was punishing, and one mistake in the very beginning would most likely ruin your chances of getting any further into the mission.
I’m just basing all of these comments on reviews on the internet which I looked up in the last five minutes; I never played the original Stuntman more than a half an hour because it really just didn’t do anything for me.
The reason the original Stuntman didn’t do anything for me is because it was too unbelievable. I mean, just everything about it was unbelievable. You had to race through these crazy stunt sequences for . . . what, exactly? You were a movie stunt driver, only the stages were so sparsely populated that you probably wouldn’t even watch this movie if you found a VHS tape of it in your mailbox on the day of its theatrical release. The idea of playing a game in which you played the part of a stunt double for an actor in a movie felt too sneeringly abstract, like just off-camera, the whole time, was a guy who had actually found proof of the nonexistence of God in a box of Corn Pops. Add to this the leering disbelief cultivated by the game’s nonchalant insistence that movie stunt-driving sequences are shot in three minutes, in real time, and not by literally a hundred takes of three-second bursts, and you end up with what we call an impossible videogame to call the best videogame of all time.
The new Stuntman, with a subtitle they call Ignition, in addition to being a much better game than its predecessor, is also a phenomenal game. It plays great — heavy cars and all — and looks so great, with so much happening all around you as you drive through burning houses and under falling lava boulders and ramp out of parking garages, that you can forgive it for insisting that movie stunt sequences are shot in real-time. Imagine that: a videogame paying homage to movies, and you can respect it all the more precisely because it’s a videogame.
It helps that the makers of this game, Paradigm Entertainment, were once called Paradigm Simulations, and dealt extensively with trying to transform real things into realistically controllable representations on television screens. Their first and most famous attempt at making a videogame was also a sequel to something made by an established developer — it was Pilotwings 64, released alongside Super Mario 64 and the Nintendo 64 console. Way back then, way back in Pilotwings 64 was Stuntman Ignition in its most embryonic form. Back then, the simulation bits and the videogamey bits clung to one another as though in a freezing breeze. It was ultimately too simmy, because when worse comes to worst, realism tends to always convince people, somehow; now here’s Stuntman Ignition, wherein realism and videogames walk hand-in-hand through a county fair on a summer night, and videogames have finally succeeded in ramming a large scepter of cotton-candy down realism’s throat. The result is fantastic, spectacular, commendable. The very least you can say about Stuntman Ignition is that, in this world where people who understand quality do exist, whether Stuntman Ignition sold well or not doesn’t matter, because the people who scripted the events in this game will never — never — find themselves out of work, and should never expect to earn less than $70K a year. If, truly, games are to move forward and heck Hollywood in the back of the head with a basketball pump, these master Rube-Goldberg device craftsmen are the people who will, at last, make it all convincing.
I bet you’re wondering by now, what makes this game so good? Here’s where I finally tell you: everything! (That’s where my “template for review of great game” ends.) Just as in Stuntman (described somewhere up there), you’re a stunt driver in movies. There are six “movies” in the game — a James Bond-like spy movie, a police comedy, a volcano disaster flick, a British gangster film, a military B-movie, a 70s cop thriller, and a superhero blockbuster. (See all the synonyms for “movie” up there? We call that journalism school.) Each “movie” has six “scenes” for you to play out. The director and stunt coordinator describe the scenes for you using such pointed words as “In this scene, you’ll be driving a motorcycle while on fire”. And then, essentially, that’s what you do: you drive that motorcycle while it’s on fire.
The game that ensues is like Burnout 3 meets Parappa the Rapper. You’re going to slam people and crash through buildings, though you’re going to do it according to a strict schedule. Never before have big green flashing arrows indicating which direction to turn made so much sense in a driving game: in other driving games, you’re pretending to be racing a real race; in Stuntman: Ignition, you’re a person (possibly a jerkoff) with a videogame controller, pretending to be a person who’s pretending to be an actor who’s pretending to escape from an exploding city. That is, officially, enough layers of abstraction to initiate the brain’s “heck it, let’s just have fun” reflex.
When a “race” is over, you’re going to see a replay, and magically, all of the green arrows and gadgets will have disappeared. It’s just you, the car, the pumping (cheesy) music score, hundreds of carefully scripted events, and lots of graphics. If it looks cool though not cool enough, you might want to play it again. Unlike other perfectionism-inducing games (like Guitar Hero), you’re allowed some improvisation; the only way you can get actually penalized is to miss one of the landmark tricks that the director has decided ahead of time. What you do is you play these little three-minute segments over and over again, learning all the points you have to hit; then you race them over and over again all over again trying to perfect the hit points and scope out all of the “air pockets” for improvisation.
Stuntman: Ignition proceeds to actually reward you for your adventurous spirit, both by giving you more points (YESSSSSS) and by, well, making your replay look a lot cooler. You don’t even need points, though: when you’re playing this game well, you know. That thrusts it right up there with Metal Gear Solid 3, in my book.
According to Metacritic, this game is somewhat below-average because most reviewers find it “difficult” and “repetitive”. These are words that game reviewers probably shouldn’t be allowed to use. Some reviewers say that the game is only entertaining to people who obsessively pursue perfection, which I guess might be right, though I wouldn’t call myself obsessive about perfection, and I still love this game. I love the repetition of it. Shouldn’t a good game make you want to play it over and over and over again? (Ignore what I said in my Portal review!) It’s actually kind of a shame that websites like IGN groaned at this game; THQ’s PR should have got the word out that the game was made by the makers of Pilotwings 64 — all morbidly obese people on the internet seem to jump at the opportunity to glow all over anything touched by anything by anyone who’s ever been “first-party” with Nintendo. (Denis Dyack, et cetera.)
Okay, what I really mean is that this game is better than Guitar Hero. I’m not even going to say anything about how Guitar Hero isn’t as good as playing a real guitar, because I realize that’s an uppity thing to say. Instead, I’m going to say that Stuntman: Ignition is better, because it represents a greater realm of possibilities attainable by reaching for perfection. Guitar Hero, as what it is, does not simulate a musical performance so much as it puts numbers on it. If you make a mistake in Guitar Hero, you start over. Start over with what, though? You start over pretending to play a song. And when it’s over, what do you get? A number, a tiny bit of rhythm training, and a friend calling you an asshole. With Stuntman: Ignition, your quest for perfection is represented by a replay of your performance. A “replay” of your “performance” with Guitar Hero would just consist of a song that you’ve heard before. In other words, it’s about context. The context of Stuntman is that you’re driving a car for a movie; the context of Guitar Hero is that you’re playing a guitar in a concert. Contextually, playing a guitar is a harder fantasy for someone who’s only pretending to play a guitar by holding a plastic fake guitar; however, driving a pretend car is an easy fantasy for someone who’s pretending to drive a car using an abstract videogame controller. If that doesn’t make perfect sense, put it this way: in Guitar Hero, the “guitar” on the screen is just a big flowing abstract bar; in Stuntman, the car on the screen looks like a car. That sort of thing goes a long way!
click for super-hi-res desktop wallpaper version
On a more molecular level, this game is excellent because of what it does for the art of performance playing. Never before has the performance of a videogame actually looked so . . . real. For years, the art of “superplaying” or “speedrunning” a game has inspired many young people who could be applying that energy into studying to be a doctor to make videos of themselves breaking videogames brutally and carefully. Any speed run of Super Metroid available on YouTube is about as entertaining to watch as a film in which a kid in toothpaste-stained purple sweatpants and “Eraserhead” hair cartwheels into a room, does a pee-pee dance in front of a man delivering a Shakespearean monologue, withdraws a .45 from his waistband, shoots the man in the throat before he can finish speaking, and cartwheels into the next room, where a different man attempting the same monologue waits. Any super play of a hardcore 2D shooting game like Mushihimesama will look like complete utter clusterhecking nonsense to anyone who doesn’t actually like these games. So the guy never lets go of the fire button, and knows exactly where the holes are in this boss’s same-every-time pattern, and is very skilled at staying as close to the bottom of the screen and moving as little as possible while mathematical chaos breaks out around him. So what? In short, super plays and speed runs are ways of playing videogames well, which seems to kind of (maybe) be something that game designers don’t entirely think about when designing games.
It’s actually kind of a glaring problem: why does no one think, “Will our game look more or less like a glue-sniffing ostrich on hot sand when someone plays it as well as they can?” With Stuntman: Ignition, the only way to play is to superplay; the only way to superplay is to play brilliantly. When you’ve done good, you know. When you do awesome and then lose right at the very end — that’s what we call bowing down before the boss. The game is packed with a crude, pure justice. Get a couple of friends over, and pass the controller.
As with all videogames involving automobiles, this one is perhaps better on the Xbox 360, because you can use custom soundtracks so that you’re always driving to Nirvana’s “Breed”. Then again, Motorstorm for the PS3 actually has the song “Breed” in it, though it’s mostly surrounded by blaring filth, so who knows.
Oh well, here’s hoping that in an attempt to appeal to dull critics they don’t make Stuntman 3 a game in which you use the Guitar Hero controller to simulate mouse clicks as your on-screen hand-avatar scripts exploding traffic events in the Unreal Engine for a game about making a pretend race track for a pretend car being driven in real-time by a guy pretending to be an actor who’s pretending to be someone else.
2007
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE BEST GAME EVER ABOUT POINTS A AND B.”
After playing Portal, it becomes abundantly clear that every videogame produced should probably be required by law to contain at least one fantastical item that the player wishes he could have in real life. The closest any game has ever gotten to Portal‘s Portal Gun would have to be the Castrol Tom’s Supra in Gran Turismo, which is kind of sad because that’s just a car.
Simply put, the Portal Gun lets you shoot a Blue Portal and a Red Portal; go in the Blue Portal, come out the Red Portal. Go in the Red Portal, come out the Blue Portal.
The beginning of the game streamlines the dynamic by providing you with Red Portals and letting you place Blue Portals. Even then, it’s enough to confuse most peoples’ girlfriends (if they exist). The very first puzzle after the player receives the ability to shoot both Red and Blue Portals involves a door across a very, very wide chasm. In order to get there, you just shoot a Portal of any color at the wall near the door and then shoot a Portal at the wall near where you stand. Enter the Portal nearest to you and, with a pan-flash worthy of Super Mario Bros., power flickers to life in virgin regions of your brain. It used to be, chasms were the point of games; in Portal, they’re just a casualty of the game’s brutally inventive, genre-breaking concept. The only way to play this game is to break what you already know about other games, which I suppose is especially true if you know nothing at all about games. This game is vandalism for the gamer’s mind; it breaks into the game design profession’s ladies department at midnight and straps diamond dildos on all the mannequins.
Any human being worth conversing with will, upon encountering that first genius chasm in Portal, begin to literally quiver whilst contemplating the possibilities of owning a real-life Portal gun. An elaborate example would involve putting one portal in, say, an apartment in Rome, and another one in your apartment in Philadelphia. Not everyone has an apartment in Rome, however. A simpler example — I wouldn’t mind having a portal in my bedroom and another one in my office five kilometers away. Would be nice to not have to commute! Have one portal on the sofa cushion and another on the ceiling above your toilet, for example, to turn defecating into something of a game. Sex with your girlfriend could become severely interesting, as you do her from in her apartment via a portal in your apartment, then pull out and close the portal, leaving her bewildered and alone. Or — and this was actually the first one I thought of — with very simple portal placement, you could finally experience auto-fellatio without straining your abdominal muscles (or having ribs removed). Just remember to close the portals when you’re done, or the next person stepping into your apartment is going to immediately know exactly what you were doing.
As Portal starts building in cleverness — with the introduction of surfaces that cannot be portaled — your mind may or may not calm down, and start to ponder potential puzzles. The first time the game threw a momentum-based puzzle my way, I immediately thought it would be awesome if there was a puzzle where you have to cross a long chasm by placing two portals on the floor far beneath your feet. When the game eventually tossed out one such puzzle, it felt really nice. Like the game was listening. Good games are like this — they make you start to expect to see your name in the credits.
The “story” of Portal, in typical Valve fashion, is told entirely as you’re actually playing the game. You wake up in a kind of test-tube bed with hideous music playing on a nearby radio. You are informed that you are a test subject. The droning computer voice refers to you as “[Subject Name Here]”, which at first seems like a funny little joke, and then eventually — if you duck into enough optional side rooms — seems less like a one-off and more like a sinister hint.
Sinister hint or not, it’s entirely up to you how much you read into the story — if at all — just as it’s up to you to play this game in the first place. Having gone into this game cold turkey, I had no idea what kind of “plot” there would be, if any, so I was weirdly shocked (this was at two in the morning) when I got to the first “side room” — dilapidated and littered with garbage, a stark contrast to the sterile white of the testing center. A cold wave came over me: no, the spectacular dialogue (spoken only by the computer voice) in this game isn’t just for optional amusement. There really is a story back there, somewhere.
My first side-room experience happened to come just minutes after I thought, what if we get to break out of this testing center and use the portal gun in real life? In a way, using the portal gun in a simulated videogamefacsimile of “real life” was more appealing, in that moment, than actually using a real portal gun in real real life, probably because the fake real life was a more immediate possibility. In the end, which was great, the game only met me halfway, though what a spectacular halfway it was.
Some said the game was too short; some people have also said that the greatest compliment a pop song can receive is “it’s too short”, though those people probably don’t regularly play three-hour videogames, and thus many of them might find Portal to be too long. (I happen to think there are many better things to say about pop music. “This song made me quit smoking”, for example, can be a better compliment than “It’s too short”. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear the song that made someone quit smoking?) I suppose the crux of this well-waged argument is that Portal is both short and not conducive to replaying. This is perhaps a fair criticism, though that first play-through is so much of a brain marathon that it’s going to stick with you for months, or even years. I’d rather play a three-hour game with a razor-sharp concept, hilariously quotable dialogue, and a vaguely sketched story that just keeps coming back to you than, say, scrounge around big environments looking to collect all 101 hecking Dalmatians. Also, as a short game, and as one that can be played mostly by utilizing actual common sense, it’s exceptionally easy to recommend it to people who don’t own any Devil May Cry T-shirts. In the end, Portal‘s three hours contain more story and more personality than probably any 100-hour game has ever had before it; it draws a new line in the sand between games that are about showing us something cool and games that are giving us something to do in the interim period between the game’s release and the day that the buy-back rate at used game shops falls through the floor. With this writing, I’d like to implore the Worldwide Videogame Industry to “make more games like Portal“, though seeing as when Famitsu implored the Japanese Videogame Industry to “make more games like Brain Training” we ended up with literally whole shop floors devoted to brain-training games, it’s probably not a good idea. I mean, there’s only so much you can do with portals, and even less you can do with a whole shelf full of games about portals.
While we’re at it, let’s say that consulting GameFAQs for this game should probably be illegal.
As with Katamari, there’s really no reason to make a sequel to Portal; again, as with Katamari, the only way to make a sequel would be to expand on the concept only logistically. An actual evolution of Katamari would present the player with a tiny clump in an actual, breathing, realistic metropolis. An evolution of Portal would see the escaped test subject fleeing from the feds in a sprawling real-world environment, with a certain destination clearly in mind (let’s say the penthouse office suite of a specific skyscraper) and numerous puzzles laid out in logical places throughout the city, solvable only with the portal gun; the player navigates from puzzle to puzzle as the indirect result of her being chased by shadowy men in radiation suits. Eventually, the game would come together like one huge puzzle.
Maybe you’d even have two portal guns, and be able to use four portals at a time. Man!
It occurs to me that it would be kind of cool if Valve were to collaborate a bit with Rockstar to make the portal gun a downloadable item in Grand Theft Auto IV. They don’t even have to produce any specific missions for it — if you pay, say, five dollars, then the portal gun is permanently placed in your character’s house. Man, that’s a good idea. Someone should give me a job, or something. I’m genuinely surprised at how I just can’t find the proper words to adequately congratulate myself, here.
The writing in Portal is so good, from moment to moment, that it births within me the unshakable and vaguely self-important impression that its writer, Erik Wolpaw (of Psychonauts and Old Man Murray) hates me personally. (There’s no better compliment I can give any piece of writing.) Still, the amount of rabid internet pseudo-posturing concerning the words “Weighted Companion Cube” or “Still Alive” (Protip: play the game to figure out what these words mean) is a bit bewildering. Half of the people who praise the Weighted Companion Cube as a fresh breath of emotion in a videogame industry that is otherwise desensitized to violence against grandmothers and grandfathers are also the sons of the same invisible bitch who step forward to “lol” whenever Kotaku posts a story about the current state of the “Ninjas vs. Pirates” meme. Scientists are hard at work in cooperation with the police, by the way, in proving the hypothesis that half of the people who claim to still find the words “Ninjas” and “Pirates” funny when used in the same sentence either played high school football or tried out for it. That some people will “LOL” at any mention of the Weighted Companion Cube or embroider little custom-made pillows of it while still commenting on web forums that “it’s kind of a shame that even if you wait like ten minutes to dispose of the cube GLaDOS still tells you you destroyed the cube faster than any past test subject” illustrates that these people are only pretending to have a sense of humor. (Here, if I wanted, I could turn this article into a pseudo-literary analysis of how GLaDOS is simply trying to make essentially every test subject feel like they’re more horrible than most other people, and how this is a subtle commentary on how videogames desensitize people, et cetera, though I’m probably the only person who would find that hilarious.) The best conclusion that can be reached, I suppose, is that people in general aren’t capable of truly appreciating quality for what it is, and the nagging feeling in the center of the brain that forces them to regurgitate the most boring key phrases of an otherwise virtuosic tableau of exciting phrases (I loved the “Didn’t we have some fun, though?” line, for example) is a yearning to understand why they enjoyed what they just enjoyed. Really, you have to just let it flow, man.
As good as Portal‘s writing is (and it is indeed excellent), at the end of the day, it’s really no more earth-shattering than the visual production values of God of War: in other words, it’s the bare minimum that videogame-reviewing reviewers and videogame-playing players should be expecting. Luckily for Portal, it also has a magnificent game concept, perfect pacing, and is actually playable from start to finish by someone who didn’t grow up with an unopened box of Super Mario Bros. & Legend of Zelda cereal (“collector’s item”) under their bed. For all it represents, it’s also Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2007. Sorry if you were expecting a ceremony for that! I might as well use this paragraph to say that Portal is “kind of tied” with Pac-Man: Championship Edition, in that if you play both of these games in one day, you’ve had about as much fun as it’s possible to have with videogames released in 2007. I often think of Portal sometimes while playing Pac-Man: Championship Edition, which I guess makes this sentence less of a tangent. Though the hell with it, tangents are more fun, and Portal is so good that talking about it is quite frankly boring. I’ll use the rest of this paragraph to say that the Action Button Dot Net Runner Up Game of the Year, 2007 is Stuntman Ignition, which, as it were, has much better graphics than Guitar Hero. I also pause here to spoil that Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2008 is most likely going to be Sega / Creative Assembly’s Viking: Battle for Asgard, because I love vikings, I love Creative Assembly, I consider Spartan: Total Warrior the sharpest game ever made, and most importantly because I have seen screenshots and I will not be swayed.
(*tied with pac-man: championship edition)
Getting back on topic, then: some kids have seen fit to both solve the puzzles in Portal and solve them as fast as possible, which is a little redundant, like seeing how fast you can write out all the answers on a calculus test with an answer key right next to you. Portal, unlike some (most) games, is not about the finger exercise — it’s about the experience of getting through it, letting it open your mind a little bit, putting it away, and then ceaselessly, turgidly, relentlessly forcing your friends to borrow it until everyone you know has played it and thanked you. To digress, the only game that’s better under this description would be God Hand, because I recommend that one fiercely and still play it. Then again, why would I want to play a game over and over again? Yearning for “replay value” is a sickness that dwells deep in the heart of every mainstream game reviewer. The best games aren’t ones with swathes of collectible bullstuff; they’re ones like Portal, or Cave Story — games that, art or pop-art or whatever the hell they are (Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood has called Cave Story “art”, and I’m pretty sure he’s smarter than me (not being sarcastic), so who knows), are so undeniably, tightly put-together that clearing them makes us never want to see them again, makes us wonder why the people who made them aren’t out, I don’t know, hecking curing cancer, developing the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, or something. In this day and age when even a (metaphorically) fat-fingered bastard like me can learn to script events in the Unreal Engine, Portal (no, not BioShock) is precisely the kind of videogame everyone out there needs to play. In short, it’s substance over style, and the style is spectacular.
Did you ever have this experience: a band or a book or a film that someone recommended to you very casually — maybe they said “I guess you might like them”, or something else mealy-mouthed enough to make you wonder what this jerk knows about what you like — and then, when you finally got around to listening to that band / reading that book / seeing that movie you were hecking blown away, and disappointed by all of your friends, because not a single one of them knows you well enough to know that this thing that they got to before you is precisely the sort of thing you’d love? I have that experience all the time, most recently with this game Portal, and the television show “The Sopranos”, which I started watching on a bizarre whim (it’s so good I haven’t touched a videogame in weeks). If you, dear reader, have actually read to the end of this inane, half-autistic nonsense right here (one of three articles written on one lunch break, meaning it took less than twenty minutes and was written hungry) and you still haven’t played Portal, you are hereby ordered to consider this the strongest possible recommendation.
★★★★
“THE BEST GAME EVER ABOUT POINTS A AND B.”
After playing Portal, it becomes abundantly clear that every videogame produced should probably be required by law to contain at least one fantastical item that the player wishes he could have in real life. The closest any game has ever gotten to Portal‘s Portal Gun would have to be the Castrol Tom’s Supra in Gran Turismo, which is kind of sad because that’s just a car.
Simply put, the Portal Gun lets you shoot a Blue Portal and a Red Portal; go in the Blue Portal, come out the Red Portal. Go in the Red Portal, come out the Blue Portal.
The beginning of the game streamlines the dynamic by providing you with Red Portals and letting you place Blue Portals. Even then, it’s enough to confuse most peoples’ girlfriends (if they exist). The very first puzzle after the player receives the ability to shoot both Red and Blue Portals involves a door across a very, very wide chasm. In order to get there, you just shoot a Portal of any color at the wall near the door and then shoot a Portal at the wall near where you stand. Enter the Portal nearest to you and, with a pan-flash worthy of Super Mario Bros., power flickers to life in virgin regions of your brain. It used to be, chasms were the point of games; in Portal, they’re just a casualty of the game’s brutally inventive, genre-breaking concept. The only way to play this game is to break what you already know about other games, which I suppose is especially true if you know nothing at all about games. This game is vandalism for the gamer’s mind; it breaks into the game design profession’s ladies department at midnight and straps diamond dildos on all the mannequins.
Any human being worth conversing with will, upon encountering that first genius chasm in Portal, begin to literally quiver whilst contemplating the possibilities of owning a real-life Portal gun. An elaborate example would involve putting one portal in, say, an apartment in Rome, and another one in your apartment in Philadelphia. Not everyone has an apartment in Rome, however. A simpler example — I wouldn’t mind having a portal in my bedroom and another one in my office five kilometers away. Would be nice to not have to commute! Have one portal on the sofa cushion and another on the ceiling above your toilet, for example, to turn defecating into something of a game. Sex with your girlfriend could become severely interesting, as you do her from in her apartment via a portal in your apartment, then pull out and close the portal, leaving her bewildered and alone. Or — and this was actually the first one I thought of — with very simple portal placement, you could finally experience auto-fellatio without straining your abdominal muscles (or having ribs removed). Just remember to close the portals when you’re done, or the next person stepping into your apartment is going to immediately know exactly what you were doing.
As Portal starts building in cleverness — with the introduction of surfaces that cannot be portaled — your mind may or may not calm down, and start to ponder potential puzzles. The first time the game threw a momentum-based puzzle my way, I immediately thought it would be awesome if there was a puzzle where you have to cross a long chasm by placing two portals on the floor far beneath your feet. When the game eventually tossed out one such puzzle, it felt really nice. Like the game was listening. Good games are like this — they make you start to expect to see your name in the credits.
The “story” of Portal, in typical Valve fashion, is told entirely as you’re actually playing the game. You wake up in a kind of test-tube bed with hideous music playing on a nearby radio. You are informed that you are a test subject. The droning computer voice refers to you as “[Subject Name Here]”, which at first seems like a funny little joke, and then eventually — if you duck into enough optional side rooms — seems less like a one-off and more like a sinister hint.
Sinister hint or not, it’s entirely up to you how much you read into the story — if at all — just as it’s up to you to play this game in the first place. Having gone into this game cold turkey, I had no idea what kind of “plot” there would be, if any, so I was weirdly shocked (this was at two in the morning) when I got to the first “side room” — dilapidated and littered with garbage, a stark contrast to the sterile white of the testing center. A cold wave came over me: no, the spectacular dialogue (spoken only by the computer voice) in this game isn’t just for optional amusement. There really is a story back there, somewhere.
My first side-room experience happened to come just minutes after I thought, what if we get to break out of this testing center and use the portal gun in real life? In a way, using the portal gun in a simulated videogamefacsimile of “real life” was more appealing, in that moment, than actually using a real portal gun in real real life, probably because the fake real life was a more immediate possibility. In the end, which was great, the game only met me halfway, though what a spectacular halfway it was.
Some said the game was too short; some people have also said that the greatest compliment a pop song can receive is “it’s too short”, though those people probably don’t regularly play three-hour videogames, and thus many of them might find Portal to be too long. (I happen to think there are many better things to say about pop music. “This song made me quit smoking”, for example, can be a better compliment than “It’s too short”. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear the song that made someone quit smoking?) I suppose the crux of this well-waged argument is that Portal is both short and not conducive to replaying. This is perhaps a fair criticism, though that first play-through is so much of a brain marathon that it’s going to stick with you for months, or even years. I’d rather play a three-hour game with a razor-sharp concept, hilariously quotable dialogue, and a vaguely sketched story that just keeps coming back to you than, say, scrounge around big environments looking to collect all 101 hecking Dalmatians. Also, as a short game, and as one that can be played mostly by utilizing actual common sense, it’s exceptionally easy to recommend it to people who don’t own any Devil May Cry T-shirts. In the end, Portal‘s three hours contain more story and more personality than probably any 100-hour game has ever had before it; it draws a new line in the sand between games that are about showing us something cool and games that are giving us something to do in the interim period between the game’s release and the day that the buy-back rate at used game shops falls through the floor. With this writing, I’d like to implore the Worldwide Videogame Industry to “make more games like Portal“, though seeing as when Famitsu implored the Japanese Videogame Industry to “make more games like Brain Training” we ended up with literally whole shop floors devoted to brain-training games, it’s probably not a good idea. I mean, there’s only so much you can do with portals, and even less you can do with a whole shelf full of games about portals.
While we’re at it, let’s say that consulting GameFAQs for this game should probably be illegal.
As with Katamari, there’s really no reason to make a sequel to Portal; again, as with Katamari, the only way to make a sequel would be to expand on the concept only logistically. An actual evolution of Katamari would present the player with a tiny clump in an actual, breathing, realistic metropolis. An evolution of Portal would see the escaped test subject fleeing from the feds in a sprawling real-world environment, with a certain destination clearly in mind (let’s say the penthouse office suite of a specific skyscraper) and numerous puzzles laid out in logical places throughout the city, solvable only with the portal gun; the player navigates from puzzle to puzzle as the indirect result of her being chased by shadowy men in radiation suits. Eventually, the game would come together like one huge puzzle.
Maybe you’d even have two portal guns, and be able to use four portals at a time. Man!
It occurs to me that it would be kind of cool if Valve were to collaborate a bit with Rockstar to make the portal gun a downloadable item in Grand Theft Auto IV. They don’t even have to produce any specific missions for it — if you pay, say, five dollars, then the portal gun is permanently placed in your character’s house. Man, that’s a good idea. Someone should give me a job, or something. I’m genuinely surprised at how I just can’t find the proper words to adequately congratulate myself, here.
The writing in Portal is so good, from moment to moment, that it births within me the unshakable and vaguely self-important impression that its writer, Erik Wolpaw (of Psychonauts and Old Man Murray) hates me personally. (There’s no better compliment I can give any piece of writing.) Still, the amount of rabid internet pseudo-posturing concerning the words “Weighted Companion Cube” or “Still Alive” (Protip: play the game to figure out what these words mean) is a bit bewildering. Half of the people who praise the Weighted Companion Cube as a fresh breath of emotion in a videogame industry that is otherwise desensitized to violence against grandmothers and grandfathers are also the sons of the same invisible bitch who step forward to “lol” whenever Kotaku posts a story about the current state of the “Ninjas vs. Pirates” meme. Scientists are hard at work in cooperation with the police, by the way, in proving the hypothesis that half of the people who claim to still find the words “Ninjas” and “Pirates” funny when used in the same sentence either played high school football or tried out for it. That some people will “LOL” at any mention of the Weighted Companion Cube or embroider little custom-made pillows of it while still commenting on web forums that “it’s kind of a shame that even if you wait like ten minutes to dispose of the cube GLaDOS still tells you you destroyed the cube faster than any past test subject” illustrates that these people are only pretending to have a sense of humor. (Here, if I wanted, I could turn this article into a pseudo-literary analysis of how GLaDOS is simply trying to make essentially every test subject feel like they’re more horrible than most other people, and how this is a subtle commentary on how videogames desensitize people, et cetera, though I’m probably the only person who would find that hilarious.) The best conclusion that can be reached, I suppose, is that people in general aren’t capable of truly appreciating quality for what it is, and the nagging feeling in the center of the brain that forces them to regurgitate the most boring key phrases of an otherwise virtuosic tableau of exciting phrases (I loved the “Didn’t we have some fun, though?” line, for example) is a yearning to understand why they enjoyed what they just enjoyed. Really, you have to just let it flow, man.
As good as Portal‘s writing is (and it is indeed excellent), at the end of the day, it’s really no more earth-shattering than the visual production values of God of War: in other words, it’s the bare minimum that videogame-reviewing reviewers and videogame-playing players should be expecting. Luckily for Portal, it also has a magnificent game concept, perfect pacing, and is actually playable from start to finish by someone who didn’t grow up with an unopened box of Super Mario Bros. & Legend of Zelda cereal (“collector’s item”) under their bed. For all it represents, it’s also Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2007. Sorry if you were expecting a ceremony for that! I might as well use this paragraph to say that Portal is “kind of tied” with Pac-Man: Championship Edition, in that if you play both of these games in one day, you’ve had about as much fun as it’s possible to have with videogames released in 2007. I often think of Portal sometimes while playing Pac-Man: Championship Edition, which I guess makes this sentence less of a tangent. Though the hell with it, tangents are more fun, and Portal is so good that talking about it is quite frankly boring. I’ll use the rest of this paragraph to say that the Action Button Dot Net Runner Up Game of the Year, 2007 is Stuntman Ignition, which, as it were, has much better graphics than Guitar Hero. I also pause here to spoil that Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2008 is most likely going to be Sega / Creative Assembly’s Viking: Battle for Asgard, because I love vikings, I love Creative Assembly, I consider Spartan: Total Warrior the sharpest game ever made, and most importantly because I have seen screenshots and I will not be swayed.
(*tied with pac-man: championship edition)
Getting back on topic, then: some kids have seen fit to both solve the puzzles in Portal and solve them as fast as possible, which is a little redundant, like seeing how fast you can write out all the answers on a calculus test with an answer key right next to you. Portal, unlike some (most) games, is not about the finger exercise — it’s about the experience of getting through it, letting it open your mind a little bit, putting it away, and then ceaselessly, turgidly, relentlessly forcing your friends to borrow it until everyone you know has played it and thanked you. To digress, the only game that’s better under this description would be God Hand, because I recommend that one fiercely and still play it. Then again, why would I want to play a game over and over again? Yearning for “replay value” is a sickness that dwells deep in the heart of every mainstream game reviewer. The best games aren’t ones with swathes of collectible bullstuff; they’re ones like Portal, or Cave Story — games that, art or pop-art or whatever the hell they are (Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood has called Cave Story “art”, and I’m pretty sure he’s smarter than me (not being sarcastic), so who knows), are so undeniably, tightly put-together that clearing them makes us never want to see them again, makes us wonder why the people who made them aren’t out, I don’t know, hecking curing cancer, developing the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, or something. In this day and age when even a (metaphorically) fat-fingered bastard like me can learn to script events in the Unreal Engine, Portal (no, not BioShock) is precisely the kind of videogame everyone out there needs to play. In short, it’s substance over style, and the style is spectacular.
Did you ever have this experience: a band or a book or a film that someone recommended to you very casually — maybe they said “I guess you might like them”, or something else mealy-mouthed enough to make you wonder what this jerk knows about what you like — and then, when you finally got around to listening to that band / reading that book / seeing that movie you were hecking blown away, and disappointed by all of your friends, because not a single one of them knows you well enough to know that this thing that they got to before you is precisely the sort of thing you’d love? I have that experience all the time, most recently with this game Portal, and the television show “The Sopranos”, which I started watching on a bizarre whim (it’s so good I haven’t touched a videogame in weeks). If you, dear reader, have actually read to the end of this inane, half-autistic nonsense right here (one of three articles written on one lunch break, meaning it took less than twenty minutes and was written hungry) and you still haven’t played Portal, you are hereby ordered to consider this the strongest possible recommendation.
2007
text by tim rogers
⋆☆☆☆
“ESCAPISM FOR QUADRIPLEGICS.”
I’m not going to lie to you: I haven’t actually played this game more than five minutes. I have, however, stopped at the arcade once every night for the past few months and ended up staring — for just a few moments — at fully-grown men with illustrious cigarette habits and mortal reasons for staring at this game until their wives are deep in dreamless sleep. The arcade of which I speak is a Namco-owned joint three seconds walking distance from the exit of the Seiyu supermarket in Ogikubo where I stop every night to buy okra and orange paprikas with which to cook life-fulfilling vegan fried rice. (That food reference there is for the kids. Every good game review should have one!) I enter this arcade for the same reason I enter the flower shop in the basement of Ogikubo Station: because the winter in Tokyo is a cold bitch ballroom dancing with a cold bastard. The company where I work is amazingly located on the top floor of the same building as a Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line subway station; I take the elevator downstairs, walk onto the train with expert timing, and then get off not five minutes later in the deep underground of Ogikubo, the town where I proudly live. While many grown men dash up the escalator and eagerly into the freezing cold, I enter the Aoyama Flower Shop, which opens into the food basement of a Lumine department store; I track past the bagel shop and the rice shop and the custom-made tofu shop, through the international grocery (where I sometimes buy red onions), and through a winding passageway into the basement of the Town Seven building. I hold my breath as I walk past a fish market, glare at the amazingly good-looking girl who for some reason nonchalantly shouts “Good morning” or “Good evening” to passersby of a tangerine stand literally from the minute I leave for work on the morning to literally the minute I show up in the evening with my iPod headphones blasting math rock into my ears. Past the vegetble market, I slip through a passage into the Seiyu basement, grab a paprika and a mesh bag of okra, and then hop on the escalator upstairs. If I need eggs, or skim milk, I buy one of these things. If I’m out of brown rice, I buy some of that, too. Eventually, I’m at the register. I pay the money and head for the automatic doors, bracing myself for the blast of cold. The doors veen open, and there I am, outside, in the future. The year 2008. The second year in history the name of which has sounded like The Future. Not three seconds’ walking distance from the Seiyu door is the automatic door of abovementioned arcade. I plunge in, plastic grocery bags in hand. There I am, in a Japanese arcade. And there they are — the arcade denizens, the life-living human beings whose transit every night brings them here.
Make no bones about it: I enter this arcade every night because it is large, heated, and has two exits. The rear exit is close to the Seiyu supermarket exit; the front exit stands at the precipice of a crosswalk. I linger by that entrance — thankfully, a push-button-operated auto door, for maximum heating efficiency — until the light turns green; I sprint out the door, across the street, and down the famed Ogikubo Church Avenue shopping street, past the Seventh Day Adventist church and the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital, and right into my apartment door. Much as I like living next door to a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in theory, it’s kind of useless if I actually get sick; they’d probably shrug and deny me treatment for one of my frequent ear infections because “Jesus is coming to claim our souls next week, anyway”.
While standing by the arcade door, I often catch reflections of Tekken 6 in the glass. Sometimes, I groan so much I fog the glass up, and then I can’t see Tekken 6 anymore, until I write “PENIS” in the fog and then I can see Tekken 6 again, inside the letters.
The point of all the writing in this piece, up until now (and it pains me to have to spell this out), is that I can cover four city blocks of distance by navigating commercialism-packed underground tunnels, and that the ten minutes I spend in the grocery store picking vegetables and waiting in line make me long for home; if only the men who got snared by the Namco arcade in Ogikubo, too, had spent ten minutes in the grocery store, they’d probably not consider it such a good idea to sit down and play Tekken 6. They’d probably get home sooner, maybe before eight PM. If they spend just ten minutes playing Tekken 6, that can interrupt their schedule to the point that it’s later than eight PM, so that they don’t feel like cooking when they get home. They’ll instead settle for some nasty cup ramen at a convenient store, and be unable to shave the next morning because of the pimples that popped up on their chin while they slept. They’ll go in to the office the next morning looking like an oily, vinegar-blooded scruff, and their chances of sexxing the secretary will further approach the floor.
NOW I’M GOING TO ACTUALLY REVIEW TEKKEN 6
Nope, just kidding! If you came to this website because you really want to read an IGN-style “fair” “review” of Tekken 6, I’d prefer it if you went somewhere else!
Tekken 6 is a blow job from a bear trap. Arcades “survived” in Japan for the most arbitrary of reasons — that they’re placed on top real-estate close to train stations; arcades “died” in America because you have to drive out of your way to go there. FPSes are popular in America because people craving person-on-person competition can get some action from the comfort of their own home (in other words, without having to drive thirty-minutes out of their way to an arcade); FPSes are not popular in Japan because anyone craving person-on-person gaming competition can get some from an arcade three minutes’ walk from their local grocery store. While there surely exist established games that Japanese arcade gamers will go out of their way to experience at a particular arcade (Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, for example), something like Tekken 6 is a conniving trap built by a conniving hack developer.
The idea to review Tekken 6 first came to me last night, as I waited in front of the glass at the Namco arcade in Ogikubo. Somehow, the glass wouldn’t fog up (might spring be coming?), so I gravitated toward the gorgeous LCD cabinets, commonplace since the rolling-out of Virtua Fighter 5 in 2006. At the arcade in Ogikubo, they’ve got two sets of eight machines, set up in two islands of four back-to-back pairs. As with any just about any fighting game in existence at the moment, you can purchase a member card to save your profile. It saves your win / loss record and whatever frighteningly gaudy costume items (clown wigs, gardening hats, novelty sunglasses) you’ve won and slapped onto your character.
The inherent problem with the card system is that all you have to do is glance at the corners of the screen on multiple machines for about five scientist-like minutes to realize how shattered this game is with regard to execution. I remember back when Tekken 3 was new — and for PlayStation! — and people dared to complain that Eddie Gordo was a “button-mashing character”, and that “anyone could win” with him. No one seemed to know that he was, indeed, the future of the series. Yeah — back then, the series that would become SoulCalibur was a history-based, slow-paced fighting game with excellent experimental music. Now we have Tekken 6, where the win/loss ratios in the corner of every machine I’ve encountered in the past twenty-four hours display the most frightening statistical anomaly: namely, that every player is roughly winning 50% of the time and losing 50% of the time. I would have tried to take pictures of the screens if Japanese arcade employees weren’t such nazis — the last time I even tried to write an email on my cellular phone in a Japanese arcade, I got my arm grabbed by a guy who yelled “NO FOTO!” so many times that the guy at the front desk started yelling it, too, making a big “X” with his hands.
If you ask me, they probably shouldn’t display the win/loss records at all times on the screen for Tekken 6. They should probably display the records at the beginning and end of the match only. In addition to making the game look sloppy, it also reveals to any passersby (especially girls) how much money each player has spent on the game. I swear, there are guys at the local arcade with something like 540 wins and 540 losses. Apply a little first-year algebra and you can discover that people are spending a decent chunk of change on this game. And for what? The chances of winning or losing are so even, like craps, which has a 51% chance of “winning” a roll, though Tekken 6 doesn’t give you money when you win. Rather, your only incentive for blasting forward in this jungle of shiny filth is the rare chance to win a “prize” at the end of a match. Insert your card — and a hundred yen — into a standalone machine, and you can configure your character to look like a complete jackass.
Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution championed the winnable items feature, only it was sure to make each winnable item somewhat stylish. Glancing at Tekken 6 monitors, you can almost imagine the PowerPoint presentation that set this disaster into motion. I have a serious hunch that some liver-spotted gray-skinned old joy-hating, coal-tar-stuffting cocklord actually used the words “Quantity over Quality”: last night, I saw Jin Kazama, the “main character” of the series (I think), dressed in black overalls, army boots, aviator sunglasses, a rainbow-colored clown wig, a giant broad straw farmer’s hat, and . . . a duffel bag full of rakes and hoes on his back. What the heck? Did they pass a memo around the office, asking everyone to think of ideas for winnable items, and some guy wrote, “My wife’s sister likes gardening, so how about a bag of rakes and hoes?” The boss snapped his fingers and said “Promotion!” And the guy said, “Really?” And the boss said “Hell no!” And then they put the rakes and hoes in there anyway. Because why not? They’ve got a quota to fill.
Whether the winnable items are tacky because they’re tacky or tacky because they disrupt the otherwise rigorously established aesthetic flow of the character designs is a tough call to make; luckily, I only missed one question on my California State DMV written test (“Which of the following is not a penalty for fleeing when requested to stop by a highway patrol officer?”), so I must at least not be mentally &^#$#ed. I’ll take a stab: everything about this game is hideous, from the sawmill drum machine and overdriven guitar soundtrack (I say this as someone who can tell when such music is good) right down to the convoluted labyrinth of a “story”.
Who knows what the hell is happening in the way of a “plot” in the Tekken series. It’s perhaps the only videogame that Uwe Boll could make better with a film adaptation. There’s an old guy with Batman-like hair, named Heihachi, who is supposedly evil, Japanese, and a billionaire. He may or may not be an artist’s rendition of the overlapped resume photographs of all the executive members of Namco. He has a son, and apparently he was also married, at some point, to a girl like forty years younger than him. Apparently, there’s something like a thirty-year time lapse between Tekken 2 and Tekken 3, during which the younger girl gets a little older, her son by the evil man is born and grows into the Main Character from a Japanese Fighting Game, and the Chinese man who looks like Fei Long — the Chinese man from Super Street Fighter II who looks like Bruce Lee — now has a son, who resembles his father down to the polygon, which is to say he still looks exactly like the guy from Super Street Fighter II who looks like Bruce Lee. Of course, the father is still playable — he just has gray hair now. The son is, of course, like the father, with a tweaked move set. I remember his CG ending — the CG endings were the selling-point of the PlayStation ports — in Tekken 3, where he’s practicing somersault kicks with his dad while the fat and muscular grotesquely bearded guy in a karate gi with a two-foot high flat-top and ridiculous sideburns stands by and guffaws for some reason. Tekken 4 was declared an abysmal failure even by Tekken fans, so I’m not even going to look it up on Wikipedia; my only experience with the game involved walk into a friend’s house for five minutes and realizing that the hideous guy with the &^#$#ed flat top is still in it. Tekken 5 opens with a computer-animated cut-scene that begins with white text on a black screen declaring “HEIHACHI MISHIMA IS DEAD“, though of course if you play the game enough it’s all like “JK DUDE LOL”, and then it’s like “HEIHACHI MISHIMA IS BACK“.
This is vintage Namco, the company who introduced a nice fighting game called Soul Edge to the world, changed the last word of the title and retooled it spectacularly for a sequel, which would tactically lack any of the emphasis on actual characters and story; when SoulCalibur was more popular than Soul Edge (called Soul Blade in America, because that sounds far more violent), they decided to call the next sequel SoulCalibur II. In Soul Calibur II, one of the “plot” lines concerns the death of the Greek Girl Character named Sophitia. Her sister Cassandra sets out to avenge her sister, though of course, since there are people who like Sophitia (the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets fail to conclude that Sophitia’s presence was not the reason Soul Calibur sold in the first place), they can’t just not put her into Soul Calibur II, so if you play enough — hey! There she is!
Also in Soul Calibur II, out of raw hope that someone, somewhere would buy all three console ports, Namco wedged in characters befitting of each of the available console’s personalities. the Xbox version got a Todd McFarlane approved Spawn; the Nintendo Gamecube version got a fetishistically modeled Link from The Legend of Zelda; The PlayStation 2 got Heihachi from Tekken, which was such a cop-out. In putting Spawn and Link into Soul Calibur II, Namco were announcing that they admired these characters and wanted to treat fans; in putting Heihachi into the PlayStation 2 port, they were basically saying that, yeah, we guess Tekken Tag Tournament was available for purchase at the launch of the PlayStation 2. Why not just put a Ridge Racer car in there as a playable character?
Witness another of the many faces of Namco: the conniving hacks who strive — real hard — to have a Ridge Racer game available on every game console on earth on the day of its launch, because so many people need to buy something.
With the straight-to-console Soul Calibur 3, Namco didn’t bother shoehorning in licensed characters. Instead, they put in a thoughtful character-creation mode, which ultimately didn’t quite deliver. Now SoulCalibur IV is on the horizon, and it stars hecking Darth Vader on the PlayStation 3 and Yoda on the Xbox 360. I’m not even going to try to say anything negative about that. (In fact, I’ll even say that I kinda want to play as Darth Vader, a little bit. Because, you know, what the hell.) With SoulCalibur II, they put Link, Spawn, and Heihachi on their respective console versions’ boxes. That didn’t seem like too much of a stretcher — I’m being very gentle here — though if they put Darth Vader or Yoda on the box of SoulCalibur IV, that’s pretty much the death knell. Even if Square- Enix announced a Lego Batman world for Kingdom Hearts III it wouldn’t be as despicable as Namco putting Yoda or Darth Vader on the box. Square-Enix — no, Square (let’s leave Enix out of this) — are lovable, pathos-dripping hacks. Namco are just palm-rubbing, lip-licking conniving hacks, standing out in front of the bar at two in the morning with a stack of fresh-from-Kinkos business cards in their inner jacket pocket, waiting for whatever girls are going to stumble out alone and drunk.
What, you really want to hear more about Tekken 6? What the heck is wrong with you?
What’s new in Tekken 6, you ask? Well, new characters, of course! Now, in addition to playing as a hideous man with sideburns and a flat top, a now-fully-restored and alive again Heihachi, and a Chinese guy who looks like Bruce Lee, you can also play as a disgusting, obese police officer man with a scraggly yellow beard, as though being overweight and in need of a shave wasn’t something many gamers should want to escape. Having said that, I suppose that a fat, bearded police officer is, probably, at least escapism for a quadriplegic. The two other new characters include a boyish girl (or girlish boy) with Final Fantasy-like hair and ornamental clothes. At a glance, s/he looks like a blond version of Eileen, a new character introduced in Virtua Fighter 5. The other new character is a Spanish bullfighter, and that’s where I blow the whistle: the other new character in Virtua Fighter 5 was a Mexican wrestler. That’s too much of a coincidence to pass up; besides, I know for a fact that many Japanese people don’t know the difference between a Mexican person and a Spanish person, and that most Japanese people are under the impression that anyone with a last name that ends in “Z” is probably either a bullfighter or a Mexican wrestler.
Other “fan favorites” return: characters that started as in-jokes, like the kangaroo, the grizzly bears, the panda bear, and a giant professional wrestler with a microscopic tiger head on his shoulders — continues into the present day for no fathomable reason other than “we own these characters, so we’re going to keep using them.”
In the interest of not being entirely negative, I’ll say that I’ve seen Tekken 5 and Tekken 6 running on adjacent cabinets (some players still “prefer” Tekken 5, I have surmised), and Tekken 6 definitely has better graphics. It’s more than marginal. The high-definition resolution does wonders. The bloom lighting is everywhere, and everything glows with a vaguely delicious plastic sheen.
Though you know what? It only ends up making the game look worse. Traipse through to the end of the single-player campaign and you’ll experience the latest in the Tekken series’ line of carnival-ride-like “Big Target” Brand final bosses. Tekken 5‘s towering Final Beast(), shiny like pleather, an Egyptian tomb-god, wields what I think is a weapon-like tail. Hit him with an upward kick, and he spins in the air, end over end, somersaulting no less than twelve times before hitting the ground. Watching this sixteen-foot-tall character spin so helplessly, and at such mach speed, is vaguely like watching a &^#$# slowly lick layers of paint off the Mona Lisa.
In the interest of internet science, which I know full well is mostly made up, I plunged forward and played a match against a guy engaged in a pachinko-like battle against the final boss. I timed my press of the start button with the first frame of animation of what would have been the boss’s final deathblow. I imagine the guy on the other side of the cabinet, smoking like it was going out of style, had the most non-plussed expression on his face. He was playing with a card, a win/loss record of roughly 400/400, and as the flat-topped bastard; I picked theblond girl-like person and proceeded to destroy him in three straight rounds, by utilizing the sparse rhythm I learned from months of trying to play the drums, basic knowledge of How to Not Lose in Virtua Fighter 5, and the exact same sliding-step-forward-straight-punch move spammed over and over again whenever I saw an opening. It could be that I’m as genius a fighting game strategist as Kurt Cobain was a guitarist, though I’m pretty sure it mostly has to do with Tekken just being a stuffty game. Or maybe the guy just wanted to lose.
If you’ve spent three minutes looking at a Tekken game, you’ve no doubt seen it: a character takes a quick step forward, delivering a jab. A big, pixely orange burst pops forth at the point of impact, and the hit character’s body jerks forward, goes limp like a ragdoll, and then, in the space of a single frame of animation, pops completely horizontal, one leg raised slightly above the other, parallel to the ground, and hovering at his opponent’s waist-level. Then, utilizing the sense of rhythm that he might have learned from banging a pot before being punished by his mother twenty years prior, the player with the upper hand taps forward and punches again; the impact — with the horizontal man’s kneecap, roughly — snaps the horizontal character back into a vertical position, wherein his body jerks forward, goes limp, and then pops horizontal again. The player doing the punching repeats this vertical-horizontal-vertial popping process as many times as he can, until eventually the character’s horizontal body slams into the ground with a sound like a thousand bombs blowing up nine hundred and ninety-nine airports.
Then there’s The Issue. This is something that bothered me about Tekken 5 as well, though now, with the graphical upgrades in Tekken 6, I just can’t let it slide: the ground shatters whenever a character falls on his or her back. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with sand, or snow, or marble: the ground will shatter. I have a scientific calculator right here (not really), and I can tell you that in order for a person to shatter marble with his or her back after falling over from a single punch to the chest, they’d need to be greater than or equal to nine hundred feet in height and moving no less than seven thousand miles per hour. The floor shatters, the fragments scatter into the air; if you aren’t blinking by now, you’ll notice as the fallen character bounces like a rubber ball that the part of the floor that had just shattered is still in pristine condition; the fragments finally fall, and then fade away.
To think, some people who don’t even think to shrug this off are complaining en masse about the crazy facial expressions in Street Fighter IV. For stuff’s sake, people — have you ever seen someone get punched in the stomach in real life? They usually don’t look too nonchalant about it! Street Fighter IV is carrying the torch forward from Street Fighter II, in which men (accurately) vomited on themselves when slam-kicked in the testicles. To not portray people in pain when they’re hit in a videogame is irresponsible; the shattering floors in Tekken are even worse.
With all the HDR lighting and high-definition textures on the floor surfaces, you’d figure that the development team would have made “cut this stuff out” a red-texted entry on their Action Item List. Think again! This is what they did in Tekken 5, so how dare anyone suggest they take it out of Tekken 6! The man who originally spoke that idea during a Tekken 5 planning meeting, during which “special move ideas” like “vomit into other character’s mouth” were written in careful, fine font on a dry erase board, though he was first reprimanded by the boss for not directly contributing to the “special move idea” discussion, now drives an actual mid-size car that cost between $12,000 and $16,000, which is a huge step up from the train he was riding to work every day before that. We must respect this working-class protagonist’s every day dream: the magic shatter-floors must return. Now we only have to wonder, if someone brings up the idea to put Indiana Jones in Tekken 7, will Namco executives buy him a box of gourmet chocolate-covered potato chips, or will they sue him for infringing on the SoulCalibur team’s ideas?
I’m not going to lie to you: I hate Tekken. I kind of hate Soul Calibur, too, though for purely different reasons. See, I hate Soul Calibur because I used to like it. With Soul Calibur III, in an attempt to appeal to people who yawned at Soul Calibur II, in an attempt to chase the dream that would see all people on earth, even people who spend $200 a month on hair-care products, playing SoulCalibur, they did hatefully uncool things to the character designs. My favorite character, Yunsung, as of Soul Calibur III, was dressed in what looked like a Halloween costume, with fluorescent green Adidas-looking shoes. It was around that point that I realized I didn’t like the series at all, that the only thing connecting me to it was that I had a few friends who were better at it than they were at Street Fighter III, which meant I got to play it and relax with people I knew pretty well. I loved the original — Soul Edge — because it was on PlayStation and it felt adventurous, with the instruction manual describing all the main characters’ heights as being around 5’5″ because, hey, that was huge back in the 16th century. Now they’ve grown up, and it’s all big hair and Limit Breaks. If I’m going to play these games alone — or, better yet, with someone I don’t know — I’m going to need to feel some human connection to the context, going in. Why not push the SoulCalibur team onto a Final Fantasy fighting game? Replace all the bland characters with their embarrassingly inflating football-shaped breasts and undercleavage with recognizable Final Fantasy characters, locations, and gloriously remixed music. The reason they don’t do this is simple; Keita Takahashi once told someone, who then told me, Namco refused to believe that he might have another game idea as good as Katamari Damacy, because “at Namco, the Tekken team makes Tekken, the Ridge Racer team makes Ridge Racer, the Ace Combat team makes Ace Combat.” Furthermore, though a Final Fantasy fighting game with a SoulCalibur engine is a definite money-printing license, Namco wouldn’t bother because they’d have to share that money with Square. Square wouldn’t bother because they’re already outsourcing a Final Fantasy fighting game, for PSP, even, and the conditions of their contract allow them to pretend that they made it themselves. In short, quality or creativity don’t matter to these people. And neither does money. It’s all about pride, about putting out your own thing and seeing how many numbers it can rack up, how long it stays there until the police or the sanitation workers haul it away.
And there sits Tekken 6, every day all of an eternity; the bear trap on the way home from work, pachinko for the men of the world who know gambling is wrong. Maybe the win/loss records are so even because literally half the time any given player just doesn’t want to win anymore. CONTINUE magazine, in their February, 2008 issue, named Tekken 6 as one of the worst games of 2007, right up there with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Namco’s The Idolm@ster. They derided The Idolm@ster for turning normal people into posers; they insinuate that no one who plays it actually wants to play it. These people who put down the money aren’t even convinced that anyone else considers the game worthwhile. Namco is simply riding the wave of “otaku”-awareness, and the players of disreputable bullstuff like The Idolm@ster merely seek to be “part of” something, even if it’s being part of some corporation’s attempt to cash in on loser-chic. The players laugh — in public, and on the internet — about how it might actually be funny to be pretending to like something, though eventually they fall into their own trap and actually start wondering if they might actually like it. This is how multiple personality disorders are born; Tekken is pretty much the same thing, only it’s about muscular dudes (and grizzly bears and pandas and kangaroos and dinosaurs) and grating stuff-rock instead of gyrating flat-chested little girls with wide-open, unblinking, face-sized eyes and terrifying pop numbers. Men plunk down money fatalistically, winning sometimes, losing sometimes, and when they walk away, they never look happy. And there’s me, waiting for the light outside to turn green, thinking about cooking dinner.
–tim rogers
( if you make this your band name, please credit me in your liner notes)
(* too-late disclaimer: if you already like tekken and claim to have some skill at it, that’s okay! no need to yell at me. i have so much respect for you; i’m not even kidding.)
⋆☆☆☆
“ESCAPISM FOR QUADRIPLEGICS.”
I’m not going to lie to you: I haven’t actually played this game more than five minutes. I have, however, stopped at the arcade once every night for the past few months and ended up staring — for just a few moments — at fully-grown men with illustrious cigarette habits and mortal reasons for staring at this game until their wives are deep in dreamless sleep. The arcade of which I speak is a Namco-owned joint three seconds walking distance from the exit of the Seiyu supermarket in Ogikubo where I stop every night to buy okra and orange paprikas with which to cook life-fulfilling vegan fried rice. (That food reference there is for the kids. Every good game review should have one!) I enter this arcade for the same reason I enter the flower shop in the basement of Ogikubo Station: because the winter in Tokyo is a cold bitch ballroom dancing with a cold bastard. The company where I work is amazingly located on the top floor of the same building as a Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line subway station; I take the elevator downstairs, walk onto the train with expert timing, and then get off not five minutes later in the deep underground of Ogikubo, the town where I proudly live. While many grown men dash up the escalator and eagerly into the freezing cold, I enter the Aoyama Flower Shop, which opens into the food basement of a Lumine department store; I track past the bagel shop and the rice shop and the custom-made tofu shop, through the international grocery (where I sometimes buy red onions), and through a winding passageway into the basement of the Town Seven building. I hold my breath as I walk past a fish market, glare at the amazingly good-looking girl who for some reason nonchalantly shouts “Good morning” or “Good evening” to passersby of a tangerine stand literally from the minute I leave for work on the morning to literally the minute I show up in the evening with my iPod headphones blasting math rock into my ears. Past the vegetble market, I slip through a passage into the Seiyu basement, grab a paprika and a mesh bag of okra, and then hop on the escalator upstairs. If I need eggs, or skim milk, I buy one of these things. If I’m out of brown rice, I buy some of that, too. Eventually, I’m at the register. I pay the money and head for the automatic doors, bracing myself for the blast of cold. The doors veen open, and there I am, outside, in the future. The year 2008. The second year in history the name of which has sounded like The Future. Not three seconds’ walking distance from the Seiyu door is the automatic door of abovementioned arcade. I plunge in, plastic grocery bags in hand. There I am, in a Japanese arcade. And there they are — the arcade denizens, the life-living human beings whose transit every night brings them here.
Make no bones about it: I enter this arcade every night because it is large, heated, and has two exits. The rear exit is close to the Seiyu supermarket exit; the front exit stands at the precipice of a crosswalk. I linger by that entrance — thankfully, a push-button-operated auto door, for maximum heating efficiency — until the light turns green; I sprint out the door, across the street, and down the famed Ogikubo Church Avenue shopping street, past the Seventh Day Adventist church and the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital, and right into my apartment door. Much as I like living next door to a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in theory, it’s kind of useless if I actually get sick; they’d probably shrug and deny me treatment for one of my frequent ear infections because “Jesus is coming to claim our souls next week, anyway”.
While standing by the arcade door, I often catch reflections of Tekken 6 in the glass. Sometimes, I groan so much I fog the glass up, and then I can’t see Tekken 6 anymore, until I write “PENIS” in the fog and then I can see Tekken 6 again, inside the letters.
The point of all the writing in this piece, up until now (and it pains me to have to spell this out), is that I can cover four city blocks of distance by navigating commercialism-packed underground tunnels, and that the ten minutes I spend in the grocery store picking vegetables and waiting in line make me long for home; if only the men who got snared by the Namco arcade in Ogikubo, too, had spent ten minutes in the grocery store, they’d probably not consider it such a good idea to sit down and play Tekken 6. They’d probably get home sooner, maybe before eight PM. If they spend just ten minutes playing Tekken 6, that can interrupt their schedule to the point that it’s later than eight PM, so that they don’t feel like cooking when they get home. They’ll instead settle for some nasty cup ramen at a convenient store, and be unable to shave the next morning because of the pimples that popped up on their chin while they slept. They’ll go in to the office the next morning looking like an oily, vinegar-blooded scruff, and their chances of sexxing the secretary will further approach the floor.
NOW I’M GOING TO ACTUALLY REVIEW TEKKEN 6
Nope, just kidding! If you came to this website because you really want to read an IGN-style “fair” “review” of Tekken 6, I’d prefer it if you went somewhere else!
Tekken 6 is a blow job from a bear trap. Arcades “survived” in Japan for the most arbitrary of reasons — that they’re placed on top real-estate close to train stations; arcades “died” in America because you have to drive out of your way to go there. FPSes are popular in America because people craving person-on-person competition can get some action from the comfort of their own home (in other words, without having to drive thirty-minutes out of their way to an arcade); FPSes are not popular in Japan because anyone craving person-on-person gaming competition can get some from an arcade three minutes’ walk from their local grocery store. While there surely exist established games that Japanese arcade gamers will go out of their way to experience at a particular arcade (Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, for example), something like Tekken 6 is a conniving trap built by a conniving hack developer.
The idea to review Tekken 6 first came to me last night, as I waited in front of the glass at the Namco arcade in Ogikubo. Somehow, the glass wouldn’t fog up (might spring be coming?), so I gravitated toward the gorgeous LCD cabinets, commonplace since the rolling-out of Virtua Fighter 5 in 2006. At the arcade in Ogikubo, they’ve got two sets of eight machines, set up in two islands of four back-to-back pairs. As with any just about any fighting game in existence at the moment, you can purchase a member card to save your profile. It saves your win / loss record and whatever frighteningly gaudy costume items (clown wigs, gardening hats, novelty sunglasses) you’ve won and slapped onto your character.
The inherent problem with the card system is that all you have to do is glance at the corners of the screen on multiple machines for about five scientist-like minutes to realize how shattered this game is with regard to execution. I remember back when Tekken 3 was new — and for PlayStation! — and people dared to complain that Eddie Gordo was a “button-mashing character”, and that “anyone could win” with him. No one seemed to know that he was, indeed, the future of the series. Yeah — back then, the series that would become SoulCalibur was a history-based, slow-paced fighting game with excellent experimental music. Now we have Tekken 6, where the win/loss ratios in the corner of every machine I’ve encountered in the past twenty-four hours display the most frightening statistical anomaly: namely, that every player is roughly winning 50% of the time and losing 50% of the time. I would have tried to take pictures of the screens if Japanese arcade employees weren’t such nazis — the last time I even tried to write an email on my cellular phone in a Japanese arcade, I got my arm grabbed by a guy who yelled “NO FOTO!” so many times that the guy at the front desk started yelling it, too, making a big “X” with his hands.
If you ask me, they probably shouldn’t display the win/loss records at all times on the screen for Tekken 6. They should probably display the records at the beginning and end of the match only. In addition to making the game look sloppy, it also reveals to any passersby (especially girls) how much money each player has spent on the game. I swear, there are guys at the local arcade with something like 540 wins and 540 losses. Apply a little first-year algebra and you can discover that people are spending a decent chunk of change on this game. And for what? The chances of winning or losing are so even, like craps, which has a 51% chance of “winning” a roll, though Tekken 6 doesn’t give you money when you win. Rather, your only incentive for blasting forward in this jungle of shiny filth is the rare chance to win a “prize” at the end of a match. Insert your card — and a hundred yen — into a standalone machine, and you can configure your character to look like a complete jackass.
Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution championed the winnable items feature, only it was sure to make each winnable item somewhat stylish. Glancing at Tekken 6 monitors, you can almost imagine the PowerPoint presentation that set this disaster into motion. I have a serious hunch that some liver-spotted gray-skinned old joy-hating, coal-tar-stuffting cocklord actually used the words “Quantity over Quality”: last night, I saw Jin Kazama, the “main character” of the series (I think), dressed in black overalls, army boots, aviator sunglasses, a rainbow-colored clown wig, a giant broad straw farmer’s hat, and . . . a duffel bag full of rakes and hoes on his back. What the heck? Did they pass a memo around the office, asking everyone to think of ideas for winnable items, and some guy wrote, “My wife’s sister likes gardening, so how about a bag of rakes and hoes?” The boss snapped his fingers and said “Promotion!” And the guy said, “Really?” And the boss said “Hell no!” And then they put the rakes and hoes in there anyway. Because why not? They’ve got a quota to fill.
Whether the winnable items are tacky because they’re tacky or tacky because they disrupt the otherwise rigorously established aesthetic flow of the character designs is a tough call to make; luckily, I only missed one question on my California State DMV written test (“Which of the following is not a penalty for fleeing when requested to stop by a highway patrol officer?”), so I must at least not be mentally &^#$#ed. I’ll take a stab: everything about this game is hideous, from the sawmill drum machine and overdriven guitar soundtrack (I say this as someone who can tell when such music is good) right down to the convoluted labyrinth of a “story”.
Who knows what the hell is happening in the way of a “plot” in the Tekken series. It’s perhaps the only videogame that Uwe Boll could make better with a film adaptation. There’s an old guy with Batman-like hair, named Heihachi, who is supposedly evil, Japanese, and a billionaire. He may or may not be an artist’s rendition of the overlapped resume photographs of all the executive members of Namco. He has a son, and apparently he was also married, at some point, to a girl like forty years younger than him. Apparently, there’s something like a thirty-year time lapse between Tekken 2 and Tekken 3, during which the younger girl gets a little older, her son by the evil man is born and grows into the Main Character from a Japanese Fighting Game, and the Chinese man who looks like Fei Long — the Chinese man from Super Street Fighter II who looks like Bruce Lee — now has a son, who resembles his father down to the polygon, which is to say he still looks exactly like the guy from Super Street Fighter II who looks like Bruce Lee. Of course, the father is still playable — he just has gray hair now. The son is, of course, like the father, with a tweaked move set. I remember his CG ending — the CG endings were the selling-point of the PlayStation ports — in Tekken 3, where he’s practicing somersault kicks with his dad while the fat and muscular grotesquely bearded guy in a karate gi with a two-foot high flat-top and ridiculous sideburns stands by and guffaws for some reason. Tekken 4 was declared an abysmal failure even by Tekken fans, so I’m not even going to look it up on Wikipedia; my only experience with the game involved walk into a friend’s house for five minutes and realizing that the hideous guy with the &^#$#ed flat top is still in it. Tekken 5 opens with a computer-animated cut-scene that begins with white text on a black screen declaring “HEIHACHI MISHIMA IS DEAD“, though of course if you play the game enough it’s all like “JK DUDE LOL”, and then it’s like “HEIHACHI MISHIMA IS BACK“.
This is vintage Namco, the company who introduced a nice fighting game called Soul Edge to the world, changed the last word of the title and retooled it spectacularly for a sequel, which would tactically lack any of the emphasis on actual characters and story; when SoulCalibur was more popular than Soul Edge (called Soul Blade in America, because that sounds far more violent), they decided to call the next sequel SoulCalibur II. In Soul Calibur II, one of the “plot” lines concerns the death of the Greek Girl Character named Sophitia. Her sister Cassandra sets out to avenge her sister, though of course, since there are people who like Sophitia (the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets fail to conclude that Sophitia’s presence was not the reason Soul Calibur sold in the first place), they can’t just not put her into Soul Calibur II, so if you play enough — hey! There she is!
Also in Soul Calibur II, out of raw hope that someone, somewhere would buy all three console ports, Namco wedged in characters befitting of each of the available console’s personalities. the Xbox version got a Todd McFarlane approved Spawn; the Nintendo Gamecube version got a fetishistically modeled Link from The Legend of Zelda; The PlayStation 2 got Heihachi from Tekken, which was such a cop-out. In putting Spawn and Link into Soul Calibur II, Namco were announcing that they admired these characters and wanted to treat fans; in putting Heihachi into the PlayStation 2 port, they were basically saying that, yeah, we guess Tekken Tag Tournament was available for purchase at the launch of the PlayStation 2. Why not just put a Ridge Racer car in there as a playable character?
Witness another of the many faces of Namco: the conniving hacks who strive — real hard — to have a Ridge Racer game available on every game console on earth on the day of its launch, because so many people need to buy something.
With the straight-to-console Soul Calibur 3, Namco didn’t bother shoehorning in licensed characters. Instead, they put in a thoughtful character-creation mode, which ultimately didn’t quite deliver. Now SoulCalibur IV is on the horizon, and it stars hecking Darth Vader on the PlayStation 3 and Yoda on the Xbox 360. I’m not even going to try to say anything negative about that. (In fact, I’ll even say that I kinda want to play as Darth Vader, a little bit. Because, you know, what the hell.) With SoulCalibur II, they put Link, Spawn, and Heihachi on their respective console versions’ boxes. That didn’t seem like too much of a stretcher — I’m being very gentle here — though if they put Darth Vader or Yoda on the box of SoulCalibur IV, that’s pretty much the death knell. Even if Square- Enix announced a Lego Batman world for Kingdom Hearts III it wouldn’t be as despicable as Namco putting Yoda or Darth Vader on the box. Square-Enix — no, Square (let’s leave Enix out of this) — are lovable, pathos-dripping hacks. Namco are just palm-rubbing, lip-licking conniving hacks, standing out in front of the bar at two in the morning with a stack of fresh-from-Kinkos business cards in their inner jacket pocket, waiting for whatever girls are going to stumble out alone and drunk.
What, you really want to hear more about Tekken 6? What the heck is wrong with you?
What’s new in Tekken 6, you ask? Well, new characters, of course! Now, in addition to playing as a hideous man with sideburns and a flat top, a now-fully-restored and alive again Heihachi, and a Chinese guy who looks like Bruce Lee, you can also play as a disgusting, obese police officer man with a scraggly yellow beard, as though being overweight and in need of a shave wasn’t something many gamers should want to escape. Having said that, I suppose that a fat, bearded police officer is, probably, at least escapism for a quadriplegic. The two other new characters include a boyish girl (or girlish boy) with Final Fantasy-like hair and ornamental clothes. At a glance, s/he looks like a blond version of Eileen, a new character introduced in Virtua Fighter 5. The other new character is a Spanish bullfighter, and that’s where I blow the whistle: the other new character in Virtua Fighter 5 was a Mexican wrestler. That’s too much of a coincidence to pass up; besides, I know for a fact that many Japanese people don’t know the difference between a Mexican person and a Spanish person, and that most Japanese people are under the impression that anyone with a last name that ends in “Z” is probably either a bullfighter or a Mexican wrestler.
Other “fan favorites” return: characters that started as in-jokes, like the kangaroo, the grizzly bears, the panda bear, and a giant professional wrestler with a microscopic tiger head on his shoulders — continues into the present day for no fathomable reason other than “we own these characters, so we’re going to keep using them.”
In the interest of not being entirely negative, I’ll say that I’ve seen Tekken 5 and Tekken 6 running on adjacent cabinets (some players still “prefer” Tekken 5, I have surmised), and Tekken 6 definitely has better graphics. It’s more than marginal. The high-definition resolution does wonders. The bloom lighting is everywhere, and everything glows with a vaguely delicious plastic sheen.
Though you know what? It only ends up making the game look worse. Traipse through to the end of the single-player campaign and you’ll experience the latest in the Tekken series’ line of carnival-ride-like “Big Target” Brand final bosses. Tekken 5‘s towering Final Beast(), shiny like pleather, an Egyptian tomb-god, wields what I think is a weapon-like tail. Hit him with an upward kick, and he spins in the air, end over end, somersaulting no less than twelve times before hitting the ground. Watching this sixteen-foot-tall character spin so helplessly, and at such mach speed, is vaguely like watching a &^#$# slowly lick layers of paint off the Mona Lisa.
In the interest of internet science, which I know full well is mostly made up, I plunged forward and played a match against a guy engaged in a pachinko-like battle against the final boss. I timed my press of the start button with the first frame of animation of what would have been the boss’s final deathblow. I imagine the guy on the other side of the cabinet, smoking like it was going out of style, had the most non-plussed expression on his face. He was playing with a card, a win/loss record of roughly 400/400, and as the flat-topped bastard; I picked theblond girl-like person and proceeded to destroy him in three straight rounds, by utilizing the sparse rhythm I learned from months of trying to play the drums, basic knowledge of How to Not Lose in Virtua Fighter 5, and the exact same sliding-step-forward-straight-punch move spammed over and over again whenever I saw an opening. It could be that I’m as genius a fighting game strategist as Kurt Cobain was a guitarist, though I’m pretty sure it mostly has to do with Tekken just being a stuffty game. Or maybe the guy just wanted to lose.
If you’ve spent three minutes looking at a Tekken game, you’ve no doubt seen it: a character takes a quick step forward, delivering a jab. A big, pixely orange burst pops forth at the point of impact, and the hit character’s body jerks forward, goes limp like a ragdoll, and then, in the space of a single frame of animation, pops completely horizontal, one leg raised slightly above the other, parallel to the ground, and hovering at his opponent’s waist-level. Then, utilizing the sense of rhythm that he might have learned from banging a pot before being punished by his mother twenty years prior, the player with the upper hand taps forward and punches again; the impact — with the horizontal man’s kneecap, roughly — snaps the horizontal character back into a vertical position, wherein his body jerks forward, goes limp, and then pops horizontal again. The player doing the punching repeats this vertical-horizontal-vertial popping process as many times as he can, until eventually the character’s horizontal body slams into the ground with a sound like a thousand bombs blowing up nine hundred and ninety-nine airports.
Then there’s The Issue. This is something that bothered me about Tekken 5 as well, though now, with the graphical upgrades in Tekken 6, I just can’t let it slide: the ground shatters whenever a character falls on his or her back. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with sand, or snow, or marble: the ground will shatter. I have a scientific calculator right here (not really), and I can tell you that in order for a person to shatter marble with his or her back after falling over from a single punch to the chest, they’d need to be greater than or equal to nine hundred feet in height and moving no less than seven thousand miles per hour. The floor shatters, the fragments scatter into the air; if you aren’t blinking by now, you’ll notice as the fallen character bounces like a rubber ball that the part of the floor that had just shattered is still in pristine condition; the fragments finally fall, and then fade away.
To think, some people who don’t even think to shrug this off are complaining en masse about the crazy facial expressions in Street Fighter IV. For stuff’s sake, people — have you ever seen someone get punched in the stomach in real life? They usually don’t look too nonchalant about it! Street Fighter IV is carrying the torch forward from Street Fighter II, in which men (accurately) vomited on themselves when slam-kicked in the testicles. To not portray people in pain when they’re hit in a videogame is irresponsible; the shattering floors in Tekken are even worse.
With all the HDR lighting and high-definition textures on the floor surfaces, you’d figure that the development team would have made “cut this stuff out” a red-texted entry on their Action Item List. Think again! This is what they did in Tekken 5, so how dare anyone suggest they take it out of Tekken 6! The man who originally spoke that idea during a Tekken 5 planning meeting, during which “special move ideas” like “vomit into other character’s mouth” were written in careful, fine font on a dry erase board, though he was first reprimanded by the boss for not directly contributing to the “special move idea” discussion, now drives an actual mid-size car that cost between $12,000 and $16,000, which is a huge step up from the train he was riding to work every day before that. We must respect this working-class protagonist’s every day dream: the magic shatter-floors must return. Now we only have to wonder, if someone brings up the idea to put Indiana Jones in Tekken 7, will Namco executives buy him a box of gourmet chocolate-covered potato chips, or will they sue him for infringing on the SoulCalibur team’s ideas?
I’m not going to lie to you: I hate Tekken. I kind of hate Soul Calibur, too, though for purely different reasons. See, I hate Soul Calibur because I used to like it. With Soul Calibur III, in an attempt to appeal to people who yawned at Soul Calibur II, in an attempt to chase the dream that would see all people on earth, even people who spend $200 a month on hair-care products, playing SoulCalibur, they did hatefully uncool things to the character designs. My favorite character, Yunsung, as of Soul Calibur III, was dressed in what looked like a Halloween costume, with fluorescent green Adidas-looking shoes. It was around that point that I realized I didn’t like the series at all, that the only thing connecting me to it was that I had a few friends who were better at it than they were at Street Fighter III, which meant I got to play it and relax with people I knew pretty well. I loved the original — Soul Edge — because it was on PlayStation and it felt adventurous, with the instruction manual describing all the main characters’ heights as being around 5’5″ because, hey, that was huge back in the 16th century. Now they’ve grown up, and it’s all big hair and Limit Breaks. If I’m going to play these games alone — or, better yet, with someone I don’t know — I’m going to need to feel some human connection to the context, going in. Why not push the SoulCalibur team onto a Final Fantasy fighting game? Replace all the bland characters with their embarrassingly inflating football-shaped breasts and undercleavage with recognizable Final Fantasy characters, locations, and gloriously remixed music. The reason they don’t do this is simple; Keita Takahashi once told someone, who then told me, Namco refused to believe that he might have another game idea as good as Katamari Damacy, because “at Namco, the Tekken team makes Tekken, the Ridge Racer team makes Ridge Racer, the Ace Combat team makes Ace Combat.” Furthermore, though a Final Fantasy fighting game with a SoulCalibur engine is a definite money-printing license, Namco wouldn’t bother because they’d have to share that money with Square. Square wouldn’t bother because they’re already outsourcing a Final Fantasy fighting game, for PSP, even, and the conditions of their contract allow them to pretend that they made it themselves. In short, quality or creativity don’t matter to these people. And neither does money. It’s all about pride, about putting out your own thing and seeing how many numbers it can rack up, how long it stays there until the police or the sanitation workers haul it away.
And there sits Tekken 6, every day all of an eternity; the bear trap on the way home from work, pachinko for the men of the world who know gambling is wrong. Maybe the win/loss records are so even because literally half the time any given player just doesn’t want to win anymore. CONTINUE magazine, in their February, 2008 issue, named Tekken 6 as one of the worst games of 2007, right up there with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Namco’s The Idolm@ster. They derided The Idolm@ster for turning normal people into posers; they insinuate that no one who plays it actually wants to play it. These people who put down the money aren’t even convinced that anyone else considers the game worthwhile. Namco is simply riding the wave of “otaku”-awareness, and the players of disreputable bullstuff like The Idolm@ster merely seek to be “part of” something, even if it’s being part of some corporation’s attempt to cash in on loser-chic. The players laugh — in public, and on the internet — about how it might actually be funny to be pretending to like something, though eventually they fall into their own trap and actually start wondering if they might actually like it. This is how multiple personality disorders are born; Tekken is pretty much the same thing, only it’s about muscular dudes (and grizzly bears and pandas and kangaroos and dinosaurs) and grating stuff-rock instead of gyrating flat-chested little girls with wide-open, unblinking, face-sized eyes and terrifying pop numbers. Men plunk down money fatalistically, winning sometimes, losing sometimes, and when they walk away, they never look happy. And there’s me, waiting for the light outside to turn green, thinking about cooking dinner.
–tim rogers
( if you make this your band name, please credit me in your liner notes)
(* too-late disclaimer: if you already like tekken and claim to have some skill at it, that’s okay! no need to yell at me. i have so much respect for you; i’m not even kidding.)
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE BEST GAME OF ALL-TIME.”
So this is it. This is the big Nintendo Wii game. What’s even coming out for the Nintendo Wii after this? Who gives a stuff! What more could you possibly need? Super Mario versus Solid Snake FTW!
At any rate, here’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the biggest little dollop of gruel yet slopped on the lunch tray of gamerkind. The Japanese title is “Smash Brothers X“, which sounds so much cleaner. “Clean” is the biggest compliment-word this game should ever be awarded, and I don’t precisely mean that as an insult: it is undistilled, pure, gelatinous videogame essence, sat on a table to wobble until eternity. It’s the third game in a series that, in the interest of politeness, we’ll say “has two other games”. Both of those games were popular; this game (sequel #2) takes the “more of the same” model plopped out by the last game (sequel #1) to a new extreme, stuffing it full of more playable characters, more collectible items, more gameplay modes, and more Kingdom Hearts-influenced scenario (which in the previous games was set at zero).
Nintendo masterminded a breathtaking PR plan: literally, they managed to halt the mouth-breaths of mouth-breathing near-thirtysomethings the world over at least once a week in the half-year-long run up to the game’s release, all by regularly updating a simple, clean website. Some players — old enough to have fathered children and not noticed — kept steely resolve, vowing to avoid spoilers and not look at the website until after the game was released.
That is to say, it’s Memorial Day, we’re going to go see Mel Gibson in “The Patriot”, wherein any of the main characters could die at any time, and Nintendo has managed to get all of the kids into the minivan without a single no-popcorn warning.
The “story” mode begins with Mario fighting Kirby in a giant arena that’s floating in space. The player chooses to play as either Mario or Kirby. If you choose Mario, when you win, you’ll see a cut-scene in which Mario punches Kirby so hard he turns into . . . an action figure of Kirby. Mario then walks up and touches the Kirby action figure, which turns back into Kirby. Mario pats Kirby on the back, and the two salute the wildly cheering crowds.
Then sinister stuff starts happening. A giant airship (owned by MetaKnight from the Kirby series, of course) shows up, et cetera et cetera, eventually we’ve got a running adventure in which Nintendo characters interact with one another with no dialogue (spoken or text), fighting for the vaguely defined “good guys” against hordes of “bad guys”; whenever a bad guy (Wario, Bowser, Ganondorf) shows up in a cut-scene, they’re equipped with a big sci-fi gun which, when fired, turns any Nintendo character into an action figure. Someone is trying to collect all of the Nintendo action figures! Who the flaming heck is it? If you want to know the answer, turn to the last page, and then buy the game.
Three, four, five, six times in the game, there’s a scene where a Big Bad Guy fires a gun at a Helpless Nintendo Character, and a Big Strong Nintendo Character jumps in the way of the beam, is turned into a toy, and is carted off. In all of those occasions, the Helpless Nintendo Character is, less than two seconds later, greeted by a Big-Brother-Like character.
The reason the characters are turning into action figures is simple: because the theme of the first Smash Bros. game was that all of the characters were action figures, and the player was just a kid playing with these action figures. Only the Kingdom Hearts II scenario-writer could say, “What if the action figures in Super Smash Bros. were real?” and then answer the follow-up question (“. . . you’re not hecking serious, are you?”) with “. . . Why wouldn’t I be serious?” That this sort of thing actually gets greenlighted is hilarious and awesome.
Yep. This is how game scenarios go when you’ve hired the guy who wrote Kingdom Hearts II. Mickey Mouse was such a badass in that.
THE GRAPHICS
Are great!
As I slogged through the single-player experience, I looked on the bright side of things more than several times, going so far as to hope that the person collecting all the Nintendo action figures was a fifty-foot tall pimple-faced mama’s boy.
I know, Super Smash Bros. isn’t a platform game; it’s a fighting game, and it’s an awesome one. Still, that the team felt it crucial to include a twelve-hour-long mode consisting of side-scrolling stages interrupted by the only computer-animated cut-scenes in the game is proof that a lot of work went into this. Maybe I’m nitpicking, though I kinda wish it controlled just like Super Mario Bros. 3. Some of these level designs are okay, I guess, though when they start breaking out the Super Princess Peach-like “puzzles” (giving you a key literally two feet in front of a door), the air all around you may or may not become polluted with groans.
Some of the battles are really satisfying; the little animation and sound effect when you kill an opponent in the deathmatch mode are fine-tuned to be satisfying, to be your motivation to kill more opponents — as used in single-player mode every time you kill anything, it provides a weird crunchy pace that is, at the very least, a lot better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game or its sequels. Back in the heyday of the multi-player money-sucking beat-em-up, games like The Simpsons or X-men The Arcade Game were brainless, ultimately metaphysically unsatisfying exercises that ended when the pizza arrived at the table. Those games just bled perfectly into the pizza-eating experience. Now, with Smash Bros. X, we have a game where the most satisfying elements feel like breaking the world brick-stuffting land-speed record. I’m not even messing with you here: about an hour into the “story” mode, (the timing of the previous night’s dinner might have had something to do with this), I nonchalantly paused the game, went to the toilet, and shat so hard I must have seen a ghost. Just as the eternally iron-pumping black man I sometimes call my “inner monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Mother hecker!” Smash Bros. X was beyond the point of making perfect sense.
It was from that point on that I avoided playing the story mode with a second player; with such a random slog, when something satisfying somehow juts in, it becomes hard for either one of you to take credit. Credit — knowing who killed who — is everything in Smash Bros. X, and somehow having two players in the single-player mode somehow makes staying alive feel as cheap and dirty as dying repeatedly and credit-feeding Golden Axe. That stuff just isn’t funny.
It’s definitely not the “Tekken Force” mode from Tekken 3!
Eventually, the game got pretentious, portentous, and actually kind of rude. There are moments in the run up to the last stage (a hilariously giant Castlevania-like “exploration” maze) where the cut-scenes stop being funny and start feeling vaguely like what pornography must look like in the ecology-drenched world inhabited by the “Captain Planet” kids. Which is actually kind of hot — Wheeler would look awesome jerking off. What if he accidentally engaged the “FIRE!” ring?
THE STORY
Is awesome!
There’s a moment close to the very, very end that turns this game with sudden fierceness into The Anti-Literature. A tear literally escaped my body at the point, though it actually came out my nose, and not my eye (had a car accident as a kid), so I’m still not gay. Faced with a terrifyingly bland, Final Fantasy-like final boss, the Single Greatest and Worst Moment in Videogame History happens. If you’re like me and you always play videogames with one of those sofa-side TV trays hovering over your lap, for God’s sake, if you don’t want tomato soup on the ceiling, exercise caution when approaching the final boss of this game.
I’m actually kind of serious when I say that, if the clusterhecking nonsense of the story mode — headgear-wearing &^#$# cutscenes, twelve hours of sloggy gameplay and all — existed only to increase the hideous size of that exclamation point right before the final boss, then I take back everything I said, and champion this game as worthy of Andy Warhol.
And then, it’s over. The game doesn’t need to put an ending in after what just happened; all we get is a wide-angle shot of all of the playable characters standing on a cliff, facing an orange sunset, the camera zooming back, as an orchestra, live via a cellular phone with really clear reception, belts out a terrific, Final Fantasy-like “credits theme”. There’s a choir, singing in German, or Latin, or one of those languages spoken only the cool people studied in high school, and every once in a while, the screen fades to black to show us title cards informing us of the deep and invigorating meaning of the words being sung: “He was my friend! He helped me out when I needed help! He was great! He was my hero! And then we stood there, together!”
Remember that scene in Final Fantasy VIII, where the main characters went up into space and were suddenly like “LOL, we’re in space?” And though the game graphics were still jaggy polygons, and though the dialog still existed in boxes, suddenly a real song started playing, with the fruitiest lyrics, and being sung by a girl? Most human beings, if they were living in a college dormitory the first and last time they played that game, got up and did the “rape-prevention” deadbolt. The ending of Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the exact opposite of that.
THE MUSIC
Is fantastic!
Of course, this music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu. That’s right, Nintendo fans — Nintendo assembled an expert team of, like, twenty composers from various videogame companies to remix 8- or 16-bit Nintendo blooping theme music into awesome orchestral perfection. Michiko Naruke, who exhibited excellent use of live whistling in the classic opening theme of Wild Arms, pays her respect by making an awesome medley of all the two-bar ocarina songs from Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And the ocarina songs all sound just like they sounded in Zelda! Yuzo Koshiro, whose expertly composed new-age or techno soundtracks to games like Ys or Streets of Rage, turns in a bitching, note-for-note recreation of the Legend of Zelda overworld theme. Yes!
(Lunar, Grandia, Radiata Stories composer) Noriyuki Iwadare and (Dawn of Mana, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song composer) Kenji Ito turn in exceptional, chunky-bass Fire Emblem tracks.
(Mr. Masafumi Takada (Godhand, No More Heroes, killer7), meanwhile, does a couple of weird little tunes that kinda don’t fit the action.)
In the end, Smash Bros. X is what it is. Let’s be honest: It’s a random, carnival-like brawling “experience” that is probably going to be pretty fun at parties if everyone has played and attained a fair degree of skill at various old 2D side-scrolling action games. And that’s why we love it!
Since no professional videogame review being aggragated by MetaCritic is actually “real” without negative points, I’m going to use this paragraph to voice my concern about the game’s control scheme. Namely, the only way you’re going to be able to use a D-pad to move your character is if you play the game with just the Wiimote, which means that you have to press the A button with the side of your thumb and the hook-like pseudo-trigger B button with your middle finger to do a hard attack. Not too keen on that, thanks! I would rather use the Classic Controller’s brilliant D-pad (which I believe is the best D-pad of all time (I’ve verified this by playing through Landstalker with it)) to control my character. You can’t do this, however; though the game’s official website is smug enough to brag about the various controller-configuring menus, saying “We’ve thought of everything!” they actually haven’t thought of everything, because everything would mean I could use the D-pad to move.
THE GAMEPLAY
Is spec-freakin’-tacular!
Some people might say that the game doesn’t let you control movement with the D-pad because the analog stick is an integral part of the game design: you have to tap the analog stick hard in a specific direction as you press an attack button. I say that Virtua Fighter does a damn good job of having “short tap” and “long tap” special moves with just a digital joystick, and the execution time of said moves never feels longer than instantaneous. I want to double-tap that delicious, apple-pie-like, deep d-pad to run; I want to long-tap and short-tap to do smash attacks. My friends in the “Videogame Industry” tell me this is impossible in a game like Smash Bros. X, which is already taking huge risks and breaking tons of Nintendo’s internal rules (one of those rules being that a Nintendo-made game should neither have nor need a controller-input option menu), and that we should be glad we got as much as we did get, and that we should be doubly glad that this was all done in the interest of inviting The Casual Gamer to participate in the heated, old-school brawling action. Whatever. The default setting of the Classic Controller’s D-pad is left and right for “horizontal taunt”, up for “upward taunt”, and down for “downward taunt”. If Nintendo’s idea of inviting casual gamers into a hardcore game involves letting them do something useless in multiple directions, then I’d hate to see how they’re going to get hardcore gamers playing casual games, when that time comes. Are they going to invent overly complicated, customizable control schemes for a VCR-programming mini-game in Animal Crossing, where the A button operates the right index finger? On the other hand, a videogame that lets me customize my controls (thankfully, yes, I could make jumping button-activated and cancel the “up = jump” input) obviously assumes I know a thing or two about games, so why the stuff does it constantly put a little indicator over the character I’m controlling, even in the single-player mode — and only if I’m using a customized control scheme? I mean, why not put a “1P” indicator above someone who’s too dumb to make their own custom control scheme? It’s weird, and thinking about it actually kind of makes me lonely, like that screen on MySpace.com that keeps telling me “You must be someone’s friend to make comments about them”. Oh.
Seriously, not a single person whose hands I’ve plopped a Classic Controller into has not, immediately at the start of a match, pressed the D-pad to try to move, and instead initiated one taunt after another, after another, after another. I don’t know, though; maybe they were just really cocky professional players.
Also, online play is awesome. Smashing a buddy thousands of miles away, all without lag — that is heaven!
The high point of this game for me was, of course, being able to play as Sonic the Hedgehog, who I loved for his sharpness as a child and hated for his looseness as a man-child. In an age where every new game from Sonic Team controls like a stick of butter held vertical on a hot frying pan, Smash Bros. X emerges by default as the Best Game Starring Sonic the Hedgehog Since the Mega Drive Days. When I play as him, I’m so used to seeing him slide around helplessly in some of the most poorly-designed videogame stages of all time that I forget all my complaints about the controls and game design and allow myself to enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog not sucking.
I guess, by then, the game has its claws deep into my muscle fibers; I’m fantasizing, occasionally, about crafting custom stages for Sonic to play around in, and then sharing them with my friends. All the while, I wish that I could make my own characters, too. The recent-Smash Bros.-like Jump Superstars proved that Jump manga characters actually are cooler-looking than Nintendo characters. It’s enough to make you wonder.
It’s said that Katamari Damacy was originally plotted out with just spheres and cubes — roll this sphere around, sticking cubes and spheres to it, and it gets bigger. The personality of the game came afterward, and it kind of shows. I don’t even mean any offense by that: Katamari Damacy is a game of spectacularly skillful design. It’s fun, it’s amazingly well-conceived and executed, and the graphic design choices go above and beyond the call of duty to actually wedge some catharsis into the whole ordeal. The thing is, I’ve jerked myself into such a tizzy over Sonic the Hedgehog that it’s now very difficult for me to separate the concept of Smash Bros. from the execution. Did Hal Laboratory get an idea for an inverse fighting game (small characters and big stages instead of big characters and small stages) with a clever little play hook (knock the players off the edge, keep them from getting back up), or did Nintendo ask them to make a party-action game starring Nintendo characters, and this was the first thing they came up with? Would this game be worth any time at all with characters I didn’t recognize? Is this game just another Mario Golf, pulling Mario-addicted gamers to a completely different genre? From a Mario Golf perspective, it’s a hell of a success, though as the videogame for the Nintendo Wii that’s sold a million copies in the shortest amount of time — and, fatalistically, without even using any of the Wii’s selling points — it’s kind of embarrassing. Where the previous game let you discover figurines of characters during solo play, this game’s “big innovation” as regards the “collection” gimmick is to let the player also discover stickers, which they can then freely — and in 3D! — place on the figures they’ve collected via the museum mode. That Super Smash Bros. Brawl inspires people to do this sort of thing is a resounding testament to the fact that it might, perhaps, not be a terrible videogame. On paper, however, these things look scary, as though “videogames made me do it” is becoming as equally viable a defense for kleptomania as for multiple homicide. I mean, it’s got a Nintendogs . . . thing in it, wherein a polygonal puppy bounds up and paws at the screen. The thing is, the puppies in Nintendogs are crude computer-animated compromises for actual puppies; they’re not “Nintendo characters” per se. Putting them on a more mechanically capable machine than the Nintendo DS doesn’t make you exclaim, “Yay! A Puppy!” so much as it makes you scratch your head, identify subliminally that it’s a reference to Nintendogs, which is, yes, a videogame compromise for people who want a puppy and are just too lazy to get a puppy, and wonder why they didn’t just film an actual puppy, and then realize that if they did film an actual puppy, it would basically shatter the game’s vibe.
Or would it? The question you have to ask, at the end, is one of integrity: is there anything that can shatter this game’s vibe? Really? It might just be crafted from the ground up in the interest of all-encompassing immunity. We’ve already got a realistic human Solid Snake brandishing a realistic rocket launcher or sniper rifle against ultra-unrealistic humans like Ness from Mother 2, armed with a baseball bat, and a cartoon dinosaur named Yoshi, on a stage based on the Nintendo DS Picto-Chat application, where an unseen hand draws scratchy, sketchy lines that function as platforms. As a person who recently finished watching the entire series of “The Sopranos” and was amazed by the craft and sheer artistry of the finale, I feel vaguely insulted even thinking about how, in a world where BioShock (a game I, for the record, don’t even really like) exists, this tittering sack of fetish fragments called Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the game that just about everyone else who tangentially shares this hobby is looking forward to above anything else. God help us all when the walls start caving in.
At least I know where I’ll be when Jesus comes riding that great big Yoshi in the sky: sitting on my sofa with my best buds, engaged deep and fierce in a hard round of Super Smash Bros. Brawl — Action Button Dot Net‘s choice for best game of all time, laughing it up, sharing good times, right up until the last atom make-disappears itself.
★★★★
“THE BEST GAME OF ALL-TIME.”
So this is it. This is the big Nintendo Wii game. What’s even coming out for the Nintendo Wii after this? Who gives a stuff! What more could you possibly need? Super Mario versus Solid Snake FTW!
At any rate, here’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the biggest little dollop of gruel yet slopped on the lunch tray of gamerkind. The Japanese title is “Smash Brothers X“, which sounds so much cleaner. “Clean” is the biggest compliment-word this game should ever be awarded, and I don’t precisely mean that as an insult: it is undistilled, pure, gelatinous videogame essence, sat on a table to wobble until eternity. It’s the third game in a series that, in the interest of politeness, we’ll say “has two other games”. Both of those games were popular; this game (sequel #2) takes the “more of the same” model plopped out by the last game (sequel #1) to a new extreme, stuffing it full of more playable characters, more collectible items, more gameplay modes, and more Kingdom Hearts-influenced scenario (which in the previous games was set at zero).
Nintendo masterminded a breathtaking PR plan: literally, they managed to halt the mouth-breaths of mouth-breathing near-thirtysomethings the world over at least once a week in the half-year-long run up to the game’s release, all by regularly updating a simple, clean website. Some players — old enough to have fathered children and not noticed — kept steely resolve, vowing to avoid spoilers and not look at the website until after the game was released.
That is to say, it’s Memorial Day, we’re going to go see Mel Gibson in “The Patriot”, wherein any of the main characters could die at any time, and Nintendo has managed to get all of the kids into the minivan without a single no-popcorn warning.
The “story” mode begins with Mario fighting Kirby in a giant arena that’s floating in space. The player chooses to play as either Mario or Kirby. If you choose Mario, when you win, you’ll see a cut-scene in which Mario punches Kirby so hard he turns into . . . an action figure of Kirby. Mario then walks up and touches the Kirby action figure, which turns back into Kirby. Mario pats Kirby on the back, and the two salute the wildly cheering crowds.
Then sinister stuff starts happening. A giant airship (owned by MetaKnight from the Kirby series, of course) shows up, et cetera et cetera, eventually we’ve got a running adventure in which Nintendo characters interact with one another with no dialogue (spoken or text), fighting for the vaguely defined “good guys” against hordes of “bad guys”; whenever a bad guy (Wario, Bowser, Ganondorf) shows up in a cut-scene, they’re equipped with a big sci-fi gun which, when fired, turns any Nintendo character into an action figure. Someone is trying to collect all of the Nintendo action figures! Who the flaming heck is it? If you want to know the answer, turn to the last page, and then buy the game.
Three, four, five, six times in the game, there’s a scene where a Big Bad Guy fires a gun at a Helpless Nintendo Character, and a Big Strong Nintendo Character jumps in the way of the beam, is turned into a toy, and is carted off. In all of those occasions, the Helpless Nintendo Character is, less than two seconds later, greeted by a Big-Brother-Like character.
The reason the characters are turning into action figures is simple: because the theme of the first Smash Bros. game was that all of the characters were action figures, and the player was just a kid playing with these action figures. Only the Kingdom Hearts II scenario-writer could say, “What if the action figures in Super Smash Bros. were real?” and then answer the follow-up question (“. . . you’re not hecking serious, are you?”) with “. . . Why wouldn’t I be serious?” That this sort of thing actually gets greenlighted is hilarious and awesome.
Yep. This is how game scenarios go when you’ve hired the guy who wrote Kingdom Hearts II. Mickey Mouse was such a badass in that.
THE GRAPHICS
Are great!
As I slogged through the single-player experience, I looked on the bright side of things more than several times, going so far as to hope that the person collecting all the Nintendo action figures was a fifty-foot tall pimple-faced mama’s boy.
I know, Super Smash Bros. isn’t a platform game; it’s a fighting game, and it’s an awesome one. Still, that the team felt it crucial to include a twelve-hour-long mode consisting of side-scrolling stages interrupted by the only computer-animated cut-scenes in the game is proof that a lot of work went into this. Maybe I’m nitpicking, though I kinda wish it controlled just like Super Mario Bros. 3. Some of these level designs are okay, I guess, though when they start breaking out the Super Princess Peach-like “puzzles” (giving you a key literally two feet in front of a door), the air all around you may or may not become polluted with groans.
Some of the battles are really satisfying; the little animation and sound effect when you kill an opponent in the deathmatch mode are fine-tuned to be satisfying, to be your motivation to kill more opponents — as used in single-player mode every time you kill anything, it provides a weird crunchy pace that is, at the very least, a lot better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game or its sequels. Back in the heyday of the multi-player money-sucking beat-em-up, games like The Simpsons or X-men The Arcade Game were brainless, ultimately metaphysically unsatisfying exercises that ended when the pizza arrived at the table. Those games just bled perfectly into the pizza-eating experience. Now, with Smash Bros. X, we have a game where the most satisfying elements feel like breaking the world brick-stuffting land-speed record. I’m not even messing with you here: about an hour into the “story” mode, (the timing of the previous night’s dinner might have had something to do with this), I nonchalantly paused the game, went to the toilet, and shat so hard I must have seen a ghost. Just as the eternally iron-pumping black man I sometimes call my “inner monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Mother hecker!” Smash Bros. X was beyond the point of making perfect sense.
It was from that point on that I avoided playing the story mode with a second player; with such a random slog, when something satisfying somehow juts in, it becomes hard for either one of you to take credit. Credit — knowing who killed who — is everything in Smash Bros. X, and somehow having two players in the single-player mode somehow makes staying alive feel as cheap and dirty as dying repeatedly and credit-feeding Golden Axe. That stuff just isn’t funny.
It’s definitely not the “Tekken Force” mode from Tekken 3!
Eventually, the game got pretentious, portentous, and actually kind of rude. There are moments in the run up to the last stage (a hilariously giant Castlevania-like “exploration” maze) where the cut-scenes stop being funny and start feeling vaguely like what pornography must look like in the ecology-drenched world inhabited by the “Captain Planet” kids. Which is actually kind of hot — Wheeler would look awesome jerking off. What if he accidentally engaged the “FIRE!” ring?
THE STORY
Is awesome!
There’s a moment close to the very, very end that turns this game with sudden fierceness into The Anti-Literature. A tear literally escaped my body at the point, though it actually came out my nose, and not my eye (had a car accident as a kid), so I’m still not gay. Faced with a terrifyingly bland, Final Fantasy-like final boss, the Single Greatest and Worst Moment in Videogame History happens. If you’re like me and you always play videogames with one of those sofa-side TV trays hovering over your lap, for God’s sake, if you don’t want tomato soup on the ceiling, exercise caution when approaching the final boss of this game.
I’m actually kind of serious when I say that, if the clusterhecking nonsense of the story mode — headgear-wearing &^#$# cutscenes, twelve hours of sloggy gameplay and all — existed only to increase the hideous size of that exclamation point right before the final boss, then I take back everything I said, and champion this game as worthy of Andy Warhol.
And then, it’s over. The game doesn’t need to put an ending in after what just happened; all we get is a wide-angle shot of all of the playable characters standing on a cliff, facing an orange sunset, the camera zooming back, as an orchestra, live via a cellular phone with really clear reception, belts out a terrific, Final Fantasy-like “credits theme”. There’s a choir, singing in German, or Latin, or one of those languages spoken only the cool people studied in high school, and every once in a while, the screen fades to black to show us title cards informing us of the deep and invigorating meaning of the words being sung: “He was my friend! He helped me out when I needed help! He was great! He was my hero! And then we stood there, together!”
Remember that scene in Final Fantasy VIII, where the main characters went up into space and were suddenly like “LOL, we’re in space?” And though the game graphics were still jaggy polygons, and though the dialog still existed in boxes, suddenly a real song started playing, with the fruitiest lyrics, and being sung by a girl? Most human beings, if they were living in a college dormitory the first and last time they played that game, got up and did the “rape-prevention” deadbolt. The ending of Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the exact opposite of that.
THE MUSIC
Is fantastic!
Of course, this music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu. That’s right, Nintendo fans — Nintendo assembled an expert team of, like, twenty composers from various videogame companies to remix 8- or 16-bit Nintendo blooping theme music into awesome orchestral perfection. Michiko Naruke, who exhibited excellent use of live whistling in the classic opening theme of Wild Arms, pays her respect by making an awesome medley of all the two-bar ocarina songs from Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And the ocarina songs all sound just like they sounded in Zelda! Yuzo Koshiro, whose expertly composed new-age or techno soundtracks to games like Ys or Streets of Rage, turns in a bitching, note-for-note recreation of the Legend of Zelda overworld theme. Yes!
(Lunar, Grandia, Radiata Stories composer) Noriyuki Iwadare and (Dawn of Mana, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song composer) Kenji Ito turn in exceptional, chunky-bass Fire Emblem tracks.
(Mr. Masafumi Takada (Godhand, No More Heroes, killer7), meanwhile, does a couple of weird little tunes that kinda don’t fit the action.)
In the end, Smash Bros. X is what it is. Let’s be honest: It’s a random, carnival-like brawling “experience” that is probably going to be pretty fun at parties if everyone has played and attained a fair degree of skill at various old 2D side-scrolling action games. And that’s why we love it!
Since no professional videogame review being aggragated by MetaCritic is actually “real” without negative points, I’m going to use this paragraph to voice my concern about the game’s control scheme. Namely, the only way you’re going to be able to use a D-pad to move your character is if you play the game with just the Wiimote, which means that you have to press the A button with the side of your thumb and the hook-like pseudo-trigger B button with your middle finger to do a hard attack. Not too keen on that, thanks! I would rather use the Classic Controller’s brilliant D-pad (which I believe is the best D-pad of all time (I’ve verified this by playing through Landstalker with it)) to control my character. You can’t do this, however; though the game’s official website is smug enough to brag about the various controller-configuring menus, saying “We’ve thought of everything!” they actually haven’t thought of everything, because everything would mean I could use the D-pad to move.
THE GAMEPLAY
Is spec-freakin’-tacular!
Some people might say that the game doesn’t let you control movement with the D-pad because the analog stick is an integral part of the game design: you have to tap the analog stick hard in a specific direction as you press an attack button. I say that Virtua Fighter does a damn good job of having “short tap” and “long tap” special moves with just a digital joystick, and the execution time of said moves never feels longer than instantaneous. I want to double-tap that delicious, apple-pie-like, deep d-pad to run; I want to long-tap and short-tap to do smash attacks. My friends in the “Videogame Industry” tell me this is impossible in a game like Smash Bros. X, which is already taking huge risks and breaking tons of Nintendo’s internal rules (one of those rules being that a Nintendo-made game should neither have nor need a controller-input option menu), and that we should be glad we got as much as we did get, and that we should be doubly glad that this was all done in the interest of inviting The Casual Gamer to participate in the heated, old-school brawling action. Whatever. The default setting of the Classic Controller’s D-pad is left and right for “horizontal taunt”, up for “upward taunt”, and down for “downward taunt”. If Nintendo’s idea of inviting casual gamers into a hardcore game involves letting them do something useless in multiple directions, then I’d hate to see how they’re going to get hardcore gamers playing casual games, when that time comes. Are they going to invent overly complicated, customizable control schemes for a VCR-programming mini-game in Animal Crossing, where the A button operates the right index finger? On the other hand, a videogame that lets me customize my controls (thankfully, yes, I could make jumping button-activated and cancel the “up = jump” input) obviously assumes I know a thing or two about games, so why the stuff does it constantly put a little indicator over the character I’m controlling, even in the single-player mode — and only if I’m using a customized control scheme? I mean, why not put a “1P” indicator above someone who’s too dumb to make their own custom control scheme? It’s weird, and thinking about it actually kind of makes me lonely, like that screen on MySpace.com that keeps telling me “You must be someone’s friend to make comments about them”. Oh.
Seriously, not a single person whose hands I’ve plopped a Classic Controller into has not, immediately at the start of a match, pressed the D-pad to try to move, and instead initiated one taunt after another, after another, after another. I don’t know, though; maybe they were just really cocky professional players.
Also, online play is awesome. Smashing a buddy thousands of miles away, all without lag — that is heaven!
The high point of this game for me was, of course, being able to play as Sonic the Hedgehog, who I loved for his sharpness as a child and hated for his looseness as a man-child. In an age where every new game from Sonic Team controls like a stick of butter held vertical on a hot frying pan, Smash Bros. X emerges by default as the Best Game Starring Sonic the Hedgehog Since the Mega Drive Days. When I play as him, I’m so used to seeing him slide around helplessly in some of the most poorly-designed videogame stages of all time that I forget all my complaints about the controls and game design and allow myself to enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog not sucking.
I guess, by then, the game has its claws deep into my muscle fibers; I’m fantasizing, occasionally, about crafting custom stages for Sonic to play around in, and then sharing them with my friends. All the while, I wish that I could make my own characters, too. The recent-Smash Bros.-like Jump Superstars proved that Jump manga characters actually are cooler-looking than Nintendo characters. It’s enough to make you wonder.
It’s said that Katamari Damacy was originally plotted out with just spheres and cubes — roll this sphere around, sticking cubes and spheres to it, and it gets bigger. The personality of the game came afterward, and it kind of shows. I don’t even mean any offense by that: Katamari Damacy is a game of spectacularly skillful design. It’s fun, it’s amazingly well-conceived and executed, and the graphic design choices go above and beyond the call of duty to actually wedge some catharsis into the whole ordeal. The thing is, I’ve jerked myself into such a tizzy over Sonic the Hedgehog that it’s now very difficult for me to separate the concept of Smash Bros. from the execution. Did Hal Laboratory get an idea for an inverse fighting game (small characters and big stages instead of big characters and small stages) with a clever little play hook (knock the players off the edge, keep them from getting back up), or did Nintendo ask them to make a party-action game starring Nintendo characters, and this was the first thing they came up with? Would this game be worth any time at all with characters I didn’t recognize? Is this game just another Mario Golf, pulling Mario-addicted gamers to a completely different genre? From a Mario Golf perspective, it’s a hell of a success, though as the videogame for the Nintendo Wii that’s sold a million copies in the shortest amount of time — and, fatalistically, without even using any of the Wii’s selling points — it’s kind of embarrassing. Where the previous game let you discover figurines of characters during solo play, this game’s “big innovation” as regards the “collection” gimmick is to let the player also discover stickers, which they can then freely — and in 3D! — place on the figures they’ve collected via the museum mode. That Super Smash Bros. Brawl inspires people to do this sort of thing is a resounding testament to the fact that it might, perhaps, not be a terrible videogame. On paper, however, these things look scary, as though “videogames made me do it” is becoming as equally viable a defense for kleptomania as for multiple homicide. I mean, it’s got a Nintendogs . . . thing in it, wherein a polygonal puppy bounds up and paws at the screen. The thing is, the puppies in Nintendogs are crude computer-animated compromises for actual puppies; they’re not “Nintendo characters” per se. Putting them on a more mechanically capable machine than the Nintendo DS doesn’t make you exclaim, “Yay! A Puppy!” so much as it makes you scratch your head, identify subliminally that it’s a reference to Nintendogs, which is, yes, a videogame compromise for people who want a puppy and are just too lazy to get a puppy, and wonder why they didn’t just film an actual puppy, and then realize that if they did film an actual puppy, it would basically shatter the game’s vibe.
Or would it? The question you have to ask, at the end, is one of integrity: is there anything that can shatter this game’s vibe? Really? It might just be crafted from the ground up in the interest of all-encompassing immunity. We’ve already got a realistic human Solid Snake brandishing a realistic rocket launcher or sniper rifle against ultra-unrealistic humans like Ness from Mother 2, armed with a baseball bat, and a cartoon dinosaur named Yoshi, on a stage based on the Nintendo DS Picto-Chat application, where an unseen hand draws scratchy, sketchy lines that function as platforms. As a person who recently finished watching the entire series of “The Sopranos” and was amazed by the craft and sheer artistry of the finale, I feel vaguely insulted even thinking about how, in a world where BioShock (a game I, for the record, don’t even really like) exists, this tittering sack of fetish fragments called Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the game that just about everyone else who tangentially shares this hobby is looking forward to above anything else. God help us all when the walls start caving in.
At least I know where I’ll be when Jesus comes riding that great big Yoshi in the sky: sitting on my sofa with my best buds, engaged deep and fierce in a hard round of Super Smash Bros. Brawl — Action Button Dot Net‘s choice for best game of all time, laughing it up, sharing good times, right up until the last atom make-disappears itself.
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“THE BEST BOWEL-MOVEMENT SIMULATOR YET.”
So this is it. This is the big Nintendo Wii game. What’s even coming out for the Nintendo Wii after this? A quick visit to Nintendo.co.jp (which we’ll use because on Nintendo.com it’s impossible for anyone who’s not a robot-scientist to tell the difference between an in-site link and a McDonald’s advertisement) shows us that, of the 19 games on the “upcoming” list, 18 of them have already been released, the only one that hasn’t been already released is just a refitting of Common Sense Training for the Nintendo DS (now with the words “For Everyone” and “In Front of Your TV” shoehorned into the title to admirably allow maximum accessibility and minimum shame for the people the game seeks to fix), one of them is that terrifying Donkey Kong Jet Race game where you have to shake the controller and the nunchuk belligerently just to move, precisely three of them are games that haven’t precisely existed in another form on another platform (and one of those three is packed in when you buy a spare controller), and five of them feature Super Mario as a playable character. We’ve got Mario flying through space, Mario foot-racing against Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario playing soccer (not too much of a stretch given that some (many (most)) European soccer players have even uglier facial hair), Mario as a sheet of paper in a fairyland world where you have to open a god damned menu to “equip” the ability to jump (exagerration (critics loved it, anyway, citing the brilliance of the insipid gameplay mechanic wherein you press a button to rotate the screen into THREE-DEE MODE every time you arrive at an obstacle or puzzle whose solution isn’t immediately, painfully obvious)). It goes without saying that, of all these games in which Mario dons different hats while still donning his signature hat (I am a wordplay master) , the one most looked-forward-to by game-lovers the world over is the one in which Mario is permitted, both by the rules of the game and by simple operation of a game controller, to punch his younger brother (named “Luigi”) in the face. This is also something you can do in real life, unless you don’t have a younger brother (in the interest of the Nintendo fans in the audience, reading this review because this game stars Link from the Zelda series, I’ll explain that the reasons you might not have a younger brother are: you have only older brothers, older sisters, younger sisters, some combination of those three, you are an only child, or your younger brother has died, either by walking in front of a bus or jerking off too much, et cetera), though if, like me, your younger brother’s part time job involves accidentally keeping stampeding antelopes out of Wal-Mart at two in the morning, there’s a danger of your fist being consumed like by acid (or literally by teeth).
The only game on the list of Wii games on the Nintendo.co.jp website that I can actually applaud is Wii Fit, which doesn’t make sense because I like Wii Fit in concept alone; the execution is half-baked, and when you get down to brass tacks, it’s really hardly as much fun as “Billy’s Boot Camp”, which at least features appearances by gyrating, punching, kicking, furiously toned, tight, white-hot black women.
At any rate, here’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the biggest little dollop of gruel yet slopped on the lunch tray of gamerkind. The Japanese title is “Smash Brothers X“, which sounds so much cleaner. “Clean” is the biggest compliment-word this game should ever be awarded, and I don’t precisely mean that as an insult: it is undistilled, pure, gelatinous videogame essence, sat on a table to wobble until eternity. It’s the third game in a series that, in the interest of politeness, we’ll say “has two other games”. Both of those games were popular; this game (sequel #2) takes the “more of the same” model plopped out by the last game (sequel #1) to a new extreme, stuffing it full of more playable characters, more collectible items, more gameplay modes, and more Kingdom Hearts-influenced scenario (which in the previous games was set at zero).
Nintendo masterminded a breathtaking PR plan: literally, they managed to halt the mouth-breaths of mouth-breathing near-thirtysomethings the world over at least once a week in the half-year-long run up to the game’s release, all by regularly updating a simple, clean website. Some players — old enough to have fathered children and not noticed — kept steely resolve, vowing to avoid spoilers and not look at the website until after the game was released.
That is to say, it’s Memorial Day, we’re going to go see Mel Gibson in “The Patriot”, wherein any of the main characters could die at any time, and Nintendo has managed to get all of the kids into the minivan with just one no-popcorn warning.
In the end, what’s there to spoil? I’m sure someone could send me a long, psychotic email peppered with subtle allusions to child abuse, and by the end of that email, I’d know one person’s opinion, though I sure as hell wouldn’t understand it. What we have here is a videogame with a time- and sales-proven conceptual play hook, populated by characters that the player has already seen, or else he just plain isn’t interested. If the player has already seen all the characters, what’s to spoil? Well, for one thing, the way these characters, from classic 2D games, are represented in brilliant 3D, and the reason they appear in the “story”.
The “story” mode begins with Mario fighting Kirby in a giant arena that’s floating in space. The player chooses to play as either Mario or Kirby. If you choose Mario, when you win, you’ll see a cut-scene in which Mario punches Kirby so hard he turns into . . . an action figure of Kirby. Mario then walks up and touches the Kirby action figure, which turns back into Kirby. Mario pats Kirby on the back, and the two salute the wildly cheering crowds.
Then sinister stuff starts happening. A giant airship (owned by MetaKnight from the Kirby series, of course) shows up, et cetera et cetera, eventually we’ve got a running adventure in which Nintendo characters interact with one another with no dialogue (spoken or text), fighting for the vaguely defined “good guys” against hordes of “bad guys”; whenever a bad guy (Wario, Bowser, Ganondorf) shows up in a cut-scene, they’re equipped with a big sci-fi gun which, when fired, turns any Nintendo character into an action figure. Someone is trying to collect all of the Nintendo action figures! Who the flaming heck is it? If you want to know the answer, turn to the last page, and then buy the game.
Three, four, five, six times in the game, there’s a scene where a Big Bad Guy fires a gun at a Helpless Nintendo Character, and a Big Strong Nintendo Character jumps in the way of the beam, is turned into a toy, and is carted off. In all of those occasions, the Helpless Nintendo Character is, less than two seconds later, greeted by a Big-Brother-Like character. Fox McCloud comes down to help Diddy Kong after Donkey Kong is carted off by Wario, for example. (If you consider this a spoiler and are actually angry right now, please don’t visit this website anymore.)
The reason the characters are turning into action figures is simple: because the theme of the first Smash Bros. game was that all of the characters were action figures, and the player was just a kid playing with these action figures. Only the Kingdom Hearts II scenario-writer could say, “What if the action figures in Super Smash Bros. were real?” and then answer the follow-up question (“. . . you’re not hecking serious, are you?”) with “. . . Why wouldn’t I be serious?”
Yes. This is how game scenarios go when you’ve hired the guy who wrote Kingdom Hearts II.
As I slogged through the single-player experience, I looked on the bright side of things more than several times, going so far as to hope that the person collecting all the Nintendo action figures was a fifty-foot tall pimple-faced mama’s boy. Eventually, as story point after story point cascaded down the pipe, as I started to get tired of control quirks (like how hard your character snap-grabs a ledge over and over again when you’re trying to drop down), my optimism and patience wore to nanomachine thinness.
To be fair, Super Smash Bros. isn’t a platform game; it’s a fighting game that is occasionally a hit at parties. Still, that the team felt it crucial to include a twelve-hour-long mode consisting of side-scrolling stages interrupted by the only computer-animated cut-scenes in the game is proof that a lot of work went into this. Which is a shame, because all this mode really does is highlight just how dull the game’s core engine is. Why can’t it control just like Super Mario Bros. 3? Some of these level designs are okay, I guess, though when they start breaking out the Super Princess Peach-like “puzzles” (giving you a key literally two feet in front of a door), the air all around you may or may not become polluted with groans.
Some of the battles are satisfying, I suppose; the little animation when you kill an opponent in the deathmatch mode is fine-tuned to be satisfying, to be your motivation to kill more opponents — as used in single-player mode every time you kill anything, it provides a weird crunchy pace that is, at the very least, a lot better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game or its sequels. Back in the heyday of the multi-player money-sucking beat-em-up, games like The Simpsons or X-men The Arcade Game were brainless, ultimately metaphysically unsatisfying exercises that ended when the pizza arrived at the table. Those games just bled perfectly into the pizza-eating experience. Now, with Smash Bros. X, we have a game where the most satisfying elements feel like breaking the world brick-stuffting land-speed record. I’m not even messing with you here: about an hour into the “story” mode, (the timing of the previous night’s dinner might have had something to do with this), I nonchalantly paused the game, went to the toilet, and shat so hard I must have seen a ghost. Just as the eternally iron-pumping black man I sometimes call my “inner monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Mother hecker!” Smash Bros. X was beyond the point of making perfect sense.
It was from that point on that I avoided playing the story mode with a second player; with such a random slog, when something satisfying somehow juts in, it becomes hard for either one of you to take credit. Credit — knowing who killed who — is everything in Smash Bros. X, and somehow having two players in the single-player mode somehow makes staying alive feel as cheap and dirty as dying repeatedly and credit-feeding Golden Axe. That stuff just isn’t funny.
Well, at least it isn’t “Tekken Force” mode from Tekken 3.
Eventually, the game got pretentious, portentous, and actually kind of rude. There are moments in the run up to the last stage (a hilariously giant Castlevania-like “exploration” maze) where the cut-scenes stop being funny and start feeling vaguely like what pornography must look like in the ecology-drenched world inhabited by the “Captain Planet” kids.
There’s a moment close to the very, very end that turns this game with sudden fierceness into The Anti-Literature. A tear literally escaped my body at the point, though it actually came out my nose, and not my eye (had a car accident as a kid), so I’m still not gay. Faced with a terrifyingly bland, Final Fantasy-like final boss, the Single Greatest and Worst Moment in Videogame History happens. If you’re like me and you always play videogames with one of those sofa-side TV trays hovering over your lap, for God’s sake, if you don’t want tomato soup on the ceiling, exercise caution when approaching the final boss of this game.
I’m actually kind of serious when I say that, if the clusterhecking nonsense of the story mode — headgear-wearing &^#$# cutscenes, twelve hours of sloggy gameplay and all — existed only to increase the hideous size of that exclamation point right before the final boss, then I take back everything I said, and champion this game as worthy of Andy Warhol.
I’m more or less positive, however, that it was all just an accident.
And then, it’s over. The game doesn’t need to put an ending in after what just happened; all we get is a wide-angle shot of all of the playable characters standing on a cliff, facing an orange sunset, the camera zooming back, as an orchestra, live via a cellular phone with really clear reception, belts out a terrifically banal, Final Fantasy-like “credits theme”. There’s a choir, singing in German, or Latin, or one of those languages spoken only by people no one likes, and every once in a while, the screen fades to black to show us title cards informing us of the deep and invigorating (warning: exact opposites used for hyperbole effect) meaning of the words being sung: “He was my friend! He helped me out when I needed help! He was great! He was my hero! And then we stood there, together!”
Remember that scene in Final Fantasy VIII, where the main characters went up into space and were suddenly like “LOL, we’re in space”? And though the game graphics were still jaggy polygons, and though the dialog still existed in boxes, suddenly a real song started playing, with the fruitiest lyrics, and being sung by a girl? Most human beings, if they were living in a college dormitory the first and last time they played that game, got up and did the “rape-prevention” deadbolt. With the ending of Smash Bros. X, a deadbolt doesn’t feel like enough. The feeling that your mother walked into your room (impossibly, because you are now an adult who has his own house and your mother is dead) to find you masturbating with an exuberant grin while staring at a tray of paperclips will not slide off your epidermis until you’ve taken at least six showers.
Of course, this music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, no doubt submitted to Nintendo in the form of bleeping, blooping humming during a wicked Skype-powered conference call. The secretary took dictation, drawing a doodle of Hello Kitty with a tear on her cheek and a battle-axe on her shoulder, and twenty-five minutes later, we had us a videogame.
I don’t want to be rude — okay, maybe I do, just a little bit. Though yeah, some of this music is pretty bad. A lot of composers just fetishistically recreate the tracks with as much deadly realism as possible: The usually quite gifted (Wild Arms composer) Michiko Naruke turns in a shrill, ear-grating, fanboy-stroking, Nintendo-64-quality medley of the tinny and obnoxious little ocarina songs from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, set to gurgling little clumps of boring percussion. There’s not a single smile-cracker in the game aside from, bizarrely, (Lunar, Grandia, Radiata Stories composer) Noriyuki Iwadare and (Dawn of Mana, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song composer) Kenji Ito’s exceptional, chunky-bass Fire Emblem tracks. I guess that’s because no single piece of Fire Emblem music is as iconic as, say, the Super Mario Bros. theme. Mr. Ito, who is the official torch-bearer for videogame composers as far as Action Button Dot Net is concerned, otherwise flails and cowers behind the sofa in fear of the slaps of gamers with tracks like “Space Armada” from Star Fox. Most of the time, everything is so by-the-book that the only way to even pretend to like this stuff is to already love it.
(Mr. Masafumi Takada (Godhand, No More Heroes, killer7) is disqualified from these discussions, for blatantly breaking Nintendo’s “whatever you do, don’t make something awesome” rule.)
Why would you call in a super-team of composers if you don’t want them to make music that reflects their personal style? It’s a little bit puzzling. Seeing as this game makes even Yuzo “Jesus” Koshiro sound like vanilla ice cream at best and potato chips at worst, I’m going to have to stand firm in my belief that all of the composers involved were doing their best to approximate what every other composer was going to sound like, and not succeeding. At worst, the music sounds like the background for a never-ending reel of eight-millimeter footage of ritualistically defecating Teletubbies; at best, the music sounds like something far too good for the ugly, noisy cacophony of cackles, heckles, squeals, screams, bonks, donks, honks, splatters, laser blasts, snuggles, snuffles, smacks, whacks, thwacks, snorks, and hee-hees of the on-screen cartoon orgy. Just as the sound of a circus strongman with a handlebar mustache tearing a wet cabbage in half with his bare hands punctuates a lovingly crafted piece of electronic music, a gong sounds, somewhere high in the sky: here we are, and we are finally old enough to have something worth being ashamed of.
Also, if this game’s Metal Gear Solid stage is any indication, the “Love Theme From Metal Gear Solid 4” is an almost direct rip-off of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” theme, which, as a person who once touched a violin on accident, is a downright awful piece of classical music.
In the end, Smash Bros. X is what it is. It’s a random, carnival-like brawling “experience” that is probably going to be pretty fun at parties if everyone has played and attained a fair degree of skill at various old 2D side-scrolling action games. It’s just — nope! — not quite enough for me. (Disclaimer: “Me” is a person who enjoys videogames and other forms of entertainment.)
For years, I’ve been telling people I wanted a big-scale “fighting” game that played exactly like the Castlevania games on the Gameboy Advance (or DS, I guess): I wanted snappy controls, I wanted quick fighting, I wanted real, human opponents. More than a dozen times, some jackass snapped his fingers and then pointed directly at my nose and declared “Smash Bros., dude!” I wish I remembered all of those guys’ names because I would tell each and every one of them, personally, to heck themselves. Instead, I’m going to use this paragraph to voice my concern about the game’s control scheme. Namely, the only way you’re going to be able to use a D-pad to move your character is if you play the game with just the Wiimote, which means that you have to press the A button with the side of your thumb and the hook-like pseudo-trigger B button with your middle finger to do a hard attack. Not too keen on that, thanks! I would rather use the Classic Controller’s brilliant D-pad (which I believe is the best D-pad of all time (I’ve verified this by playing through Landstalker with it)) to control my character. You can’t do this, however; though the game’s official website is smug enough to brag about the various controller-configuring menus, saying “We’ve thought of everything!” they actually haven’t thought of everything, because everything would mean I could use the D-pad to move.
Some people might say that the game doesn’t let you control movement with the D-pad because the analog stick is an integral part of the game design: you have to tap the analog stick hard in a specific direction as you press an attack button. I say that Virtua Fighter does a damn good job of having “short tap” and “long tap” special moves with just a digital joystick, and the execution time of said moves never feels longer than instantaneous. I want to double-tap that delicious, apple-pie-like, deep d-pad to run; I want to long-tap and short-tap to do smash attacks. My friends in the “Videogame Industry” tell me this is impossible in a game like Smash Bros. X, which is already taking huge risks and breaking tons of Nintendo’s internal rules (one of those rules being that a Nintendo-made game should neither have nor need a controller-input option menu), and that we should be glad we got as much as we did get, and that we should be doubly glad that this was all done in the interest of inviting The Casual Gamer to participate in the heated, old-school brawling action. Whatever. The default setting of the Classic Controller’s D-pad is left and right for “horizontal taunt”, up for “upward taunt”, and down for “downward taunt”. If Nintendo’s idea of inviting casual gamers into a hardcore game involves letting them do something useless in multiple directions, then I’d hate to see how they’re going to get hardcore gamers playing casual games, when that time comes. Are they going to invent overly complicated, customizable control schemes for a VCR-programming mini-game in Animal Crossing, where the A button operates the right index finger? On the other hand, a videogame that lets me customize my controls (thankfully, yes, I could make jumping button-activated and cancel the “up = jump” input) obviously assumes I know a thing or two about games, so why the stuff does it constantly put a little indicator over the character I’m controlling, even in the single-player mode — and only if I’m using a customized control scheme? I mean, why not put a “1P” indicator above someone who’s too dumb to make their own custom control scheme? It’s weird, and thinking about it actually kind of makes me lonely, like that screen on MySpace.com that keeps telling me “You must be someone’s friend to make comments about them”. Oh.
Seriously, not a single person whose hands I’ve plopped a Classic Controller into has not, immediately at the start of a match, pressed the D-pad to try to move, and instead initiated one taunt after another, after another, after another. I don’t know, though; maybe they were just really cocky professional players.
Also, for the record, I’ve never completed an actual match of Smash Bros. X online. Most of my opponents either drop out during the 60-second waiting period before matches start. Sometimes matches do indeed start, during which there’s no chat, of course, under the Friend Code Regime, so all players can do to communicate their sexual preferences or racial hate to opponents is name themselves CAUCASIAN PENIS and then stand there and not attack, demonstrating that their username is what they want to take; and the preset chat messages are ham-handed Japanese Uncle Jokes like “I think I dropped Ten Yen” (yeah, I’ll drop ten yen . . . in your ass (high five!)). During these matches, usually, people drop out due to lag, which is so bad that actually fighting is like trying to recommend a very long novel to a person in a train speeding outside and far beneath your bedroom window.
After attempting to play Super Mario Bros. 3 using the Classic Controller’s left analog stick instead of the glorious D-pad, I was absolutely shocked at how deliciously sensitive it is for 2D games. Going back to play Smash Bros. was kind of exasperating and floaty after that. All of the little weird things started popping out — like, the core mechanic of the game is that every time you hit someone their meter goes up, right? If it’s higher than 100%, then they’ll fly off the edge of the stage when hit with a strong attack. As they’re flying off, they can use a lovingly fetishistic mid-air jump plus a crispily implemented upward-thrusting special attack to grab on to the edge of the stage and get back in the game. This works really well, on the stages comprised of floating islands. The game goes ahead and vomits on its own gimmick’s shoes, though, with the multiple stages wherein the “edge” is just an edge of the screen. All it takes to die on these stages is to be knocked off, and out of sight. All of the friends I’ve played this game with have just shrugged and said “That’s how it was in some of the stages of Super Smash Bros. Melee, dude!” Oh? I suppose, in Nintendo’s case, that makes it alright to just do over and over again. Oh, well. Sometimes, though, you’ll be playing the game, and I swear that your damage meter will be at less than 80%, and some bastard like Ice Climber Kid will come up and whomp you with a hammer and you’ll just fly out into the background and “die”. What the hell is up with that? After a certain amount of single-player practice, I was getting to like the regular rules — try to get someone to fall off the edge, line up a brilliant smash attack to hit them just after they do their save move and before they touch the ground (so as to leave them helplessly flying, since they can only do the save once per flight). And then I start playing against people, and I’m on an FPS-worthy Killing Spree, and I’m barely getting touched, and then the game just throws me off into the distance after a random hit. What the hell is up with that? It’s like the inverse of Mario Party, where any player without any stars at the end of the game gets a star for achieving the worthwhile task of not getting any stars. It’s tacky and weird, and in a “hardcore” action game like this, it feels vaguely like Snickers suddenly announcing that their wrappers have always been edible — and delicious!
The high point of this game for me was, of course, being able to play as Sonic the Hedgehog, who I loved for his sharpness as a child and hated for his looseness as a man-child. In an age where every new game from Sonic Team controls like a stick of butter held vertical on a hot frying pan, Smash Bros. X emerges by default as the Best Game Starring Sonic the Hedgehog Since the Mega Drive Days. When I play as him, I’m so used to seeing him slide around helplessly in some of the most poorly-designed videogame stages of all time that I forget all my complaints about the controls and game design and allow myself to enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog not sucking.
I guess, by then, the game has its claws deep into my muscle fibers; I’m fantasizing, occasionally, about crafting custom stages for Sonic to play around in, and then sharing them with my friends. All the while, I wish that I could make my own characters, too. The recent-Smash Bros.-like Jump Superstars proved that Jump manga characters actually are cooler-looking than Nintendo characters. It’s enough to make you wonder.
It’s said that Katamari Damacy was originally plotted out with just spheres and cubes — roll this sphere around, sticking cubes and spheres to it, and it gets bigger. The personality of the game came afterward, and it kind of shows. I don’t even mean any offense by that: Katamari Damacy is a game of spectacularly skillful design. It’s fun, it’s amazingly well-conceived and executed, and the graphic design choices go above and beyond the call of duty to actually wedge some catharsis into the whole ordeal. The thing is, I’ve jerked myself into such a tizzy over Sonic the Hedgehog that it’s now very difficult for me to separate the concept of Smash Bros. from the execution. Did Hal Laboratory get an idea for an inverse fighting game (small characters and big stages instead of big characters and small stages) with a clever little play hook (knock the players off the edge, keep them from getting back up), or did Nintendo ask them to make a party-action game starring Nintendo characters, and this was the first thing they came up with? (1)
Would this game be worth any time at all with characters I didn’t recognize? Is this game just another Mario Golf, pulling Mario-addicted gamers to a completely different genre? From a Mario Golf perspective, it’s a hell of a success, though as the videogame for the Nintendo Wii that’s sold a million copies in the shortest amount of time — and, fatalistically, without even using any of the Wii’s selling points — it’s kind of embarrassing. Where the previous game let you discover figurines of characters during solo play, this game’s “big innovation” as regards the “collection” gimmick is to let the player also discover stickers, which they can then freely — and in 3D! — place on the figures they’ve collected via the museum mode. That Super Smash Bros. Brawl inspires people to do this sort of thing is a resounding testament to the fact that it might, perhaps, not be a terrible videogame. On paper, however, these things look scary, as though “videogames made me do it” is becoming as equally viable a defense for kleptomania as for multiple homicide. I mean, it’s got a Nintendogs . . . thing in it, wherein a polygonal puppy bounds up and paws at the screen. The thing is, the puppies in Nintendogs are crude computer-animated compromises for actual puppies; they’re not “Nintendo characters” per se. Putting them on a more mechanically capable machine than the Nintendo DS doesn’t make you exclaim, “Yay! A Puppy!” so much as it makes you scratch your head, identify subliminally that it’s a reference to Nintendogs, which is, yes, a videogame compromise for people who want a puppy and are just too lazy to get a puppy, and wonder why they didn’t just film an actual puppy, and then realize that if they did film an actual puppy, it would basically shatter the game’s vibe.
Or would it? The question you have to ask, at the end, is one of integrity: is there anything that can shatter this game’s vibe? Really? It might just be crafted from the ground up in the interest of all-encompassing immunity. We’ve already got a realistic human Solid Snake brandishing a realistic rocket launcher or sniper rifle against ultra-unrealistic humans like Ness from Mother 2, armed with a baseball bat, and a cartoon dinosaur named Yoshi, on a stage based on the Nintendo DS Picto-Chat application, where an unseen hand draws scratchy, sketchy lines that function as platforms. As a person who recently finished watching the entire series of “The Sopranos” and was amazed by the craft and sheer artistry of the finale, I feel vaguely insulted even thinking about how, in a world where BioShock (a game I, for the record, don’t even really like) exists, this tittering sack of fetish fragments called Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the game that just about everyone else who tangentially shares this hobby is looking forward to above anything else. God help us all when the walls start caving in.
(*Note: The score of this game, which is “two stars (out of four)” has been decided with much scientific thought. The rampant and somewhat embarrassing Nintendo fetishism discussed at forensic lengths in this review is responsible for the game being docked six stars, bringing it to a negative two stars (out of four) on our scale; the fact that I have played this game for several hours every day since its release with a gaggle of dudes who just don’t give a heck about Luigi’s canonical significance, and I have not yet gotten bored of it, adds four stars to the score, bringing it up to a positive two stars (out of four). So there you have it.)
–tim rogers
1) My good friend Theodore Troops has pointed me to this article, which answers the chicken-egg question of Smash Bros.’ origin. It seems like they did have a concept before they shoehorned in the Nintendo characters. Not wholly unbelievable at all!
2) Also, if you’re going to comment saying that I should try playing this game “as a fighting game” — well, I really don’t know why I didn’t mention that aspect! I guess it slipped my mind. I’ve been playing it with my “co-workers” in the Action Button Dot Net Laboratories for about an hour a day for three weeks now, and the fact that I haven’t quit playing it yet is the whole reason the game gets two stars. I swear, with a control scheme tailor-made to my needs (basically, I need it to feel just like Super Mario Bros. 3), this game would literally be a fourteen out of ten on the Action Button Dot Net zero- to four-star scale. Fetishism and all. Make of that what you will.
(*readers with a keen eye will notice that our rating system, which judges games on a scale of zero stars to four, with half-stars in between, can actually be interpreted to mean we’re rating games on a scale of one to nine. we leave the “ten” off so that only games branded “game of the year” will be regarded as “tens”. also, we leave the ten off so that two stars (5 out of 9) is the dead center of our scale, with as many ranking notches above it as below it. just to kind of stupidify what i just said (and to partly deflect hate mail), i’m going to paste this review into another review in about five minutes, and give it a four-star rating, add a different final sentence, and maybe cut a couple parts out or change a couple phrasings. make of that what you will. don’t worry, though: this is the real review.)
★★☆☆
“THE BEST BOWEL-MOVEMENT SIMULATOR YET.”
So this is it. This is the big Nintendo Wii game. What’s even coming out for the Nintendo Wii after this? A quick visit to Nintendo.co.jp (which we’ll use because on Nintendo.com it’s impossible for anyone who’s not a robot-scientist to tell the difference between an in-site link and a McDonald’s advertisement) shows us that, of the 19 games on the “upcoming” list, 18 of them have already been released, the only one that hasn’t been already released is just a refitting of Common Sense Training for the Nintendo DS (now with the words “For Everyone” and “In Front of Your TV” shoehorned into the title to admirably allow maximum accessibility and minimum shame for the people the game seeks to fix), one of them is that terrifying Donkey Kong Jet Race game where you have to shake the controller and the nunchuk belligerently just to move, precisely three of them are games that haven’t precisely existed in another form on another platform (and one of those three is packed in when you buy a spare controller), and five of them feature Super Mario as a playable character. We’ve got Mario flying through space, Mario foot-racing against Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario playing soccer (not too much of a stretch given that some (many (most)) European soccer players have even uglier facial hair), Mario as a sheet of paper in a fairyland world where you have to open a god damned menu to “equip” the ability to jump (exagerration (critics loved it, anyway, citing the brilliance of the insipid gameplay mechanic wherein you press a button to rotate the screen into THREE-DEE MODE every time you arrive at an obstacle or puzzle whose solution isn’t immediately, painfully obvious)). It goes without saying that, of all these games in which Mario dons different hats while still donning his signature hat (I am a wordplay master) , the one most looked-forward-to by game-lovers the world over is the one in which Mario is permitted, both by the rules of the game and by simple operation of a game controller, to punch his younger brother (named “Luigi”) in the face. This is also something you can do in real life, unless you don’t have a younger brother (in the interest of the Nintendo fans in the audience, reading this review because this game stars Link from the Zelda series, I’ll explain that the reasons you might not have a younger brother are: you have only older brothers, older sisters, younger sisters, some combination of those three, you are an only child, or your younger brother has died, either by walking in front of a bus or jerking off too much, et cetera), though if, like me, your younger brother’s part time job involves accidentally keeping stampeding antelopes out of Wal-Mart at two in the morning, there’s a danger of your fist being consumed like by acid (or literally by teeth).
The only game on the list of Wii games on the Nintendo.co.jp website that I can actually applaud is Wii Fit, which doesn’t make sense because I like Wii Fit in concept alone; the execution is half-baked, and when you get down to brass tacks, it’s really hardly as much fun as “Billy’s Boot Camp”, which at least features appearances by gyrating, punching, kicking, furiously toned, tight, white-hot black women.
At any rate, here’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the biggest little dollop of gruel yet slopped on the lunch tray of gamerkind. The Japanese title is “Smash Brothers X“, which sounds so much cleaner. “Clean” is the biggest compliment-word this game should ever be awarded, and I don’t precisely mean that as an insult: it is undistilled, pure, gelatinous videogame essence, sat on a table to wobble until eternity. It’s the third game in a series that, in the interest of politeness, we’ll say “has two other games”. Both of those games were popular; this game (sequel #2) takes the “more of the same” model plopped out by the last game (sequel #1) to a new extreme, stuffing it full of more playable characters, more collectible items, more gameplay modes, and more Kingdom Hearts-influenced scenario (which in the previous games was set at zero).
Nintendo masterminded a breathtaking PR plan: literally, they managed to halt the mouth-breaths of mouth-breathing near-thirtysomethings the world over at least once a week in the half-year-long run up to the game’s release, all by regularly updating a simple, clean website. Some players — old enough to have fathered children and not noticed — kept steely resolve, vowing to avoid spoilers and not look at the website until after the game was released.
That is to say, it’s Memorial Day, we’re going to go see Mel Gibson in “The Patriot”, wherein any of the main characters could die at any time, and Nintendo has managed to get all of the kids into the minivan with just one no-popcorn warning.
In the end, what’s there to spoil? I’m sure someone could send me a long, psychotic email peppered with subtle allusions to child abuse, and by the end of that email, I’d know one person’s opinion, though I sure as hell wouldn’t understand it. What we have here is a videogame with a time- and sales-proven conceptual play hook, populated by characters that the player has already seen, or else he just plain isn’t interested. If the player has already seen all the characters, what’s to spoil? Well, for one thing, the way these characters, from classic 2D games, are represented in brilliant 3D, and the reason they appear in the “story”.
The “story” mode begins with Mario fighting Kirby in a giant arena that’s floating in space. The player chooses to play as either Mario or Kirby. If you choose Mario, when you win, you’ll see a cut-scene in which Mario punches Kirby so hard he turns into . . . an action figure of Kirby. Mario then walks up and touches the Kirby action figure, which turns back into Kirby. Mario pats Kirby on the back, and the two salute the wildly cheering crowds.
Then sinister stuff starts happening. A giant airship (owned by MetaKnight from the Kirby series, of course) shows up, et cetera et cetera, eventually we’ve got a running adventure in which Nintendo characters interact with one another with no dialogue (spoken or text), fighting for the vaguely defined “good guys” against hordes of “bad guys”; whenever a bad guy (Wario, Bowser, Ganondorf) shows up in a cut-scene, they’re equipped with a big sci-fi gun which, when fired, turns any Nintendo character into an action figure. Someone is trying to collect all of the Nintendo action figures! Who the flaming heck is it? If you want to know the answer, turn to the last page, and then buy the game.
Three, four, five, six times in the game, there’s a scene where a Big Bad Guy fires a gun at a Helpless Nintendo Character, and a Big Strong Nintendo Character jumps in the way of the beam, is turned into a toy, and is carted off. In all of those occasions, the Helpless Nintendo Character is, less than two seconds later, greeted by a Big-Brother-Like character. Fox McCloud comes down to help Diddy Kong after Donkey Kong is carted off by Wario, for example. (If you consider this a spoiler and are actually angry right now, please don’t visit this website anymore.)
The reason the characters are turning into action figures is simple: because the theme of the first Smash Bros. game was that all of the characters were action figures, and the player was just a kid playing with these action figures. Only the Kingdom Hearts II scenario-writer could say, “What if the action figures in Super Smash Bros. were real?” and then answer the follow-up question (“. . . you’re not hecking serious, are you?”) with “. . . Why wouldn’t I be serious?”
Yes. This is how game scenarios go when you’ve hired the guy who wrote Kingdom Hearts II.
As I slogged through the single-player experience, I looked on the bright side of things more than several times, going so far as to hope that the person collecting all the Nintendo action figures was a fifty-foot tall pimple-faced mama’s boy. Eventually, as story point after story point cascaded down the pipe, as I started to get tired of control quirks (like how hard your character snap-grabs a ledge over and over again when you’re trying to drop down), my optimism and patience wore to nanomachine thinness.
To be fair, Super Smash Bros. isn’t a platform game; it’s a fighting game that is occasionally a hit at parties. Still, that the team felt it crucial to include a twelve-hour-long mode consisting of side-scrolling stages interrupted by the only computer-animated cut-scenes in the game is proof that a lot of work went into this. Which is a shame, because all this mode really does is highlight just how dull the game’s core engine is. Why can’t it control just like Super Mario Bros. 3? Some of these level designs are okay, I guess, though when they start breaking out the Super Princess Peach-like “puzzles” (giving you a key literally two feet in front of a door), the air all around you may or may not become polluted with groans.
Some of the battles are satisfying, I suppose; the little animation when you kill an opponent in the deathmatch mode is fine-tuned to be satisfying, to be your motivation to kill more opponents — as used in single-player mode every time you kill anything, it provides a weird crunchy pace that is, at the very least, a lot better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game or its sequels. Back in the heyday of the multi-player money-sucking beat-em-up, games like The Simpsons or X-men The Arcade Game were brainless, ultimately metaphysically unsatisfying exercises that ended when the pizza arrived at the table. Those games just bled perfectly into the pizza-eating experience. Now, with Smash Bros. X, we have a game where the most satisfying elements feel like breaking the world brick-stuffting land-speed record. I’m not even messing with you here: about an hour into the “story” mode, (the timing of the previous night’s dinner might have had something to do with this), I nonchalantly paused the game, went to the toilet, and shat so hard I must have seen a ghost. Just as the eternally iron-pumping black man I sometimes call my “inner monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Mother hecker!” Smash Bros. X was beyond the point of making perfect sense.
It was from that point on that I avoided playing the story mode with a second player; with such a random slog, when something satisfying somehow juts in, it becomes hard for either one of you to take credit. Credit — knowing who killed who — is everything in Smash Bros. X, and somehow having two players in the single-player mode somehow makes staying alive feel as cheap and dirty as dying repeatedly and credit-feeding Golden Axe. That stuff just isn’t funny.
Well, at least it isn’t “Tekken Force” mode from Tekken 3.
Eventually, the game got pretentious, portentous, and actually kind of rude. There are moments in the run up to the last stage (a hilariously giant Castlevania-like “exploration” maze) where the cut-scenes stop being funny and start feeling vaguely like what pornography must look like in the ecology-drenched world inhabited by the “Captain Planet” kids.
There’s a moment close to the very, very end that turns this game with sudden fierceness into The Anti-Literature. A tear literally escaped my body at the point, though it actually came out my nose, and not my eye (had a car accident as a kid), so I’m still not gay. Faced with a terrifyingly bland, Final Fantasy-like final boss, the Single Greatest and Worst Moment in Videogame History happens. If you’re like me and you always play videogames with one of those sofa-side TV trays hovering over your lap, for God’s sake, if you don’t want tomato soup on the ceiling, exercise caution when approaching the final boss of this game.
I’m actually kind of serious when I say that, if the clusterhecking nonsense of the story mode — headgear-wearing &^#$# cutscenes, twelve hours of sloggy gameplay and all — existed only to increase the hideous size of that exclamation point right before the final boss, then I take back everything I said, and champion this game as worthy of Andy Warhol.
I’m more or less positive, however, that it was all just an accident.
And then, it’s over. The game doesn’t need to put an ending in after what just happened; all we get is a wide-angle shot of all of the playable characters standing on a cliff, facing an orange sunset, the camera zooming back, as an orchestra, live via a cellular phone with really clear reception, belts out a terrifically banal, Final Fantasy-like “credits theme”. There’s a choir, singing in German, or Latin, or one of those languages spoken only by people no one likes, and every once in a while, the screen fades to black to show us title cards informing us of the deep and invigorating (warning: exact opposites used for hyperbole effect) meaning of the words being sung: “He was my friend! He helped me out when I needed help! He was great! He was my hero! And then we stood there, together!”
Remember that scene in Final Fantasy VIII, where the main characters went up into space and were suddenly like “LOL, we’re in space”? And though the game graphics were still jaggy polygons, and though the dialog still existed in boxes, suddenly a real song started playing, with the fruitiest lyrics, and being sung by a girl? Most human beings, if they were living in a college dormitory the first and last time they played that game, got up and did the “rape-prevention” deadbolt. With the ending of Smash Bros. X, a deadbolt doesn’t feel like enough. The feeling that your mother walked into your room (impossibly, because you are now an adult who has his own house and your mother is dead) to find you masturbating with an exuberant grin while staring at a tray of paperclips will not slide off your epidermis until you’ve taken at least six showers.
Of course, this music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, no doubt submitted to Nintendo in the form of bleeping, blooping humming during a wicked Skype-powered conference call. The secretary took dictation, drawing a doodle of Hello Kitty with a tear on her cheek and a battle-axe on her shoulder, and twenty-five minutes later, we had us a videogame.
I don’t want to be rude — okay, maybe I do, just a little bit. Though yeah, some of this music is pretty bad. A lot of composers just fetishistically recreate the tracks with as much deadly realism as possible: The usually quite gifted (Wild Arms composer) Michiko Naruke turns in a shrill, ear-grating, fanboy-stroking, Nintendo-64-quality medley of the tinny and obnoxious little ocarina songs from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, set to gurgling little clumps of boring percussion. There’s not a single smile-cracker in the game aside from, bizarrely, (Lunar, Grandia, Radiata Stories composer) Noriyuki Iwadare and (Dawn of Mana, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song composer) Kenji Ito’s exceptional, chunky-bass Fire Emblem tracks. I guess that’s because no single piece of Fire Emblem music is as iconic as, say, the Super Mario Bros. theme. Mr. Ito, who is the official torch-bearer for videogame composers as far as Action Button Dot Net is concerned, otherwise flails and cowers behind the sofa in fear of the slaps of gamers with tracks like “Space Armada” from Star Fox. Most of the time, everything is so by-the-book that the only way to even pretend to like this stuff is to already love it.
(Mr. Masafumi Takada (Godhand, No More Heroes, killer7) is disqualified from these discussions, for blatantly breaking Nintendo’s “whatever you do, don’t make something awesome” rule.)
Why would you call in a super-team of composers if you don’t want them to make music that reflects their personal style? It’s a little bit puzzling. Seeing as this game makes even Yuzo “Jesus” Koshiro sound like vanilla ice cream at best and potato chips at worst, I’m going to have to stand firm in my belief that all of the composers involved were doing their best to approximate what every other composer was going to sound like, and not succeeding. At worst, the music sounds like the background for a never-ending reel of eight-millimeter footage of ritualistically defecating Teletubbies; at best, the music sounds like something far too good for the ugly, noisy cacophony of cackles, heckles, squeals, screams, bonks, donks, honks, splatters, laser blasts, snuggles, snuffles, smacks, whacks, thwacks, snorks, and hee-hees of the on-screen cartoon orgy. Just as the sound of a circus strongman with a handlebar mustache tearing a wet cabbage in half with his bare hands punctuates a lovingly crafted piece of electronic music, a gong sounds, somewhere high in the sky: here we are, and we are finally old enough to have something worth being ashamed of.
Also, if this game’s Metal Gear Solid stage is any indication, the “Love Theme From Metal Gear Solid 4” is an almost direct rip-off of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” theme, which, as a person who once touched a violin on accident, is a downright awful piece of classical music.
In the end, Smash Bros. X is what it is. It’s a random, carnival-like brawling “experience” that is probably going to be pretty fun at parties if everyone has played and attained a fair degree of skill at various old 2D side-scrolling action games. It’s just — nope! — not quite enough for me. (Disclaimer: “Me” is a person who enjoys videogames and other forms of entertainment.)
For years, I’ve been telling people I wanted a big-scale “fighting” game that played exactly like the Castlevania games on the Gameboy Advance (or DS, I guess): I wanted snappy controls, I wanted quick fighting, I wanted real, human opponents. More than a dozen times, some jackass snapped his fingers and then pointed directly at my nose and declared “Smash Bros., dude!” I wish I remembered all of those guys’ names because I would tell each and every one of them, personally, to heck themselves. Instead, I’m going to use this paragraph to voice my concern about the game’s control scheme. Namely, the only way you’re going to be able to use a D-pad to move your character is if you play the game with just the Wiimote, which means that you have to press the A button with the side of your thumb and the hook-like pseudo-trigger B button with your middle finger to do a hard attack. Not too keen on that, thanks! I would rather use the Classic Controller’s brilliant D-pad (which I believe is the best D-pad of all time (I’ve verified this by playing through Landstalker with it)) to control my character. You can’t do this, however; though the game’s official website is smug enough to brag about the various controller-configuring menus, saying “We’ve thought of everything!” they actually haven’t thought of everything, because everything would mean I could use the D-pad to move.
Some people might say that the game doesn’t let you control movement with the D-pad because the analog stick is an integral part of the game design: you have to tap the analog stick hard in a specific direction as you press an attack button. I say that Virtua Fighter does a damn good job of having “short tap” and “long tap” special moves with just a digital joystick, and the execution time of said moves never feels longer than instantaneous. I want to double-tap that delicious, apple-pie-like, deep d-pad to run; I want to long-tap and short-tap to do smash attacks. My friends in the “Videogame Industry” tell me this is impossible in a game like Smash Bros. X, which is already taking huge risks and breaking tons of Nintendo’s internal rules (one of those rules being that a Nintendo-made game should neither have nor need a controller-input option menu), and that we should be glad we got as much as we did get, and that we should be doubly glad that this was all done in the interest of inviting The Casual Gamer to participate in the heated, old-school brawling action. Whatever. The default setting of the Classic Controller’s D-pad is left and right for “horizontal taunt”, up for “upward taunt”, and down for “downward taunt”. If Nintendo’s idea of inviting casual gamers into a hardcore game involves letting them do something useless in multiple directions, then I’d hate to see how they’re going to get hardcore gamers playing casual games, when that time comes. Are they going to invent overly complicated, customizable control schemes for a VCR-programming mini-game in Animal Crossing, where the A button operates the right index finger? On the other hand, a videogame that lets me customize my controls (thankfully, yes, I could make jumping button-activated and cancel the “up = jump” input) obviously assumes I know a thing or two about games, so why the stuff does it constantly put a little indicator over the character I’m controlling, even in the single-player mode — and only if I’m using a customized control scheme? I mean, why not put a “1P” indicator above someone who’s too dumb to make their own custom control scheme? It’s weird, and thinking about it actually kind of makes me lonely, like that screen on MySpace.com that keeps telling me “You must be someone’s friend to make comments about them”. Oh.
Seriously, not a single person whose hands I’ve plopped a Classic Controller into has not, immediately at the start of a match, pressed the D-pad to try to move, and instead initiated one taunt after another, after another, after another. I don’t know, though; maybe they were just really cocky professional players.
Also, for the record, I’ve never completed an actual match of Smash Bros. X online. Most of my opponents either drop out during the 60-second waiting period before matches start. Sometimes matches do indeed start, during which there’s no chat, of course, under the Friend Code Regime, so all players can do to communicate their sexual preferences or racial hate to opponents is name themselves CAUCASIAN PENIS and then stand there and not attack, demonstrating that their username is what they want to take; and the preset chat messages are ham-handed Japanese Uncle Jokes like “I think I dropped Ten Yen” (yeah, I’ll drop ten yen . . . in your ass (high five!)). During these matches, usually, people drop out due to lag, which is so bad that actually fighting is like trying to recommend a very long novel to a person in a train speeding outside and far beneath your bedroom window.
After attempting to play Super Mario Bros. 3 using the Classic Controller’s left analog stick instead of the glorious D-pad, I was absolutely shocked at how deliciously sensitive it is for 2D games. Going back to play Smash Bros. was kind of exasperating and floaty after that. All of the little weird things started popping out — like, the core mechanic of the game is that every time you hit someone their meter goes up, right? If it’s higher than 100%, then they’ll fly off the edge of the stage when hit with a strong attack. As they’re flying off, they can use a lovingly fetishistic mid-air jump plus a crispily implemented upward-thrusting special attack to grab on to the edge of the stage and get back in the game. This works really well, on the stages comprised of floating islands. The game goes ahead and vomits on its own gimmick’s shoes, though, with the multiple stages wherein the “edge” is just an edge of the screen. All it takes to die on these stages is to be knocked off, and out of sight. All of the friends I’ve played this game with have just shrugged and said “That’s how it was in some of the stages of Super Smash Bros. Melee, dude!” Oh? I suppose, in Nintendo’s case, that makes it alright to just do over and over again. Oh, well. Sometimes, though, you’ll be playing the game, and I swear that your damage meter will be at less than 80%, and some bastard like Ice Climber Kid will come up and whomp you with a hammer and you’ll just fly out into the background and “die”. What the hell is up with that? After a certain amount of single-player practice, I was getting to like the regular rules — try to get someone to fall off the edge, line up a brilliant smash attack to hit them just after they do their save move and before they touch the ground (so as to leave them helplessly flying, since they can only do the save once per flight). And then I start playing against people, and I’m on an FPS-worthy Killing Spree, and I’m barely getting touched, and then the game just throws me off into the distance after a random hit. What the hell is up with that? It’s like the inverse of Mario Party, where any player without any stars at the end of the game gets a star for achieving the worthwhile task of not getting any stars. It’s tacky and weird, and in a “hardcore” action game like this, it feels vaguely like Snickers suddenly announcing that their wrappers have always been edible — and delicious!
The high point of this game for me was, of course, being able to play as Sonic the Hedgehog, who I loved for his sharpness as a child and hated for his looseness as a man-child. In an age where every new game from Sonic Team controls like a stick of butter held vertical on a hot frying pan, Smash Bros. X emerges by default as the Best Game Starring Sonic the Hedgehog Since the Mega Drive Days. When I play as him, I’m so used to seeing him slide around helplessly in some of the most poorly-designed videogame stages of all time that I forget all my complaints about the controls and game design and allow myself to enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog not sucking.
I guess, by then, the game has its claws deep into my muscle fibers; I’m fantasizing, occasionally, about crafting custom stages for Sonic to play around in, and then sharing them with my friends. All the while, I wish that I could make my own characters, too. The recent-Smash Bros.-like Jump Superstars proved that Jump manga characters actually are cooler-looking than Nintendo characters. It’s enough to make you wonder.
It’s said that Katamari Damacy was originally plotted out with just spheres and cubes — roll this sphere around, sticking cubes and spheres to it, and it gets bigger. The personality of the game came afterward, and it kind of shows. I don’t even mean any offense by that: Katamari Damacy is a game of spectacularly skillful design. It’s fun, it’s amazingly well-conceived and executed, and the graphic design choices go above and beyond the call of duty to actually wedge some catharsis into the whole ordeal. The thing is, I’ve jerked myself into such a tizzy over Sonic the Hedgehog that it’s now very difficult for me to separate the concept of Smash Bros. from the execution. Did Hal Laboratory get an idea for an inverse fighting game (small characters and big stages instead of big characters and small stages) with a clever little play hook (knock the players off the edge, keep them from getting back up), or did Nintendo ask them to make a party-action game starring Nintendo characters, and this was the first thing they came up with? (1)
Would this game be worth any time at all with characters I didn’t recognize? Is this game just another Mario Golf, pulling Mario-addicted gamers to a completely different genre? From a Mario Golf perspective, it’s a hell of a success, though as the videogame for the Nintendo Wii that’s sold a million copies in the shortest amount of time — and, fatalistically, without even using any of the Wii’s selling points — it’s kind of embarrassing. Where the previous game let you discover figurines of characters during solo play, this game’s “big innovation” as regards the “collection” gimmick is to let the player also discover stickers, which they can then freely — and in 3D! — place on the figures they’ve collected via the museum mode. That Super Smash Bros. Brawl inspires people to do this sort of thing is a resounding testament to the fact that it might, perhaps, not be a terrible videogame. On paper, however, these things look scary, as though “videogames made me do it” is becoming as equally viable a defense for kleptomania as for multiple homicide. I mean, it’s got a Nintendogs . . . thing in it, wherein a polygonal puppy bounds up and paws at the screen. The thing is, the puppies in Nintendogs are crude computer-animated compromises for actual puppies; they’re not “Nintendo characters” per se. Putting them on a more mechanically capable machine than the Nintendo DS doesn’t make you exclaim, “Yay! A Puppy!” so much as it makes you scratch your head, identify subliminally that it’s a reference to Nintendogs, which is, yes, a videogame compromise for people who want a puppy and are just too lazy to get a puppy, and wonder why they didn’t just film an actual puppy, and then realize that if they did film an actual puppy, it would basically shatter the game’s vibe.
Or would it? The question you have to ask, at the end, is one of integrity: is there anything that can shatter this game’s vibe? Really? It might just be crafted from the ground up in the interest of all-encompassing immunity. We’ve already got a realistic human Solid Snake brandishing a realistic rocket launcher or sniper rifle against ultra-unrealistic humans like Ness from Mother 2, armed with a baseball bat, and a cartoon dinosaur named Yoshi, on a stage based on the Nintendo DS Picto-Chat application, where an unseen hand draws scratchy, sketchy lines that function as platforms. As a person who recently finished watching the entire series of “The Sopranos” and was amazed by the craft and sheer artistry of the finale, I feel vaguely insulted even thinking about how, in a world where BioShock (a game I, for the record, don’t even really like) exists, this tittering sack of fetish fragments called Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the game that just about everyone else who tangentially shares this hobby is looking forward to above anything else. God help us all when the walls start caving in.
(*Note: The score of this game, which is “two stars (out of four)” has been decided with much scientific thought. The rampant and somewhat embarrassing Nintendo fetishism discussed at forensic lengths in this review is responsible for the game being docked six stars, bringing it to a negative two stars (out of four) on our scale; the fact that I have played this game for several hours every day since its release with a gaggle of dudes who just don’t give a heck about Luigi’s canonical significance, and I have not yet gotten bored of it, adds four stars to the score, bringing it up to a positive two stars (out of four). So there you have it.)
–tim rogers
1) My good friend Theodore Troops has pointed me to this article, which answers the chicken-egg question of Smash Bros.’ origin. It seems like they did have a concept before they shoehorned in the Nintendo characters. Not wholly unbelievable at all!
2) Also, if you’re going to comment saying that I should try playing this game “as a fighting game” — well, I really don’t know why I didn’t mention that aspect! I guess it slipped my mind. I’ve been playing it with my “co-workers” in the Action Button Dot Net Laboratories for about an hour a day for three weeks now, and the fact that I haven’t quit playing it yet is the whole reason the game gets two stars. I swear, with a control scheme tailor-made to my needs (basically, I need it to feel just like Super Mario Bros. 3), this game would literally be a fourteen out of ten on the Action Button Dot Net zero- to four-star scale. Fetishism and all. Make of that what you will.
(*readers with a keen eye will notice that our rating system, which judges games on a scale of zero stars to four, with half-stars in between, can actually be interpreted to mean we’re rating games on a scale of one to nine. we leave the “ten” off so that only games branded “game of the year” will be regarded as “tens”. also, we leave the ten off so that two stars (5 out of 9) is the dead center of our scale, with as many ranking notches above it as below it. just to kind of stupidify what i just said (and to partly deflect hate mail), i’m going to paste this review into another review in about five minutes, and give it a four-star rating, add a different final sentence, and maybe cut a couple parts out or change a couple phrasings. make of that what you will. don’t worry, though: this is the real review.)
2008
text by tim rogers
★★★★
I hope you guys had fun reading this website, because I’m probably not going to bother writing on it anymore!
The reason would be Treasure’s Bangai-O Spirits, a game so perfect and so deep that when it comes right down to the wire, I’d probably rather be sealed in a sensory deprivation tank playing it against my best friend for millenia than working, vacationing in the Bahamas, or even having pseudo-violent sex. That’s the sign of a good game, right there — if you’d willingly give up an opportunity to let a girl live out her fantasy to rape a man just so that you could deflect projectiles for a couple more hours. I get this feeling, playing this game — if I keep deflecting projectiles, eventually I’ll be so good at deflecting projectiles that I won’t even need to close my eyes or tense my knees to ejaculate. I will simply be. I will flow.
Maybe that’s not enough for the videogame company PR dudes who troll this website (hi dad!), so let’s put it into more back-of-boxy language:
Bangai-oh Spirits is “Brain Training” for God. He spake unto the earth: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last, the Street Fighter II and the Street Fighter III, the Sin and Punishment and the Ikaruga, the carbon dioxide and the oxygen, the Bangai-oh Spirits for the Nintendo DS.”
This isn’t just the best game Treasure has ever made — hell, it isn’t even just the best game they can make, it’s a 210-gun salute to the head of the pathology they’ve waved proudly for the last decade and a half of their illustrious careers designing quirky little games that only morbidly obese people like myself seem capable of enjoying. It’s them dropping all their cards — five aces, including the elusive Golden Ace of Knives — on the table and putting a pistol in their mouth and saying heck you, I will pull this trigger, I swear I will.
This is hardly hyperbole.
Bangai-O Spirits is a puzzle game, a shooting game, a fighting game, an MMORPG. It is Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter III at the same time. In this age of Everyday Shooter and dozens of other one-man games that let you use two analog sticks to move and shoot at the same time, Treasure steps in with an update to their own Robotron riff, and they manage to outclass literally everyone, even without the multidirectional shooting gimmick.
What’s so good about the game? It’s kind of hard to put it in a few words, so we’ll have to break with tradition and actually discuss the way the game plays — not yet, though, don’t worry. I know, you wish I’d just keep talking about my penis for the duration of the review, though hey, sometimes we humans have to endure boring stuff.
The tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits is pretty boring. However, unlike an actual school, the long-winded tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits teaches you how to be objectively awesome. Each tutorial stage opens with a dialogue between three characters — a commander with an eyepatch, a young girl with large breasts, and a too-cool youth in a hip military uniform. In addition to teaching you how to use weapons, the commander also manages to enrage the cool youth: as the tutorials get more complicated and wordy, toward the end, the kid literally says that he didn’t realize he signed up for “an actual robot anime” — he just thought the robot and the anime characters on the box were there to draw in anime fans. The professor then gets defensive, insinuating that the end of Evangelion was “the best part”. Not making this up! When you beat the tutorial, the commander says, “We’ve defeated the Tutorial Army!” And the kid says, “That was fast. If we sell this game back now, do you think we can get at least 3,500 yen for it?”
Bangai-O Spirits: It burns!
The professor — and the girl — are quick to point out that the game has over 160 stages in the “Free play” mode, and that you can edit your own stages and play multiplayer, if you want. The kid shrugs this off, says that “stage-editing is for losers”.
And just like that — you’ll never see those three anime stereotypes again.
This is refreshing, when you consider that Treasure games have always had problems expressing story and character. Dynamite Headdy, their attempt to break into the mainstream with a “mascot” character, was a huge jumbled cluster of near-impossible challenges; it requires some degree of arcane voodoo magic to even get past the tutorial in that game, and it requires nerves of steel to like any of the bizarre characters. The music is Chinese water-torture. (The game itself is pretty alright.)
Treasure has gone through the weirdest phases of wanting to be popular and not giving a heck. Gunstar Heroes was an attempt to capitalize on a perceived opening in the action game market for people who didn’t like the look of Contra. It was apparently conceived as a kind of Sonic the Hedgehog with guns and fighting-game inspired close-quarters combat. Gunstar Heroes thrives whenever it’s not trying to tell a story, or be otherwise interesting. Each stage plays differently from the last, with a short shoot-em-up runup to the gimmick segments or boss parade: the Dice Palace stage, cited as the “best stage ever!” by game “journalists” with maybe a quarter-piece of their cranium missing, is all at once Treasure’s fragmentary genius and infuriating shortcomings rolled into one. It’s a line of pleasant little challenges — one-offs involving their pristine game engine — interrupted by an absolutely lazy hub where you roll a dice to move through a “board game” that’s just a straight line.
Gunstar Heroes begins to shine in stage five, which is titled “DESTROY THEM ALL” — contrary to what the lobotomites writing top-hundred lists will tell you, “DESTROY THEM ALL” is the “best stage ever”: all semblance of “level design” falls away, in the best way possible, and it’s just you, an entire enemy army, and occasional platforms. Flying enemies drop bombs, you jump up, grab them out of the air, and chuck them at towering robot walkers. Grunts run full-steam at you, and if you see an opening, you grab one and use him as a projectile, too. You do this over and over again for ten minutes, and the word “ENJOY” never vanishes from the stock-market ticker running across the bottom of your brain.
Why can’t Gunstar Heroes just be six straight hours of this? Why can’t it just never end? Let the computer just keep crunching the numbers and stuffting out bad guys — the more I kill, the more the computer stuffs. Zen Masters will tell you that there has to be balance, that without low points, high points wouldn’t feel as special, shadow lends context to light, et cetera, though really, Pac-Man Championship Edition is non-stop fun, and anyone who complains because there aren’t any NPCs to talk to is probably also a chimpanzee.
At any rate, Gunstar Heroes was something of a failure in Japan because
1. Most people on earth literally can’t read
2. It was on the MegaDrive, which was essentially the Xbox of its day.
Back then, people who owned MegaDrives in Japan were called “MegaDrivers”, just as the first wave of Xbox players called themselves “Xboxers”. Dynamite Headdy was Treasure’s idea of appealing to a broader audience — at least, in theory — and when the three-year-olds of the world found out that the instruction manual contained more words than “Happy” and “Fun”, it all went south.
Thus spake Alien Soldier, a schizophrenic, shattered velvet bag of demonic battle fragments. The full title of Alien Solider is, and I quote, “VISUAL SHOCK! SOUND SHOCK! NOW IS THE TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE ALIEN SOLDER FOR MEGADRIVERS CUSTOM“. In other words, they’re weren’t lying to themselves — or anyone, really. Alien Soldier‘s title screen contains perhaps the longest story crawl of the 16-bit era, and no amount of resetting the console will make it any less ridiculous. Watching the superplays embedded on the Sega Ages compilation disc are like attending a waterski wedding on the surface of the sun. The game’s arcane mechanics are a Treasure staple: encouraging the player to play in the most ridiculous, unattractive way possible. To wit: the strongest attack at your disposal isn’t the flaming, screen-spanning dash that you can only perform with full health (and even then, only once) — it’s the pixels-wide flames that erupt from your character’s back as he’s doing said dash. Playing the game to completion is equal to breaking it — finding the pixels that work, freezing there, and TKO’ing every opponent in the first instant of the fight.
Eventually, Treasure tried to make money, and mostly failed, because they thought a game needed a “story” to be a phenomenal hit, and the story in the relatively high-budget Sin and Punishment was so loopy and bizarre that you can’t overlook it; to say it was written on acid or after smoking much reefer is a criminal overstatment. It’s more like something written in one day by a man with really bad indigestion cascading into diarrhea. For its mechanics, it’s easily one of the best games of all-time, and though the cut-scenes are fiercely skippable, the very fact that it has a story (and that its music sounds like pornography for librarians) keeps it out of the specialest place in my heart. It also — and this is pure conjecture — kept the game from being released outside Japan, even though it was written entirely in English and intended primarily for US release.
All throughout the years, as Treasure floundered with the weirdest cartoon licenses (Tiny Toon Adventures, for god’s sake), I wished they’d just make a full-on fighting game with Gunstar Heroes mechanics. They kind of almost did that with Yuyu Hakusho for MegaDrive, and later Guardian Heroes for Saturn — and most recently two Bleach-based fighting games on the Nintendo DS — though the games always felt too focused on “personality” and “selling points”. And they never set the world on fire.
Treasure’s Ikaruga, which resulted seemingly from a sudden desire to make the cleanest, simplest shooting game of all time as a kind of counterpoint to their Radiant Silvergun, the clusterheckiest shooter ever conceived, ironically, was perhaps their most internationally acclaimed game; maybe this has had something to do with Treasure’s recent game design roll-backs.
Bangai-Oh! for Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64, has always been my favorite Treasure game, not so much for its “hilarious quirky dialogue” as for its crunchy shooting action. There’s very little fat in the game, and it’s quite an accomplishment that Bangai-O Spirits is even leaner.
ACTUALLY DISCUSSING THE GAME NOW
I’m not even going to bother discussing how this game differs from Bangai-Oh, because it doesn’t matter: Bangai-Oh hardly exists anymore. Instead, I’m going to try to explain to you why you should buy this game, and not something like, I don’t know, Super Smash Bros..
In Bangai-O Spirits, you control a giant robot — which happens to be only the size of one “block” of the playing field. I believe this was the core concept of the original game — control a cursor-sized player character that looks like a giant robot.
Your goal in this game is to destroy various targets in stages. A rough map of the stage, with the required targets highlighted, takes up the top screen. You move around on the lower screen.
You have five general kinds of attacks. Before each mission, you’re free to select which weapons you want to use.
Press the Y button to use one basic weapon, and the B button to use another one.
Press the A button to dash in the direction you’re facing. Press any direction while dashing to change direction.
Press the L button or the R button to use one of two “EX Attacks”. Hold the button to charge the EX attack, and release to unleash it. The more enemy bullets in your general area when you release the trigger, the fiercer the attack you’ll unleash. If you let go of the button just as a bullet is hitting you, the missiles emanating from your body will even increase in size.
There are seven types of basic weapons. None of them are “better” than any other. Each has a definite strength and a definite weakness. All bullets are capable of canceling out other bullets, meaning that “the best defense is a good offense” and “the best offense is a good defense” are more than just something karate teachers tell kids.
I will explain the weapon classes briefly:
1. Bound laser: Laser-like missiles that reflect off walls at 45-degree angles. Pros: Can be used to access unsuspecting enemies in tight spots. Cons: Very average strength.
2. Homing missiles: Missiles that chase enemies. Pros: will hunt enemies down for several seconds; no need to even aim, most of the time. Cons: Even weaker than the bound shot; sub-par mid-air turning radius.
3. Break shot: Special shots capable of canceling two enemy bullets instead of one. Pros: can be used to cut through an enemy’s bullet curtain. Cons: even weaker than homing shot.
4. Napalm shot: Super-powerful shot. Pros: relatively twice the power of a bound shot. Cons: very easily canceled — normal bound / homing shots can eat through two napalm shots before being canceled themselves; break shots can eat four napalm shots.
5. Sword: It’s a sword. Pros: ultra-powerful, ultra fast. Cons: ultra-short-range. Hard to move forward and close in while attacking.
6. Shield: It’s a shield. Position it by tapping a direction and pressing the attack button. Pros: eats any and all bullets endlessly. Stays in the direction where you put it. “Movable cover”, essentially. Doesn’t fade even when you fire your other weapon. Cons: kind of hard to get used to! (Though in a Treasure game, “Kind of hard to get used to” is often used to describe The One Thing The Game Designer Wants You To Do All The Time.)
7. Bat: A giant baseball bat. Pros: can deflect any projectiles back at the enemy. Can deflect dozens of projectiles at a time, even. Can even turn enemies into projectiles. Can also be used to hit physics objects (conveniently shaped like soccer balls, baseballs, basketballs). Cons: Kind of slow. Not much attack power on its own.
Some of these weapons can even be combined in Radiant Silvergun style — homing and bound, for example — by pressing both buttons at once.
Your default attack mode is “free” — you can move while shooting — and your robot can fly all around the stage, with delicious crispy coasting physics. However, should you tap an attack button twice and then hold it the second time, your character will enter “fixed” mode, and you’ll stop anywhere (even in mid-air) and be free to aim in any direction. Useful in so many ways.
Now I’ll explain the EX attacks. Man, I’m like IGN over here:
1. Homing: Fires a multitude of homing shots. Good for: wide-open spaces with lots of enemies.
2. Bound: Fires a multitude of bound shots. Good for: twisty tunnels and lots of projectiles.
3. Break: Fires a multitude of break shots. Good for: lots of bullets, feeling tricky.
4. Napalm: Fires a multitude of napalm shots. Good for: feeling lucky.
5. Freeze: Freezes enemy bullets in the air. The “Treasure Factor”. Good for: super-playing and “puzzle”-solving. The longer you hold the button, the longer the bullets freeze.
6. Reflect: Works like a bat, except in all directions all at once. Good for: people who know what the hell they’re doing.
All EX attacks (except Freeze) can be “focused” in a direction of your choosing. In the previous Bangai-Oh game, you could only blast the bullets in a circle around your character’s body. In Spirits, you can press a directional button in one of eight ways while charging your attack, and then release the button to unleash the attack in only that direction.
And that’s it. That’s the game’s engine. The instruction manual doesn’t even describe the weapons — it just tells you to play the tutorial and find out for yourself. It knows that if you’re holding that instruction manual, you’re a Treasure-gaming freak who doesn’t read manuals anyway.
The tutorial contains the game’s only instances of “Story”. Its little lessons cascade into something huge, and the last stage is a frustrating, amazing, idiotic feat of level design with an infuriating execution and an exhilirating climax. Once you get past it, you’re free — as you’ve always been — to play the “Free Play” mode, which has, yes, well over a hundred and four tens of stages. You can play the stages in any order. You don’t even have to clear one stage to move on to the next. The interface is DOS-like in its cleanliness. Press the right directional button to advance forward one stage. If you’ve cleared the stage, your best time and top score will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you want to play a stage, press the A button. Now you have the DOS-like weapon-select screen. Choose your arsenal and play the stage. If you die, sucks to be you. Choose “exit” to go back to the stage-select menu. Try different weapons.
Many stages are beatable with any weapon selection; few absolutely require use of the bat to obtain the “easy” solutions. Many stages feature hang-ups that force you to open the menu and restart. Some stages feature extended side-scrolls climaxing in epic one-on-five battles with steel-trap-minded opponents of equal abilities. Some stages are massive labyrinths with multiple targets and pursuing grunts. Some stages are vertical scrolls that force you to avoid cascading unbreakable blocks while breaking the correct breakable blocks in order to reach the target. Other stages begin with the player surrounded at point-blank range by four giant honkin’ beam cannons; the 3-2-1 countdown to the start of the stage is basically a countdown to the trigger being pulled. You have literally half of one second to figure out how to win.
All of the praises heaped on Wario Ware instead belong to this game; the yokels of the world jump on Wario for featuring Nintendo Characters, who are virtually like game journalists’ “childhood friends”, only better, because they actually exist. Wario Ware has “amazing” stages that begin with a screen of The Legend of Zelda — there’s Link, and there’s a cave in a wall. When the game starts, you have five seconds to get into the cave. Get in, and the game pats you on the head and moves to another challenge. Sure, there are some nice things to say for the vision of Wario Ware, though at the end of the day, it doesn’t make the player feel spiritually complete, much less any smarter: there’s something to be said for the game’s glee in forcing the player to sharpen his mind to a point where he can acknowledge in a microsecond what he’s supposed to do, though the game ultimately fails in the eyes of god (and me) for never telling the player why. Bangai-O Spirits is about a son-of-a-bitching giant robot with fantastic weapons; your character is a soldier fighting the bad guys. You have to survive so that you can fight again. The only way to survive is to DESTROY THEM ALL.
Sometimes it’s a puzzle game, sometimes it’s a platformer. Sometimes it’s a hardcore bullet-hell shooter. Sometimes it’s a fighting game meant to be played by robots with laser-eyes. It is Every Genre. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter what it is, because it’s Bangai-O. It’s mind-expanding. It’s a diamond-sharp core engine joyfully level-designed gang-bang-style by a team of dudes who have been putting the “crunch” in “scrunch” for over a decade now. On the one hand, they don’t give a stuff what order you play the levels in. On the other hand, they need you to play this game every day for the rest of your life. For this purpose, they have created a level-edit mode.
The level-edit mode is more than just level-design — it’s a shockingly deep elementary course in game design. I described the weapons above, right? If you have any imagination at all, your mind should be teeming with possibilities. Make a puzzle stage, make a rock-hard traditional-style platform stage. If you’ve got a crush on the “Reflect” EX attack, make a stage that puts a new spin on it. The game is saintly in its generosity. Like I said above, Treasure aren’t just shooting themselves in the foot with this game — they’re shooting themselves in the throat. If you be a man who loves hardcore action games, you don’t need anything else.
The platinum icing on this golden cake, however, is the multiplayer mode. I spent six minutes throwing together a long rectangular stage with soccer balls and two evil enemy Bangai-O clones in it, and then played a deathmatch with a friend. We used bats and EX reflect, and just had a screaming orgy, squealing like distorted schoolchildren for literally 25 rounds in a row. Remember when you were ten, and you played River City Ransom with your buddy, and you stood on a garbage can and your buddy kicked the garbage can, which made you slide toward the edge of the screen, so you jumped and kicked a guy in the head? Then, years later, remember when you first played Halo co-op, and your friend got in the driver’s seat of the Warthog and you got on the turret, and you guys drove around hecking stuff up? Well, even in this day and age where four friends can get on Xbox Live and play Halo 3 transcontinentally, with one guy driving the warthog, another guy manning the turret, a third in the passenger’s seat firing a sniper rifle, and a fourth on a Ghost flying around shooting lasers — Bangai-O Spirits manages to provide gaggingly huge thrills with tiny sprites and solid-color backgrounds. It’ll make you remember Halo, and then remember River City Ransom, and then remember Bangai-O Spirits — the game you are playing right now. At the low points, it’s like playing the best game ever; at the high points, what is on the screen in your hands is pretty much the same thing that huge-headed aliens see when they mind-heck each other for sleepless, foodless dozens of hours on end.
What might go down as the game’s biggest “mainstream” innovation is its ability to transmit data via audio files. It says on the back of the box: “For the first time in history, custom map and reload data can be transmitted as sound files.” That’s kind of neat. Here I’d thought, for the longest time, that Treasure despised the aural sense (what with the brapping scrapping scraping nonsense-bullstuff music and limp sound effects that tend to populate their games, this one kind-of included). It’s nice to see them acknowledging that human beings have ears, I suppose. To load map data, you put it on an iPod and then just hold a headphone over the DS microphone. Sounds wacky, I know. The first time it actually worked, it kind of scared me a little bit. I wouldn’t stuff my pants with amazement if this cute little feature, above all else, is what makes Treasure world-famous after all. Failing that — well, listen to a stage for yourself. Game or no game, I know some people who would pay good money to stand in a dark room and listen to grown men in Darth Vader suits make sounds like this for two hours and call it “music”. Hell, one of those people is me.
At present, the Amazon.co.jp score for this game is three and a half out of five stars. The first review on the page describes the game as fun and nifty and all, though the tutorial is perhaps too confusing for beginners, so he has to give the game two stars. Boo-hoo. Another reviewer says, and I quote, “I wish they would have just ported the N64 version.” As a person who has played and loved the N64 and Dreamcast versions both, I say that this game is easily the better version. Not only that, you might as well not even compare it to the originals. It is its own game. And besides, everyone knows that the guys who write reviews of games on Amazon.co.jp are coke-bottle-glasses-wearing greasy-haired horse-teethed freakazoids who wear dirty pale-green electrician’s uniforms all day, every day, even though they don’t have a job.
I really don’t know what else to say to recommend this game to you. Don’t think about it in relation to any other games. Consider this game, for all intents and purposes, the only game in existence. If you read the description of weapons and it sounded purely awesome, if you’ve played every Kenta Cho game and often tell people “Yeah, this stuff is better than that Xbox stuff”, if you bought an Xbox 360 because Jeff Minter designed the music visualizer, if you know why Panzer Dragoon Zwei is exponentially better than Rez, if you possess enough cold hard evidence of the heart to prove in front of a jury that Cave Story murdered Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, then even if you be a female, you are my brother, and we will join for great justice and we will love this game until and even after the end times come, until and even after we lose our corporeal bodies due to the explosion of the sun or nuclear war. We will live on, in spirit — in Bangai-O spirit.
This game is a joyful disease. Pass it on.
In other words:
Absolute highest recommendation.
–tim rogers
addendum: I just revisited the instruction manual and read the profiles of the three “characters” in the “story” mode. It says of Ruri, the girl, that it “seems as though she’s not in love with Masato”. It says of Masato, the boy, that it “seems as though he’s not Ruri’s brother”. Yeah, that’s not just game-of-the-year-worthy story exposition — that’s the Best thing ever, right there.
addendum the second: To clarify, the multiplayer mode doesn’t allow the two players to kill one another. Yes, it’s tragic, because this game would essentially destroy Senko no Ronde in that case, and, in all ways imaginable, become the Greatest Game Ever. The multiplayer mode is, instead, about shooting bad guys together, competing for points on a stage-for-stage basis. If you set up a custom stage so that there are a bunch of evil Bangai-O clones, working together is pretty fun! Like, really pretty fun. Amazingly fun, sometimes, especially if you set up a stage that, scientifically, just isn’t possible to win, and then proceed to lose fifty times in a row, until you suddenly win ten times in a row. Balancing a VS mode for something like this would have been code-murder. It would have been like making a whole separate game, which I’m sure Treasure didn’t have time for.
★★★★
I hope you guys had fun reading this website, because I’m probably not going to bother writing on it anymore!
The reason would be Treasure’s Bangai-O Spirits, a game so perfect and so deep that when it comes right down to the wire, I’d probably rather be sealed in a sensory deprivation tank playing it against my best friend for millenia than working, vacationing in the Bahamas, or even having pseudo-violent sex. That’s the sign of a good game, right there — if you’d willingly give up an opportunity to let a girl live out her fantasy to rape a man just so that you could deflect projectiles for a couple more hours. I get this feeling, playing this game — if I keep deflecting projectiles, eventually I’ll be so good at deflecting projectiles that I won’t even need to close my eyes or tense my knees to ejaculate. I will simply be. I will flow.
Maybe that’s not enough for the videogame company PR dudes who troll this website (hi dad!), so let’s put it into more back-of-boxy language:
Bangai-oh Spirits is “Brain Training” for God. He spake unto the earth: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last, the Street Fighter II and the Street Fighter III, the Sin and Punishment and the Ikaruga, the carbon dioxide and the oxygen, the Bangai-oh Spirits for the Nintendo DS.”
This isn’t just the best game Treasure has ever made — hell, it isn’t even just the best game they can make, it’s a 210-gun salute to the head of the pathology they’ve waved proudly for the last decade and a half of their illustrious careers designing quirky little games that only morbidly obese people like myself seem capable of enjoying. It’s them dropping all their cards — five aces, including the elusive Golden Ace of Knives — on the table and putting a pistol in their mouth and saying heck you, I will pull this trigger, I swear I will.
This is hardly hyperbole.
Bangai-O Spirits is a puzzle game, a shooting game, a fighting game, an MMORPG. It is Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter III at the same time. In this age of Everyday Shooter and dozens of other one-man games that let you use two analog sticks to move and shoot at the same time, Treasure steps in with an update to their own Robotron riff, and they manage to outclass literally everyone, even without the multidirectional shooting gimmick.
What’s so good about the game? It’s kind of hard to put it in a few words, so we’ll have to break with tradition and actually discuss the way the game plays — not yet, though, don’t worry. I know, you wish I’d just keep talking about my penis for the duration of the review, though hey, sometimes we humans have to endure boring stuff.
The tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits is pretty boring. However, unlike an actual school, the long-winded tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits teaches you how to be objectively awesome. Each tutorial stage opens with a dialogue between three characters — a commander with an eyepatch, a young girl with large breasts, and a too-cool youth in a hip military uniform. In addition to teaching you how to use weapons, the commander also manages to enrage the cool youth: as the tutorials get more complicated and wordy, toward the end, the kid literally says that he didn’t realize he signed up for “an actual robot anime” — he just thought the robot and the anime characters on the box were there to draw in anime fans. The professor then gets defensive, insinuating that the end of Evangelion was “the best part”. Not making this up! When you beat the tutorial, the commander says, “We’ve defeated the Tutorial Army!” And the kid says, “That was fast. If we sell this game back now, do you think we can get at least 3,500 yen for it?”
Bangai-O Spirits: It burns!
The professor — and the girl — are quick to point out that the game has over 160 stages in the “Free play” mode, and that you can edit your own stages and play multiplayer, if you want. The kid shrugs this off, says that “stage-editing is for losers”.
And just like that — you’ll never see those three anime stereotypes again.
This is refreshing, when you consider that Treasure games have always had problems expressing story and character. Dynamite Headdy, their attempt to break into the mainstream with a “mascot” character, was a huge jumbled cluster of near-impossible challenges; it requires some degree of arcane voodoo magic to even get past the tutorial in that game, and it requires nerves of steel to like any of the bizarre characters. The music is Chinese water-torture. (The game itself is pretty alright.)
Treasure has gone through the weirdest phases of wanting to be popular and not giving a heck. Gunstar Heroes was an attempt to capitalize on a perceived opening in the action game market for people who didn’t like the look of Contra. It was apparently conceived as a kind of Sonic the Hedgehog with guns and fighting-game inspired close-quarters combat. Gunstar Heroes thrives whenever it’s not trying to tell a story, or be otherwise interesting. Each stage plays differently from the last, with a short shoot-em-up runup to the gimmick segments or boss parade: the Dice Palace stage, cited as the “best stage ever!” by game “journalists” with maybe a quarter-piece of their cranium missing, is all at once Treasure’s fragmentary genius and infuriating shortcomings rolled into one. It’s a line of pleasant little challenges — one-offs involving their pristine game engine — interrupted by an absolutely lazy hub where you roll a dice to move through a “board game” that’s just a straight line.
Gunstar Heroes begins to shine in stage five, which is titled “DESTROY THEM ALL” — contrary to what the lobotomites writing top-hundred lists will tell you, “DESTROY THEM ALL” is the “best stage ever”: all semblance of “level design” falls away, in the best way possible, and it’s just you, an entire enemy army, and occasional platforms. Flying enemies drop bombs, you jump up, grab them out of the air, and chuck them at towering robot walkers. Grunts run full-steam at you, and if you see an opening, you grab one and use him as a projectile, too. You do this over and over again for ten minutes, and the word “ENJOY” never vanishes from the stock-market ticker running across the bottom of your brain.
Why can’t Gunstar Heroes just be six straight hours of this? Why can’t it just never end? Let the computer just keep crunching the numbers and stuffting out bad guys — the more I kill, the more the computer stuffs. Zen Masters will tell you that there has to be balance, that without low points, high points wouldn’t feel as special, shadow lends context to light, et cetera, though really, Pac-Man Championship Edition is non-stop fun, and anyone who complains because there aren’t any NPCs to talk to is probably also a chimpanzee.
At any rate, Gunstar Heroes was something of a failure in Japan because
1. Most people on earth literally can’t read
2. It was on the MegaDrive, which was essentially the Xbox of its day.
Back then, people who owned MegaDrives in Japan were called “MegaDrivers”, just as the first wave of Xbox players called themselves “Xboxers”. Dynamite Headdy was Treasure’s idea of appealing to a broader audience — at least, in theory — and when the three-year-olds of the world found out that the instruction manual contained more words than “Happy” and “Fun”, it all went south.
Thus spake Alien Soldier, a schizophrenic, shattered velvet bag of demonic battle fragments. The full title of Alien Solider is, and I quote, “VISUAL SHOCK! SOUND SHOCK! NOW IS THE TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE ALIEN SOLDER FOR MEGADRIVERS CUSTOM“. In other words, they’re weren’t lying to themselves — or anyone, really. Alien Soldier‘s title screen contains perhaps the longest story crawl of the 16-bit era, and no amount of resetting the console will make it any less ridiculous. Watching the superplays embedded on the Sega Ages compilation disc are like attending a waterski wedding on the surface of the sun. The game’s arcane mechanics are a Treasure staple: encouraging the player to play in the most ridiculous, unattractive way possible. To wit: the strongest attack at your disposal isn’t the flaming, screen-spanning dash that you can only perform with full health (and even then, only once) — it’s the pixels-wide flames that erupt from your character’s back as he’s doing said dash. Playing the game to completion is equal to breaking it — finding the pixels that work, freezing there, and TKO’ing every opponent in the first instant of the fight.
Eventually, Treasure tried to make money, and mostly failed, because they thought a game needed a “story” to be a phenomenal hit, and the story in the relatively high-budget Sin and Punishment was so loopy and bizarre that you can’t overlook it; to say it was written on acid or after smoking much reefer is a criminal overstatment. It’s more like something written in one day by a man with really bad indigestion cascading into diarrhea. For its mechanics, it’s easily one of the best games of all-time, and though the cut-scenes are fiercely skippable, the very fact that it has a story (and that its music sounds like pornography for librarians) keeps it out of the specialest place in my heart. It also — and this is pure conjecture — kept the game from being released outside Japan, even though it was written entirely in English and intended primarily for US release.
All throughout the years, as Treasure floundered with the weirdest cartoon licenses (Tiny Toon Adventures, for god’s sake), I wished they’d just make a full-on fighting game with Gunstar Heroes mechanics. They kind of almost did that with Yuyu Hakusho for MegaDrive, and later Guardian Heroes for Saturn — and most recently two Bleach-based fighting games on the Nintendo DS — though the games always felt too focused on “personality” and “selling points”. And they never set the world on fire.
Treasure’s Ikaruga, which resulted seemingly from a sudden desire to make the cleanest, simplest shooting game of all time as a kind of counterpoint to their Radiant Silvergun, the clusterheckiest shooter ever conceived, ironically, was perhaps their most internationally acclaimed game; maybe this has had something to do with Treasure’s recent game design roll-backs.
Bangai-Oh! for Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64, has always been my favorite Treasure game, not so much for its “hilarious quirky dialogue” as for its crunchy shooting action. There’s very little fat in the game, and it’s quite an accomplishment that Bangai-O Spirits is even leaner.
ACTUALLY DISCUSSING THE GAME NOW
I’m not even going to bother discussing how this game differs from Bangai-Oh, because it doesn’t matter: Bangai-Oh hardly exists anymore. Instead, I’m going to try to explain to you why you should buy this game, and not something like, I don’t know, Super Smash Bros..
In Bangai-O Spirits, you control a giant robot — which happens to be only the size of one “block” of the playing field. I believe this was the core concept of the original game — control a cursor-sized player character that looks like a giant robot.
Your goal in this game is to destroy various targets in stages. A rough map of the stage, with the required targets highlighted, takes up the top screen. You move around on the lower screen.
You have five general kinds of attacks. Before each mission, you’re free to select which weapons you want to use.
Press the Y button to use one basic weapon, and the B button to use another one.
Press the A button to dash in the direction you’re facing. Press any direction while dashing to change direction.
Press the L button or the R button to use one of two “EX Attacks”. Hold the button to charge the EX attack, and release to unleash it. The more enemy bullets in your general area when you release the trigger, the fiercer the attack you’ll unleash. If you let go of the button just as a bullet is hitting you, the missiles emanating from your body will even increase in size.
There are seven types of basic weapons. None of them are “better” than any other. Each has a definite strength and a definite weakness. All bullets are capable of canceling out other bullets, meaning that “the best defense is a good offense” and “the best offense is a good defense” are more than just something karate teachers tell kids.
I will explain the weapon classes briefly:
1. Bound laser: Laser-like missiles that reflect off walls at 45-degree angles. Pros: Can be used to access unsuspecting enemies in tight spots. Cons: Very average strength.
2. Homing missiles: Missiles that chase enemies. Pros: will hunt enemies down for several seconds; no need to even aim, most of the time. Cons: Even weaker than the bound shot; sub-par mid-air turning radius.
3. Break shot: Special shots capable of canceling two enemy bullets instead of one. Pros: can be used to cut through an enemy’s bullet curtain. Cons: even weaker than homing shot.
4. Napalm shot: Super-powerful shot. Pros: relatively twice the power of a bound shot. Cons: very easily canceled — normal bound / homing shots can eat through two napalm shots before being canceled themselves; break shots can eat four napalm shots.
5. Sword: It’s a sword. Pros: ultra-powerful, ultra fast. Cons: ultra-short-range. Hard to move forward and close in while attacking.
6. Shield: It’s a shield. Position it by tapping a direction and pressing the attack button. Pros: eats any and all bullets endlessly. Stays in the direction where you put it. “Movable cover”, essentially. Doesn’t fade even when you fire your other weapon. Cons: kind of hard to get used to! (Though in a Treasure game, “Kind of hard to get used to” is often used to describe The One Thing The Game Designer Wants You To Do All The Time.)
7. Bat: A giant baseball bat. Pros: can deflect any projectiles back at the enemy. Can deflect dozens of projectiles at a time, even. Can even turn enemies into projectiles. Can also be used to hit physics objects (conveniently shaped like soccer balls, baseballs, basketballs). Cons: Kind of slow. Not much attack power on its own.
Some of these weapons can even be combined in Radiant Silvergun style — homing and bound, for example — by pressing both buttons at once.
Your default attack mode is “free” — you can move while shooting — and your robot can fly all around the stage, with delicious crispy coasting physics. However, should you tap an attack button twice and then hold it the second time, your character will enter “fixed” mode, and you’ll stop anywhere (even in mid-air) and be free to aim in any direction. Useful in so many ways.
Now I’ll explain the EX attacks. Man, I’m like IGN over here:
1. Homing: Fires a multitude of homing shots. Good for: wide-open spaces with lots of enemies.
2. Bound: Fires a multitude of bound shots. Good for: twisty tunnels and lots of projectiles.
3. Break: Fires a multitude of break shots. Good for: lots of bullets, feeling tricky.
4. Napalm: Fires a multitude of napalm shots. Good for: feeling lucky.
5. Freeze: Freezes enemy bullets in the air. The “Treasure Factor”. Good for: super-playing and “puzzle”-solving. The longer you hold the button, the longer the bullets freeze.
6. Reflect: Works like a bat, except in all directions all at once. Good for: people who know what the hell they’re doing.
All EX attacks (except Freeze) can be “focused” in a direction of your choosing. In the previous Bangai-Oh game, you could only blast the bullets in a circle around your character’s body. In Spirits, you can press a directional button in one of eight ways while charging your attack, and then release the button to unleash the attack in only that direction.
And that’s it. That’s the game’s engine. The instruction manual doesn’t even describe the weapons — it just tells you to play the tutorial and find out for yourself. It knows that if you’re holding that instruction manual, you’re a Treasure-gaming freak who doesn’t read manuals anyway.
The tutorial contains the game’s only instances of “Story”. Its little lessons cascade into something huge, and the last stage is a frustrating, amazing, idiotic feat of level design with an infuriating execution and an exhilirating climax. Once you get past it, you’re free — as you’ve always been — to play the “Free Play” mode, which has, yes, well over a hundred and four tens of stages. You can play the stages in any order. You don’t even have to clear one stage to move on to the next. The interface is DOS-like in its cleanliness. Press the right directional button to advance forward one stage. If you’ve cleared the stage, your best time and top score will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you want to play a stage, press the A button. Now you have the DOS-like weapon-select screen. Choose your arsenal and play the stage. If you die, sucks to be you. Choose “exit” to go back to the stage-select menu. Try different weapons.
Many stages are beatable with any weapon selection; few absolutely require use of the bat to obtain the “easy” solutions. Many stages feature hang-ups that force you to open the menu and restart. Some stages feature extended side-scrolls climaxing in epic one-on-five battles with steel-trap-minded opponents of equal abilities. Some stages are massive labyrinths with multiple targets and pursuing grunts. Some stages are vertical scrolls that force you to avoid cascading unbreakable blocks while breaking the correct breakable blocks in order to reach the target. Other stages begin with the player surrounded at point-blank range by four giant honkin’ beam cannons; the 3-2-1 countdown to the start of the stage is basically a countdown to the trigger being pulled. You have literally half of one second to figure out how to win.
All of the praises heaped on Wario Ware instead belong to this game; the yokels of the world jump on Wario for featuring Nintendo Characters, who are virtually like game journalists’ “childhood friends”, only better, because they actually exist. Wario Ware has “amazing” stages that begin with a screen of The Legend of Zelda — there’s Link, and there’s a cave in a wall. When the game starts, you have five seconds to get into the cave. Get in, and the game pats you on the head and moves to another challenge. Sure, there are some nice things to say for the vision of Wario Ware, though at the end of the day, it doesn’t make the player feel spiritually complete, much less any smarter: there’s something to be said for the game’s glee in forcing the player to sharpen his mind to a point where he can acknowledge in a microsecond what he’s supposed to do, though the game ultimately fails in the eyes of god (and me) for never telling the player why. Bangai-O Spirits is about a son-of-a-bitching giant robot with fantastic weapons; your character is a soldier fighting the bad guys. You have to survive so that you can fight again. The only way to survive is to DESTROY THEM ALL.
Sometimes it’s a puzzle game, sometimes it’s a platformer. Sometimes it’s a hardcore bullet-hell shooter. Sometimes it’s a fighting game meant to be played by robots with laser-eyes. It is Every Genre. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter what it is, because it’s Bangai-O. It’s mind-expanding. It’s a diamond-sharp core engine joyfully level-designed gang-bang-style by a team of dudes who have been putting the “crunch” in “scrunch” for over a decade now. On the one hand, they don’t give a stuff what order you play the levels in. On the other hand, they need you to play this game every day for the rest of your life. For this purpose, they have created a level-edit mode.
The level-edit mode is more than just level-design — it’s a shockingly deep elementary course in game design. I described the weapons above, right? If you have any imagination at all, your mind should be teeming with possibilities. Make a puzzle stage, make a rock-hard traditional-style platform stage. If you’ve got a crush on the “Reflect” EX attack, make a stage that puts a new spin on it. The game is saintly in its generosity. Like I said above, Treasure aren’t just shooting themselves in the foot with this game — they’re shooting themselves in the throat. If you be a man who loves hardcore action games, you don’t need anything else.
The platinum icing on this golden cake, however, is the multiplayer mode. I spent six minutes throwing together a long rectangular stage with soccer balls and two evil enemy Bangai-O clones in it, and then played a deathmatch with a friend. We used bats and EX reflect, and just had a screaming orgy, squealing like distorted schoolchildren for literally 25 rounds in a row. Remember when you were ten, and you played River City Ransom with your buddy, and you stood on a garbage can and your buddy kicked the garbage can, which made you slide toward the edge of the screen, so you jumped and kicked a guy in the head? Then, years later, remember when you first played Halo co-op, and your friend got in the driver’s seat of the Warthog and you got on the turret, and you guys drove around hecking stuff up? Well, even in this day and age where four friends can get on Xbox Live and play Halo 3 transcontinentally, with one guy driving the warthog, another guy manning the turret, a third in the passenger’s seat firing a sniper rifle, and a fourth on a Ghost flying around shooting lasers — Bangai-O Spirits manages to provide gaggingly huge thrills with tiny sprites and solid-color backgrounds. It’ll make you remember Halo, and then remember River City Ransom, and then remember Bangai-O Spirits — the game you are playing right now. At the low points, it’s like playing the best game ever; at the high points, what is on the screen in your hands is pretty much the same thing that huge-headed aliens see when they mind-heck each other for sleepless, foodless dozens of hours on end.
What might go down as the game’s biggest “mainstream” innovation is its ability to transmit data via audio files. It says on the back of the box: “For the first time in history, custom map and reload data can be transmitted as sound files.” That’s kind of neat. Here I’d thought, for the longest time, that Treasure despised the aural sense (what with the brapping scrapping scraping nonsense-bullstuff music and limp sound effects that tend to populate their games, this one kind-of included). It’s nice to see them acknowledging that human beings have ears, I suppose. To load map data, you put it on an iPod and then just hold a headphone over the DS microphone. Sounds wacky, I know. The first time it actually worked, it kind of scared me a little bit. I wouldn’t stuff my pants with amazement if this cute little feature, above all else, is what makes Treasure world-famous after all. Failing that — well, listen to a stage for yourself. Game or no game, I know some people who would pay good money to stand in a dark room and listen to grown men in Darth Vader suits make sounds like this for two hours and call it “music”. Hell, one of those people is me.
At present, the Amazon.co.jp score for this game is three and a half out of five stars. The first review on the page describes the game as fun and nifty and all, though the tutorial is perhaps too confusing for beginners, so he has to give the game two stars. Boo-hoo. Another reviewer says, and I quote, “I wish they would have just ported the N64 version.” As a person who has played and loved the N64 and Dreamcast versions both, I say that this game is easily the better version. Not only that, you might as well not even compare it to the originals. It is its own game. And besides, everyone knows that the guys who write reviews of games on Amazon.co.jp are coke-bottle-glasses-wearing greasy-haired horse-teethed freakazoids who wear dirty pale-green electrician’s uniforms all day, every day, even though they don’t have a job.
I really don’t know what else to say to recommend this game to you. Don’t think about it in relation to any other games. Consider this game, for all intents and purposes, the only game in existence. If you read the description of weapons and it sounded purely awesome, if you’ve played every Kenta Cho game and often tell people “Yeah, this stuff is better than that Xbox stuff”, if you bought an Xbox 360 because Jeff Minter designed the music visualizer, if you know why Panzer Dragoon Zwei is exponentially better than Rez, if you possess enough cold hard evidence of the heart to prove in front of a jury that Cave Story murdered Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, then even if you be a female, you are my brother, and we will join for great justice and we will love this game until and even after the end times come, until and even after we lose our corporeal bodies due to the explosion of the sun or nuclear war. We will live on, in spirit — in Bangai-O spirit.
This game is a joyful disease. Pass it on.
In other words:
Absolute highest recommendation.
–tim rogers
addendum: I just revisited the instruction manual and read the profiles of the three “characters” in the “story” mode. It says of Ruri, the girl, that it “seems as though she’s not in love with Masato”. It says of Masato, the boy, that it “seems as though he’s not Ruri’s brother”. Yeah, that’s not just game-of-the-year-worthy story exposition — that’s the Best thing ever, right there.
addendum the second: To clarify, the multiplayer mode doesn’t allow the two players to kill one another. Yes, it’s tragic, because this game would essentially destroy Senko no Ronde in that case, and, in all ways imaginable, become the Greatest Game Ever. The multiplayer mode is, instead, about shooting bad guys together, competing for points on a stage-for-stage basis. If you set up a custom stage so that there are a bunch of evil Bangai-O clones, working together is pretty fun! Like, really pretty fun. Amazingly fun, sometimes, especially if you set up a stage that, scientifically, just isn’t possible to win, and then proceed to lose fifty times in a row, until you suddenly win ten times in a row. Balancing a VS mode for something like this would have been code-murder. It would have been like making a whole separate game, which I’m sure Treasure didn’t have time for.
text by Ario Barzan
★★☆☆
“A BEAUTIFUL BED-TIME STORY THAT€™S CONSTANTLY INTERRUPTED BY THE MONSTERS UNDER YOUR BED.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. This is a video game that managed to make me plunk down three days’ worth of hours, never to complete it, to speak of it as the most beautiful little monster. A great title that’s not great because it cheats itself out of true potential – accomplished by way of fetishistic and arid adherence to long-pointless craft, now cuddled by baroque swirls of Tradition – Dragon Quest VIII is presented as a young, budding musician in a shop who forsakes his talent and inherits his father’s business of shoe making. He’s forming the most wonderful compositions in his head – but, look, he’s in a shoe shop.
The story, here, is simple and straight, if sometimes embarrassing because of the (unusually good) voice acting that brings out the absurdity of situations (talking evil dogs with death vendettas). And, really, the voices are good, but I and the game could do without them. You are cast into the boots of Silent Hero Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine, and your journey started before you started the game. Some time ago, a magician put a spell on the castle you guarded, turning most everyone into plants. Mysteriously, you weren’t affected. Now, you are stopping by a town for information, and your companions are a princess horse, a gremlin king, and a squat ruffian.
Your first battle is with three blue, bouncing, happy-faced dollops called Slimes, seemingly the series’ mascot, who leap out from the grass at your camp site. The screen’s colors smudge, then refocus. A first-person view shows the enemies with text saying “A slime appears!” three times. You select “Attack” from a menu displaying battle options, and you or the ruffian named Yangus will lash out with sword or club. You exchange blows with the Slimes until they are dead. It’s quick, mindless. The slimes are cute. Were this a one-time, referential throwback, I’d be slinging an arm around Dragon Quest VIII‘s back and telling it, “Listen – let’s hit the town, tonight. Drinks are on me.” But, no. Japanese RPGs come and go, faceless drones pumped out of the unloving corporate womb, and it’s a shame that here is Dragon Quest VIII, containing more character than damn near everything, and it’s a tragedy of design.
For forcing me into a three-to-five-or-more-minute situation every fifteen seconds, the game doesn’t do a very good job in validation. It’s not even that I have a big problem with the turn-based mold. Super Mario RPG was excellence. This realizes its format and hands in a circle with two dots and an upward crescent as a portrait for its figure drawing class. Simplicity is fine, provided there’s a constant verve. Dragon Quest VIII‘s mechanics are grayed by a tired prosaicism: there are no tweaks that produce even mildly involving combat.
The timing of button presses in Super Mario RPG let you better your attacks or reduce the potency of enemies’, and that simple element slipped such a deceptively thin layer into the fighting, leading to great results, like taking out bosses in a single usage of the Super Jump because you were awesome enough. Dragon Quest VIII‘s “timing,” then, is the Tension feature. Select “Psyche Up” and watch your avatar attempt to ease their constipation and incrementally increase their strength. This simply makes them into a pacifist; if you want your hit to be powerful enough to matter, you’ve go to keep selecting “Psyche Up” with each turn and refrain from all other actions until you’ve become a pseudo-Super Saiyan. Sometimes you won’t even fully power up. I guess that’s the game’s idea of a cute technical quirk. It’s cardboard-flavored, and relies on arbitrary oppositional behavior for proper execution (i.e. oh god I hope this boss doesn’t kill me before I can get a hit in at MAXIMUM POWER).
None of the fighting you do – and you do a hell of a lot of fighting – seems to matter, because you aren’t doing any fighting. Every attack is an animated substitute backed up by statistics, numbed by a wash of NES RPGs’ graph-paper-white and the disconnect from player input. It’s your numbers crunching against others’, and the so-called skill required for progress translates to the path of time consumption and “paper beats rock.” It doesn’t help that equipment is sold at merciless prices. The blur of the screen and the swell of the battle music sends a sickness through the gut similar to the feeling upon looking at the clock and knowing your shift at a hateful job is about to begin. The fighting isn’t something to be enjoyed within itself; it’s an aspect to get over with as soon as possible, which is sort of morbidly hilarious, considering how dragging the fights really are. There are awkwardly long pauses for loading and “charming” padding that drags. If Yangus hits an enemy and paralyzes them, the screen will say “X is paralyzed!” below, and represent this with zig-zagging lines around the monster. Then, the camera will zoom in on the monster and repeat the line, “X is paralyzed!” These annoyances build up to form speed bumps. Even saving is a bunch of drawn-out nonsense.
It’s a weird twist that part of Dragon Quest VIII‘s undoing is its own sincerity regarding its format. Seams are touted as time-honored triumphs (Look! I’m like what you played when you were little!). I surprise myself when I say the thing could be better off with a slice of dishonesty. Or, preferably, guts. I mean, okay – random fights. Why don’t we give them reasons for happening, rather than warping us to scuffles with three dragons when there were not three dragons in front of us on a huge field four-seconds ago? Logic, people. As part of any game becomes literalized, the remaining abstractions clash more furiously. The cohesiveness, pacing of Dragon Quest VIII‘s world cracks when naturalness is split up with antiques. Chrono Trigger did it right, and maybe if we’d stop being so afraid of it, maybe if we were willing to digest its ideas and stop treating it as that game – maybe we’d be somewhere.
So what else is left? Everything you do outside of the killing, and that, ladies and sirs, is the running, which is some of the most gorgeously divine running next to Shadow of the Colossus. It’s so good, hell, you might want to walk. I don’t care what you think about Akira Toriyama, his imprisoned character style be damned, because Dragon Quest VIII is luscious to gaze upon. When it’s on the television screen, I am playing 3D for the first time, as it were, using the camera like a madman to sop up blue, blue skies and bending trees on green, rolling hills. Heaven help those who’re insufferable maintainers of the same Mature Gamer pride that kept them from appreciating the joy of Wind Waker‘s style (God knows what would happen if they weren’t found chewing beef jerky, guffawing at a Chuck Norris joke, and sniping someone’s head via Sam Fisher). You could live in Dragon Quest VIII‘s buildings, warmed by fireplaces and thick colors, supported by velvety beams of wood and brickwork you want to touch. It’s disgustingly rich. Yes, I invested close to seventy hours on my file, and it was all for the running and the clean shorelines and the freshness of a pale sunrise.
Koichi Sugiyama, close to being in his eighties, and a gear in the series’ distinct trio (the other two being Toriyama and Yuji Horii), really got me to buy Dragon Quest VIII. The man is Bernstein, Debussy, Hubert Parry – a wealth of composers rolled into one distinct mind. He’s another Hitoshi Sakimoto, writing compositions not bound by the usual play-required context of game music. As far as I’m concerned, Sugiyama still hasn’t gotten past the peak of Dragon Quest V, a commonality in the field (Uematsu has his Final Fantasy 6, etc.), but it’s difficult to get disappointed with how consistent he is. This consistency, admittedly, has made some of his output feel a bit recurrent. Dragon Quest VIII‘s non-Japan release has (usually) orchestrated music, a decision I can appreciate, not being the world’s most rabid fan of MIDI. The soundtrack is sweet, clear, waiting to be explored, though it could use some restraint at points, or extra spice. The overworld theme gets too loud and too loopy after a while. On the other hand, the music for sailing is the greatest sailing music in the world, anything and everything it should be.
There is a part in Dragon Quest VIII where you’ve exited a town near the sea. The town is renowned for its sculptors. Beyond it, the climate has changed. Trees’ leaves and the grass are coated in autumn tones, a result of the Northern location and its nearby snowy lands. Between you and your ulterior motive is a Pisa-like building called Rydon’s Tower. Rydon, a man obsessed with height in his architecture, is supposedly still in the tower, still building up to the sky, still trying to outdo himself. Each slice of a floor is supported by columns, and their spacing exposes the blue enamel of the sky and brown, limber trees. The wind and Sugiyama’s in-game masterpiece quietly mingle. It’s a dream. As a professor is more critical of the slacker genius than the brain-dead slob, I pick on Dragon Quest VIII. While the coating is generally matured, sparkling, the mechanics remain rooted in the diaper they shat in two decades ago. An invocation of nostalgia is used as a crutch for entertainment, and the battle design isn’t “daringly antique” or “classically refreshing” – it’s stagnantly unaltered and impotent. People fear change above all else: this fear squashed and wrinkled Dragon Quest IX‘s intention to put us in the action. I hope Square-Enix has the balls to give the series’ pants a kick in the future. Dragon Quest VIII is a frustrating mixture: both sub-mediocre and soaring above the crowd. For that, I recommend it and say, “Stay the hell away.”
★★☆☆
“A BEAUTIFUL BED-TIME STORY THAT€™S CONSTANTLY INTERRUPTED BY THE MONSTERS UNDER YOUR BED.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. This is a video game that managed to make me plunk down three days’ worth of hours, never to complete it, to speak of it as the most beautiful little monster. A great title that’s not great because it cheats itself out of true potential – accomplished by way of fetishistic and arid adherence to long-pointless craft, now cuddled by baroque swirls of Tradition – Dragon Quest VIII is presented as a young, budding musician in a shop who forsakes his talent and inherits his father’s business of shoe making. He’s forming the most wonderful compositions in his head – but, look, he’s in a shoe shop.
The story, here, is simple and straight, if sometimes embarrassing because of the (unusually good) voice acting that brings out the absurdity of situations (talking evil dogs with death vendettas). And, really, the voices are good, but I and the game could do without them. You are cast into the boots of Silent Hero Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine, and your journey started before you started the game. Some time ago, a magician put a spell on the castle you guarded, turning most everyone into plants. Mysteriously, you weren’t affected. Now, you are stopping by a town for information, and your companions are a princess horse, a gremlin king, and a squat ruffian.
Your first battle is with three blue, bouncing, happy-faced dollops called Slimes, seemingly the series’ mascot, who leap out from the grass at your camp site. The screen’s colors smudge, then refocus. A first-person view shows the enemies with text saying “A slime appears!” three times. You select “Attack” from a menu displaying battle options, and you or the ruffian named Yangus will lash out with sword or club. You exchange blows with the Slimes until they are dead. It’s quick, mindless. The slimes are cute. Were this a one-time, referential throwback, I’d be slinging an arm around Dragon Quest VIII‘s back and telling it, “Listen – let’s hit the town, tonight. Drinks are on me.” But, no. Japanese RPGs come and go, faceless drones pumped out of the unloving corporate womb, and it’s a shame that here is Dragon Quest VIII, containing more character than damn near everything, and it’s a tragedy of design.
For forcing me into a three-to-five-or-more-minute situation every fifteen seconds, the game doesn’t do a very good job in validation. It’s not even that I have a big problem with the turn-based mold. Super Mario RPG was excellence. This realizes its format and hands in a circle with two dots and an upward crescent as a portrait for its figure drawing class. Simplicity is fine, provided there’s a constant verve. Dragon Quest VIII‘s mechanics are grayed by a tired prosaicism: there are no tweaks that produce even mildly involving combat.
The timing of button presses in Super Mario RPG let you better your attacks or reduce the potency of enemies’, and that simple element slipped such a deceptively thin layer into the fighting, leading to great results, like taking out bosses in a single usage of the Super Jump because you were awesome enough. Dragon Quest VIII‘s “timing,” then, is the Tension feature. Select “Psyche Up” and watch your avatar attempt to ease their constipation and incrementally increase their strength. This simply makes them into a pacifist; if you want your hit to be powerful enough to matter, you’ve go to keep selecting “Psyche Up” with each turn and refrain from all other actions until you’ve become a pseudo-Super Saiyan. Sometimes you won’t even fully power up. I guess that’s the game’s idea of a cute technical quirk. It’s cardboard-flavored, and relies on arbitrary oppositional behavior for proper execution (i.e. oh god I hope this boss doesn’t kill me before I can get a hit in at MAXIMUM POWER).
None of the fighting you do – and you do a hell of a lot of fighting – seems to matter, because you aren’t doing any fighting. Every attack is an animated substitute backed up by statistics, numbed by a wash of NES RPGs’ graph-paper-white and the disconnect from player input. It’s your numbers crunching against others’, and the so-called skill required for progress translates to the path of time consumption and “paper beats rock.” It doesn’t help that equipment is sold at merciless prices. The blur of the screen and the swell of the battle music sends a sickness through the gut similar to the feeling upon looking at the clock and knowing your shift at a hateful job is about to begin. The fighting isn’t something to be enjoyed within itself; it’s an aspect to get over with as soon as possible, which is sort of morbidly hilarious, considering how dragging the fights really are. There are awkwardly long pauses for loading and “charming” padding that drags. If Yangus hits an enemy and paralyzes them, the screen will say “X is paralyzed!” below, and represent this with zig-zagging lines around the monster. Then, the camera will zoom in on the monster and repeat the line, “X is paralyzed!” These annoyances build up to form speed bumps. Even saving is a bunch of drawn-out nonsense.
It’s a weird twist that part of Dragon Quest VIII‘s undoing is its own sincerity regarding its format. Seams are touted as time-honored triumphs (Look! I’m like what you played when you were little!). I surprise myself when I say the thing could be better off with a slice of dishonesty. Or, preferably, guts. I mean, okay – random fights. Why don’t we give them reasons for happening, rather than warping us to scuffles with three dragons when there were not three dragons in front of us on a huge field four-seconds ago? Logic, people. As part of any game becomes literalized, the remaining abstractions clash more furiously. The cohesiveness, pacing of Dragon Quest VIII‘s world cracks when naturalness is split up with antiques. Chrono Trigger did it right, and maybe if we’d stop being so afraid of it, maybe if we were willing to digest its ideas and stop treating it as that game – maybe we’d be somewhere.
So what else is left? Everything you do outside of the killing, and that, ladies and sirs, is the running, which is some of the most gorgeously divine running next to Shadow of the Colossus. It’s so good, hell, you might want to walk. I don’t care what you think about Akira Toriyama, his imprisoned character style be damned, because Dragon Quest VIII is luscious to gaze upon. When it’s on the television screen, I am playing 3D for the first time, as it were, using the camera like a madman to sop up blue, blue skies and bending trees on green, rolling hills. Heaven help those who’re insufferable maintainers of the same Mature Gamer pride that kept them from appreciating the joy of Wind Waker‘s style (God knows what would happen if they weren’t found chewing beef jerky, guffawing at a Chuck Norris joke, and sniping someone’s head via Sam Fisher). You could live in Dragon Quest VIII‘s buildings, warmed by fireplaces and thick colors, supported by velvety beams of wood and brickwork you want to touch. It’s disgustingly rich. Yes, I invested close to seventy hours on my file, and it was all for the running and the clean shorelines and the freshness of a pale sunrise.
Koichi Sugiyama, close to being in his eighties, and a gear in the series’ distinct trio (the other two being Toriyama and Yuji Horii), really got me to buy Dragon Quest VIII. The man is Bernstein, Debussy, Hubert Parry – a wealth of composers rolled into one distinct mind. He’s another Hitoshi Sakimoto, writing compositions not bound by the usual play-required context of game music. As far as I’m concerned, Sugiyama still hasn’t gotten past the peak of Dragon Quest V, a commonality in the field (Uematsu has his Final Fantasy 6, etc.), but it’s difficult to get disappointed with how consistent he is. This consistency, admittedly, has made some of his output feel a bit recurrent. Dragon Quest VIII‘s non-Japan release has (usually) orchestrated music, a decision I can appreciate, not being the world’s most rabid fan of MIDI. The soundtrack is sweet, clear, waiting to be explored, though it could use some restraint at points, or extra spice. The overworld theme gets too loud and too loopy after a while. On the other hand, the music for sailing is the greatest sailing music in the world, anything and everything it should be.
There is a part in Dragon Quest VIII where you’ve exited a town near the sea. The town is renowned for its sculptors. Beyond it, the climate has changed. Trees’ leaves and the grass are coated in autumn tones, a result of the Northern location and its nearby snowy lands. Between you and your ulterior motive is a Pisa-like building called Rydon’s Tower. Rydon, a man obsessed with height in his architecture, is supposedly still in the tower, still building up to the sky, still trying to outdo himself. Each slice of a floor is supported by columns, and their spacing exposes the blue enamel of the sky and brown, limber trees. The wind and Sugiyama’s in-game masterpiece quietly mingle. It’s a dream. As a professor is more critical of the slacker genius than the brain-dead slob, I pick on Dragon Quest VIII. While the coating is generally matured, sparkling, the mechanics remain rooted in the diaper they shat in two decades ago. An invocation of nostalgia is used as a crutch for entertainment, and the battle design isn’t “daringly antique” or “classically refreshing” – it’s stagnantly unaltered and impotent. People fear change above all else: this fear squashed and wrinkled Dragon Quest IX‘s intention to put us in the action. I hope Square-Enix has the balls to give the series’ pants a kick in the future. Dragon Quest VIII is a frustrating mixture: both sub-mediocre and soaring above the crowd. For that, I recommend it and say, “Stay the hell away.”
2008
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“A GRINNING CORPSE.”
And so this is Christmas — and what have we Mario Kart Wii.
Actually, so proud of that first sentence right there, I let this review sit untouched for an hour and a half, and now that air has returned to my lungs and the pain in the pit of my stomach has evaporated, I have no idea what I was going to say. It was going to all be very coherent and straightforward, and I was probably going to call this game the “Best Mario Kart Yet!” and maybe even give it a perfect score. I don’t know anymore, though. So it often goes with criticism — you have to nip opinions in the bud, or else they start to change. Looks like I’m going to just have to complain about this game’s box for seven or eight paragraphs before actually talking about the game, and by the time I start talking about the game, you’ll have already counted all the paragraphs and reported the tally on your favorite web forum, and damned me repeatedly to the Special Hell for obese, homosexual serial murderers. Which, if only you’d stick around to the end of the review, you’d see is precisely the thing that a person who “likes” Mario Kart is supposed to do, anyway.
Insert the sound of me sighing! (If you need help imagining what I look like, imagine the World’s Fattest, Gayest Serial Murderer.)
Before I commence a long, perhaps-planned (“second-degree”) tangent about the box, let’s take a look at this sentence, which I’m pretty sure I had planned out in my head long before I lost concentration:
“Mario Kart Wii turns any weeknight into Christmas Eve.”
I’m pretty sure that when I first cooked that sentence up in my brain I meant to use it in a fairly straightforward review, in which I compared Mario Kart Wii fondly to what many human beings growing up in first-world countries consider to be a delicious and savorable evening of family togetherness and friendly rivalry as each prodigal brothers communicates the girth of his derring-dos far away from the fireplace.
Now, though, a few hours (during which “office work” was done) and several espressos removed from the original typing of that sentence, I’m capable of a more linear forensic analysis: perhaps, subconsciously, the writer of that sentence (“me”) was considering his own definition of Christmas Eve, which includes references to being locked in his room upstairs (by his own hand), gritting his teeth at the sound of pleasure rumbling up from downstairs, and girding up his loins for the morning, when he, despite pulling in a 4.0 GPA for his entire life and never speaking a single profane word, will not receive a single gift. More to the point, he’s going to have to sit there by the Christmas tree and watch his little brother open morbidly expensive present after morbidly expensive present — or else be excommunicated from his parents’ idea of the Catholic Church.
That is to say, yes, “Christmas” for me is synonymous with gritting my teeth and hissing like a rabid fairy whilst all the world becomes an orchestra in the name of pleasing someone even fatter than I am.
To be fair, Mario Kart Wii isn’t exactly like Christmas — in the case of real Christmas, my little brother would hop aboard the Fun Train at “YESSSSSSSSSSSS” Station and crash immediately into a wall, almost as animalistically pleased to report that “THIS SHIT IS BROKEN ALREADY WHAT THE heck” as he had been five minutes ago when he said “SWEET DUDE THIS IS ALL I EVER WANTED”. With Mario Kart Wii, no one complains that dad is a limp-noodle moron for not buying enough AA batteries, because they’re all “having fun” pointing the remote control at their RC cars and pretending it’s moving.
Here is where I am tempted, as I usually am, to say all the positive things about the game, just to get it out of the way. That means it’s time, once again, to engage my masterminded plan to Get the Kids off my Lawn — ie, begin the tongue-speaking tangent ritual. Lucky for you guys, I might have actually had this tangent written out for, like, two months already:
So Mario Kart Wii is the next title in a long line of games that come with a plastic accessory to snap the Wii Remote into. This time, it’s a steering wheel. Snap your Wiimote into this plastic steering wheel — made of delicious, vinyl smelling, pistol-heavy white plastic — and now you can pretend you’re driving a car. On your sofa! Welcome to the future!
The Wii Wheel is Nintendo’s first perhaps-inadvertent acknowledgement of just how silly the name “Wii” is, particularly because it repeats the “Whee” sound twice in a row, giving us a play on “Wee-wee”, which is a “cute” name that young parents frighteningly think up when it comes time to tell their male children what that shrunken sausage between their thighs is, or explain to their little girls what a dictionary would have to say about when water starts voluntarily leaking out the crack between their legs. Why didn’t they just call the accessory the “Wiil”? Probably because it would look ridiculous. You know how you can repeat a word over and over and over again, and then suddenly the word loses all meaning (Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove)? It’d be a lot like that. For over a year now, I personally have been comfortable with the name “Wii”. It has, for the longest time, struck me as entirely juvenile that any adult (at least, I’m pretty sure that anyone smart enough to type words on the internet must be an adult) would see the name “Wii” and think of “Wee-wee” — a maturity-archaic descriptor for urinary evacuation and/or the penis itself — before they would think of, I don’t know, “We”, the preferred first-person plural pronoun of English students worldwide.
If you set your mind to it, you can make any molehill into an apocalypse, so let’s try with the Wii Wheel: it is rigidly documented that when Nintendo’s concept-men got together under the Fellowship of the Revolution, desiring only to reinvent the way people think about budget-priced half-hearted morally void videogames, they had absolutely no idea what they were going to make in the end. On Kotaku there was this story linked once, with a bunch of pictures of concept sketches for the Nintendo “Revolution”‘s eventual controller. One of them was shaped like a huge Super Mario invincibility star (I can’t call it a “Starman” in good faith because that would be infringing on the David Bowie song, and infringing on David Bowie (he’s a big fan of the site) is something the Action Button Action Legal Team has told me repeatedly not to do), and it had like five buttons on it, one at each point. I guess players were supposed to press the Happy Button whenever they started to feel sad, and the various games (yet with pre-production titles like “Next Mario Game” and “Next Zelda Game” and “Next Animal Crossing“) would reciprocate by playing back a happy, encouraging text-message related to the day’s weather (internet connection required): “Six days of rain in a row means the price of brown rice will be sixteen yen cheaper per kilogram three months from now!”
Flash back way before this, and remember that time at an E3 press conference when Satoru Iwata, who we at Action Button Dot Net are dead convinced is absolutely not a stupid person, walked on-stage and presented the audience with their reward for bearing the heat of the afternoon and stale muffins: a little plastic box. “This is our new games console. It’s finished, and it’s the size of three DVD cases stacked on top of one another!” Amazed, shrieking applause followed.
Basically, that was Satoru Iwata talking out his balls, though not in the way you think: the console most certainly was complete. I mean, let’s face it, the thing’s just a Gamecube with a spec bump. I’m not knocking that aspect of the Wii, not by a longshot. In fact, I’m applauding the size of its testicles: Nintendo had slaved away for years under a liverspotted coal-tar-stuffting octogenarian with an epic mean streak, Sunday-driving down one wrong boulevard after another, and eventually they’d lost touch with the “people” that had made them rich in the first place. If Iwata were a character in Final Fantasy Tactics, he’d be a level 99 Calculator, for sure: with one swift flick of his wrist, he was able to make an epicly large percentage of Japanese Human Beings go bug-eyed at the sight of outdated graphics and tinny sound. All it took to pull off this magic trick was one bite-sized cypher: the idea-nugget that there are gamers, and there are non-gamers, and that non-gamers can be divided up into “people who have never played games” and “people who played games before and then stopped”, and that “people who played games before and then stopped”, while perhaps a smaller group than “people who have never played games”, are in fact probably a larger group than “gamers”. The point of Nintendo’s Revolution Vigil, during which I’m guessing a dozen greying men huddled in a bomb shelter subsisting on a meat-locker full of Boss Coffee for three months was to figure out how, exactly, to package the Same Old Shit in a way that made Grandma and Grandpa stuff their same old pants with excitement.
In the end, the “Wii”, a moniker chosen for its “first-person plural” aspect as well as its similarity to a shout of uncontrollable glee, was born and branded as “The DS, on your TV — only now, the stylus is invisible“. The DS, of course, had been the result of Satoru Iwata having conveniently eaten a Very Grotesquely Large Salad and a bowl of rice precisely twenty-two hours before first seeing the television commercials for Sony’s EyeToy: during that forty-five minute breakneck brickstuff, Iwata must have screamed “Eureka!” so many times that he couldn’t not invent the Nintendo DS by the time he began washing his hands. If only Sony Japan had had a little faith, if only they hadn’t dismissed “casual games” as something the Japanese don’t “do”, or if only Sony Europe had developed some solid concepts (like, say, EyeToy games that were deeper than window-washing and/or don’t feature the player’s horrifyingly-lit slack-jawed visage as the “protagonist”) to sell said septegenarian board members, then maybe the PlayStation 2 would be the top-selling console instead of the Wii, and the PlayStation 3 would either look more or less depressing, given your perspective.
Alternate sentence-clump I couldn’t fit in the above paragraph: long before I obtained an interest in poetry and my penis got so inexplicably large, I worked at a GameStop in Indiana, from roughly the Dreamcast launch to the PlayStation 2 launch. Right before the PlayStation 2 was released, Sony sent us demo stations, with fiber-optic blue track-lighting embedded in frosted glass: “PlayStation 2”, it said. We put this demo kiosk right next to the Dreamcast demo kiosk, and the kids who we accidentally babysat while their mother stood in the women’s shoe store across the hall looking lonely would stand there and squeal at the sphere-eyed, single-complexioned John Madden Football Warriors on screen: “PlayStation Two is toight!” We switched the PlayStation 2 inside for a Dreamcast, with the objectively-better-looking NFL 2K1, and the kids began to ogle it, and squeal: “PlayStation Two is toight!” In the end, we probably hecked up the world economy in a chaos-theory sort of way — maybe our trickery of those dumb kids, for selfish purposes, had been the butterfly-wing-flap that brought about the DS/Wii hurricane, who knows. Though at the time, it really, honestly seemed like something to do.
Back in the real world, here we are with this Nintendo Wii wheel. I’m not going to make too much fun of it, because it has a delicious weight and it smells like vintage vinyl records. It also manages to miraculously fill in some kind of psychological gap and feel, most of the time, not at all like bullstuff. This is remarkable, I guess, because games like Excitetruck on the Wii and Motorstorm on the PlayStation 3 have featured controller-tilting steering wheel controls and mostly ended up feeling cheap instead of psychically immersive. The Wii Wheel is no second coming of Christ or anything, though playing Mario Kart Wii with and without it leads me to mathematically declare that yes, it does make a difference.
Still, there’s a sort of weird pseudo-backwardness about it. If Nintendo’s goal with the Wii was to create new genres of fun while lighting peoples’ imaginations on fire, and if this goal required them to make a controller that was as simple as possible, why complicate things? What’s with all the add-ons? Like, I was at the presentation where Iwata revealed the new controller; I heard him say their goal was to make the simplest game controller possible, because a PlayStation pad was too daunting and the sight of an Xbox controller gave grandpa epilepsy; I thought it was hilarious, brilliant. Then they rolled out the nunchuk attachment, as if to say, “You can play regular games on it, too.” That left me a tiny bit confused. I don’t even feel like finishing this paragraph now, to be honest, so I’ll just say, and objectively, that if this world we live in is one where a PlayStation 3 controller, with four face buttons, a D-pad, four triggers, and two analog sticks, can and will make your aunt call the cops, then the Nintendo Wii Remote, plus protective rubber safety condom, plus nunchuk, is obviously a hybrid sextoy / murder-weapon, and you will need a Catholic priest to perform an exorcism on your eventual death bed if you’ve ever so much looked at one.
Though the initial Nintendo “Revolution” controller concept reel clearly showed a guy playing (from a point of view inside the TV, looking out — a crucial point for what we’re going to discuss later) a first-person shooter of some sort, Nintendo eventually released a “Zapper” peripheral, which is no more than a hollow shell that cheaply binds your remote and nunchuk together into the shape of a crude gun. It’s supposed to help the players’ imaginations, or something. If you ask me, it looks like what happens when the cinematographer for “Star Trek” drinks on the set.
If Nintendo is all about giving us this magnificent magic wand — and the Wiimote is a grand technological icon on par with the iPod, don’t get me wrong — and letting our imaginations run wild, why must they continually doubt our imaginations?
I would put that question in huge, bold letters, though something holds me back. I guess it’s the fact that, yes, I find that the Wii Wheel really does enhance the experience of using controller tilts to steer in Mario Kart Wii. Instead, all I can do is whimper: though the controller is shaped like a steering wheel, we have to press the “2” button on the Wiimote in order to accelerate, which makes it absolutely impossible to employ the 10-2 position on the wheel while playing the game. Why bother to simulate driving, if you’re going to force people to do so in such a manner that would, in the case of a real-life head-on collision and airbag deployment, result in the driver’s right hand flipping backward at a high enough speed to possibly break the passenger’s neck? (I smell a very loose class-action lawsuit, though I suppose Japan is exempt, for obvious reasons.)
When Nintendo announced — at the same press conference where they revealed the remote — that they’d be making “shells” for enhancing the remote, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I thought “shell” had been a slip — I thought they meant they’d keep making attachments like the nunchuk, things with buttons or whatever on them.
Therefore: if the upcoming Super Mario Sluggers baseball game comes with a baseball bat shell for the remote, it will be the Piece of White Plastic that Broke the Aircraft Carrier’s Back, and I will walk down to my local convenient store, withdraw 6,000 yen from the ATM, and proceed to eat it right there, in front of the super-hot visual-kei cashier dude. Maybe he’ll mistake me for a hardass, or else a wounded lunatic, and he’ll ask for my phone number, and we can have tea parties.
This, of course, is not even the tangent I meant to go on. No, it’s all just context for what I’m about to say:
Mario Kart Wii‘s box, in addition to being shiny, delicious, and somehow both white and colorful, in addition to being packed just firmly enough to squeeze with the tips of the fingers, setting off “I am holding a High-Quality Videogame Product, I must run home and eat a bowl of cereal AQAP” alarms within my obese human brain, also features a picture of Super Mario himself, and his brother Luigi, both holding Wii Wheels.
Why are they holding the Wii Wheel? Well, they’re playing Mario Kart Wii, of course.
An open-mouthed forensic analysis of this follows:
Mario and Luigi are holding the Wii Wheel on the front of the box for Mario Kart Wii.
They are floating on air, with feet kicking wildly and surprised expressions on their faces.
Their feet are, for the record, not in the position that people’s feet would need to be in to operate an automobile.
Beneath their bodies are shadows of what look to be formula-1 race cars.
The Wii Wheel is included in the box, as is a copy of Mario Kart Wii.
The photograph of the Wii Wheel in the background of the cover image is the actual size of the Wii Wheel in the box.
The DVD case containing the Mario Kart Wii software also features the picture of Mario and Luigi using the Wii Wheel.
The Wii Wheel in the background image of the instruction manual cover is a drawing, not a photograph.
It is also not actual size, for obvious reasons.
The Wii Wheel is not needed to play Mario Kart Wii.
The Seventh Circle of Hell is revealed on the game’s title screen, which features a (much-lower-resolution) instance of the aforementioned image.
(An inside-the-box observation: Amazon.co.jp’s official image of this game’s box is an actual photograph of the actual box, with an airbrushed shadow and all.)
(An outside-the-box observation: videogames are about us pretending to do things; in Mario Kart, we step into Mario’s virtual shoes as we hold a real-like steering wheel. Mario’s use of the wheel on this box can then only be seen as a mockery of us flesh-and-blood creations: if this game is about pretending to drive a car, then Mario is pretending to pretend to drive a car. Et cetera.)
Now, it is quite possible that Mario and Luigi are sitting on a sofa, though the sofa has been invisibled for presumably the same reasons that music comes even out of the trash cans at Disneyland. That’s not the point. The point is that here were are, adults, Horny As Hell in the 21st Century, possibly fornicating three or four times a week, possibly enjoying fornicating more than our forefathers did, and here’s Mario and Luigi, holding the same controller I’m holding, freaking out as they look in my direction. I’m about to press the A button and begin the enthralling user registration process, and they’re already having fun, albeit in freeze-frame. This is when the Nintendo “Revolution” concept reel showed off at Tokyo Game Show 2005 all comes rushing back to me: cheap horror-movie sounds, a young boy in a yellow T-shirt aiming the Wiimote with his right hand and twiddling an analog stick with his left hand while his girlfriend’s teeth chatter; some said that the “Revolution” was Nintendo giving a spiritual tax refund to those numb nincompoops who thought pulling the NES controller sharply upward might make Mario jump higher, and maybe those people were right; at the time, all that was certain was that Nintendo was now inside the game, looking out at us. We would be the stars in their new games, just as “You” would be TIME magazine’s “person of the year” in 2006. When the “Wii” was eventually named, and then quickly launched, the brilliant gateway for many non-players was the opportunity to craft a “Mii”, a videogame character that would essentially look like you — if you were a videogame character (with somewhat stuffty graphics).
Flash forward to 2008, an era some have dubbed “The Now”: here we have Established Videogame Characters, the Super Mario Brothers, aka Mario and Luigi, holding the game controller that real-life you and me are using to control said Established Videogame Characters in said Established Videogame Franchise. It’s easy to generalize, and raise up scarecrow debates, like how it’s bizarre that the box art (and title screen) portrays videogame characters doing something human beings can do on their own instead of portray them doing the fantastic, escapist things they can do in the ame, or ask hilarious questions like “What’s next, Little Sister using an Xbox 360 controller to control Big Daddy on the front of BioShock 2?”
More to the point: Part of Nintendo’s policy for Wii software was (and continues to be) that the advertisements always feature real-life human beings enjoying the games. Wii Play‘s box shows a real human hand clinging to a Wiimote, for example. With games like Smash Bros., with strong brand appeal and old-school controls, the advertising standards didn’t enter the equation. With Mario Kart Wii, Nintendo had themselves painted into a corner — on the one hand, we’ve got this orgasmically beloved characters, and on the other hand, we have a clever new way to engorge the players’ endorphins, to make them feel the car. That they went with advertising both at once is a no-brainer; that they made said image into their game’s title screen is the trumpet of a kind of third-world apocalypse. It bangs a gong in the brain: at Nintendo, something has changed.
Then you realize that, by playing Mario Kart Wii for enough hours, you can unlock the ability to use your Mii in a race.
The argument that ensues is awesome. You can figure it out yourself, because I have to throw up right now, for reasons completely not related to this article, or even videogames. It’ll be like a mad-lib. I’ll write the beginning:
“If and when they make a Wii2, with 720p graphics and a hard-drive, if and when they upgrade the Miis so their appendages don’t look as gimpy and/or so they can have more interesting clothes and a couple more face part options (multicolored hair, et cetera), there will still be a ‘Classic Mii’ option, for people who want the gimpy appendages or more limited selection of noses.”
And then the ending:
“And when, at last, Classic Mii Kart Wii 2 is released, you’ll be able to unlock Baby Mario.”
ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW
That was fun!
Now let’s talk about Mario Kart Wii. I’ll use the inverted pyramid method to summarize:
Mario Kart Wii for the Nintendo Wii, by Nintendo: you’ve played it already, or it’s definitely not your favorite game ever. I despise the weapons and everything they represent. The tracks are shining examples of good videogame level design — great videogame level design, even. We’re talking Original-Super Mario Bros.-worthy level design. Even the jerk-off parts in two tracks where you get fired out of a cannon and thus are not controlling the game for a whole three seconds are forgivable when, upon landing, you’re, like, going down a snowboard slope, with awesome speed-boosting half-pipes. The motorcycles are cool, with appropriately floaty drift mechanics, and the ability to do wheelies for extra speed boost. The graphics are colorful and sharp, with gritty textures that look actually cute, even confectionary-like; it’s like the Wii’s hamster-wheel graphics processor is finding a niche as some kind of sideways “new retro”. The character voices are hateful trash, a cacophony of homicidal crocodiles kacking down cotton candy, schizophrenic ostriches kacking down skittles, kleptomanic velociraptors kacking down broken glass; the music, for the most part, sounds like something a Brazilian community college professor would compose as a tool for conditioning the more gorillia-like breed of human &^#$# to masturbate to, thus sparing the lives and virginities of entire city blocks. Donkey Kong is great, and it’s sad that his voice sounds like Goofy drowning in Jell-O.
Now that that’s over with, I’m going to go back and expand on the second sentence of the above paragraph re: weapons.
I hate the weapons. Well, not all of them. The green shell and the banana peel can stay. And, of course, the speed-boost mushroom, which isn’t a “weapon”, anyway.
Anyway, most of the rest of the weapons are hateful. Let’s go ahead and make a list, in order from least to most hateful:
Red Shells: I guess these are kind of okay. They target the person in front of you — or right behind you — and they’re usually a sure hit, though they can be avoided.
Bob-omb: throw in any direction to cause a big explosion that can possibly catch many other drivers at once. I guess it’s decent because it takes a bit of skill to use, and it’s dangerous because you can get yourself caught up in the blast.
Thunder cloud: a thunder cloud appears above your car and hisses at you for a bit; wait too long and it’ll strike you with lightning and shrink you; tag another racer before the lightning comes out and the cloud will stick to his car, instead. Decent because it makes for a nice little game of hot potato and it carries a risk.
Super dash mushroom: a dash mushroom that can be used something like twenty times in rapid succession. Basically the game’s way of telling you that you suck, though you might stand a chance of getting better if only you win a couple of races and feel good about yourself.
Mega mushroom: turns your car twice the size and jacks the speed up to 200%. You can also crush any drivers you run over. Mostly fair because there’s a risk accompanying the reward (ie, your car is harder to control).
Invincibility Star: makes you invincible and about 200% faster. Kind of almost the same thing as the Mega Mushroom.
Bullet Bill: turns your car and driver into a Bullet Bill, which flies at about 1000% the speed of your car, flattening anything in its path and usually jumping you ahead ten or so places in the race; really easy to control. Kind of really stupidly unfair in a “Yay Button” sort of way.
POW Block: use this to cause an earthquake, flattening every car that’s touching the ground. Wouldn’t be quite so hateful if it was a tiny bit easier to avoid the quakes. I suppose you’re supposed to jump at some precise millisecond to avoid it, though I haven’t succeeded at it once. Always seems to impact just as you land on a tiny island before a ramp that will jump you to another tiny island, meaning that you fall into a pit and lose about twelve places in the race.
hecking Squid Thing: No, I’m not going to call it by its canonical name. Use this stupid thing to telepathically squirt ink on every driver in front of you, making it “harder” for them to “see”. If you get hit with this yourself, that means there’s going to be a big ugly black “ink” effect on the screen, obstructing your view. If you use this against computer racers, the “ink driving” AI algorithm kicks in, everyone starts bizarrely wobbling back and forth, and it’s horribly depressing: for a split-split second, your brain becomes unable to differentiate between the phrases “next time I get laid” and “the day I die”. Seriously, obstructing the view is not a good idea for a videogame. Have you ever heard about that blind kid who can beat anyone at Mortal Kombat? Yeah, that’s because Mortal Kombat isn’t a real videogame.
Lightning Bolt: awarded only to the most headgear-wearing-&^#$#ed of players, those who are in twelfth place and deserve to be there forever. When used, it shrinks every other kart on the course to half speed and half size, making them instantly crushable by the lightning-bolt-using driver. However, it does not change the fact that the driver who used it most likely sucks. It awards them only hope, for a few seconds, before restoring everything to normal and telling the jerk who used it to get to the back of the bus again. In short, it just causes immense annoyance to anyone who’s not losing to everyone.
The Fake Item Box: for heck’s sake, it doesn’t look anything like a real item box. For one thing, it’s red, and for another thing, the question mark is upside-down. According to the Japanese manual, “It looks exactly like a real item box.” That’s hecking false advertising, right there. I mean, I suppose that the average Japanese person doesn’t immediately reject an upside-down question mark, and — well, I realize that the average American can’t identify the North American continent on a map, though hell. It’s really, stupidly embarrassing, this thing. Anyone who hits one is either stupid enough to think it’s a real item box or just forced into a position where there’s no alternative, and in the latter case, they’re just going to think (if they’re like me, which I’m sure everyone is) of how ridiculous it is that these game designers might seriously think (or, even worse, be pretending to think) that people will mistake this thing for a real item box.
The Blue Shell: . . . well.
The Blue Shell is a sign of the times; it’s the first nail in the coffin of game design. Know that I come from a proud heritage of people who play Virtua Fighter 5 and genuinely enjoy losing because it teaches you something.
If you’re in a losing position and have been for a good amount of time, an algorithm behind the scenes kicks in and awards you a Blue Shell. Use it, and it rushes to the head of the pack and crashes into the person in first place with absolute certainty. Other drivers in the general area will also be decimated.
I’m sure that the general idea of the Blue Shell when it first appeared, in Super Mario Kart 64, was that a person in last place would obtain it, shudder with joy, and then be filled with the turgid urge to claw their way to the head of the pack and use it when within strategic range of the leaders.
In the current “videogame industry”, though, things like the Blue Shell are communistic concessions thrown to the people who Aren’t Getting Better. If my little brother, say, spent twenty hours a day doing something other than playing videogames — that is to say, if he sucked at videogames — the Blue Shell would be his “Best Thing Ever”: something to use when bitter and bored, to ruin the chances of the person who’s just so happening to win. The Blue Shell, simply described, is an easy way to strike back at the person who’s beating everyone, when you are the one losing to everyone. If that’s not heady, frothy communism in action, I really don’t know what the hell is. How is this a more family-friendly experience than killing hookers in Grand Theft Auto? If anything, the sugar-coating just makes the arsenic more dangerous, and it can’t be too hard to prove, from here, that Nintendo fanboys — big, sweaty, mouth-breathing — are actually individuals of scarier morals than most self-mutilating suicide-bombing terrorists.
Since the Nintendo Wii is the game console of the proletariat (“the game console of the proletariat” is the nice way to say “they should sell most of the games in the supermarket tabloid rack, next to ‘1,001 Baby Names for Girls (Now with more mixed-race names)'”), Nintendo has seen about sharpening the item randomization algorithms to razor edges. Everyone always has a chance to be in first place in Mario Kart Wii, which seems to make sense because I suppose it’s meant to be a “party” game for people with “friends”, though when you’re playing it dead alone, against a cold last-gen computer chip that’s only just barely powerful enough to keep a graphing calculator from meeting “six divided by three” with “ERROR”, and you’re about to cross the hecking finish line in first place and get hit by a POW Block, a Lightning Bolt, a Blue Shell, a Red Shell, and then the hecking Squid Thing — all it seems to do is present striking evidence that the world is full of pricks.
The theories seem stable enough: if we construct a few detailed Venn diagrams, we can prove that the person using the Blue Shell now might be the most technically skilled of players. He might just be having a run of stuffty luck because, of all the things we can mathematically prove about a race with more than two live (as in “not dead”) racers, someone must be losing at any given time, meaning that someone is getting these Almighty Items, and then using them, either out of bitterness or out of hope.
If you’ve got a pen and paper (or MSPaint), start making a flowchart of this: it is possible for a Good Player to be hecked back into last place, though Almighty Items only appear if one is in last place for a set period of time; a Good Player will most likely be able to advance a few places before being awarded an Almighty Item.
With a little bit of work I’m not 100% willing to do right now (got an erection again T-T), it can be quite easily proven that the only reason these items were originally conceived, in earlier installments of the series, was to make it possible for losers to become winners occasionally, and that in Mario Kart Wii, the items mainly exist to “liven up” the contest.
I have seen police officers who will accuse a man of being a homosexual for insisting that Mario Kart should just let the best man win. I’m well aware that I’m going to get at least a dozen half-sentence emails telling me that I obviously don’t like having fun. I’m fully prepared to ignore them. I stand by my assertion that maybe there’s a way to make an amazingly fun game with just a few weapons that require a small amount of skill to use.
In the name of research, I ironed my hair, donned designer eyeglasses, and gathered up a group of fourteen carrot-skinned, silver-lipped, corkscrew-beehive-headed Dolce-and-Gabbana-sunglasses-wearing Japanese part-time prostitutes and made them wait outside my apartment in single file while I forced each one in turn to play Mario Kart Wii for an hour. Twelve of them would ask me for money, six would report me to the police and press rape charges, and I think two of them actually didn’t have brains or eyes, though all of them managed to win first, second, or third place on cumulative points in the 50cc Mushroom Cup, despite them all whipping the wheel around over their heads and flailing like a lunatic, like they’d never even seen a guy driving a car in a movie.
In the end, there was me, trying to win the 150cc Special Cup, being hecked over countless times by jerk-off Lightning Bolts or Blue Shells and winding up in second place overall, maybe a dozen times in a row. It comes to feel almost like video poker, after a while — the computer obviously knows what you need in order to win, and though it’s illegal in a sense if it relies on anything more than raw math to determine what cards are dealt, when you do lose, you feel like stuff and you’re dead positive that god hates you.
It can be surmised even by an elementary school dropout that Mario Kart Wii is designed from the ground up to be “a game that people enjoy with their friends”. At what cost to our dignity, though? By “our” I don’t just mean “Hardcore video-gamers”, I mean “the human race”. There’s some Brave-New-World-style stuff peeking out from behind mama’s skirt, here: why would someone even care to get “better” if it’s possible to just keep relying on the jerk-ass weapons and occasionally getting a lucky break, just for being a jerk? With Virtua Fighter 5, it’s like, if you lose to a guy, it’s because he’s better than you. If you really like the game, you’ll keep playing whether you win or lose — with the idea being that you should want to win. Mario Kart Wii imagines a world where “it’s not whether you win or lose — it’s how you play the game” or “it’s all in good fun” or “they’re just jealous” are not just something gym teachers tell the fat kid the day he gets hazed to death in the showers; it imagines that world, and then it runs with it, straight for the gates of Hell, nose to the sky. That ain’t how it always is, jack. They wouldn’t call it a “game” if it was possible to not want to win. Someone up there needs to respect that. Rather than rely on its existing, sharp, utterly enjoyable core mechanics to encourage players to play more and get better, the game scoops out its right eye and offers it to the gods of $$$. And it sold 300,000 units on its launch day in Japan.
Mario Kart Wii unfolds as a game-design exercise with the personality of that sniveling rat bastard at every Japanese corporate party, the one who squints at a spreadsheet all day, doing no real work, and feels inadequate that he’s not bench-pressing intertwined naked lesbians on his lunch breaks, who decides in his dead samurai heart that he must go around, get in everyone’s face, take their drinks out of their hands, hold them just out of reach, chortle, guffaw, and make sure everyone is having Adequate Amounts of Fun. Some day he’ll blackmail a decently not-unattractive woman into marrying him, and when his child gets kicked in the balls at school because his dad is an asshole, he’ll tell his wife that it’s a tough world and people have to learn. Deep within the jumble of motives and execution-style hiccups called Mario Kart Wii is a mathematical proof for why you should never let the Boss speak a single suggestive word at a meeting requiring creativity: the Boss, if nothing else, exists only to ask the most hideously obvious, stupid questions at the latest time possible, and usually, if he doesn’t do this, the whole company will figuratively go down the drain. By the end of a brain-dead night of trophy collecting, of the coin-toss-like stiff odds, of the pachinko race dynamics, of the unbelievable, improbable luck that the same two racers keep finishing in the top three even though you and everyone else are bouncing all over the place, of shuddering that a gorilla named “Donkey” can share a winner’s circle with a fairy-tale princess and another instance of said fairy-tale princess as a baby, the world starts to feel the wrong color. Your mind wanders back to the Miis, to Mario holding the controller on the box, to the shadows of racecars, to the Lightning Bolt, to the Blue Shell: it’s like, all of a sudden, a publicist informs the YMCA that every “we regret to inform you that a toddler shat in our olympic-sized swimming pool” letter is bad enough for their reputation to the point that they’re probably legally better off just pumping their pools nationwide full of human feces and calling it a day: People who find the possibility of stuff in the water repulsive are a liability, whereas people who don’t mind swimming in steaming feces can be classified as, among many other things, “loyal customers”.
In short, Mario Kart Wii is a snappy little racing game with some bright happy graphics and some smashing great track design best enjoyed at your own pace in the time attack mode. It is also a sign of an three-quarters-decent-sized apocalypse, though hey, as long as everyone is having fun, that’s all that counts!
In closing, the back of the Japanese box says, and I quote (in translation):
“Battle it out in twelve-player races with rivals from all over the world! Your friends far away, or people from anywhere in the world!”
The semantics are intriguing, indicating dully to the reader that their friends are “far away”, and that anyone they haven’t ever met is a “people”, from “anywhere in the world”.
The applicable footnote reads:
“*You will need an internet connection.”
Welcome to the world, then. Hope you guys are enjoying the revolution.
★★☆☆
“A GRINNING CORPSE.”
And so this is Christmas — and what have we Mario Kart Wii.
Actually, so proud of that first sentence right there, I let this review sit untouched for an hour and a half, and now that air has returned to my lungs and the pain in the pit of my stomach has evaporated, I have no idea what I was going to say. It was going to all be very coherent and straightforward, and I was probably going to call this game the “Best Mario Kart Yet!” and maybe even give it a perfect score. I don’t know anymore, though. So it often goes with criticism — you have to nip opinions in the bud, or else they start to change. Looks like I’m going to just have to complain about this game’s box for seven or eight paragraphs before actually talking about the game, and by the time I start talking about the game, you’ll have already counted all the paragraphs and reported the tally on your favorite web forum, and damned me repeatedly to the Special Hell for obese, homosexual serial murderers. Which, if only you’d stick around to the end of the review, you’d see is precisely the thing that a person who “likes” Mario Kart is supposed to do, anyway.
Insert the sound of me sighing! (If you need help imagining what I look like, imagine the World’s Fattest, Gayest Serial Murderer.)
Before I commence a long, perhaps-planned (“second-degree”) tangent about the box, let’s take a look at this sentence, which I’m pretty sure I had planned out in my head long before I lost concentration:
“Mario Kart Wii turns any weeknight into Christmas Eve.”
I’m pretty sure that when I first cooked that sentence up in my brain I meant to use it in a fairly straightforward review, in which I compared Mario Kart Wii fondly to what many human beings growing up in first-world countries consider to be a delicious and savorable evening of family togetherness and friendly rivalry as each prodigal brothers communicates the girth of his derring-dos far away from the fireplace.
Now, though, a few hours (during which “office work” was done) and several espressos removed from the original typing of that sentence, I’m capable of a more linear forensic analysis: perhaps, subconsciously, the writer of that sentence (“me”) was considering his own definition of Christmas Eve, which includes references to being locked in his room upstairs (by his own hand), gritting his teeth at the sound of pleasure rumbling up from downstairs, and girding up his loins for the morning, when he, despite pulling in a 4.0 GPA for his entire life and never speaking a single profane word, will not receive a single gift. More to the point, he’s going to have to sit there by the Christmas tree and watch his little brother open morbidly expensive present after morbidly expensive present — or else be excommunicated from his parents’ idea of the Catholic Church.
That is to say, yes, “Christmas” for me is synonymous with gritting my teeth and hissing like a rabid fairy whilst all the world becomes an orchestra in the name of pleasing someone even fatter than I am.
To be fair, Mario Kart Wii isn’t exactly like Christmas — in the case of real Christmas, my little brother would hop aboard the Fun Train at “YESSSSSSSSSSSS” Station and crash immediately into a wall, almost as animalistically pleased to report that “THIS SHIT IS BROKEN ALREADY WHAT THE heck” as he had been five minutes ago when he said “SWEET DUDE THIS IS ALL I EVER WANTED”. With Mario Kart Wii, no one complains that dad is a limp-noodle moron for not buying enough AA batteries, because they’re all “having fun” pointing the remote control at their RC cars and pretending it’s moving.
Here is where I am tempted, as I usually am, to say all the positive things about the game, just to get it out of the way. That means it’s time, once again, to engage my masterminded plan to Get the Kids off my Lawn — ie, begin the tongue-speaking tangent ritual. Lucky for you guys, I might have actually had this tangent written out for, like, two months already:
So Mario Kart Wii is the next title in a long line of games that come with a plastic accessory to snap the Wii Remote into. This time, it’s a steering wheel. Snap your Wiimote into this plastic steering wheel — made of delicious, vinyl smelling, pistol-heavy white plastic — and now you can pretend you’re driving a car. On your sofa! Welcome to the future!
The Wii Wheel is Nintendo’s first perhaps-inadvertent acknowledgement of just how silly the name “Wii” is, particularly because it repeats the “Whee” sound twice in a row, giving us a play on “Wee-wee”, which is a “cute” name that young parents frighteningly think up when it comes time to tell their male children what that shrunken sausage between their thighs is, or explain to their little girls what a dictionary would have to say about when water starts voluntarily leaking out the crack between their legs. Why didn’t they just call the accessory the “Wiil”? Probably because it would look ridiculous. You know how you can repeat a word over and over and over again, and then suddenly the word loses all meaning (Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove)? It’d be a lot like that. For over a year now, I personally have been comfortable with the name “Wii”. It has, for the longest time, struck me as entirely juvenile that any adult (at least, I’m pretty sure that anyone smart enough to type words on the internet must be an adult) would see the name “Wii” and think of “Wee-wee” — a maturity-archaic descriptor for urinary evacuation and/or the penis itself — before they would think of, I don’t know, “We”, the preferred first-person plural pronoun of English students worldwide.
If you set your mind to it, you can make any molehill into an apocalypse, so let’s try with the Wii Wheel: it is rigidly documented that when Nintendo’s concept-men got together under the Fellowship of the Revolution, desiring only to reinvent the way people think about budget-priced half-hearted morally void videogames, they had absolutely no idea what they were going to make in the end. On Kotaku there was this story linked once, with a bunch of pictures of concept sketches for the Nintendo “Revolution”‘s eventual controller. One of them was shaped like a huge Super Mario invincibility star (I can’t call it a “Starman” in good faith because that would be infringing on the David Bowie song, and infringing on David Bowie (he’s a big fan of the site) is something the Action Button Action Legal Team has told me repeatedly not to do), and it had like five buttons on it, one at each point. I guess players were supposed to press the Happy Button whenever they started to feel sad, and the various games (yet with pre-production titles like “Next Mario Game” and “Next Zelda Game” and “Next Animal Crossing“) would reciprocate by playing back a happy, encouraging text-message related to the day’s weather (internet connection required): “Six days of rain in a row means the price of brown rice will be sixteen yen cheaper per kilogram three months from now!”
Flash back way before this, and remember that time at an E3 press conference when Satoru Iwata, who we at Action Button Dot Net are dead convinced is absolutely not a stupid person, walked on-stage and presented the audience with their reward for bearing the heat of the afternoon and stale muffins: a little plastic box. “This is our new games console. It’s finished, and it’s the size of three DVD cases stacked on top of one another!” Amazed, shrieking applause followed.
Basically, that was Satoru Iwata talking out his balls, though not in the way you think: the console most certainly was complete. I mean, let’s face it, the thing’s just a Gamecube with a spec bump. I’m not knocking that aspect of the Wii, not by a longshot. In fact, I’m applauding the size of its testicles: Nintendo had slaved away for years under a liverspotted coal-tar-stuffting octogenarian with an epic mean streak, Sunday-driving down one wrong boulevard after another, and eventually they’d lost touch with the “people” that had made them rich in the first place. If Iwata were a character in Final Fantasy Tactics, he’d be a level 99 Calculator, for sure: with one swift flick of his wrist, he was able to make an epicly large percentage of Japanese Human Beings go bug-eyed at the sight of outdated graphics and tinny sound. All it took to pull off this magic trick was one bite-sized cypher: the idea-nugget that there are gamers, and there are non-gamers, and that non-gamers can be divided up into “people who have never played games” and “people who played games before and then stopped”, and that “people who played games before and then stopped”, while perhaps a smaller group than “people who have never played games”, are in fact probably a larger group than “gamers”. The point of Nintendo’s Revolution Vigil, during which I’m guessing a dozen greying men huddled in a bomb shelter subsisting on a meat-locker full of Boss Coffee for three months was to figure out how, exactly, to package the Same Old Shit in a way that made Grandma and Grandpa stuff their same old pants with excitement.
In the end, the “Wii”, a moniker chosen for its “first-person plural” aspect as well as its similarity to a shout of uncontrollable glee, was born and branded as “The DS, on your TV — only now, the stylus is invisible“. The DS, of course, had been the result of Satoru Iwata having conveniently eaten a Very Grotesquely Large Salad and a bowl of rice precisely twenty-two hours before first seeing the television commercials for Sony’s EyeToy: during that forty-five minute breakneck brickstuff, Iwata must have screamed “Eureka!” so many times that he couldn’t not invent the Nintendo DS by the time he began washing his hands. If only Sony Japan had had a little faith, if only they hadn’t dismissed “casual games” as something the Japanese don’t “do”, or if only Sony Europe had developed some solid concepts (like, say, EyeToy games that were deeper than window-washing and/or don’t feature the player’s horrifyingly-lit slack-jawed visage as the “protagonist”) to sell said septegenarian board members, then maybe the PlayStation 2 would be the top-selling console instead of the Wii, and the PlayStation 3 would either look more or less depressing, given your perspective.
Alternate sentence-clump I couldn’t fit in the above paragraph: long before I obtained an interest in poetry and my penis got so inexplicably large, I worked at a GameStop in Indiana, from roughly the Dreamcast launch to the PlayStation 2 launch. Right before the PlayStation 2 was released, Sony sent us demo stations, with fiber-optic blue track-lighting embedded in frosted glass: “PlayStation 2”, it said. We put this demo kiosk right next to the Dreamcast demo kiosk, and the kids who we accidentally babysat while their mother stood in the women’s shoe store across the hall looking lonely would stand there and squeal at the sphere-eyed, single-complexioned John Madden Football Warriors on screen: “PlayStation Two is toight!” We switched the PlayStation 2 inside for a Dreamcast, with the objectively-better-looking NFL 2K1, and the kids began to ogle it, and squeal: “PlayStation Two is toight!” In the end, we probably hecked up the world economy in a chaos-theory sort of way — maybe our trickery of those dumb kids, for selfish purposes, had been the butterfly-wing-flap that brought about the DS/Wii hurricane, who knows. Though at the time, it really, honestly seemed like something to do.
Back in the real world, here we are with this Nintendo Wii wheel. I’m not going to make too much fun of it, because it has a delicious weight and it smells like vintage vinyl records. It also manages to miraculously fill in some kind of psychological gap and feel, most of the time, not at all like bullstuff. This is remarkable, I guess, because games like Excitetruck on the Wii and Motorstorm on the PlayStation 3 have featured controller-tilting steering wheel controls and mostly ended up feeling cheap instead of psychically immersive. The Wii Wheel is no second coming of Christ or anything, though playing Mario Kart Wii with and without it leads me to mathematically declare that yes, it does make a difference.
Still, there’s a sort of weird pseudo-backwardness about it. If Nintendo’s goal with the Wii was to create new genres of fun while lighting peoples’ imaginations on fire, and if this goal required them to make a controller that was as simple as possible, why complicate things? What’s with all the add-ons? Like, I was at the presentation where Iwata revealed the new controller; I heard him say their goal was to make the simplest game controller possible, because a PlayStation pad was too daunting and the sight of an Xbox controller gave grandpa epilepsy; I thought it was hilarious, brilliant. Then they rolled out the nunchuk attachment, as if to say, “You can play regular games on it, too.” That left me a tiny bit confused. I don’t even feel like finishing this paragraph now, to be honest, so I’ll just say, and objectively, that if this world we live in is one where a PlayStation 3 controller, with four face buttons, a D-pad, four triggers, and two analog sticks, can and will make your aunt call the cops, then the Nintendo Wii Remote, plus protective rubber safety condom, plus nunchuk, is obviously a hybrid sextoy / murder-weapon, and you will need a Catholic priest to perform an exorcism on your eventual death bed if you’ve ever so much looked at one.
Though the initial Nintendo “Revolution” controller concept reel clearly showed a guy playing (from a point of view inside the TV, looking out — a crucial point for what we’re going to discuss later) a first-person shooter of some sort, Nintendo eventually released a “Zapper” peripheral, which is no more than a hollow shell that cheaply binds your remote and nunchuk together into the shape of a crude gun. It’s supposed to help the players’ imaginations, or something. If you ask me, it looks like what happens when the cinematographer for “Star Trek” drinks on the set.
If Nintendo is all about giving us this magnificent magic wand — and the Wiimote is a grand technological icon on par with the iPod, don’t get me wrong — and letting our imaginations run wild, why must they continually doubt our imaginations?
I would put that question in huge, bold letters, though something holds me back. I guess it’s the fact that, yes, I find that the Wii Wheel really does enhance the experience of using controller tilts to steer in Mario Kart Wii. Instead, all I can do is whimper: though the controller is shaped like a steering wheel, we have to press the “2” button on the Wiimote in order to accelerate, which makes it absolutely impossible to employ the 10-2 position on the wheel while playing the game. Why bother to simulate driving, if you’re going to force people to do so in such a manner that would, in the case of a real-life head-on collision and airbag deployment, result in the driver’s right hand flipping backward at a high enough speed to possibly break the passenger’s neck? (I smell a very loose class-action lawsuit, though I suppose Japan is exempt, for obvious reasons.)
When Nintendo announced — at the same press conference where they revealed the remote — that they’d be making “shells” for enhancing the remote, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I thought “shell” had been a slip — I thought they meant they’d keep making attachments like the nunchuk, things with buttons or whatever on them.
Therefore: if the upcoming Super Mario Sluggers baseball game comes with a baseball bat shell for the remote, it will be the Piece of White Plastic that Broke the Aircraft Carrier’s Back, and I will walk down to my local convenient store, withdraw 6,000 yen from the ATM, and proceed to eat it right there, in front of the super-hot visual-kei cashier dude. Maybe he’ll mistake me for a hardass, or else a wounded lunatic, and he’ll ask for my phone number, and we can have tea parties.
This, of course, is not even the tangent I meant to go on. No, it’s all just context for what I’m about to say:
Mario Kart Wii‘s box, in addition to being shiny, delicious, and somehow both white and colorful, in addition to being packed just firmly enough to squeeze with the tips of the fingers, setting off “I am holding a High-Quality Videogame Product, I must run home and eat a bowl of cereal AQAP” alarms within my obese human brain, also features a picture of Super Mario himself, and his brother Luigi, both holding Wii Wheels.
Why are they holding the Wii Wheel? Well, they’re playing Mario Kart Wii, of course.
An open-mouthed forensic analysis of this follows:
Mario and Luigi are holding the Wii Wheel on the front of the box for Mario Kart Wii.
They are floating on air, with feet kicking wildly and surprised expressions on their faces.
Their feet are, for the record, not in the position that people’s feet would need to be in to operate an automobile.
Beneath their bodies are shadows of what look to be formula-1 race cars.
The Wii Wheel is included in the box, as is a copy of Mario Kart Wii.
The photograph of the Wii Wheel in the background of the cover image is the actual size of the Wii Wheel in the box.
The DVD case containing the Mario Kart Wii software also features the picture of Mario and Luigi using the Wii Wheel.
The Wii Wheel in the background image of the instruction manual cover is a drawing, not a photograph.
It is also not actual size, for obvious reasons.
The Wii Wheel is not needed to play Mario Kart Wii.
The Seventh Circle of Hell is revealed on the game’s title screen, which features a (much-lower-resolution) instance of the aforementioned image.
(An inside-the-box observation: Amazon.co.jp’s official image of this game’s box is an actual photograph of the actual box, with an airbrushed shadow and all.)
(An outside-the-box observation: videogames are about us pretending to do things; in Mario Kart, we step into Mario’s virtual shoes as we hold a real-like steering wheel. Mario’s use of the wheel on this box can then only be seen as a mockery of us flesh-and-blood creations: if this game is about pretending to drive a car, then Mario is pretending to pretend to drive a car. Et cetera.)
Now, it is quite possible that Mario and Luigi are sitting on a sofa, though the sofa has been invisibled for presumably the same reasons that music comes even out of the trash cans at Disneyland. That’s not the point. The point is that here were are, adults, Horny As Hell in the 21st Century, possibly fornicating three or four times a week, possibly enjoying fornicating more than our forefathers did, and here’s Mario and Luigi, holding the same controller I’m holding, freaking out as they look in my direction. I’m about to press the A button and begin the enthralling user registration process, and they’re already having fun, albeit in freeze-frame. This is when the Nintendo “Revolution” concept reel showed off at Tokyo Game Show 2005 all comes rushing back to me: cheap horror-movie sounds, a young boy in a yellow T-shirt aiming the Wiimote with his right hand and twiddling an analog stick with his left hand while his girlfriend’s teeth chatter; some said that the “Revolution” was Nintendo giving a spiritual tax refund to those numb nincompoops who thought pulling the NES controller sharply upward might make Mario jump higher, and maybe those people were right; at the time, all that was certain was that Nintendo was now inside the game, looking out at us. We would be the stars in their new games, just as “You” would be TIME magazine’s “person of the year” in 2006. When the “Wii” was eventually named, and then quickly launched, the brilliant gateway for many non-players was the opportunity to craft a “Mii”, a videogame character that would essentially look like you — if you were a videogame character (with somewhat stuffty graphics).
Flash forward to 2008, an era some have dubbed “The Now”: here we have Established Videogame Characters, the Super Mario Brothers, aka Mario and Luigi, holding the game controller that real-life you and me are using to control said Established Videogame Characters in said Established Videogame Franchise. It’s easy to generalize, and raise up scarecrow debates, like how it’s bizarre that the box art (and title screen) portrays videogame characters doing something human beings can do on their own instead of portray them doing the fantastic, escapist things they can do in the ame, or ask hilarious questions like “What’s next, Little Sister using an Xbox 360 controller to control Big Daddy on the front of BioShock 2?”
More to the point: Part of Nintendo’s policy for Wii software was (and continues to be) that the advertisements always feature real-life human beings enjoying the games. Wii Play‘s box shows a real human hand clinging to a Wiimote, for example. With games like Smash Bros., with strong brand appeal and old-school controls, the advertising standards didn’t enter the equation. With Mario Kart Wii, Nintendo had themselves painted into a corner — on the one hand, we’ve got this orgasmically beloved characters, and on the other hand, we have a clever new way to engorge the players’ endorphins, to make them feel the car. That they went with advertising both at once is a no-brainer; that they made said image into their game’s title screen is the trumpet of a kind of third-world apocalypse. It bangs a gong in the brain: at Nintendo, something has changed.
Then you realize that, by playing Mario Kart Wii for enough hours, you can unlock the ability to use your Mii in a race.
The argument that ensues is awesome. You can figure it out yourself, because I have to throw up right now, for reasons completely not related to this article, or even videogames. It’ll be like a mad-lib. I’ll write the beginning:
“If and when they make a Wii2, with 720p graphics and a hard-drive, if and when they upgrade the Miis so their appendages don’t look as gimpy and/or so they can have more interesting clothes and a couple more face part options (multicolored hair, et cetera), there will still be a ‘Classic Mii’ option, for people who want the gimpy appendages or more limited selection of noses.”
And then the ending:
“And when, at last, Classic Mii Kart Wii 2 is released, you’ll be able to unlock Baby Mario.”
ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW
That was fun!
Now let’s talk about Mario Kart Wii. I’ll use the inverted pyramid method to summarize:
Mario Kart Wii for the Nintendo Wii, by Nintendo: you’ve played it already, or it’s definitely not your favorite game ever. I despise the weapons and everything they represent. The tracks are shining examples of good videogame level design — great videogame level design, even. We’re talking Original-Super Mario Bros.-worthy level design. Even the jerk-off parts in two tracks where you get fired out of a cannon and thus are not controlling the game for a whole three seconds are forgivable when, upon landing, you’re, like, going down a snowboard slope, with awesome speed-boosting half-pipes. The motorcycles are cool, with appropriately floaty drift mechanics, and the ability to do wheelies for extra speed boost. The graphics are colorful and sharp, with gritty textures that look actually cute, even confectionary-like; it’s like the Wii’s hamster-wheel graphics processor is finding a niche as some kind of sideways “new retro”. The character voices are hateful trash, a cacophony of homicidal crocodiles kacking down cotton candy, schizophrenic ostriches kacking down skittles, kleptomanic velociraptors kacking down broken glass; the music, for the most part, sounds like something a Brazilian community college professor would compose as a tool for conditioning the more gorillia-like breed of human &^#$# to masturbate to, thus sparing the lives and virginities of entire city blocks. Donkey Kong is great, and it’s sad that his voice sounds like Goofy drowning in Jell-O.
Now that that’s over with, I’m going to go back and expand on the second sentence of the above paragraph re: weapons.
I hate the weapons. Well, not all of them. The green shell and the banana peel can stay. And, of course, the speed-boost mushroom, which isn’t a “weapon”, anyway.
Anyway, most of the rest of the weapons are hateful. Let’s go ahead and make a list, in order from least to most hateful:
Red Shells: I guess these are kind of okay. They target the person in front of you — or right behind you — and they’re usually a sure hit, though they can be avoided.
Bob-omb: throw in any direction to cause a big explosion that can possibly catch many other drivers at once. I guess it’s decent because it takes a bit of skill to use, and it’s dangerous because you can get yourself caught up in the blast.
Thunder cloud: a thunder cloud appears above your car and hisses at you for a bit; wait too long and it’ll strike you with lightning and shrink you; tag another racer before the lightning comes out and the cloud will stick to his car, instead. Decent because it makes for a nice little game of hot potato and it carries a risk.
Super dash mushroom: a dash mushroom that can be used something like twenty times in rapid succession. Basically the game’s way of telling you that you suck, though you might stand a chance of getting better if only you win a couple of races and feel good about yourself.
Mega mushroom: turns your car twice the size and jacks the speed up to 200%. You can also crush any drivers you run over. Mostly fair because there’s a risk accompanying the reward (ie, your car is harder to control).
Invincibility Star: makes you invincible and about 200% faster. Kind of almost the same thing as the Mega Mushroom.
Bullet Bill: turns your car and driver into a Bullet Bill, which flies at about 1000% the speed of your car, flattening anything in its path and usually jumping you ahead ten or so places in the race; really easy to control. Kind of really stupidly unfair in a “Yay Button” sort of way.
POW Block: use this to cause an earthquake, flattening every car that’s touching the ground. Wouldn’t be quite so hateful if it was a tiny bit easier to avoid the quakes. I suppose you’re supposed to jump at some precise millisecond to avoid it, though I haven’t succeeded at it once. Always seems to impact just as you land on a tiny island before a ramp that will jump you to another tiny island, meaning that you fall into a pit and lose about twelve places in the race.
hecking Squid Thing: No, I’m not going to call it by its canonical name. Use this stupid thing to telepathically squirt ink on every driver in front of you, making it “harder” for them to “see”. If you get hit with this yourself, that means there’s going to be a big ugly black “ink” effect on the screen, obstructing your view. If you use this against computer racers, the “ink driving” AI algorithm kicks in, everyone starts bizarrely wobbling back and forth, and it’s horribly depressing: for a split-split second, your brain becomes unable to differentiate between the phrases “next time I get laid” and “the day I die”. Seriously, obstructing the view is not a good idea for a videogame. Have you ever heard about that blind kid who can beat anyone at Mortal Kombat? Yeah, that’s because Mortal Kombat isn’t a real videogame.
Lightning Bolt: awarded only to the most headgear-wearing-&^#$#ed of players, those who are in twelfth place and deserve to be there forever. When used, it shrinks every other kart on the course to half speed and half size, making them instantly crushable by the lightning-bolt-using driver. However, it does not change the fact that the driver who used it most likely sucks. It awards them only hope, for a few seconds, before restoring everything to normal and telling the jerk who used it to get to the back of the bus again. In short, it just causes immense annoyance to anyone who’s not losing to everyone.
The Fake Item Box: for heck’s sake, it doesn’t look anything like a real item box. For one thing, it’s red, and for another thing, the question mark is upside-down. According to the Japanese manual, “It looks exactly like a real item box.” That’s hecking false advertising, right there. I mean, I suppose that the average Japanese person doesn’t immediately reject an upside-down question mark, and — well, I realize that the average American can’t identify the North American continent on a map, though hell. It’s really, stupidly embarrassing, this thing. Anyone who hits one is either stupid enough to think it’s a real item box or just forced into a position where there’s no alternative, and in the latter case, they’re just going to think (if they’re like me, which I’m sure everyone is) of how ridiculous it is that these game designers might seriously think (or, even worse, be pretending to think) that people will mistake this thing for a real item box.
The Blue Shell: . . . well.
The Blue Shell is a sign of the times; it’s the first nail in the coffin of game design. Know that I come from a proud heritage of people who play Virtua Fighter 5 and genuinely enjoy losing because it teaches you something.
If you’re in a losing position and have been for a good amount of time, an algorithm behind the scenes kicks in and awards you a Blue Shell. Use it, and it rushes to the head of the pack and crashes into the person in first place with absolute certainty. Other drivers in the general area will also be decimated.
I’m sure that the general idea of the Blue Shell when it first appeared, in Super Mario Kart 64, was that a person in last place would obtain it, shudder with joy, and then be filled with the turgid urge to claw their way to the head of the pack and use it when within strategic range of the leaders.
In the current “videogame industry”, though, things like the Blue Shell are communistic concessions thrown to the people who Aren’t Getting Better. If my little brother, say, spent twenty hours a day doing something other than playing videogames — that is to say, if he sucked at videogames — the Blue Shell would be his “Best Thing Ever”: something to use when bitter and bored, to ruin the chances of the person who’s just so happening to win. The Blue Shell, simply described, is an easy way to strike back at the person who’s beating everyone, when you are the one losing to everyone. If that’s not heady, frothy communism in action, I really don’t know what the hell is. How is this a more family-friendly experience than killing hookers in Grand Theft Auto? If anything, the sugar-coating just makes the arsenic more dangerous, and it can’t be too hard to prove, from here, that Nintendo fanboys — big, sweaty, mouth-breathing — are actually individuals of scarier morals than most self-mutilating suicide-bombing terrorists.
Since the Nintendo Wii is the game console of the proletariat (“the game console of the proletariat” is the nice way to say “they should sell most of the games in the supermarket tabloid rack, next to ‘1,001 Baby Names for Girls (Now with more mixed-race names)'”), Nintendo has seen about sharpening the item randomization algorithms to razor edges. Everyone always has a chance to be in first place in Mario Kart Wii, which seems to make sense because I suppose it’s meant to be a “party” game for people with “friends”, though when you’re playing it dead alone, against a cold last-gen computer chip that’s only just barely powerful enough to keep a graphing calculator from meeting “six divided by three” with “ERROR”, and you’re about to cross the hecking finish line in first place and get hit by a POW Block, a Lightning Bolt, a Blue Shell, a Red Shell, and then the hecking Squid Thing — all it seems to do is present striking evidence that the world is full of pricks.
The theories seem stable enough: if we construct a few detailed Venn diagrams, we can prove that the person using the Blue Shell now might be the most technically skilled of players. He might just be having a run of stuffty luck because, of all the things we can mathematically prove about a race with more than two live (as in “not dead”) racers, someone must be losing at any given time, meaning that someone is getting these Almighty Items, and then using them, either out of bitterness or out of hope.
If you’ve got a pen and paper (or MSPaint), start making a flowchart of this: it is possible for a Good Player to be hecked back into last place, though Almighty Items only appear if one is in last place for a set period of time; a Good Player will most likely be able to advance a few places before being awarded an Almighty Item.
With a little bit of work I’m not 100% willing to do right now (got an erection again T-T), it can be quite easily proven that the only reason these items were originally conceived, in earlier installments of the series, was to make it possible for losers to become winners occasionally, and that in Mario Kart Wii, the items mainly exist to “liven up” the contest.
I have seen police officers who will accuse a man of being a homosexual for insisting that Mario Kart should just let the best man win. I’m well aware that I’m going to get at least a dozen half-sentence emails telling me that I obviously don’t like having fun. I’m fully prepared to ignore them. I stand by my assertion that maybe there’s a way to make an amazingly fun game with just a few weapons that require a small amount of skill to use.
In the name of research, I ironed my hair, donned designer eyeglasses, and gathered up a group of fourteen carrot-skinned, silver-lipped, corkscrew-beehive-headed Dolce-and-Gabbana-sunglasses-wearing Japanese part-time prostitutes and made them wait outside my apartment in single file while I forced each one in turn to play Mario Kart Wii for an hour. Twelve of them would ask me for money, six would report me to the police and press rape charges, and I think two of them actually didn’t have brains or eyes, though all of them managed to win first, second, or third place on cumulative points in the 50cc Mushroom Cup, despite them all whipping the wheel around over their heads and flailing like a lunatic, like they’d never even seen a guy driving a car in a movie.
In the end, there was me, trying to win the 150cc Special Cup, being hecked over countless times by jerk-off Lightning Bolts or Blue Shells and winding up in second place overall, maybe a dozen times in a row. It comes to feel almost like video poker, after a while — the computer obviously knows what you need in order to win, and though it’s illegal in a sense if it relies on anything more than raw math to determine what cards are dealt, when you do lose, you feel like stuff and you’re dead positive that god hates you.
It can be surmised even by an elementary school dropout that Mario Kart Wii is designed from the ground up to be “a game that people enjoy with their friends”. At what cost to our dignity, though? By “our” I don’t just mean “Hardcore video-gamers”, I mean “the human race”. There’s some Brave-New-World-style stuff peeking out from behind mama’s skirt, here: why would someone even care to get “better” if it’s possible to just keep relying on the jerk-ass weapons and occasionally getting a lucky break, just for being a jerk? With Virtua Fighter 5, it’s like, if you lose to a guy, it’s because he’s better than you. If you really like the game, you’ll keep playing whether you win or lose — with the idea being that you should want to win. Mario Kart Wii imagines a world where “it’s not whether you win or lose — it’s how you play the game” or “it’s all in good fun” or “they’re just jealous” are not just something gym teachers tell the fat kid the day he gets hazed to death in the showers; it imagines that world, and then it runs with it, straight for the gates of Hell, nose to the sky. That ain’t how it always is, jack. They wouldn’t call it a “game” if it was possible to not want to win. Someone up there needs to respect that. Rather than rely on its existing, sharp, utterly enjoyable core mechanics to encourage players to play more and get better, the game scoops out its right eye and offers it to the gods of $$$. And it sold 300,000 units on its launch day in Japan.
Mario Kart Wii unfolds as a game-design exercise with the personality of that sniveling rat bastard at every Japanese corporate party, the one who squints at a spreadsheet all day, doing no real work, and feels inadequate that he’s not bench-pressing intertwined naked lesbians on his lunch breaks, who decides in his dead samurai heart that he must go around, get in everyone’s face, take their drinks out of their hands, hold them just out of reach, chortle, guffaw, and make sure everyone is having Adequate Amounts of Fun. Some day he’ll blackmail a decently not-unattractive woman into marrying him, and when his child gets kicked in the balls at school because his dad is an asshole, he’ll tell his wife that it’s a tough world and people have to learn. Deep within the jumble of motives and execution-style hiccups called Mario Kart Wii is a mathematical proof for why you should never let the Boss speak a single suggestive word at a meeting requiring creativity: the Boss, if nothing else, exists only to ask the most hideously obvious, stupid questions at the latest time possible, and usually, if he doesn’t do this, the whole company will figuratively go down the drain. By the end of a brain-dead night of trophy collecting, of the coin-toss-like stiff odds, of the pachinko race dynamics, of the unbelievable, improbable luck that the same two racers keep finishing in the top three even though you and everyone else are bouncing all over the place, of shuddering that a gorilla named “Donkey” can share a winner’s circle with a fairy-tale princess and another instance of said fairy-tale princess as a baby, the world starts to feel the wrong color. Your mind wanders back to the Miis, to Mario holding the controller on the box, to the shadows of racecars, to the Lightning Bolt, to the Blue Shell: it’s like, all of a sudden, a publicist informs the YMCA that every “we regret to inform you that a toddler shat in our olympic-sized swimming pool” letter is bad enough for their reputation to the point that they’re probably legally better off just pumping their pools nationwide full of human feces and calling it a day: People who find the possibility of stuff in the water repulsive are a liability, whereas people who don’t mind swimming in steaming feces can be classified as, among many other things, “loyal customers”.
In short, Mario Kart Wii is a snappy little racing game with some bright happy graphics and some smashing great track design best enjoyed at your own pace in the time attack mode. It is also a sign of an three-quarters-decent-sized apocalypse, though hey, as long as everyone is having fun, that’s all that counts!
In closing, the back of the Japanese box says, and I quote (in translation):
“Battle it out in twelve-player races with rivals from all over the world! Your friends far away, or people from anywhere in the world!”
The semantics are intriguing, indicating dully to the reader that their friends are “far away”, and that anyone they haven’t ever met is a “people”, from “anywhere in the world”.
The applicable footnote reads:
“*You will need an internet connection.”
Welcome to the world, then. Hope you guys are enjoying the revolution.
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE FIRST VIDEOGAME OF THE REST OF OUR LIVES.”
If you imagine for a moment that all of the emails I got last year asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, and then you also pretended that the overwhelming majority of emails asking me why I haven’t reviewed BioShock yet, when I’m going to review BioShock, or if there’s some reason I am blatantly ignoring BioShock also didn’t exist, that would leave me with a healthy stack of emails asking me when I was going to review Call of Duty 4, how much I loved Call of Duty 4, or if I was going to call Call of Duty 4 the “best game ever” or not. Well, to answer those three questions:
1. Right now!
2. A lot!
3. Nope!
If you were to imagine for a moment that all the emails I got last week asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, that would leave you with an overwhelming majority of emails asking me “Why don’t you die?”, and if you were to imagine that those emails didn’t exist, you’d have a pretty significant number of emails asking me “If BioShock isn’t a great game, what is?” To answer those two questions:
1. Let me ask my secretary!
2. Call of Duty 4!
The truth is, I didn’t really feel like reviewing Call of Duty 4 because it’s kind of too good. Also, because I wasn’t sure what the name of the game is — that “4” there is definitely raised. It is definitely an exponent. Am I supposed to call the game “Call of Duty To The Fourth Power”? How many powers do we have to put on our duty before it’s patriotic enough for Joe Sixpack and Jennifer Twoliter to enjoy on Memorial Day?
Anyway, the short version of this review is that I liked the game a lot, as much as I probably can like a game — even if I might never play it again.
The long version is this:
Unlike BioShock, Call of Duty 4 has everything: seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative, focused play mechanics, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. More than just a crotch massage plugged into a television set, Call of Duty 4 boldly toes the bizarrely forbidden line between “videogame” and “entertainment”. It’s made by people who get it so ferociously that they might not even know that there’s an “it” they’re getting. It’s hard, it’s fast, it’s lean, it’s learned, and it’s a dynamo. Developers of big-budget action-adventure games: please, if you have any common sense, this is the one you’re supposed to study. It’s the first game of the rest of our lives.
I can’t say I’ve been the biggest fan of the series. Or even the smallest one, or even the most medium-sized one. I first encountered Call of Duty 4 at a demo station at Tokyo Game Show 2007, where my brother Brandon Sheffield (of Gamasutra) played through the first mission under the enthusiastic guidance of an Activision / Infinity Ward representative. The guy was telling us how it was: you’re infiltrating a tanker, trying to get some enemy intel. You have to kill the crew, get the intel, get out, and get on your chopper. See this, now? The ship is sinking. Look at the water effects. Notice how the boat is tipping. Brandon handled it all with grace; I guess, since his magazine and website carry advertisements, occasionally rely on videogame developers to write features, and are genuinely in the habit of being as polite as possible to as many people as possible at all times, he was used to having people explain what was plainly visible. I guess I’m used to it, to, what with the line of work I’m in (let’s not even get into it), though maybe I would have minded it a whole lot less had I been actually playing. From what I could tell, the action on the screen looked distinctly, nonchalantly amazing: here we were, invading a tanker on the ocean, and outside the immediate scope of soldiers with guns versus soldiers with guns, things were happening: the ship was sinking, and it looked like the ship was sinking. We here at Action Button Dot Net are people of refined tastes: we go whole days, sometimes, listening only to The Stone Roses’ song “Breaking Into Heaven” on loop for twenty-four straight hours. I don’t need anyone telling me that something that is stuff-hot is stuff-hot, though I guess if the Activision guy had just been repeatedly saying “This Game Is Shit Hot” in a text-to-speech voice for the duration of the play session, I would have purchased the game and reviewed it immediately, just to compliment their amazing PR.
When I eventually played the game, it was after the fact; it was after every fact. Here’s what I knew, before I started playing Call of Duty 4:
1. Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are not related;
2. The previous Call of Duty games were all about World War II;
3. The first two Call of Duty games were developed by Infinity Ward;
4. The third Call of Duty game was not developed by Infinity Ward;
5. The fourth Call of Duty game was developed by Infinity Ward again;
6. The fourth Call of Duty game is not about World War II; it is set in modern times;
7. According to Wikipedia, “The Call of Duty Real-time Card Game was announced by card manufacturer Upper Deck”;
8. I’m pretty sure any card game is actually played in real-time;
9. I could be mistaken, because maybe the concept of time isn’t exactly “real” for people who spend their time playing collectible card games.
I very highly respect the idea of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, then, because Call of Duty is obviously a “strong enough” “intellectual property” to have a Real-time Card Game based on it, and messing with the formula (“the formula” being “World War II”) is a pretty bold move in this dead-horse-throttling industry we live in. Furthermore, I guess you could say my interest was piqued because World War II games have always managed to amazingly bore me. I don’t really get why: I find World War II a fascinating subject. Now that I think about it, I’ve never actually read a book about World War II on purpose, nor have I ever watched a movie about World War II because I had to, though I’ve heard a couple of people talk about World War II, and they seem to think it’s really interesting. There was a whole lot going on. Hitler was probably the last objectively evil human being history will allow; in a way, media — like newspapers, television, movies, and (hey!) videogames — spread the message of those terrible things that happened, of how even Russia and America were able to agree on something, and team up and just about literally save the world. I guess the games don’t do anything for me because — and call this a cop-out reason if you like — their graphics aren’t good enough. We’ve had decades of film dramatizations and Spielbergizations to go on, and the games just don’t look dead convincing enough. Modern War, though, hell, why not? After seeing that scene in “Fahrenheit 9/11” where an American hickboy explains that he listens to The Bloodhound Gang’s “The Roof is on Fire” while running over Iraqis in his M-1 Abrams battle tank, because “the roof is on fire” is a “metaphor”, because “Baghdad is also kinda on fire”, I figure, heck, go ahead and make a videogame out of this, already. There are moments when the events on the screen resemble things that happen in videogames — like when the AC-130 TV operator tells you that the friendlies are carrying IR beacons, so they’re glowing, so as to help you recognize who to not shoot. It strikes me that as much as games are training our kids how to join the military and/or murder civilian hookers, games (or, uh, software user interfaces in general) are teaching the military a thing or two. There was that DARPA prototype robo-tank recently, that operated by remote-control: the remote control was an Xbox 360 controller. I guess, if Call of Duty 4 had been made after the video footage of that DARPA prototype hit the internet, they would have had a perfect excuse to incorporate an Xbox 360 controller into the game and not be prickishly self-referential about it.
Call of Duty 4 is a videogame about modern-day US Marines and British SAS, taking part in small- and large-scale armed skirmishes in either some Middle-Eastern desert city or beneath the mauve-skied dawn of some rural Russian village. There’s a plot, though who the hell knows what’s going on, really? Games shouldn’t be about “narrative”; they should be about feeling like you’re an important (or at least active) part of some kind of important event. Ninety percent of the time, you’re taking orders from a man with lamb chops; your squad mates shout about tangos and charlies and bravos and tangos; sometimes, they’ll tell you that they’ve got lookout in front of this door frame, and that you are to go in and neutralize any threats (military speak for “blast anything breathing”); sometimes they scream that you need to run. Usually, whenever the latter happens, some cataclysmic event is occurring on the screen. That’s good — games should strive to, you know, have actual stuff happening. That’s the sort of thing “professional” reviewers should be able to commend: “The stuff happening on screen was interesting, and lovingly presented”. Instead, we just get people complimenting water effects: “Just looking at the water is very soothing. It’s so real it made me thirsty. –IGN.” Look higher, people!
Very early in the game, when you’re escaping a sinking ship, the level design offers you a multitude of choices which way to run. Your team is full of experienced, hard dudes, and they know where to go. So you follow them, and you get out alive. However, the game is sure to give you the choice to go some other route, though that will promptly get you killed. In the interest of science, I’ve put a controller in the hands of various friends, and not a single one of them has escaped from the tanker on the first try. At the end, they always go the wrong way, and Dreaded White Text tells them “You went the wrong way”. And that’s it. This seemed to frustrate many of my friends to no end, though I found it chaotically intriguing. I kind of wish the game had done more of that.
For the most part, though, actually playing Call of Duty 4 is entertaining in the most tenuous way. The game’s atmosphere works as hard as it can to simply make you feel like you’re a part of these big events. You get a very strong sense that you’re fighting with a team, probably because your teammates don’t ever say &^#$#ed things to one another, or high-five one-another, and because they actually obtain a significant amount of the kills during a firefight. And some of the gunfights are tough; tough enough to make you wonder how real soldiers put up with this stuff without, you know, dying. I guess the absolute animal fear of death has something to do with it. However, eventually, Call of Duty 4 managed to win me over, and greatly; its expertly executed atmosphere, and very focused play mechanics didn’t get tiring even as I dropped countless nickels into the slot machine of the moment on some of the more brutal gunfights. I started to respect the level design on deeper levels: usually, you’re heading toward waypoints, sometimes while being pursued by bad guys, or sometimes while avoiding lookouts. Every once in a while, all hell breaks loose and there are maybe fifteen guys on the top of a hill, which has two staircases and a couple of dirt roads leading up it. There’s no set-in-stone way to win each momentary skirmish, though “thinking on your feet” is a really good place to start. Shades of Metal Gear Solid 3 start to leak in, eventually, as the game allows you to feel for yourself when you’re doing well or phoning it in: sometimes, a fight will end without you scoring more than four or five kills; you’ll feel like stuff for having let your dudes do all the work, and then you’ll notice that two of them died. This feeling runs weirdly parallel to the arcade-like action feel of dropping nickels into the slot machine, trying wild tactics, getting shot in the head, trying something crazier next time. There you go: Call of Duty 4 effortlessly manages equal parts dramatic catharsis and arcade action.
There’s a conscientious, well-played part midway through the game, where a soldier on point races up a staircase, only to be grabbed by a Middle-Eastern Individual of Opposing Political Views: if you manage to shoot the attacker, the game awards you with an Xbox Achievement for having saved the guy (who, I notice from the credits, is named after a member of the development team). This is clever, mostly, because in many games (even this one) Xbox Achievements tend to award the player for doing arbitrary things that he doesn’t have to do in order to succeed at the game. There’s a word that game designers throw around often: “Visual language”. Basically, how the game, visually, tells the player that he’s doing something right or wrong; “Achievements”, with their big, bombastic, bloated, banal on-screen explosion of Old-Navy-worthy graphic design, are, to me, at least, the exact opposite of satisfaction: killing the final boss of a game and seeing “Achievement Unlocked: The End!” elicits a VH1 Pop-Up Video sound effect in the middle of my head, and I get something like the inverse of an erection (we call it a “turtle”). Yes, “Achievements” are a fragment of the devil, in this “videogame industry”; you can’t even use the points to buy anything. I suspect that giving a player an achievement for, you know, ensuring that one of his comrades doesn’t die is Infinity Ward’s way of subverting the masses in as clever a way as possible. For one thing, looking out for your own is something someone in the military, fighting a war, is obligated to do. On the other hand, each of Call of Duty 4‘s tenuous little gun-versus-gun contests sees you walking the razor’s edge between life and death, and the life and death of your expendable squad-mates; the game is constantly telling the player with its visual language whether he is doing well or not. This game is whispering that we don’t need “Achievements”, really, if the game is expertly well-made.
TANGENT “RE: DEATH” BEGINS
I kind of wonder, a lot more than is probably healthy, about death in videogames. Call of Duty 4 brings up the question of death many times, as your guy is shot in the side of the head and you scream “Who shot me?” and your friend, who is half-drunk, says “Dude, in a real war, you’d never see the bullets coming, either.” Eventually, he goes from being half-drunk to fully drunk, and that makes his words all the more consideration-worthy: Man, what kinds of people actually go out and fight real wars? What the heck is wrong with these people? Politics aside, who is willing to die for anything, much less the concept of a country? And what’s with these kids playing these FPSes, anyway? What the hell are they thinking? Do they see these games as training exercises for the one day when they’ll get to wield an AK in the name of shooting ragheads from the back of a Hummer? I’m not going to pretend that these kids possess a single political atom in their bodies; I know the score: they just want to kill. What I can say, with serious scientific certainty, is that I once saw a YouTube video of I think it was Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (boring game, by the way) where the first comment was “Awesome game” and the third comment accused the game of being for homosexuals because the graphics weren’t photo-realistic enough. I defecate you negative. I suppose this is why Call of Duty 4‘s Big Back-of-Box Quote is “The most PHOTO-REALISTIC video game WE’VE EVER SEEN.” (Game Informer.) I’m hardly even going to make fun of that quote; Activision PR did what they had to do.
On a high-enough difficulty level, Call of Duty 4 recreates some of the dread of war. I honestly tend to avoid FPSes where you can’t see the bullets “because you can’t see the bullets in real life”, because this isn’t real life, it’s a game. Though as I’ve said above, it plays well as a game; you feel like you did something when you win, you know you messed up when you lose, no matter how many dozens of times you lose. And the presentation remains seamless.
Anyway. There’s a part where Call of Duty 4 does something shocking; I don’t really know how to explain it without spoiling it, so let’s just say that it steps back through the fourth wall for a moment. Yes, I’m saying it had been standing in front of the fourth wall for its entire running time until that moment, when it stepped back behind the fourth wall. The scene involves death — though not in a videogame-y, “Looney Tunes”-y, “if at first you don’t succeed” way, and not in a melodramatic movie way, either. It’s easy to say that “the character you’re controlling dies as a result of the narrative”, and it’s easy to look at that statement, as what it is, and nitpick away: well, in the game, you can die so many times, in the middle of so many inconsequential skirmishes, and then you just respawn almost immediately (after reading a nice little anti-war quote by some famous person whose pacifist attitude didn’t stop them from dying) and try again like nothing had ever happened.
How can narrative-related death be special at all in a piece of work in a medium where the player must die repeatedly? The answer to these question is, of course, “The death must be shocking, and awful”. It must be a huge sentence-ending punctuation mark, where previous deaths had been commas. It’s a tall order, though Call of Duty 4 pulls it off, and when it does, it leaves you feeling deeply sad, or deeply confused. Either way, it’s made its point, and it’s perhaps even more brilliant than even I’ve given it credit for: if you be a cranberry-juice-sipping, organic red onion connoisseur who’s forty-five seconds away from coining the phrase “Post-Kojima”, you will say, “Interesting”, and you will continue playing; if you be review-writer for a website with expanding advertisements for “NEW! Pepsi-Filled Doritos!” plastered all over your reviews, you will say, “The publisher sent me this for free!”, and you will keep playing; if you be an iron-pumping jock-face frat boy, you will say, “Gonna kill me them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards!” and you will keep playing, to keep killing you them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards.
Welcome to Post-Kojima: a world where game designers do quirky little abnormal things with their games and nobody complains.
We can only pretend to complain (which is something we excel at): after being shocked by “that scene”, I will never be shocked by it again, nor is it hardly possible for me to be shocked by anything resembling it.
And part of me wonders if they could have pulled it off so the Guy Who Dies can’t die a single “normal” “in-game” death before the Big Moment. In fact, if they’d managed to do this, I might have had to call Call of Duty 4 the best game of all-time. They’ve already orchestrated every stage of the game so that there are air-strikes, visible helicopters firing at enemies you’ll never see, and adverse weather conditions; why not go the extra (ten (thousand)) mile(s), and orchestrate it so that your guy can’t die? Oh man, I’m talking out my ass here, I know, though wouldn’t that be really cool? I’d like to say that you could have one friendly soldier “accidentally” take the hit for you every time an enemy checkmates you, though that would require there to be a lot of friendlies, in the case of the player being a total jerk and putting the controller down just to see what happens.
I guess the game’s heavy-handed treatment of friendly fire is compensation enough: namely, if you shoot and kill one of the “main” characters, the screen will sharply fade, and Dreaded White Text informs you “Friendly Fire Will Not Be Tolerated!” I got curious, after a while, and it turns out that — hey — the main characters don’t ever get mortally wounded by the enemy on their own. Interesting.
Either way, game-y deaths included, Call of Duty 4 is all “visual language”. If you “die”, the game visually tells you that you messed up, and then it visually tells you that you’re alive again. Visual language is about more than color saturation and camera angles, though. For example, I’ve seen enough military movies to know, at least, that when the guy leading me stops in place and raises his hand, that means I should stop moving forward and crouch down on the ground, or that when all the guys in front of me run up and take cover behind a low wall, I should pop into place wherever there’s room. How novel, then, that Call of Duty 4 makes these common-sense reactions the correct thing to do game-wise whenever it seems right to do them. Meanwhile, other war FPSes, like Brothers in Arms, have game-like representations for things like suppressing fire: shoot enough at a distant enemy, and the aiming circle turns red, indicating that the enemy is suppressed. In Call of Duty 4, the game doesn’t tell you when your tactics are working. They just work — or they don’t. It’s hardly even a videogame, anymore, once you’ve plunged into it. It’s mostly “entertainment”. Mostly.
Call of Duty 4‘s instruction manual is eight pages long, six if you subtract the table of contents and the blank “NOTES” page (on which I drew a picture of a thumbs-up). No character in this game ever says anything about playing the game; no one voice actor was asked to speak actual words about in-game weapons, or name a single button on the videogame controller in your hands. The people represented in this game know what they’re doing; they’re soldiers; moreover, they’re serious soldiers, serious enough to literally say “target neutralized” immediately after shooting a dog. So when you’re in a city that has been deserted, soaking in the silent awe of what might have previously been a community center of some sort, your characters are free to say things like, “Fifty thousand people used to live here.” That’s the “narrative” “emerging”; they’re not even talking about the mission — possibly because the mission is the same as it ever is: move forward, follow orders, shoot anyone who would shoot you, throw grenades when prudent. If someone says jump, don’t even ask how high — just jump as high as you can. It’ll either be high enough, or you’ll be dead. That’s all the “game” there is to Call of Duty 4: now get out there and experience Modern Warfare.
I suppose this is where Call of Duty 4 wins versus something like BioShock — and it wins quite triumphantly, and instantly (by default, almost): because it’s easy to explain. Though its narrative does indeed hide things from the player, and though it does make many (successful, virtuoso) attempts to surprise the player, it never lies; it never feels cheap. In something like BioShock, you’ve got this fantastic, imaginative underwater world, and with something that loopy, the game designers also have a huge responsibility to explain everything, and they feel a crushing pressure to dazzle the player: no body renders a computer-animated dragon if they’re not going to make that dragon breate fire. Game designers tend to (“tend to”, yes) not quite always be Tolstoy, or even Dostoyevsky, so in cases like BioShock, we end up with “Your dude was being mind-controlled by a dude with a mind-control plasmid lol”; that still doesn’t answer the question of why things like mind-control psychic powers are available from vending machines in your game world; that still doesn’t change the fact that the game’s proudest moment is ridiculous: it shows you a Defenseless Little Girl and expects you to scream “art!” because the game offers you the “moral choice” to kill or not kill the Defenseless Little Girl, like killing little girls was something normal, non-evil people might occasionally do, et cetera.
In Call of Duty 4, story-wise and game-wise, there is nothing to explain: we’re fighting a war. We’re shooting these guys because if they saw us they’d shoot us. There’s no pandering and moping about how war is bad, because, quite frankly, this game makes war look hellish, and kind of sad, which I guess is the undeniable reality of war, anyway; when you weigh my “overall impression” of this game, the impact of the representation of the somewhat depressing (in a horrific way) nature of war and the satisfying snap of the combat are about 50-50. Like BioShock, this is a game that is essentially all mood; though the playable experience disappears so completely into that mood that when the game throws us a heavily post-Kojima “mission” where we “play” as a captive powerful man, waiting to be executed, or where we operate the guns of an AC-130 gunship, scorching faceless foes, witlessly staring through a videogame within a videogame, it’s more than interesting: it’s fantastic, moving, surprising, and, most impressively, it’s absolutely effortless. Hardly any “ingenuity” went into the crafting of this experience, and I say that with the utmost respect. Rather, Call of Duty 4 was seemingly constructed like that other great Russian invention, the rollercoaster: you get some graph paper and a straightedge, you decide, right here and right now, how tall that first hill is going to be, and the rest of the hills just build themselves.
It does so many hilariously right things, like condition you to believe that every single dog you’re ever going to encounter is going to be some one-hit-killing uber-difficult enemy monsterfreak, and then it’ll suddenly throw you a part in the middle of an extended stealth segment where you have a silenced sniper rifle and there’s a downright frightening-looking wild dog hovering around a carcass nearby. You can shoot the dog and not attract any attention, though your superior says we should just navigate around the dog. It turns out, even if the dog sees you, all he does is look at you and growl. That’s pretty fantastic: here we have evidence that the world of this game actually does contain some kind of semblance of life. All it takes is one little spark. I remember the very elementary example from Dragon Quest VII: of all the dozens of cities and all the thousands of citizens in those cities, in one little town, there’s a bar, and at that bar, there’s a woman wearing a red dress, sitting alone. If you talk to the girl, she says she’s perfectly fine and she doesn’t need your company. If you talk to a man on the other side of the bar, he says, “What’s the deal with that woman in the red dress, drinking alone?” A woman in a red dress and a man wondering why she’s alone: that’s all it takes, really, to make your “entertainment software virtual field map” into a “simulated world”.
Seriously, some of the stuff in here — the ecstatically brief “final boss” comes sharply to mind — makes Hideo Kojima look like a rank amateur. We can forgive — and even love — Kojima, at the end of the day, for being something of a prankster prodding at the videogame medium just to see what kind of noises it makes, though I’m pretty sure, as he is only one man, he’d be at a loss if asked to make a game that actually, really, literally approaches the craftsmanship of, say, a Scorsese film; the people behind Call of Duty 4, on the other hand, though I have reason to believe they have studied Metal Gear, Shadow of the Colossus, and many other important games, might not be “influenced” by any of them so much as they just have a rock-solid grip on common sense. Common sense, above all else, is usually the essential ingredient in being good at anything. For a game designer, common sense involves knowing that “experience” is more important than “narrative”, that “narrative” need only be the birds in the sky (or the helicopters raging by, guns blazing).
It’s like, rather than write down a million ideas for what kind of violent psychic powers our undersea-dwelling philosophers and artists might have been able to buy from a vending machine, this is a game where missions are conceived as “Yeah, you’re going to snipe some guy, then you’re going to run away from dudes who try to blow up the hotel you’re using as a sniper base; you’re going to run about a kilometer away, there’s going to be an abandoned swimming pool, and then you’re going to hold a position while you wait for your evacuation chopper to get there. Your partner is wounded, so when the chopper gets there, you have to pick him up and carry him into the chopper.” It might not mean everything to gamers or even game-designers these days, though the fact that you actually manipulate your character all the way into the chopper, and can then aim your gun out the back and shoot at the ground as you take off is pretty crucial.
One thing that kind of got me was the mission where you play a flashback; in a lesser game, I guess it works, because who gives a stuff, really, about where Spider-Man was last Friday, as long as stuff exploded? In this game, a regular virtuoso piece when it comes to impressing us with the impact and the, uh, presence of the present, when it asks me to play something in the past, and I make a mistake in that flashback, and a message on the screen tells me “Your actions got [so and so] killed”, I think, so what? Isn’t someone supposed to be just telling this story to a bunch of marines in some god-forsaken rat-hole in western Russia right now? If he messes up in his storytelling, or forgets a detail, says “So there were some guys on the left, and I, uhh, went to the left–I mean, the right–” does that erase his former commanding officer from existence, and alter future events?
On the other hand, when the situation comes to a head and I’m aiming a sniper rifle for an extended period of time, listening to very technical explanations of how wind speed affects bullet path from my superior, I’m thinking, in my Real Life Head over here, “Well, wait, isn’t this guy I’m aiming at still alive in the present?” And suddenly, there you go — that’s kind of an interesting feeling.
There are certain situations (like when you’re sneaking around, your cover gets blown, and the enemies open fire on you) wherein your character will literally be completely helpless, and in those situations, the game does not wrest controls from your hands; instead, it lets you feel what it’s like to die because you made a mistake. Compare this to platform games like Super Mario Galaxy, where you sometimes float down into a bottomless pit, helpless, in control, yet not in control, because you made a mistake. The feeling of helplessness is far more pronounced, far more obnoxious, and, weirdly, far more forgivable in Call of Duty 4, because the said helpless situations literally always involve your dude, you gun, your grenades, and some other dudes with guns and grenades. There are no bottomless pits, bottomless for the sake of being “something that can kill you”. It’s quite deceptively impressive how effectively the game communicates to you that you can’t solve all situations with a gun or grenades — either in real life, or even in this game, where your actions are limited to shooting, throwing grenades, and moving. Yes, sometimes “Moving” is the solution to your problems. So it is that all situations in Call of Duty 4 can and will be solved by shooting, throwing grenades, running away, hiding, or some combination thereof. Well, sometimes, you have to break a dog’s neck, though it’s as much a quick-time event as not a quick-time event: the button used to kill them is always, after all, the same button as a regular melee attack. The game does not ask you — even once — to throw a lightning bolt at a pool of water in which an enemy is standing, or use a key to open a door.
I guess if I had to nitpick something, it would be that sometimes the loading times are too short to read the bountiful anti-war quotes displayed on screen whenever you die.
Okay, no, I thought of another one: in this world of Modern Warfare, there exist doors that simply will not open no matter how many times you shoot them with an Uzi or stab them with your combat knife. No, these doors will only open when your commanding officer walks up to them and deems them fit to be opened. I can’t really call this a fault of the game, because,
1. How would my character know where to go, really? He’s just a grunt; he doesn’t have the intel.
2. Poking around at random doors is not listed as one of his orders.
3. 99% of the time, the game is very good about giving the player orders, and telling him where to go, and where to be.
4. If you play the game like a good soldier and not like a jerk, you should be able to make everything look pretty smooth.
I’ve said, before, that games can perhaps never be “art” because I seriously can’t think of a single game that some jerk can’t just pick up and immediately tilt the right analog stick to one side, cackling as the camera spins in circles — or some equivalent action. I was disappointed quite ferociously when I tried to show a particular friend the first stage of Stranglehold, a game that, if played correctly, looks really cool (though still not as cool as an actual John Woo movie); he immediately identified how silly it looks when the protagonist slides back and forth across a countertop. We here at Action Button Dot Net collectively say: heck that guy. I’m guaranteeing you, game developers: if you make a game that aspires to “art” if played all the way through, adjusting the camera a minimal amount of times and performing only the necessary actions, we will gladly attempt to play the game that way. Because, I mean, why not? I don’t see anyone else making that particular promise. I might as well make it.
Is Call of Duty 4 art if played perfectly, pristinely, quickly, and efficiently? If you never die, if you never get shot, is Call of Duty 4 as emotionally affecting as Saving Private Ryan? (Here we refrain from asking whether or not “Saving Private Ryan” is art.) The answer to this question is — surprise! — that that’s a &^#$#ed question: if you’re good enough at the game to not die or not get hit, then you’re probably not having “fun”; if you’re just watching someone else play, you’re more prone to ask questions like “why are there numbers on the screen?” “what does ‘checkpoint reached’ mean?” or “why does the camera almost never show anyone’s face?” In-game death, sometimes of the meaningless, un-telegraphed variety, motivates the player to be more observant; surviving the same challenge on a subsequent attempt makes him feel accomplished, or even entertained. So, in asking the question of how we can make a game that entertains the player without requiring the player to perform perfectly, we end up back at that boring question of how we can motivate the player to do better without making his on-screen avatar realistically die and then come right back to life.
For now, maybe just tweaking the respawn presentation is all we need. Just make the screen fade to black really quick, and then fade back up. Maybe make every checkpoint occur immediately after a memorable line of dialog: no one will be able to complain about hearing a particular line over and over again, because that would mean revealing when and where you died multiple times. “Looks like Christmas is coming three times this year — for the second time today!” you hear, just as you respawn, and you think, “Oh — I’m back here”.
I’m picking this nit really, really hard, right here, because it’s all I have; maybe you’ve come to realize that that’s the nature of this website. Call of Duty 4‘s singleplayer mode is a focused, tight game, of a voraciously consumable, short running time, with minimal filler or nonsense. It strokes the player’s ego sometimes, sure, with all the Tangoes and Charlies being bandied about, though hey, we might as well just chalk that up to etiquette: the player isn’t lying to himself; he’s admitting that he’s obviously the type of person to sit in his underwear in the dark in the dead of night controlling a pretend soldier in a pretend war. Might as well be nice to him. The play mechanics disappear almost completely into the structure and flow of the campaign, et cetera et cetera — so why can’t I turn off all the HUD elements? Much as I like that Einstein quote about how World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones, why can’t I turn those quotes off? What if I don’t want to know precisely how many bullets are left in my clip, or whenever the game has just saved itself?
Actually, I’m playing this online, multiplayer, right now (review of Call of Duty 4 multiplayer: fun!), and I’ve just noticed that my gun doesn’t bob up and down realistically when I move while crouched. Yes! That’s another significant complaint right there!
A less significant complaint is that I’m not quite sure what “throw back” means, even after beating the game — am I picking a grenade up off the ground and then throwing it back at the enemy? If so, why does the grenade just manage to suddenly appear in my hand? There’s no bend-over-and-grab animation. It’s a little confusing.
Also, I suppose I could mention that the textures on some of the surfaces are pretty low-resolution, though I reckon nobody would learn anything from my pointing that out. They obviously chose the lower textures so they could concentrate on performance, et cetera.
Many of my friends had trouble with the dreaded “Ferris Wheel” mission, so I guess that’s worth pointing out: there’s a Ferris wheel. You have one guy sniping enemy dudes from a grassy hill. The game gives you thirty seconds to plant some mines and C4 before going to hide in the shadows. You shoot some dudes, then shoot some more dudes, then you get a checkpoint; then a load of dudes comes in. The thing is, the C4 is really handy for the load of dudes; however, if you already placed the C4 in a not-perfect place, you’re hecked. I’ve polled my Gmail chat list, and something like one-third of the people I know who played this game gave up entirely at that mission. That kind of sucks; I reloaded my save, gladly played the run-up to the Ferris Wheel again, and planted C4 on the cars, so as to bomb the guys as they slid down the helicopter ropes. It did pretty good!
I really don’t know what else to say about this game; having just mentioned helicopters and ropes in the preceding paragraph, I am thinking about Choplifter, and wishing that Infinity Ward would make something of a Choplifter reboot / remake for next-generation consoles. Call it Call of Duty: Chopper. Let me fly a helicopter, rescuing dudes from the heat of battle, or dropping dudes off. Ascend or descend with L1 and R1; drop bombs with the L trigger, and firemachine guns with the R trigger. Let me use a badass rope ladder to rescue dudes if the “landing zone” (that’s “LZ” from now on) is “too hot”. There could be an online multiplayer mode, only it’d be more like Rock Band, because people would be forced to cooperate — you’ve got one guy flying the chopper, the other aiming the machine gun, and, uhh, I’m sure the pilot could handle the bombs and ladder himself, actually. So yeah — two-player co-op isn’t too bad! Your army would be ideally competing with another army, with their own two-man chopper team. You could build a pretty great game out of piloting a helicopter, with clever enough level design, like those Strike games EA made forever ago. What do you say, Infinity Ward? Pay me $100,000 a year and I’ll come over there and design the triumphant return of helicopter games for you. I’ll lease a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution — a red one — not six minutes after getting off the plane, just so I can drive over to your office and design a game about a helicopter. I’m not even kidding. I’ll design it all day and all night. Helicopters, man. They’re the next big thing, I’m not even kidding.
To sum up: Call of Duty 4 is a tight-as-hell game with seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative that’s more about the Hollywoodian moment-to-moment nature of its experience than about any straightforward plot, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. Though the multiplayer is fun, I might never play through the singleplayer campaign again, much as I will fondly remember it as a thrilling piece of work and recommend it to friends and game designers for the next several years. No, dear readers, it’s not the “Best Game Ever” — and I won’t dare say that I could think of a better game (even though I can: I mean, just make a Zelda game with the focus and attention to detail of something like Call of Duty 4; I say this as a person who feels pretty much zero emotion when I hear the word “Zelda”, so take it or leave it) — and I still like Gears of War a tiny bit better, just because of the sheer ridiculousness of it. Much as I love Gears, though, I recognize that it’s not for everyone, so I wholeheartedly, hereby, allow the people of the world to like Call of Duty 4. And if you’re a game developer, please: this is the one (well, this and Portal) that you should rip off.
★★★★
“THE FIRST VIDEOGAME OF THE REST OF OUR LIVES.”
If you imagine for a moment that all of the emails I got last year asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, and then you also pretended that the overwhelming majority of emails asking me why I haven’t reviewed BioShock yet, when I’m going to review BioShock, or if there’s some reason I am blatantly ignoring BioShock also didn’t exist, that would leave me with a healthy stack of emails asking me when I was going to review Call of Duty 4, how much I loved Call of Duty 4, or if I was going to call Call of Duty 4 the “best game ever” or not. Well, to answer those three questions:
1. Right now!
2. A lot!
3. Nope!
If you were to imagine for a moment that all the emails I got last week asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, that would leave you with an overwhelming majority of emails asking me “Why don’t you die?”, and if you were to imagine that those emails didn’t exist, you’d have a pretty significant number of emails asking me “If BioShock isn’t a great game, what is?” To answer those two questions:
1. Let me ask my secretary!
2. Call of Duty 4!
The truth is, I didn’t really feel like reviewing Call of Duty 4 because it’s kind of too good. Also, because I wasn’t sure what the name of the game is — that “4” there is definitely raised. It is definitely an exponent. Am I supposed to call the game “Call of Duty To The Fourth Power”? How many powers do we have to put on our duty before it’s patriotic enough for Joe Sixpack and Jennifer Twoliter to enjoy on Memorial Day?
Anyway, the short version of this review is that I liked the game a lot, as much as I probably can like a game — even if I might never play it again.
The long version is this:
Unlike BioShock, Call of Duty 4 has everything: seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative, focused play mechanics, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. More than just a crotch massage plugged into a television set, Call of Duty 4 boldly toes the bizarrely forbidden line between “videogame” and “entertainment”. It’s made by people who get it so ferociously that they might not even know that there’s an “it” they’re getting. It’s hard, it’s fast, it’s lean, it’s learned, and it’s a dynamo. Developers of big-budget action-adventure games: please, if you have any common sense, this is the one you’re supposed to study. It’s the first game of the rest of our lives.
I can’t say I’ve been the biggest fan of the series. Or even the smallest one, or even the most medium-sized one. I first encountered Call of Duty 4 at a demo station at Tokyo Game Show 2007, where my brother Brandon Sheffield (of Gamasutra) played through the first mission under the enthusiastic guidance of an Activision / Infinity Ward representative. The guy was telling us how it was: you’re infiltrating a tanker, trying to get some enemy intel. You have to kill the crew, get the intel, get out, and get on your chopper. See this, now? The ship is sinking. Look at the water effects. Notice how the boat is tipping. Brandon handled it all with grace; I guess, since his magazine and website carry advertisements, occasionally rely on videogame developers to write features, and are genuinely in the habit of being as polite as possible to as many people as possible at all times, he was used to having people explain what was plainly visible. I guess I’m used to it, to, what with the line of work I’m in (let’s not even get into it), though maybe I would have minded it a whole lot less had I been actually playing. From what I could tell, the action on the screen looked distinctly, nonchalantly amazing: here we were, invading a tanker on the ocean, and outside the immediate scope of soldiers with guns versus soldiers with guns, things were happening: the ship was sinking, and it looked like the ship was sinking. We here at Action Button Dot Net are people of refined tastes: we go whole days, sometimes, listening only to The Stone Roses’ song “Breaking Into Heaven” on loop for twenty-four straight hours. I don’t need anyone telling me that something that is stuff-hot is stuff-hot, though I guess if the Activision guy had just been repeatedly saying “This Game Is Shit Hot” in a text-to-speech voice for the duration of the play session, I would have purchased the game and reviewed it immediately, just to compliment their amazing PR.
When I eventually played the game, it was after the fact; it was after every fact. Here’s what I knew, before I started playing Call of Duty 4:
1. Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are not related;
2. The previous Call of Duty games were all about World War II;
3. The first two Call of Duty games were developed by Infinity Ward;
4. The third Call of Duty game was not developed by Infinity Ward;
5. The fourth Call of Duty game was developed by Infinity Ward again;
6. The fourth Call of Duty game is not about World War II; it is set in modern times;
7. According to Wikipedia, “The Call of Duty Real-time Card Game was announced by card manufacturer Upper Deck”;
8. I’m pretty sure any card game is actually played in real-time;
9. I could be mistaken, because maybe the concept of time isn’t exactly “real” for people who spend their time playing collectible card games.
I very highly respect the idea of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, then, because Call of Duty is obviously a “strong enough” “intellectual property” to have a Real-time Card Game based on it, and messing with the formula (“the formula” being “World War II”) is a pretty bold move in this dead-horse-throttling industry we live in. Furthermore, I guess you could say my interest was piqued because World War II games have always managed to amazingly bore me. I don’t really get why: I find World War II a fascinating subject. Now that I think about it, I’ve never actually read a book about World War II on purpose, nor have I ever watched a movie about World War II because I had to, though I’ve heard a couple of people talk about World War II, and they seem to think it’s really interesting. There was a whole lot going on. Hitler was probably the last objectively evil human being history will allow; in a way, media — like newspapers, television, movies, and (hey!) videogames — spread the message of those terrible things that happened, of how even Russia and America were able to agree on something, and team up and just about literally save the world. I guess the games don’t do anything for me because — and call this a cop-out reason if you like — their graphics aren’t good enough. We’ve had decades of film dramatizations and Spielbergizations to go on, and the games just don’t look dead convincing enough. Modern War, though, hell, why not? After seeing that scene in “Fahrenheit 9/11” where an American hickboy explains that he listens to The Bloodhound Gang’s “The Roof is on Fire” while running over Iraqis in his M-1 Abrams battle tank, because “the roof is on fire” is a “metaphor”, because “Baghdad is also kinda on fire”, I figure, heck, go ahead and make a videogame out of this, already. There are moments when the events on the screen resemble things that happen in videogames — like when the AC-130 TV operator tells you that the friendlies are carrying IR beacons, so they’re glowing, so as to help you recognize who to not shoot. It strikes me that as much as games are training our kids how to join the military and/or murder civilian hookers, games (or, uh, software user interfaces in general) are teaching the military a thing or two. There was that DARPA prototype robo-tank recently, that operated by remote-control: the remote control was an Xbox 360 controller. I guess, if Call of Duty 4 had been made after the video footage of that DARPA prototype hit the internet, they would have had a perfect excuse to incorporate an Xbox 360 controller into the game and not be prickishly self-referential about it.
Call of Duty 4 is a videogame about modern-day US Marines and British SAS, taking part in small- and large-scale armed skirmishes in either some Middle-Eastern desert city or beneath the mauve-skied dawn of some rural Russian village. There’s a plot, though who the hell knows what’s going on, really? Games shouldn’t be about “narrative”; they should be about feeling like you’re an important (or at least active) part of some kind of important event. Ninety percent of the time, you’re taking orders from a man with lamb chops; your squad mates shout about tangos and charlies and bravos and tangos; sometimes, they’ll tell you that they’ve got lookout in front of this door frame, and that you are to go in and neutralize any threats (military speak for “blast anything breathing”); sometimes they scream that you need to run. Usually, whenever the latter happens, some cataclysmic event is occurring on the screen. That’s good — games should strive to, you know, have actual stuff happening. That’s the sort of thing “professional” reviewers should be able to commend: “The stuff happening on screen was interesting, and lovingly presented”. Instead, we just get people complimenting water effects: “Just looking at the water is very soothing. It’s so real it made me thirsty. –IGN.” Look higher, people!
Very early in the game, when you’re escaping a sinking ship, the level design offers you a multitude of choices which way to run. Your team is full of experienced, hard dudes, and they know where to go. So you follow them, and you get out alive. However, the game is sure to give you the choice to go some other route, though that will promptly get you killed. In the interest of science, I’ve put a controller in the hands of various friends, and not a single one of them has escaped from the tanker on the first try. At the end, they always go the wrong way, and Dreaded White Text tells them “You went the wrong way”. And that’s it. This seemed to frustrate many of my friends to no end, though I found it chaotically intriguing. I kind of wish the game had done more of that.
For the most part, though, actually playing Call of Duty 4 is entertaining in the most tenuous way. The game’s atmosphere works as hard as it can to simply make you feel like you’re a part of these big events. You get a very strong sense that you’re fighting with a team, probably because your teammates don’t ever say &^#$#ed things to one another, or high-five one-another, and because they actually obtain a significant amount of the kills during a firefight. And some of the gunfights are tough; tough enough to make you wonder how real soldiers put up with this stuff without, you know, dying. I guess the absolute animal fear of death has something to do with it. However, eventually, Call of Duty 4 managed to win me over, and greatly; its expertly executed atmosphere, and very focused play mechanics didn’t get tiring even as I dropped countless nickels into the slot machine of the moment on some of the more brutal gunfights. I started to respect the level design on deeper levels: usually, you’re heading toward waypoints, sometimes while being pursued by bad guys, or sometimes while avoiding lookouts. Every once in a while, all hell breaks loose and there are maybe fifteen guys on the top of a hill, which has two staircases and a couple of dirt roads leading up it. There’s no set-in-stone way to win each momentary skirmish, though “thinking on your feet” is a really good place to start. Shades of Metal Gear Solid 3 start to leak in, eventually, as the game allows you to feel for yourself when you’re doing well or phoning it in: sometimes, a fight will end without you scoring more than four or five kills; you’ll feel like stuff for having let your dudes do all the work, and then you’ll notice that two of them died. This feeling runs weirdly parallel to the arcade-like action feel of dropping nickels into the slot machine, trying wild tactics, getting shot in the head, trying something crazier next time. There you go: Call of Duty 4 effortlessly manages equal parts dramatic catharsis and arcade action.
There’s a conscientious, well-played part midway through the game, where a soldier on point races up a staircase, only to be grabbed by a Middle-Eastern Individual of Opposing Political Views: if you manage to shoot the attacker, the game awards you with an Xbox Achievement for having saved the guy (who, I notice from the credits, is named after a member of the development team). This is clever, mostly, because in many games (even this one) Xbox Achievements tend to award the player for doing arbitrary things that he doesn’t have to do in order to succeed at the game. There’s a word that game designers throw around often: “Visual language”. Basically, how the game, visually, tells the player that he’s doing something right or wrong; “Achievements”, with their big, bombastic, bloated, banal on-screen explosion of Old-Navy-worthy graphic design, are, to me, at least, the exact opposite of satisfaction: killing the final boss of a game and seeing “Achievement Unlocked: The End!” elicits a VH1 Pop-Up Video sound effect in the middle of my head, and I get something like the inverse of an erection (we call it a “turtle”). Yes, “Achievements” are a fragment of the devil, in this “videogame industry”; you can’t even use the points to buy anything. I suspect that giving a player an achievement for, you know, ensuring that one of his comrades doesn’t die is Infinity Ward’s way of subverting the masses in as clever a way as possible. For one thing, looking out for your own is something someone in the military, fighting a war, is obligated to do. On the other hand, each of Call of Duty 4‘s tenuous little gun-versus-gun contests sees you walking the razor’s edge between life and death, and the life and death of your expendable squad-mates; the game is constantly telling the player with its visual language whether he is doing well or not. This game is whispering that we don’t need “Achievements”, really, if the game is expertly well-made.
TANGENT “RE: DEATH” BEGINS
I kind of wonder, a lot more than is probably healthy, about death in videogames. Call of Duty 4 brings up the question of death many times, as your guy is shot in the side of the head and you scream “Who shot me?” and your friend, who is half-drunk, says “Dude, in a real war, you’d never see the bullets coming, either.” Eventually, he goes from being half-drunk to fully drunk, and that makes his words all the more consideration-worthy: Man, what kinds of people actually go out and fight real wars? What the heck is wrong with these people? Politics aside, who is willing to die for anything, much less the concept of a country? And what’s with these kids playing these FPSes, anyway? What the hell are they thinking? Do they see these games as training exercises for the one day when they’ll get to wield an AK in the name of shooting ragheads from the back of a Hummer? I’m not going to pretend that these kids possess a single political atom in their bodies; I know the score: they just want to kill. What I can say, with serious scientific certainty, is that I once saw a YouTube video of I think it was Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (boring game, by the way) where the first comment was “Awesome game” and the third comment accused the game of being for homosexuals because the graphics weren’t photo-realistic enough. I defecate you negative. I suppose this is why Call of Duty 4‘s Big Back-of-Box Quote is “The most PHOTO-REALISTIC video game WE’VE EVER SEEN.” (Game Informer.) I’m hardly even going to make fun of that quote; Activision PR did what they had to do.
On a high-enough difficulty level, Call of Duty 4 recreates some of the dread of war. I honestly tend to avoid FPSes where you can’t see the bullets “because you can’t see the bullets in real life”, because this isn’t real life, it’s a game. Though as I’ve said above, it plays well as a game; you feel like you did something when you win, you know you messed up when you lose, no matter how many dozens of times you lose. And the presentation remains seamless.
Anyway. There’s a part where Call of Duty 4 does something shocking; I don’t really know how to explain it without spoiling it, so let’s just say that it steps back through the fourth wall for a moment. Yes, I’m saying it had been standing in front of the fourth wall for its entire running time until that moment, when it stepped back behind the fourth wall. The scene involves death — though not in a videogame-y, “Looney Tunes”-y, “if at first you don’t succeed” way, and not in a melodramatic movie way, either. It’s easy to say that “the character you’re controlling dies as a result of the narrative”, and it’s easy to look at that statement, as what it is, and nitpick away: well, in the game, you can die so many times, in the middle of so many inconsequential skirmishes, and then you just respawn almost immediately (after reading a nice little anti-war quote by some famous person whose pacifist attitude didn’t stop them from dying) and try again like nothing had ever happened.
How can narrative-related death be special at all in a piece of work in a medium where the player must die repeatedly? The answer to these question is, of course, “The death must be shocking, and awful”. It must be a huge sentence-ending punctuation mark, where previous deaths had been commas. It’s a tall order, though Call of Duty 4 pulls it off, and when it does, it leaves you feeling deeply sad, or deeply confused. Either way, it’s made its point, and it’s perhaps even more brilliant than even I’ve given it credit for: if you be a cranberry-juice-sipping, organic red onion connoisseur who’s forty-five seconds away from coining the phrase “Post-Kojima”, you will say, “Interesting”, and you will continue playing; if you be review-writer for a website with expanding advertisements for “NEW! Pepsi-Filled Doritos!” plastered all over your reviews, you will say, “The publisher sent me this for free!”, and you will keep playing; if you be an iron-pumping jock-face frat boy, you will say, “Gonna kill me them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards!” and you will keep playing, to keep killing you them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards.
Welcome to Post-Kojima: a world where game designers do quirky little abnormal things with their games and nobody complains.
We can only pretend to complain (which is something we excel at): after being shocked by “that scene”, I will never be shocked by it again, nor is it hardly possible for me to be shocked by anything resembling it.
And part of me wonders if they could have pulled it off so the Guy Who Dies can’t die a single “normal” “in-game” death before the Big Moment. In fact, if they’d managed to do this, I might have had to call Call of Duty 4 the best game of all-time. They’ve already orchestrated every stage of the game so that there are air-strikes, visible helicopters firing at enemies you’ll never see, and adverse weather conditions; why not go the extra (ten (thousand)) mile(s), and orchestrate it so that your guy can’t die? Oh man, I’m talking out my ass here, I know, though wouldn’t that be really cool? I’d like to say that you could have one friendly soldier “accidentally” take the hit for you every time an enemy checkmates you, though that would require there to be a lot of friendlies, in the case of the player being a total jerk and putting the controller down just to see what happens.
I guess the game’s heavy-handed treatment of friendly fire is compensation enough: namely, if you shoot and kill one of the “main” characters, the screen will sharply fade, and Dreaded White Text informs you “Friendly Fire Will Not Be Tolerated!” I got curious, after a while, and it turns out that — hey — the main characters don’t ever get mortally wounded by the enemy on their own. Interesting.
Either way, game-y deaths included, Call of Duty 4 is all “visual language”. If you “die”, the game visually tells you that you messed up, and then it visually tells you that you’re alive again. Visual language is about more than color saturation and camera angles, though. For example, I’ve seen enough military movies to know, at least, that when the guy leading me stops in place and raises his hand, that means I should stop moving forward and crouch down on the ground, or that when all the guys in front of me run up and take cover behind a low wall, I should pop into place wherever there’s room. How novel, then, that Call of Duty 4 makes these common-sense reactions the correct thing to do game-wise whenever it seems right to do them. Meanwhile, other war FPSes, like Brothers in Arms, have game-like representations for things like suppressing fire: shoot enough at a distant enemy, and the aiming circle turns red, indicating that the enemy is suppressed. In Call of Duty 4, the game doesn’t tell you when your tactics are working. They just work — or they don’t. It’s hardly even a videogame, anymore, once you’ve plunged into it. It’s mostly “entertainment”. Mostly.
Call of Duty 4‘s instruction manual is eight pages long, six if you subtract the table of contents and the blank “NOTES” page (on which I drew a picture of a thumbs-up). No character in this game ever says anything about playing the game; no one voice actor was asked to speak actual words about in-game weapons, or name a single button on the videogame controller in your hands. The people represented in this game know what they’re doing; they’re soldiers; moreover, they’re serious soldiers, serious enough to literally say “target neutralized” immediately after shooting a dog. So when you’re in a city that has been deserted, soaking in the silent awe of what might have previously been a community center of some sort, your characters are free to say things like, “Fifty thousand people used to live here.” That’s the “narrative” “emerging”; they’re not even talking about the mission — possibly because the mission is the same as it ever is: move forward, follow orders, shoot anyone who would shoot you, throw grenades when prudent. If someone says jump, don’t even ask how high — just jump as high as you can. It’ll either be high enough, or you’ll be dead. That’s all the “game” there is to Call of Duty 4: now get out there and experience Modern Warfare.
I suppose this is where Call of Duty 4 wins versus something like BioShock — and it wins quite triumphantly, and instantly (by default, almost): because it’s easy to explain. Though its narrative does indeed hide things from the player, and though it does make many (successful, virtuoso) attempts to surprise the player, it never lies; it never feels cheap. In something like BioShock, you’ve got this fantastic, imaginative underwater world, and with something that loopy, the game designers also have a huge responsibility to explain everything, and they feel a crushing pressure to dazzle the player: no body renders a computer-animated dragon if they’re not going to make that dragon breate fire. Game designers tend to (“tend to”, yes) not quite always be Tolstoy, or even Dostoyevsky, so in cases like BioShock, we end up with “Your dude was being mind-controlled by a dude with a mind-control plasmid lol”; that still doesn’t answer the question of why things like mind-control psychic powers are available from vending machines in your game world; that still doesn’t change the fact that the game’s proudest moment is ridiculous: it shows you a Defenseless Little Girl and expects you to scream “art!” because the game offers you the “moral choice” to kill or not kill the Defenseless Little Girl, like killing little girls was something normal, non-evil people might occasionally do, et cetera.
In Call of Duty 4, story-wise and game-wise, there is nothing to explain: we’re fighting a war. We’re shooting these guys because if they saw us they’d shoot us. There’s no pandering and moping about how war is bad, because, quite frankly, this game makes war look hellish, and kind of sad, which I guess is the undeniable reality of war, anyway; when you weigh my “overall impression” of this game, the impact of the representation of the somewhat depressing (in a horrific way) nature of war and the satisfying snap of the combat are about 50-50. Like BioShock, this is a game that is essentially all mood; though the playable experience disappears so completely into that mood that when the game throws us a heavily post-Kojima “mission” where we “play” as a captive powerful man, waiting to be executed, or where we operate the guns of an AC-130 gunship, scorching faceless foes, witlessly staring through a videogame within a videogame, it’s more than interesting: it’s fantastic, moving, surprising, and, most impressively, it’s absolutely effortless. Hardly any “ingenuity” went into the crafting of this experience, and I say that with the utmost respect. Rather, Call of Duty 4 was seemingly constructed like that other great Russian invention, the rollercoaster: you get some graph paper and a straightedge, you decide, right here and right now, how tall that first hill is going to be, and the rest of the hills just build themselves.
It does so many hilariously right things, like condition you to believe that every single dog you’re ever going to encounter is going to be some one-hit-killing uber-difficult enemy monsterfreak, and then it’ll suddenly throw you a part in the middle of an extended stealth segment where you have a silenced sniper rifle and there’s a downright frightening-looking wild dog hovering around a carcass nearby. You can shoot the dog and not attract any attention, though your superior says we should just navigate around the dog. It turns out, even if the dog sees you, all he does is look at you and growl. That’s pretty fantastic: here we have evidence that the world of this game actually does contain some kind of semblance of life. All it takes is one little spark. I remember the very elementary example from Dragon Quest VII: of all the dozens of cities and all the thousands of citizens in those cities, in one little town, there’s a bar, and at that bar, there’s a woman wearing a red dress, sitting alone. If you talk to the girl, she says she’s perfectly fine and she doesn’t need your company. If you talk to a man on the other side of the bar, he says, “What’s the deal with that woman in the red dress, drinking alone?” A woman in a red dress and a man wondering why she’s alone: that’s all it takes, really, to make your “entertainment software virtual field map” into a “simulated world”.
Seriously, some of the stuff in here — the ecstatically brief “final boss” comes sharply to mind — makes Hideo Kojima look like a rank amateur. We can forgive — and even love — Kojima, at the end of the day, for being something of a prankster prodding at the videogame medium just to see what kind of noises it makes, though I’m pretty sure, as he is only one man, he’d be at a loss if asked to make a game that actually, really, literally approaches the craftsmanship of, say, a Scorsese film; the people behind Call of Duty 4, on the other hand, though I have reason to believe they have studied Metal Gear, Shadow of the Colossus, and many other important games, might not be “influenced” by any of them so much as they just have a rock-solid grip on common sense. Common sense, above all else, is usually the essential ingredient in being good at anything. For a game designer, common sense involves knowing that “experience” is more important than “narrative”, that “narrative” need only be the birds in the sky (or the helicopters raging by, guns blazing).
It’s like, rather than write down a million ideas for what kind of violent psychic powers our undersea-dwelling philosophers and artists might have been able to buy from a vending machine, this is a game where missions are conceived as “Yeah, you’re going to snipe some guy, then you’re going to run away from dudes who try to blow up the hotel you’re using as a sniper base; you’re going to run about a kilometer away, there’s going to be an abandoned swimming pool, and then you’re going to hold a position while you wait for your evacuation chopper to get there. Your partner is wounded, so when the chopper gets there, you have to pick him up and carry him into the chopper.” It might not mean everything to gamers or even game-designers these days, though the fact that you actually manipulate your character all the way into the chopper, and can then aim your gun out the back and shoot at the ground as you take off is pretty crucial.
One thing that kind of got me was the mission where you play a flashback; in a lesser game, I guess it works, because who gives a stuff, really, about where Spider-Man was last Friday, as long as stuff exploded? In this game, a regular virtuoso piece when it comes to impressing us with the impact and the, uh, presence of the present, when it asks me to play something in the past, and I make a mistake in that flashback, and a message on the screen tells me “Your actions got [so and so] killed”, I think, so what? Isn’t someone supposed to be just telling this story to a bunch of marines in some god-forsaken rat-hole in western Russia right now? If he messes up in his storytelling, or forgets a detail, says “So there were some guys on the left, and I, uhh, went to the left–I mean, the right–” does that erase his former commanding officer from existence, and alter future events?
On the other hand, when the situation comes to a head and I’m aiming a sniper rifle for an extended period of time, listening to very technical explanations of how wind speed affects bullet path from my superior, I’m thinking, in my Real Life Head over here, “Well, wait, isn’t this guy I’m aiming at still alive in the present?” And suddenly, there you go — that’s kind of an interesting feeling.
There are certain situations (like when you’re sneaking around, your cover gets blown, and the enemies open fire on you) wherein your character will literally be completely helpless, and in those situations, the game does not wrest controls from your hands; instead, it lets you feel what it’s like to die because you made a mistake. Compare this to platform games like Super Mario Galaxy, where you sometimes float down into a bottomless pit, helpless, in control, yet not in control, because you made a mistake. The feeling of helplessness is far more pronounced, far more obnoxious, and, weirdly, far more forgivable in Call of Duty 4, because the said helpless situations literally always involve your dude, you gun, your grenades, and some other dudes with guns and grenades. There are no bottomless pits, bottomless for the sake of being “something that can kill you”. It’s quite deceptively impressive how effectively the game communicates to you that you can’t solve all situations with a gun or grenades — either in real life, or even in this game, where your actions are limited to shooting, throwing grenades, and moving. Yes, sometimes “Moving” is the solution to your problems. So it is that all situations in Call of Duty 4 can and will be solved by shooting, throwing grenades, running away, hiding, or some combination thereof. Well, sometimes, you have to break a dog’s neck, though it’s as much a quick-time event as not a quick-time event: the button used to kill them is always, after all, the same button as a regular melee attack. The game does not ask you — even once — to throw a lightning bolt at a pool of water in which an enemy is standing, or use a key to open a door.
I guess if I had to nitpick something, it would be that sometimes the loading times are too short to read the bountiful anti-war quotes displayed on screen whenever you die.
Okay, no, I thought of another one: in this world of Modern Warfare, there exist doors that simply will not open no matter how many times you shoot them with an Uzi or stab them with your combat knife. No, these doors will only open when your commanding officer walks up to them and deems them fit to be opened. I can’t really call this a fault of the game, because,
1. How would my character know where to go, really? He’s just a grunt; he doesn’t have the intel.
2. Poking around at random doors is not listed as one of his orders.
3. 99% of the time, the game is very good about giving the player orders, and telling him where to go, and where to be.
4. If you play the game like a good soldier and not like a jerk, you should be able to make everything look pretty smooth.
I’ve said, before, that games can perhaps never be “art” because I seriously can’t think of a single game that some jerk can’t just pick up and immediately tilt the right analog stick to one side, cackling as the camera spins in circles — or some equivalent action. I was disappointed quite ferociously when I tried to show a particular friend the first stage of Stranglehold, a game that, if played correctly, looks really cool (though still not as cool as an actual John Woo movie); he immediately identified how silly it looks when the protagonist slides back and forth across a countertop. We here at Action Button Dot Net collectively say: heck that guy. I’m guaranteeing you, game developers: if you make a game that aspires to “art” if played all the way through, adjusting the camera a minimal amount of times and performing only the necessary actions, we will gladly attempt to play the game that way. Because, I mean, why not? I don’t see anyone else making that particular promise. I might as well make it.
Is Call of Duty 4 art if played perfectly, pristinely, quickly, and efficiently? If you never die, if you never get shot, is Call of Duty 4 as emotionally affecting as Saving Private Ryan? (Here we refrain from asking whether or not “Saving Private Ryan” is art.) The answer to this question is — surprise! — that that’s a &^#$#ed question: if you’re good enough at the game to not die or not get hit, then you’re probably not having “fun”; if you’re just watching someone else play, you’re more prone to ask questions like “why are there numbers on the screen?” “what does ‘checkpoint reached’ mean?” or “why does the camera almost never show anyone’s face?” In-game death, sometimes of the meaningless, un-telegraphed variety, motivates the player to be more observant; surviving the same challenge on a subsequent attempt makes him feel accomplished, or even entertained. So, in asking the question of how we can make a game that entertains the player without requiring the player to perform perfectly, we end up back at that boring question of how we can motivate the player to do better without making his on-screen avatar realistically die and then come right back to life.
For now, maybe just tweaking the respawn presentation is all we need. Just make the screen fade to black really quick, and then fade back up. Maybe make every checkpoint occur immediately after a memorable line of dialog: no one will be able to complain about hearing a particular line over and over again, because that would mean revealing when and where you died multiple times. “Looks like Christmas is coming three times this year — for the second time today!” you hear, just as you respawn, and you think, “Oh — I’m back here”.
I’m picking this nit really, really hard, right here, because it’s all I have; maybe you’ve come to realize that that’s the nature of this website. Call of Duty 4‘s singleplayer mode is a focused, tight game, of a voraciously consumable, short running time, with minimal filler or nonsense. It strokes the player’s ego sometimes, sure, with all the Tangoes and Charlies being bandied about, though hey, we might as well just chalk that up to etiquette: the player isn’t lying to himself; he’s admitting that he’s obviously the type of person to sit in his underwear in the dark in the dead of night controlling a pretend soldier in a pretend war. Might as well be nice to him. The play mechanics disappear almost completely into the structure and flow of the campaign, et cetera et cetera — so why can’t I turn off all the HUD elements? Much as I like that Einstein quote about how World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones, why can’t I turn those quotes off? What if I don’t want to know precisely how many bullets are left in my clip, or whenever the game has just saved itself?
Actually, I’m playing this online, multiplayer, right now (review of Call of Duty 4 multiplayer: fun!), and I’ve just noticed that my gun doesn’t bob up and down realistically when I move while crouched. Yes! That’s another significant complaint right there!
A less significant complaint is that I’m not quite sure what “throw back” means, even after beating the game — am I picking a grenade up off the ground and then throwing it back at the enemy? If so, why does the grenade just manage to suddenly appear in my hand? There’s no bend-over-and-grab animation. It’s a little confusing.
Also, I suppose I could mention that the textures on some of the surfaces are pretty low-resolution, though I reckon nobody would learn anything from my pointing that out. They obviously chose the lower textures so they could concentrate on performance, et cetera.
Many of my friends had trouble with the dreaded “Ferris Wheel” mission, so I guess that’s worth pointing out: there’s a Ferris wheel. You have one guy sniping enemy dudes from a grassy hill. The game gives you thirty seconds to plant some mines and C4 before going to hide in the shadows. You shoot some dudes, then shoot some more dudes, then you get a checkpoint; then a load of dudes comes in. The thing is, the C4 is really handy for the load of dudes; however, if you already placed the C4 in a not-perfect place, you’re hecked. I’ve polled my Gmail chat list, and something like one-third of the people I know who played this game gave up entirely at that mission. That kind of sucks; I reloaded my save, gladly played the run-up to the Ferris Wheel again, and planted C4 on the cars, so as to bomb the guys as they slid down the helicopter ropes. It did pretty good!
I really don’t know what else to say about this game; having just mentioned helicopters and ropes in the preceding paragraph, I am thinking about Choplifter, and wishing that Infinity Ward would make something of a Choplifter reboot / remake for next-generation consoles. Call it Call of Duty: Chopper. Let me fly a helicopter, rescuing dudes from the heat of battle, or dropping dudes off. Ascend or descend with L1 and R1; drop bombs with the L trigger, and firemachine guns with the R trigger. Let me use a badass rope ladder to rescue dudes if the “landing zone” (that’s “LZ” from now on) is “too hot”. There could be an online multiplayer mode, only it’d be more like Rock Band, because people would be forced to cooperate — you’ve got one guy flying the chopper, the other aiming the machine gun, and, uhh, I’m sure the pilot could handle the bombs and ladder himself, actually. So yeah — two-player co-op isn’t too bad! Your army would be ideally competing with another army, with their own two-man chopper team. You could build a pretty great game out of piloting a helicopter, with clever enough level design, like those Strike games EA made forever ago. What do you say, Infinity Ward? Pay me $100,000 a year and I’ll come over there and design the triumphant return of helicopter games for you. I’ll lease a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution — a red one — not six minutes after getting off the plane, just so I can drive over to your office and design a game about a helicopter. I’m not even kidding. I’ll design it all day and all night. Helicopters, man. They’re the next big thing, I’m not even kidding.
To sum up: Call of Duty 4 is a tight-as-hell game with seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative that’s more about the Hollywoodian moment-to-moment nature of its experience than about any straightforward plot, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. Though the multiplayer is fun, I might never play through the singleplayer campaign again, much as I will fondly remember it as a thrilling piece of work and recommend it to friends and game designers for the next several years. No, dear readers, it’s not the “Best Game Ever” — and I won’t dare say that I could think of a better game (even though I can: I mean, just make a Zelda game with the focus and attention to detail of something like Call of Duty 4; I say this as a person who feels pretty much zero emotion when I hear the word “Zelda”, so take it or leave it) — and I still like Gears of War a tiny bit better, just because of the sheer ridiculousness of it. Much as I love Gears, though, I recognize that it’s not for everyone, so I wholeheartedly, hereby, allow the people of the world to like Call of Duty 4. And if you’re a game developer, please: this is the one (well, this and Portal) that you should rip off.
text by tim rogers
☆☆☆☆
“A POSTCARD FROM A ROBOT.”
(Author’s note: I originally wrote this article for insertcredit.com nearly two years ago. Though I didn’t know it back then, the “mission” behind writing this review would essentially serve as the “inspiration” for starting this here “website”. So let’s go ahead and call this review right here, originally titled “postcard from a robot”, “the genesis of action button dot net”. i don’t think enough people read it when i first posted it, so i’m putting it here, and now. i just kind of felt it was weirdly relevant to the two new reviews going live today.)
heck you Namco. heck you Bandai. heck you Namco-Bandai. heck you Bandai-Namco.
heck you for being presumptuous. heck you for being insulting. heck you for sneering Tetsuya Takahashi off of Xenosaga. heck you for tempting that man to even make a single one of those games in the first place. heck you for assuming the first of those games would sell a million copies upon release. heck you for being disappointed when it didn’t sell a million copies.
heck you for pressuring Keita Takahashi into making a sequel to Katamari. heck you for refusing to believe that a man capable of birthing such a brilliant idea might actually have a couple more brilliant ideas.
heck you for seemingly deriving pleasure from wronging people with the last name “Takahashi.”
heck you announcing Ridge Racer 7 for PlayStation3 not six months after releasing Ridge Racer 6 on Xbox 360. heck you for taking nearly five years to increase the numeral from 5 to 6, and then increasing the numeral from 6 to 7 in a few short months.
heck you for Ridge Racer in general. I bet, within the walls of your company, it’s absolutely positively imperative that everyone use the politest language when addressing the secretary, using the coffee machine, or operating a stapler; I bet you require your employees to turn off their cellular phones when they take a stuff in the employee restrooms. I bet you’re really proud of that stuff. Yet apparently you don’t think it shameful that you’re always there to release a schlocked-together Ridge Racer for every new console. heck you for possessing that ballless notion that “people who just bought a new console are bound to buy any game, right?”
heck you for Tekken 5! heck you for Tekken in general! heck you especially for Tekken 4, though heck you super-especially for releasing Tekken 5 on PlayStation2, and then immediately releasing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection in the arcade. heck you for announcing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection for PSP, with its stuffty little directional pad and unresponsive buttons, instead of PlayStation2!
heck you for that game sucking to begin with!
heck you for the character costumes in Soul Calibur III! heck you for giving Yunsung neon green Adidas high-tops!
heck you for putting names like “Zasalamel” on the back of cars in Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360! heck you for treating the names of your insignificant fighting game characters like they were fashion brands! heck you for presuming I care!
heck you for presuming I want to play Pac-Man while Ridge Racer 6 loads? heck you for sneering at the irony of a guy greeted with Pac-Man when he’s waiting for a game to load on his new high-definition television!
heck you for putting that Pac-Man game in the loading screen, when it’s not even a “loading” screen! I mean, why put a “Loading” game in there when there’s also a “Press the A button to start the game” displayed from the second the “Loading” screen appears!
heck you for Pac-Man, while we’re at it!
No, really!
Can you not see how hecking &^#$#ed Pac-Man is? He’s a yellow circle with a mouth! You make him three-dimensional, and he’s just a sphere! A hecking sphere! Who gives a stuff about a sphere?
heck you for the Tales of… series — sure, some of them are fun, and I enjoy them, though heck you for having so many different teams working on different Tales of… games at any given time because even though the games are all well-made and stand apart from one another in terms of story, you’re deathly afraid of releasing an RPG with any other name because you’re positively convinced they won’t sell, because you’re positively convinced people wouldn’t know the game was worth buying, because they wouldn’t be able to judge quality for themselves, because people need names and numerals in order to make decisions. hecking lighten up!!
Also heck you sideways for Tales of the World, an “original” PSP RPG that basically stars you as a generic guy who meets all the characters from the Tales of… games. So it’s like Kingdom Hearts, without Disney? And, according to screenshots, in Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, EVERYONE IS LEVELING UP CONSTANTLY
LEVEL INFINITY
And most importantly, heck you to the moon for presuming, time and time again, I have nothing better to do than play videogames.
On top of all this, heck you for Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort, and all that it represents.
Basically, Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort (“Resort in the palm of your hand”) is a non-game. I almost typed “a non-game in the vein of Animal Crossing,” though I think that would be saying a little much. It’s not in the vein of Animal Crossing — it’s more in the vein of reading a six-month-old tennis magazine in a dentist’s office waiting room than it is in the vein of Animal Crossing.
To put it simply, the game is about a beverage-like island. The advertisements on the subway trains all over Tokyo this summer ask the passenger, “Would you like a tropical island?” using the same sentence structure with which a bartender would ask a customer if he’d like a beer. The island of this game is, then, to be drunk like shots of whiskey. The advertisement consists of a sticker plastered to the doors of the Ginza Line. Passengers who had been, a minute earlier, waiting on the platform at Ueno Station, fanning themselves with a plastic fan handed to them by someone at Yodobashi Camera an hour ago (mine said “Intel Core2 Duo Processors: On Sale Now!” on it) now stand, looking at this advertisement. “Would you like a tropical island, sir?” After just spending four uncomfortable minutes on a train platform where the air-conditioners are positioned at weird angles, and standing at the front of the line, the position most likely to score you a seat, means tragically dodging the overhead air-conditioning unit’s diagonal flow, you get on the train, and you have to stand, anyway. The tidal wave of air-conditioning in the train chills your sweat. Your shirt sticks stiffly to your skin, and then it does not. Like magic, your body temperature begins to do a little dance. Your eyes chance upon the advertisement on the door. “How about a tropical island right about now, sir?”
How does this make you feel? You’ve just felt refreshed, like diving into the ocean after spending a hectic afternoon being chased by bandits through the desert. The idea of a tropical island should at least have some emotional response.
I somehow doubt, however, that the marketers were thinking this far ahead.
When you hear the words “tropical island,” what do you think? What sensory reaction does it awaken in you? Do you recall sand pleasantly between your toes? Sand frustratingly beneath your swimsuit? Itchy sand in your pubic hair? Cold water on your toes? Warm water on your toes? Cold water up to your waist, suddenly turning warm? Beach balls? The smell of beach ball-vinyl? The heat of said vinyl, baked in the sun? Volleyballs? Smell of the ocean? The sound of seagulls?
The smell of the air-conditioning in the hotel. The sound of muzak at the hotel lounge. The way the sun plays your skin like a different organ than it is back at home. The bewildering sense of distance when you gaze at the ocean; though your home may lie in the direction behind you, when you watch those waves, if you have come from a place where no waves break, to see breaking waves should fill you with a feeling that wherever you live, it should be beyond this, out there somewhere. The sea has enchanted men and women and children for years, across many centuries and fictional universes. You can fall in love with nothing at all — a wonderful feeling — just by standing and staring at it.
If you’ve never been to a tropical island, you might hear the phrase “tropical island” and think, perhaps, of Hawaiian Punch, and the way it makes your teeth red.
They say it’s made of lava rocks, you know.
Either way — whether it’s the crushing, vaguely peaceful notion that, like the waves, our lives will eventually crash to a shore somewhere and break, or memories of summer stomach flu and vomiting Hawaiian Punch into a public pool in a manner that burned your nostrils, either of these experiences represent memories Portable Island cannot compete with.
If you see that advertisement on the train, you might fall into a standing heavy reverie about vacationing. You might feel like going somewhere far away, and for a few precious days existing in a place you do not normally exist. You might desire a paradigm shift; you might consider just about anything an escape.
This game is promising you a vacation in the palm of your hand. It is promising you relief from your everyday life. You put it in your PSP, and you play it on the train with headphones on. It’s supposed to make you feel calm. It’s supposed to make you feel peaceful and serene in short, violent bursts. It’s the aromatherapy of videogames; you have it turned on in your room, or your office, and there it is, a window to a world that is not your world, or anyone else’s. It’s at atmospheric modifier. It’s here to brighten your day, and sometimes engulf your attention.
I would sincerely like to believe that anyone able to be fooled by this parlor trick has not the social standing to ever board a train.
I don’t want to talk about the game, really. I really don’t want to. It’s not worth it. It’s a game about an island. Only you don’t do anything on the island. You relax. You can press buttons to lie down in the sand on the beach. You can walk up to the water. You can press a button between trees and attach a hammock. You can lie in the hammock, and tweak the analog stick to swing the hammock. You can aim a camera lens and take pictures of yourself in the hammock. You can lay your character in the hammock and then sit the PSP in a stand on your desk while you work on some inane project in the office. You can gaze at him every once in a while, and feel jealous. How you wish it were you in that hammock. The game is a ship in a bottle; much as you’d like to ride it, you can’t, because you yourself are not small enough to fit into a bottle.
When your character puts the hammock away, when he or she is done with it, the hammock disappears into the black hole of his or her pocket.
You can walk along rocks. There are penguins there. You can look at them. You can take pictures of them. If you want to go to a different part of the island, you can open your menu and warp there. You can collect food for turtles. You can throw the food on the ground near a turtle, and watch a turtle walk up and start eating it. Only you can’t squat low enough, and zoom in far enough to see his mouth on the food. He’s mostly just hovering and twitching over it.
You can change your character’s clothes. You can make him look like a beach bum, an Abercrombie kid, or a surfer. If you’ve chosen a female protagonist, you can make her wear a bikini or a trendy tropical dress. You can wear big floppy sun hats or Hawaiian shirts. You can touch the screen and think, “That is what I would be wearing if I were really heading to a tropical island this summer!”
If you use the game as a planning tool, the most important lessons it can teach you have mostly everything to do with videogames: fast-travel gets you where you’re going without having to press a boring amount of buttons, and items like mangos, when investigated, appear, accompanied with full descriptions, in the “item” menu. Mangos are high in vitamin C, says the menu. You can collect a whole lot of item descriptions, animal descriptions, and fish descriptions. The game doesn’t keep track of quantities of items collected. Otherwise, you’d feel like you were competing with something, and competition isn’t necessary of a vacation. This game is utopia in a box, and utopia consists of precisely one citizen.
According to an interview in Famitsu the week before the game’s release, the developers really love money and are genuinely afraid of the most efficient ways to get it. Takayuki Nakamura, the game’s producer, says people often tell him it seems like Boku no Natsuyasumi (“My Summer Vacation”) “for adults.” Director Shigeki Tooyama says, “People often ask, ‘Oh, do you regain your HP by sleeping in the hammock?'”
Producer Nakamura explains that the goal of their design is best summarized by the fishing activity: “In other games, the programmers have determined the plentitude and size of the fish. In this game, there is no action. You put out the fishing rod and watch. It’s relaxing. You don’t go on a vacation to be stressed.” I imagine he says this with a cheeky grin, like Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld pitching their idea for a television show “about nothing,” knowing it was a brilliant idea.
Their concept gets a thumbs-down; their execution gets a middle finger up. The game is very tacky. The only game the producers — and Famitsu‘s Mr. Hamamura, ever respectful — are careful not to mention in the brief interview is Animal Crossing, which is likely where Portable Island took its inspiration from. Animal Crossing is a relaxing game with a weird little economy system worked in; it is a game about living a life in a town with other residents. Portable Island is about being dead-alone on an island paradise. That the game doesn’t involve any skill for tasks like fishing is unfortunate; that it is set up in such a way as to make the player never feel like he’s anywhere, much less an island paradise, is near-tragic. That the developers skirt around so many questions in the interview, and talk about how AMAZED people are when they explain that the game has no HIT POINTS or LIFE METER or FINAL BOSS makes it impossible to believe they’ve never played Animal Crossing or Nintendogs. They’re being deliberate in the PR where they should have been deliberate with the game.
Could the game have been saved? Could it have been exciting, enthralling, captivating, and still been about a tropical island? I don’t see why not. Animal Crossing is about a peaceful village of animals, where there’s never a hurricane and there’s never a fire, and it somehow manages to captivate boys, girls, men, and women alike. Why is this? It’s because the game is about maintenance. There’s something to maintain. You clean up your room, you position furniture. You trade things with the animal residents, or with other players via the internet or wireless connection, and you sell them to earn money to buy other things, or a bigger house. You can go fishing, and tweak your fishing rod in hopes of catching bigger fish. You can sell the fish, and make money to buy things for your house. Time flows in real time; night falls, morning comes. Items in the shop change. There’s a mystical thrill out of seeing new items appear. That thrill turns real when you show that new piece of furniture to a friend and he or she says, “I want one of those, too!” As a videogame and as a piece of entertainment, Animal Crossing is a wonderful way to waste time on the train.
In Portable Island, when you collect items, they appear in a list. You can view this list in the menu. You can see a large photo of an item, and read a description of it. Is this supposed to be fun? Animal Crossing gives a graphic realization to each item; you can see it in your room, push it, and move it around. You can play with the positioning of every item in your house. In Portable Island, you’re staying in a hotel room that has to look exactly the same when you leave as it did when you arrived. Only you’re never leaving. Your main character, then, is a nutso conservative of the most mathematical variety, for adding up “room must be in the same condition when you leave as it was when you arrived” and “you will never leave” and ending up with “do not touch anything.”
You are alone on an island. You are very alone. There is nothing to do except sit by the waves, and ponder things like real-life credit-card balances.
That the producer suggests, in the abovementioned Famitsu interview, that anyone had ever likened his game to a Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults” smacks of the worst kind of bigheadedness. It’s a guy being bigheaded and uninformed, trying to hide his big head, and not realizing that everyone sees through it. No, Portable Island cannot be Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults,” because Boku no natsuyasumi is already “for adults.” The game is not merely a “simulator” of a vacation. It is a retelling of an actual, specific summer vacation, one experienced by a young boy, taken to his aunt and uncle’s country home in 1975. There are characters who talk about themselves. There’s a girl whose brother died. Each day begins with calisthenics and breakfast and ends when you go to bed. There’s a ghost story. In addition to collecting and trading fighting beetles, you will witness a young boy learning about others and learning about himself over the course of one bittersweet summer. The game reminds you that nothing, even (or especially) carefree days, lasts forever. This is a tale for adults who have grown up; kids look at Bokunatsu and think they’d rather play Pokemon. This, right here, is a game for the wisened men of the world.
Portable Island contains no love interest, no murder mystery, no ghost story. It’s just you, dead-alone on a hecking island. Turn the PSP on in the evening, and you can watch a sunset in a bottle. Why would you do this? At the same time, in the real world, a real sun is setting. You could set the game time to a different timezone, so that the sun will be rising in the game when it’s setting in the real world, though if you do this, you’ll be missing out on the alarm clock function.
Yes, the alarm clock function. Be aware that when I say that people don’t want games they can also use as alarm clocks, I am, of course, speaking for myself. I don’t want a game that can be used as an alarm clock. I have an alarm clock. It’s called my cellular phone. (Which also runs the original Ridge Racer.) I set the alarm before I go to bed. I tell the alarm to go off at 5:07AM with a light ring. Then I set a second alarm, to go off at 6:27AM, with a louder ring. I wake up and go running.
My phone is set to “original manner mode” — so I can configure how loudly each type of event is announced. A phone call always rings quietly. Phone emails are silent. My set alarms are as configured in the “alarm” menu. So I make one quiet, and one loud. This is my casual, modern-life acceptance of the fact that people will always hit the “snooze” button for an hour before actually waking up. So far, my brain hasn’t figured out the alarm is a filthy liar and started rebelling. Or maybe it has it figured out all along, and just doesn’t mind.
I have more fun programming my cellular phone than I do playing Portable Island.
In order to use Portable Island as an alarm clock, you need one of those PSP stands, you know, where you put the PSP in and it keeps it charged up. Before you put the game into sleep mode, you tell it what time you want it to go off. The game will then wake you up with “pleasant ocean sounds” when the time comes. Actually, you can set the ocean sounds to go off in a murmur ten minutes before the alarm proper.
Here I will say something about the sample quality of said ocean sounds: they’re pretty good, I guess.
The alarm clock function is featured on the advertisements on the Ginza Line. Right beneath “How about a tropical island to ease your worries, buddy?” are three photos. One of them shows the game as an alarm clock. “Wake up to pleasant ocean sounds! Brighten up your room with pleasant ocean sounds at any time of day!” That’s kind of creepy. Though I guess some people do stuff like that. They buy VHS tapes with tropical fish on them, because they can’t have an aquarium. Personally, I prefer the sound of the highway and the distant trains outside my apartment, especially when I’ve just gotten out of the shower and am drinking a cold glass of tea, and there’s a nice breeze coming in the window.
The other two pictures on the train advertisement display the “camera” function (take pictures of the game and save them to your Memory Stick!) and the musical instrument feature, respectively. The musical instrument feature is what professional journalists call a “crock of stuff”; you can play a ukulele, assorted percussion, or steel drums, using only the PSP’s buttons. The “assorted percussion” instrument is basically a throwaway. You just jag the face buttons and the directional buttons, making a cacophony. Or, well, it would be a cacophony, if the PSP’s headphone volume went up loud enough to allow a cacophony, or if the PSP’s speakers were strong enough to allow anyone else to hear the sound effects over the volume of the clattering train rails. The steel drums are slightly more interesting, because each button or direction pressed plays a specific note. You can actually put together melodies, if you have the patience, and/or love music despite a deep hatred for touching actual musical instruments.
The ukulele function is the one that’s getting all of the attention. Famitsu did a full feature on it, for example. All the way back at Tokyo Game Show 2005, Namco had hula-skirted booth personnel carrying PSPs around tempting people to try the ukulele. I was one such tempted. It was a novel idea at first. You hold the PSP upside-down while pressing and holding the face buttons (or a shoulder button plus face buttons for extra notes), and then flick the analog stick with your thumb to simulate strumming. (One of the options in this mode is to toggle the upstroke on or off, which is mystifying, because ukulele is quit the upstroked instrument. I say this as a man who’s screwed around with a ukulele whenever at a certain friend’s house.)
You can perform in time to songs, if you want. The game will simulate the other instruments, and you will strum the ukulele. It’s worth noting that the timing practice you’ll get by strumming the analog nub can actually gift you with some real skill at playing a ukulele. However, pressing and holding buttons on the PSP can’t exactly prepare you for playing a ukulele. There are no frets on a PSP. Moreover, the game does not grade your performance. Grading the player’s performance would, I imagine, go against the producers’ “relaxation” idea. As well produced as the musical mode is (probably handled by Namco’s Taiko drum game team), the songs all happen to be dismally fruity island numbers; having your significant other walk in on you practicing one of these would be like being caught by your mother masturbating to a pineapple fetishist’s magazine.
If you’re interested in ukuleles, for the price of this software you can purchase a real ukulele of above-average craftsmanship. It is about as portable as a PSP, and actually weighs less.
For the price of a PSP and this game, you can purchase a ukulele of superior construction, or else a Fender Japan Stratocaster electric guitar. Just saying.
You could also, yes, purchase an airplane ticket somewhere sunny, with some pocket money left over for a few beers, and sleep on the beach at night. Sleeping on the beach, you’ll find, is more comfortable than being packed into a late-night rush-hour train and staring at a fake young man lying on a fake hotel’s fake bed.
The game also has a “radio” function. Engage this function, and you can listen to any mp3s stored in your Memory Stick’s PSP/MUSIC folder played under a weird filter of static, seperated by the whisperings of a DJ whose English sounds vaguely (and with probably good reason) like a Japanese who grew up in Hawaii.
The inclusion of this tool is oddly flattering, and oddly insulting, depending on the flip of your mind’s coin at any given time. For one thing, I can listen to my mp3s on an iPod without this game’s randomizing help. And I can listen to them, maybe, in a cafe overlooking a rainy highway in Shibuya, during a devastating autumn where the nightingales flew south early, while waiting for a friend to show up and cheer me down. That Portable Island creates falsely picturesque context (listening to the radio on the beach, miles from civilization) for its presentation of the mp3s feels hollow given the game’s love of lack of conflict. Yet the basic premise feels like it might not be a bad idea in an actual game: if a game set on a tropical island would use your mp3s as background music during gameplay, interrupting them sometimes with tropical weather reports, it would be kind of neat. Yet this wouldn’t work for Portable Island, firstly because there is no actual “game” to speak of, and secondly because of the PSP’s hardware limitations. The system couldn’t possibly handle hammering the CPU, the UMD, and the Memory Stick all at once without expending the battery in thirty-five seconds.
This brings us to the main point of this critique: the PSP itself. The hardware limitations are this game’s ruin. Based on my hours of time playing it (to spite myself), and my seconds spent gazing at the advertisement on the Ginza Line, before the doors opened at my station and the ad slid into the abyss, I have come to the conclusion that any and all hope that this game will sell depends on, if not making the player feel like he or she truly is on a tropical island, at least reminding the player what a tropical island is like if he or she has gone, or imparting a little bit about what makes a tropical island great to players who have never had the opportunity to go to a tropical island.
At this goal, the game fails in all aspects. I could go into detail about how cheap the experience of actually “being” on the island feels, about how fast-travel forgives the laziness that prevents you from wanting to walk anywhere, how pressing a button to lie down in your bed feels clever until you realize now you’re staring at yourself in a bed, or how the island’s layout isn’t really that interesting, and most of the locations look the same. I won’t, however. I’ll just pick on the graphics and sound: the graphics look like little more than a polished-down PlayStation2 game. The sound — good samples, yes — is tinny and at a squeaky volume. It’s all very quiet and understated.
Let’s get it out in the open: This game is not virtual reality. This game is not a lucid dream. This game is definitely not the Holodeck on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
“Virtual reality” used to see bar patrons, six beers rich, paying four dollars to put on a plastic helmet and scream at flat-shaded pterodactyls for three minutes. There were maybe goals in this; the problem was it kept sobering people up, at which point they realized they were too old to pretend to do stuff that didn’t at least look real. Virtual reality, as an institution, collapsed, because ten years ago, when the most sophisticated polygons were in fighting games like Tekken, nothing a computer generated would end up looking worth the shame of putting on that plastic helmet. It would, in fact, be jarring, and disturbing, and sobering, though it might have been the developers’ intention to immerse the player in a world that felt real.
What I’m saying, then, Namco, is that until I can feel the sand between my toes, smell the sea, dip my toe into the waves, fall asleep, and work on a tan with the help of a computer program, please don’t make a game like Portable Island.
Well, I guess it’s a little too late for that.
Recently, the idea of virtual reality has started to creep back into the pop-culture pre-conscious. The head/movement-tracking technology necessary to make a game like Dactyl Nightmare more like a good dream is only recently being revisted, in the oddest little places, like Nintendo’s DS and Wii. Photorealistic graphics, as well, are being strived toward as we speak. In this light, we can pretend to appreciate Madden a little bit, as a game that, year by year, inches strategically toward total realism. Obviously, the average Madden fan doesn’t want to have to work like a football player to play the game, and that is why a sub-VR experience is fully tolerable. The ideal Madden would be, essentially, “realistic, interactive watching.” This is still a long way off. Though today’s fighting game characters look and move far more realistically than, say, they did ten years ago, if Oblivion is the best graphics can get in a game about a large, detailed world, then I’d say we’re a long way off of creating non-games that let mom star in her favorite soap-opera. How’s mom going to appreciate her favorite soap opera, if the male romantic lead in the game world looks uglier — and more like a haunted town’s female librarian — than she does in real life? See “The Uncanny Valley” for more.
In other words, there are technological leaps and bounds yet to be taken just to bring the audio/visual experience of gaming up to a level where something like Portable Island, a game about nothing, could be in the least bit successful. Then there’s the olfactory/tactile factor, and I reckon smellovision is still decades away.
So, until then, until that golden age where the “user interface” melts away, where all videogames will be “non-games,” until that day I can enjoy playing the part of Konstantin in Square-Enix’s Anna Karenina, I take it people will continue to escape from every day life with games that feature contests of wit and skill. You see, compared to a game of Gradius V, life is actually quite dull. There are many less meteors to dodge, fewer chances to fire lasers. To escape is not to relax — it is to live a fantasy. It is to fly, where we could previously only walk. To succeed at invented tests makes us feel proud. To fail at them makes us long to succeed, at times when there are so many real things around us that we need to maintain, we will gladly welcome a fleeting desire to succeed in something we can give up at any time. In games, we will run and jump, whereas in life, we seldom do more than walk.
There’s a hypothetical question for the moment, now that we’re thinking about it: could a game about walking be fun? Perhaps more poignantly, could a game about running be fun? Recently, Rockstar released a Table Tennis game, to the whoa whoa shocking shock of many games publications. People went nuts — “The makers of Grand Theft Auto bring you TABLE TENNIS!!!” — that the game didn’t involve killer prostitutes or, at least, selling drugs to minors, or shooting up high schools. Yet, one of the developers, interviewed in some videogame rag I read I don’t remember when, said they made the game out of a desire to perfect a representation of one simple action. So they chose the simplest action that could still be interesting and involving for two players: tennis. Well, table tennis, because the scale is smaller, and would allow them the breathing room to give optimal attention to all aspects of presentation. EA’s recent Fight Night: Round 3 tries the same thing — removing the “videogamey” elements of a sports game, forsaking life meters in favor of on-character damage indicators, telling us the score only as the score would be told if it were a real sporting event — that is, via voiced television announcers. Is this the future of sports games? Without a doubt. Is it the future of all other videogames? Only if a certain few designers like Fumito Ueda have their way.
Now, remember the first time you played Super Mario 64? It might have been at a demo kiosk somewhere. You might not have known how to hold the controller right away. Yet, eventually, it started to click. The idea of pushing the analog stick a little bit to make Mario walk, and pushing it all the way to make him run was a wonderful thrill. It was often said that you didn’t even have to enter the castle to have fun, the first time you played the game; of all the things the game did right (and, to some extent, wrong), the utter joy of your first run around the castle was a pop culture miracle in and of itself. Without music, without enemies, without the possibility of dying (outside of jumping off the top of the castle), we were able to have fun simply moving around in a videogame, and with the use of only two buttons, really. Future entries into the 3D platforming-adventure genre, such as the first Jak and Daxter, would later be criticized as “About as much fun as Super Mario 64 — if you couldn’t enter the castle.” Once we’d seen the thrills that lay inside the castle, the idea of just running around outside forever seemed ridiculous.
So it occurs to me, quite naturally, that before we can make a hypothetical videogame retelling of Anna Karenina (or, perhaps, War and Peace) that involves the player playing any role he wishes, we need to first make a game about running. And I don’t mean a kitschy simulation like cavia’s Naoko Takahashi’s Let’s Run a Marathon! — I mean, a game where the player actually presses buttons to run, all alone in a desert, or perhaps a city at night. The game will not allow the player to be free to enter buildings. However, it will be so enchanting in its simplicity and serenity that no one would dare think to enter a building. Why enter a building, when there is this thrill right here, this thrill of running?
Recall the scene in the film “Adaptation” where Robert McKee yells at Charlie Kauffman for accusing real life of being boring, with nothing happening. He says there are people dying everywhere, every day; there are people getting shot, people killing other people out of jealousy or politics. He says it’s presumptuous to try to make entertainment imitate your own life, just because your own life is boring. What he is implying is that if it is only possible to write what you know, and the only thing you know is idleness, and if idleness is not worth the time it takes to tell of, you should perhaps seek to know something else before seeking to tell a story.
Yet, in running, there is conflict. The goal changes from moment to moment. You will breathe differently as your heart is beating now than you will breathe when your heart is beating more quickly. When an exhale intersects with both feet being off the ground, the inhale feels different than it does at other times. The goal in running is to keep running. Simpler than Pong, with a ball and two paddles, this Hypothetical Videogame About Running would, ideally, seek to literally and concretely reconstruct, if only in audio-visual aspects, the perpetual struggle of a man against a believable road containing no obstacles. Without a single health gauge, ideally, the game’s conflict would be to not give in to tiredness; there would be no power-ups. At the end of a session, a player would not think he had wasted his time; he would not say, “I should have just gone out running for real,” because the game will impart on him the idea that all we do until we are killed by time is kill time. That all we can ever do is attempt to escape.
Perhaps that’s putting it a little desolately.
What I am perhaps endeavoring to say is that, in a videogame consisting of images on a screen (as in, not a VR program), starring a human character, game designers are responsible for
1. placing the character in an interesting situation
and/or
2. endowing the character’s every movement with a joy-like friction.
Perhaps I got a little too prosaic with that second rule.
There is no joy in the movement of the character in Portable Island. If there were, the designers wouldn’t see fit to include a fast-travel function for traveling around to the different parts of the island instantly. There is no contest, and no struggle. There are no interesting situations. That it was made by men who have played games “about nothing,” yet also feature struggles of the hand/eye or psychological variety, men who have no doubt made videogames about giant robots destroying buildings, or girls crying because of situations involving virus-carrying aliens. These are men whose “creative” switches have only two settings — nuts or nothing. One or zero. There’s nothing in between. Digital. No analog.
It’s tempting to say that the idea of a game where you do nothing, where nothing relies on skill, nor even on persistence, could be done well. It’s tempting to say that a game where you merely relax could, under some circumstances, be a tonic for a certain kind of life gone astray. Maybe girls who work in tough offices, and live with their stern parents, and enjoy taking the time to gaze at a far-off sunset in the palms of their hands, yearning for a life that turned out a little bit differently. These girls — these parasitic princesses of the modern era — deserve love, no doubt. They deserve flowers and they deserve the joy that comes with being told they are an essential ingredient of someone’s world.
Yet they also deserve the thrill of discovering how it feels when patience is awarded. They deserve the rush that comes with the realization that in this world, there are things that we can do. Portable Island wastes no time in advertising itself as a “soothing experience” for the soul. Therefore, it leaves itself wide-open for the following criticism:
Is this game a fitting escape, then, from our rigorous life at the office? What does it soothe? What needs soothing? The official site shows a picture of a man with Portable Island in his white PSP, kicking up a racket of sea sounds as he pounds away at some fierce code on his Sony Vaio. The game is positioning itself as something to be enjoyed passively, though I reckon any man with a computer can also download a music program to aid him in listening to sounds he’d prefer to hear over false ocean noises.
Another game tried, a while back, to appeal to the unfortunate princesses of the modern era. That game was Nintendogs; it sought to soothe the wailing desires of little boys and girls who wanted dogs and could have them. Yet, as a videogame, stupid as it was (I found it quite insipid and repetitive), it also contained real, momentarily flickering tests of circumstance. You throw the frisbee and watch it fly. There is joy in its flight. The dog catches it. There’s something nice about that. If your connection to the dog is a strong one — if your heart, as it were, is pure going into Nintendogs, it will entertain you for hours on end. A child unable to have a puppy could own this game and love it, and eventually be given a puppy for his or her birthday, and love the puppy for entirely different reasons. In the same way, yes, a human can love a robot, though only if the robot doesn’t, up front, guarantee it will be able to return this love — or, more specifically, if the robot makes it sparkling clear at the outset that “I am a robot; I cannot treat a human as a human would treat a human, because I am not a human. I am a robot.”
If Portable Island is indeed an effort to cure or a compensate for something lacking from our real lives, then I argue, on the basis of the above points, that it is a failure. There may be people on Amazon.co.jp who say they like it, though I reckon the girl who says “Children would find it boring; it’s clearly a game for adults who understand life’s finer pleasures” is a viral plant and the one guy who says the game “soothes” his worries gave Madonna’s album “Who’s that Girl?” four out of five stars, so he’s obviously a flake. (It deserves only three.) He also gave Nintendo’s Brain Training three stars out of five, indicating that he, too, might be a viral plant of Bandai-Namco.
Unlike Nintendogs or Animal Crossing, Portable Island is never a place we are; rather, it is a place someone we know has been. Inserting Portable Island into the PSP and flipping the POWER switch is not unlike sending your robotic butler to Hawaii and monitoring him with a hidden camera. On the island, he is free to do anything as long as it is possible to do, only he doesn’t seem to actually do any of these things, because he is a robot, and robots and butlers just don’t know what to do on vacation. Expecting him to turn around and do something fascinating in this vacuum of a world would be like expecting your coffee machine to start dispensing photocopies of gorilla handprints.
And so therein lies the rub; even a pacifist finds it impossible to play Grand Theft Auto without committing an act of violence, because the game is programmed with more attention to the physics that result from violence than the pyhsics that result from standing around doing nothing. In Portable Island, the pacifist is given a world where violence — or action — is not allowed even in imagination. While Grand Theft Auto might unknowingly aspire to be a mural painted by a naughty child, Portable Island is a postcard from a robot.
Repeat after me: we do not need postcards from robots. Though the robot might really be on the island in the photograph, the robot is only sending the postcard because someone else told him to. At least, when your aunt sends you a postcard from the Bahamas, she’s doing it because she’s thinking of you, or she wants you to think she’s thinking of you. Portable Island, a postcard from a robot, is not thinking of you, because it’s not thinking of anything. And that brings us to the problem with the world:
The most basic way to put it is that there is a problem with this world. That problem, put in simple words, tells us that “without war, there can be no peace; without hate, there can be no love.” Why is this so? Without yin, there cannot be yang; without light, there cannot be dark. Without the bad days, there can be no context for what makes good days so good. Every rock and roll band that stands on a stage in an arena faces sometimes tens of thousands of people who, without knowing it, are asking, deep in their hearts, “Why can’t it always be love? Why can’t it always be peace?” They are lacking in something; the rock and roll star, history’s greatest robot, without making a promise or a presumption, gives them what they need at that exact moment, and though the rock and roll star might create a memory or two in each of those people, it can’t guarantee them a safe and joyful future.
The problem with this world is that we can’t always be love, and we can’t always be peace. If this problem were willed human form, and it stood before you, what would you do? Would you punch it in the face with hopes of knocking its block off? Or would you jump to the ground and sink your teeth into its ankles? Would either course of action be the “right” one? The answer is simple, and at the same time, it is nothing at all. Let’s get pretentious and damning, then:
Each work of expression humankind creates will sit at the bottom of a gazed-down-upon canyon for centuries to come, as messages from the past. Portable Island is a message from a land so far away it might as well not even exist, from a person so dry they might not even be real. As an “artistic” endeavor, it is presumptuous, ankle-biting trash that the modern world would have been better off without.
That’s putting it simply.
note how they use a photo of a real island on the box. that fact will be important in the following section.
As mentioned, you can use the camera function to take a picture of the screen — maybe with a little zoom-in or zoom-out — and save the screenshots to your Memory Stick Duo. Yet, should you import the screenshots to your computer, maybe for printing out, you’ll find they are all watermarked in the lower-right corner with rather large white font:
COPYRIGHT 2006 BANDAI-NAMCO
What the hell is this, really? Is this at all necessary?
I can imagine printing one of these and taking it to my grandmother in the hospital. (Actually, my grandmother’s dead; roll with it, though.)
“Did you ever take that trip to the tropical island? Did those bad boys at that office of yours ever give you the time off?”
“Yeah, yeah they did, grandma.”
“Did you take a picture of the sunset for me?”
“Yes, I did, look.”
“Oh, this is lovely . . . wait, what’s this? Who’s . . . Ban-dai-Nam-co?”
“Oh, that, um . . .”
“ARE YOU GAY!?”
It would probably ruin her last few days on earth.
In a way, the idea of watermarking the screenshots the player takes within the game is pretty heavy. It raises a lot of questions. The watermark in Portable Island is such a sterile, ugly, huge one. It clutters up as large a chunk of the screenshot as possible, just so anyone looking at it knows exactly what company made this game.
Why not lighten up a little bit with it, though? Why not put the “Portable Island” logo down there, instead, plus a “Bandai-Namco” logo? Why make it so legal, and sterile?
Tiny font in the instruction manual reads, “Each screenshot will be watermarked for legal purposes.” What legal purposes? So that no one can use a screenshot from this game on their blog, and fool people into believing they’ve actually been to a tropical island? Are the graphics even good enough for that?
The only situation I can think of wherein having copyright information on each screenshot of the game would be a legally “necessary” thing would be if someone were to find a way to make the characters take on lewd poses or participate in scandalous situations. And then, the watermark would only exist to confirm to the public who is responsible for this mess. That’s a pretty sanctimonious reason for watermarking a screenshot.
If I were to ask a member of the development team about why the watermark appears on each screenshot, and why it’s so ugly, I’d no doubt be told, “Hey, it’s Japanese copyright law.” Yet, as one who lives his life by the letters of Japanese copyright law, I know it’s not necessary to protect such assets. You don’t have to put your name on each screenshot unless you’re overflowing with pride and want everyone to know it was you who did that. (That, or if you think people will use the screenshots for money purposes. Though trying to imagine anyone making money selling Portable Island screenshots to a vacation magazine only leads me to a conclusion that makes Namco look like assholes, so I’ll let go.)
Yet Namco is not proud. This game was appropriated a modest budget, was delayed for a while, was shrugged at by many executives, and somehow just emerged.
Once more, the fact that these Japanese game developers are all, on the average, run by chain-smoking combed-over sixty-something men with hair the color of cigarette ashes and teeth like fat-caked fishbones comes frighteningly into view. Bandai-Namco must put their name on the screenshots generated by the game because
1. The screenshots contain no characters immediately recognizable to the general public as Bandai-Namco properties (Pac-Man, Gundam, M.O.M.O, Tekken‘s Panda or Marshall Law)
2. If this situation had come up in the past, this is certainly how the elders would have handled it.
For heck’s sake, though, you’re spoiling how people enjoy games. They enjoy showing things and saying, “I took this picture in this videogame.” If they say, “Hey, I took this picture in this game called Portable Island,” if they let the name of the product emerge naturally in one conversation, then that’s a larger commercial success than subjecting a thousand indifferent people to your watermark. I mean, really, do you think the average consumer is going to look at a picture of a computer-generated polygon man in a hammock and say, “BANDAI-NAMCO, HUH? I SURE HAVE A LOT OF RESPECT FOR THAT CORPORATE CONGLOMERATE, NOW!”
Get over yourselves!! If your game was interesting to begin with, people would ask the name when they saw the screenshot. They’d say, “Hey, what game is that from?” Maybe you’re afraid that’s never going to happen? As it is now, putting your name on a screenshot of a generic island paradise is like hanging your kid’s C-minus on your refrigerator, because you’re pretty sure he couldn’t do any better if you asked him nicely.
(And while we’re at it — videogame websites, stop watermarking screenshots. You didn’t hecking make the games. Even if you took the screenshots.)
A recent Famitsu shows that Sega will release a PSP version of their Homestar home planetarium in October. The original homestar was something you place in your living room and turn off the lights, and suddenly, right there, on your ceiling, there’s a starry sky the likes of which you’ll never see in Tokyo (light pollution, you see). The Homestar was popular to a point where it’s now marked down enormously in electronic stores all over Japan.
Well, bewilderingly, there’s a PSP “version” coming. In addition to allowing you to gaze at the starry sky in the palm of your hand, there will be trivia modes and educational tours of the cosmos.
I can understand a home planetarium working on a ceiling, though come on, in the palm of your hand? There was a survey recently that said most PSP gamers in Japan play their PSPs at home. I guess this game is meant to be the evolution of reading a book under the covers with a flashlight?
Still, though: No. For one thing, my PSP screen has five or six dead pixels in it. What if I mistake a dead pixel cluster for the North Star? The educational aspect of the software would be failing then, wouldn’t it?
This is the latest in a fleet of “non-games” for the PSP, flagshipped by Portable Island. I watch each of them come, and think Nintendo really needs to hurry up, release the Wii, blow away the public, and convince every developer that the DS isn’t just a pop-culture fad-fluke. They need to show these people a little discipline.
What if I want to gaze at stars on the train to work? The PSP’s screen is so shiny that the black background would reflect the harsh train lighting. This would mean I’d be gazing at my own face and not imaginary stars. In the same way, I can mess with the timezones on my Portable Island, by locating the magical clock-idol deep in the island jungle (or by warping to the general vicinity), and make it so the sun is setting when I wake up in the morning, making the sky over the beach on my ride to work splattered with stars. The harsh orange lights on board the Ginza Line reflect in the PSP screen, and there I am, seeing up my own nostrils. My nose is kind of oily. I should quit eating some of the things I eat. I should probably try to be healthy, like I keep saying I will be, eventually. “Eventually” is a rough concept. I should quit listening to music that makes me yearn to make things better, and start actually trying to make things better. For myself, I mean.
I soak in some air-conditioning and think back to that advertisement on the train. Why release this game in the summer? Why not release it in the winter? It would make more sense to release it in the winter, especially with the slogan being “On Portable Island, it’s always summer.”
Hey. I know another place where it’s always summer. Yeah. A tropical island.
–tim rogers wanted to find a reason to mention that you fly to Portable Island on ‘ban-nam airlines’
☆☆☆☆
“A POSTCARD FROM A ROBOT.”
(Author’s note: I originally wrote this article for insertcredit.com nearly two years ago. Though I didn’t know it back then, the “mission” behind writing this review would essentially serve as the “inspiration” for starting this here “website”. So let’s go ahead and call this review right here, originally titled “postcard from a robot”, “the genesis of action button dot net”. i don’t think enough people read it when i first posted it, so i’m putting it here, and now. i just kind of felt it was weirdly relevant to the two new reviews going live today.)
heck you Namco. heck you Bandai. heck you Namco-Bandai. heck you Bandai-Namco.
heck you for being presumptuous. heck you for being insulting. heck you for sneering Tetsuya Takahashi off of Xenosaga. heck you for tempting that man to even make a single one of those games in the first place. heck you for assuming the first of those games would sell a million copies upon release. heck you for being disappointed when it didn’t sell a million copies.
heck you for pressuring Keita Takahashi into making a sequel to Katamari. heck you for refusing to believe that a man capable of birthing such a brilliant idea might actually have a couple more brilliant ideas.
heck you for seemingly deriving pleasure from wronging people with the last name “Takahashi.”
heck you announcing Ridge Racer 7 for PlayStation3 not six months after releasing Ridge Racer 6 on Xbox 360. heck you for taking nearly five years to increase the numeral from 5 to 6, and then increasing the numeral from 6 to 7 in a few short months.
heck you for Ridge Racer in general. I bet, within the walls of your company, it’s absolutely positively imperative that everyone use the politest language when addressing the secretary, using the coffee machine, or operating a stapler; I bet you require your employees to turn off their cellular phones when they take a stuff in the employee restrooms. I bet you’re really proud of that stuff. Yet apparently you don’t think it shameful that you’re always there to release a schlocked-together Ridge Racer for every new console. heck you for possessing that ballless notion that “people who just bought a new console are bound to buy any game, right?”
heck you for Tekken 5! heck you for Tekken in general! heck you especially for Tekken 4, though heck you super-especially for releasing Tekken 5 on PlayStation2, and then immediately releasing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection in the arcade. heck you for announcing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection for PSP, with its stuffty little directional pad and unresponsive buttons, instead of PlayStation2!
heck you for that game sucking to begin with!
heck you for the character costumes in Soul Calibur III! heck you for giving Yunsung neon green Adidas high-tops!
heck you for putting names like “Zasalamel” on the back of cars in Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360! heck you for treating the names of your insignificant fighting game characters like they were fashion brands! heck you for presuming I care!
heck you for presuming I want to play Pac-Man while Ridge Racer 6 loads? heck you for sneering at the irony of a guy greeted with Pac-Man when he’s waiting for a game to load on his new high-definition television!
heck you for putting that Pac-Man game in the loading screen, when it’s not even a “loading” screen! I mean, why put a “Loading” game in there when there’s also a “Press the A button to start the game” displayed from the second the “Loading” screen appears!
heck you for Pac-Man, while we’re at it!
No, really!
Can you not see how hecking &^#$#ed Pac-Man is? He’s a yellow circle with a mouth! You make him three-dimensional, and he’s just a sphere! A hecking sphere! Who gives a stuff about a sphere?
heck you for the Tales of… series — sure, some of them are fun, and I enjoy them, though heck you for having so many different teams working on different Tales of… games at any given time because even though the games are all well-made and stand apart from one another in terms of story, you’re deathly afraid of releasing an RPG with any other name because you’re positively convinced they won’t sell, because you’re positively convinced people wouldn’t know the game was worth buying, because they wouldn’t be able to judge quality for themselves, because people need names and numerals in order to make decisions. hecking lighten up!!
Also heck you sideways for Tales of the World, an “original” PSP RPG that basically stars you as a generic guy who meets all the characters from the Tales of… games. So it’s like Kingdom Hearts, without Disney? And, according to screenshots, in Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, EVERYONE IS LEVELING UP CONSTANTLY
LEVEL INFINITY
And most importantly, heck you to the moon for presuming, time and time again, I have nothing better to do than play videogames.
On top of all this, heck you for Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort, and all that it represents.
Basically, Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort (“Resort in the palm of your hand”) is a non-game. I almost typed “a non-game in the vein of Animal Crossing,” though I think that would be saying a little much. It’s not in the vein of Animal Crossing — it’s more in the vein of reading a six-month-old tennis magazine in a dentist’s office waiting room than it is in the vein of Animal Crossing.
To put it simply, the game is about a beverage-like island. The advertisements on the subway trains all over Tokyo this summer ask the passenger, “Would you like a tropical island?” using the same sentence structure with which a bartender would ask a customer if he’d like a beer. The island of this game is, then, to be drunk like shots of whiskey. The advertisement consists of a sticker plastered to the doors of the Ginza Line. Passengers who had been, a minute earlier, waiting on the platform at Ueno Station, fanning themselves with a plastic fan handed to them by someone at Yodobashi Camera an hour ago (mine said “Intel Core2 Duo Processors: On Sale Now!” on it) now stand, looking at this advertisement. “Would you like a tropical island, sir?” After just spending four uncomfortable minutes on a train platform where the air-conditioners are positioned at weird angles, and standing at the front of the line, the position most likely to score you a seat, means tragically dodging the overhead air-conditioning unit’s diagonal flow, you get on the train, and you have to stand, anyway. The tidal wave of air-conditioning in the train chills your sweat. Your shirt sticks stiffly to your skin, and then it does not. Like magic, your body temperature begins to do a little dance. Your eyes chance upon the advertisement on the door. “How about a tropical island right about now, sir?”
How does this make you feel? You’ve just felt refreshed, like diving into the ocean after spending a hectic afternoon being chased by bandits through the desert. The idea of a tropical island should at least have some emotional response.
I somehow doubt, however, that the marketers were thinking this far ahead.
When you hear the words “tropical island,” what do you think? What sensory reaction does it awaken in you? Do you recall sand pleasantly between your toes? Sand frustratingly beneath your swimsuit? Itchy sand in your pubic hair? Cold water on your toes? Warm water on your toes? Cold water up to your waist, suddenly turning warm? Beach balls? The smell of beach ball-vinyl? The heat of said vinyl, baked in the sun? Volleyballs? Smell of the ocean? The sound of seagulls?
The smell of the air-conditioning in the hotel. The sound of muzak at the hotel lounge. The way the sun plays your skin like a different organ than it is back at home. The bewildering sense of distance when you gaze at the ocean; though your home may lie in the direction behind you, when you watch those waves, if you have come from a place where no waves break, to see breaking waves should fill you with a feeling that wherever you live, it should be beyond this, out there somewhere. The sea has enchanted men and women and children for years, across many centuries and fictional universes. You can fall in love with nothing at all — a wonderful feeling — just by standing and staring at it.
If you’ve never been to a tropical island, you might hear the phrase “tropical island” and think, perhaps, of Hawaiian Punch, and the way it makes your teeth red.
They say it’s made of lava rocks, you know.
Either way — whether it’s the crushing, vaguely peaceful notion that, like the waves, our lives will eventually crash to a shore somewhere and break, or memories of summer stomach flu and vomiting Hawaiian Punch into a public pool in a manner that burned your nostrils, either of these experiences represent memories Portable Island cannot compete with.
If you see that advertisement on the train, you might fall into a standing heavy reverie about vacationing. You might feel like going somewhere far away, and for a few precious days existing in a place you do not normally exist. You might desire a paradigm shift; you might consider just about anything an escape.
This game is promising you a vacation in the palm of your hand. It is promising you relief from your everyday life. You put it in your PSP, and you play it on the train with headphones on. It’s supposed to make you feel calm. It’s supposed to make you feel peaceful and serene in short, violent bursts. It’s the aromatherapy of videogames; you have it turned on in your room, or your office, and there it is, a window to a world that is not your world, or anyone else’s. It’s at atmospheric modifier. It’s here to brighten your day, and sometimes engulf your attention.
I would sincerely like to believe that anyone able to be fooled by this parlor trick has not the social standing to ever board a train.
I don’t want to talk about the game, really. I really don’t want to. It’s not worth it. It’s a game about an island. Only you don’t do anything on the island. You relax. You can press buttons to lie down in the sand on the beach. You can walk up to the water. You can press a button between trees and attach a hammock. You can lie in the hammock, and tweak the analog stick to swing the hammock. You can aim a camera lens and take pictures of yourself in the hammock. You can lay your character in the hammock and then sit the PSP in a stand on your desk while you work on some inane project in the office. You can gaze at him every once in a while, and feel jealous. How you wish it were you in that hammock. The game is a ship in a bottle; much as you’d like to ride it, you can’t, because you yourself are not small enough to fit into a bottle.
When your character puts the hammock away, when he or she is done with it, the hammock disappears into the black hole of his or her pocket.
You can walk along rocks. There are penguins there. You can look at them. You can take pictures of them. If you want to go to a different part of the island, you can open your menu and warp there. You can collect food for turtles. You can throw the food on the ground near a turtle, and watch a turtle walk up and start eating it. Only you can’t squat low enough, and zoom in far enough to see his mouth on the food. He’s mostly just hovering and twitching over it.
You can change your character’s clothes. You can make him look like a beach bum, an Abercrombie kid, or a surfer. If you’ve chosen a female protagonist, you can make her wear a bikini or a trendy tropical dress. You can wear big floppy sun hats or Hawaiian shirts. You can touch the screen and think, “That is what I would be wearing if I were really heading to a tropical island this summer!”
If you use the game as a planning tool, the most important lessons it can teach you have mostly everything to do with videogames: fast-travel gets you where you’re going without having to press a boring amount of buttons, and items like mangos, when investigated, appear, accompanied with full descriptions, in the “item” menu. Mangos are high in vitamin C, says the menu. You can collect a whole lot of item descriptions, animal descriptions, and fish descriptions. The game doesn’t keep track of quantities of items collected. Otherwise, you’d feel like you were competing with something, and competition isn’t necessary of a vacation. This game is utopia in a box, and utopia consists of precisely one citizen.
According to an interview in Famitsu the week before the game’s release, the developers really love money and are genuinely afraid of the most efficient ways to get it. Takayuki Nakamura, the game’s producer, says people often tell him it seems like Boku no Natsuyasumi (“My Summer Vacation”) “for adults.” Director Shigeki Tooyama says, “People often ask, ‘Oh, do you regain your HP by sleeping in the hammock?'”
Producer Nakamura explains that the goal of their design is best summarized by the fishing activity: “In other games, the programmers have determined the plentitude and size of the fish. In this game, there is no action. You put out the fishing rod and watch. It’s relaxing. You don’t go on a vacation to be stressed.” I imagine he says this with a cheeky grin, like Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld pitching their idea for a television show “about nothing,” knowing it was a brilliant idea.
Their concept gets a thumbs-down; their execution gets a middle finger up. The game is very tacky. The only game the producers — and Famitsu‘s Mr. Hamamura, ever respectful — are careful not to mention in the brief interview is Animal Crossing, which is likely where Portable Island took its inspiration from. Animal Crossing is a relaxing game with a weird little economy system worked in; it is a game about living a life in a town with other residents. Portable Island is about being dead-alone on an island paradise. That the game doesn’t involve any skill for tasks like fishing is unfortunate; that it is set up in such a way as to make the player never feel like he’s anywhere, much less an island paradise, is near-tragic. That the developers skirt around so many questions in the interview, and talk about how AMAZED people are when they explain that the game has no HIT POINTS or LIFE METER or FINAL BOSS makes it impossible to believe they’ve never played Animal Crossing or Nintendogs. They’re being deliberate in the PR where they should have been deliberate with the game.
Could the game have been saved? Could it have been exciting, enthralling, captivating, and still been about a tropical island? I don’t see why not. Animal Crossing is about a peaceful village of animals, where there’s never a hurricane and there’s never a fire, and it somehow manages to captivate boys, girls, men, and women alike. Why is this? It’s because the game is about maintenance. There’s something to maintain. You clean up your room, you position furniture. You trade things with the animal residents, or with other players via the internet or wireless connection, and you sell them to earn money to buy other things, or a bigger house. You can go fishing, and tweak your fishing rod in hopes of catching bigger fish. You can sell the fish, and make money to buy things for your house. Time flows in real time; night falls, morning comes. Items in the shop change. There’s a mystical thrill out of seeing new items appear. That thrill turns real when you show that new piece of furniture to a friend and he or she says, “I want one of those, too!” As a videogame and as a piece of entertainment, Animal Crossing is a wonderful way to waste time on the train.
In Portable Island, when you collect items, they appear in a list. You can view this list in the menu. You can see a large photo of an item, and read a description of it. Is this supposed to be fun? Animal Crossing gives a graphic realization to each item; you can see it in your room, push it, and move it around. You can play with the positioning of every item in your house. In Portable Island, you’re staying in a hotel room that has to look exactly the same when you leave as it did when you arrived. Only you’re never leaving. Your main character, then, is a nutso conservative of the most mathematical variety, for adding up “room must be in the same condition when you leave as it was when you arrived” and “you will never leave” and ending up with “do not touch anything.”
You are alone on an island. You are very alone. There is nothing to do except sit by the waves, and ponder things like real-life credit-card balances.
That the producer suggests, in the abovementioned Famitsu interview, that anyone had ever likened his game to a Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults” smacks of the worst kind of bigheadedness. It’s a guy being bigheaded and uninformed, trying to hide his big head, and not realizing that everyone sees through it. No, Portable Island cannot be Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults,” because Boku no natsuyasumi is already “for adults.” The game is not merely a “simulator” of a vacation. It is a retelling of an actual, specific summer vacation, one experienced by a young boy, taken to his aunt and uncle’s country home in 1975. There are characters who talk about themselves. There’s a girl whose brother died. Each day begins with calisthenics and breakfast and ends when you go to bed. There’s a ghost story. In addition to collecting and trading fighting beetles, you will witness a young boy learning about others and learning about himself over the course of one bittersweet summer. The game reminds you that nothing, even (or especially) carefree days, lasts forever. This is a tale for adults who have grown up; kids look at Bokunatsu and think they’d rather play Pokemon. This, right here, is a game for the wisened men of the world.
Portable Island contains no love interest, no murder mystery, no ghost story. It’s just you, dead-alone on a hecking island. Turn the PSP on in the evening, and you can watch a sunset in a bottle. Why would you do this? At the same time, in the real world, a real sun is setting. You could set the game time to a different timezone, so that the sun will be rising in the game when it’s setting in the real world, though if you do this, you’ll be missing out on the alarm clock function.
Yes, the alarm clock function. Be aware that when I say that people don’t want games they can also use as alarm clocks, I am, of course, speaking for myself. I don’t want a game that can be used as an alarm clock. I have an alarm clock. It’s called my cellular phone. (Which also runs the original Ridge Racer.) I set the alarm before I go to bed. I tell the alarm to go off at 5:07AM with a light ring. Then I set a second alarm, to go off at 6:27AM, with a louder ring. I wake up and go running.
My phone is set to “original manner mode” — so I can configure how loudly each type of event is announced. A phone call always rings quietly. Phone emails are silent. My set alarms are as configured in the “alarm” menu. So I make one quiet, and one loud. This is my casual, modern-life acceptance of the fact that people will always hit the “snooze” button for an hour before actually waking up. So far, my brain hasn’t figured out the alarm is a filthy liar and started rebelling. Or maybe it has it figured out all along, and just doesn’t mind.
I have more fun programming my cellular phone than I do playing Portable Island.
In order to use Portable Island as an alarm clock, you need one of those PSP stands, you know, where you put the PSP in and it keeps it charged up. Before you put the game into sleep mode, you tell it what time you want it to go off. The game will then wake you up with “pleasant ocean sounds” when the time comes. Actually, you can set the ocean sounds to go off in a murmur ten minutes before the alarm proper.
Here I will say something about the sample quality of said ocean sounds: they’re pretty good, I guess.
The alarm clock function is featured on the advertisements on the Ginza Line. Right beneath “How about a tropical island to ease your worries, buddy?” are three photos. One of them shows the game as an alarm clock. “Wake up to pleasant ocean sounds! Brighten up your room with pleasant ocean sounds at any time of day!” That’s kind of creepy. Though I guess some people do stuff like that. They buy VHS tapes with tropical fish on them, because they can’t have an aquarium. Personally, I prefer the sound of the highway and the distant trains outside my apartment, especially when I’ve just gotten out of the shower and am drinking a cold glass of tea, and there’s a nice breeze coming in the window.
The other two pictures on the train advertisement display the “camera” function (take pictures of the game and save them to your Memory Stick!) and the musical instrument feature, respectively. The musical instrument feature is what professional journalists call a “crock of stuff”; you can play a ukulele, assorted percussion, or steel drums, using only the PSP’s buttons. The “assorted percussion” instrument is basically a throwaway. You just jag the face buttons and the directional buttons, making a cacophony. Or, well, it would be a cacophony, if the PSP’s headphone volume went up loud enough to allow a cacophony, or if the PSP’s speakers were strong enough to allow anyone else to hear the sound effects over the volume of the clattering train rails. The steel drums are slightly more interesting, because each button or direction pressed plays a specific note. You can actually put together melodies, if you have the patience, and/or love music despite a deep hatred for touching actual musical instruments.
The ukulele function is the one that’s getting all of the attention. Famitsu did a full feature on it, for example. All the way back at Tokyo Game Show 2005, Namco had hula-skirted booth personnel carrying PSPs around tempting people to try the ukulele. I was one such tempted. It was a novel idea at first. You hold the PSP upside-down while pressing and holding the face buttons (or a shoulder button plus face buttons for extra notes), and then flick the analog stick with your thumb to simulate strumming. (One of the options in this mode is to toggle the upstroke on or off, which is mystifying, because ukulele is quit the upstroked instrument. I say this as a man who’s screwed around with a ukulele whenever at a certain friend’s house.)
You can perform in time to songs, if you want. The game will simulate the other instruments, and you will strum the ukulele. It’s worth noting that the timing practice you’ll get by strumming the analog nub can actually gift you with some real skill at playing a ukulele. However, pressing and holding buttons on the PSP can’t exactly prepare you for playing a ukulele. There are no frets on a PSP. Moreover, the game does not grade your performance. Grading the player’s performance would, I imagine, go against the producers’ “relaxation” idea. As well produced as the musical mode is (probably handled by Namco’s Taiko drum game team), the songs all happen to be dismally fruity island numbers; having your significant other walk in on you practicing one of these would be like being caught by your mother masturbating to a pineapple fetishist’s magazine.
If you’re interested in ukuleles, for the price of this software you can purchase a real ukulele of above-average craftsmanship. It is about as portable as a PSP, and actually weighs less.
For the price of a PSP and this game, you can purchase a ukulele of superior construction, or else a Fender Japan Stratocaster electric guitar. Just saying.
You could also, yes, purchase an airplane ticket somewhere sunny, with some pocket money left over for a few beers, and sleep on the beach at night. Sleeping on the beach, you’ll find, is more comfortable than being packed into a late-night rush-hour train and staring at a fake young man lying on a fake hotel’s fake bed.
The game also has a “radio” function. Engage this function, and you can listen to any mp3s stored in your Memory Stick’s PSP/MUSIC folder played under a weird filter of static, seperated by the whisperings of a DJ whose English sounds vaguely (and with probably good reason) like a Japanese who grew up in Hawaii.
The inclusion of this tool is oddly flattering, and oddly insulting, depending on the flip of your mind’s coin at any given time. For one thing, I can listen to my mp3s on an iPod without this game’s randomizing help. And I can listen to them, maybe, in a cafe overlooking a rainy highway in Shibuya, during a devastating autumn where the nightingales flew south early, while waiting for a friend to show up and cheer me down. That Portable Island creates falsely picturesque context (listening to the radio on the beach, miles from civilization) for its presentation of the mp3s feels hollow given the game’s love of lack of conflict. Yet the basic premise feels like it might not be a bad idea in an actual game: if a game set on a tropical island would use your mp3s as background music during gameplay, interrupting them sometimes with tropical weather reports, it would be kind of neat. Yet this wouldn’t work for Portable Island, firstly because there is no actual “game” to speak of, and secondly because of the PSP’s hardware limitations. The system couldn’t possibly handle hammering the CPU, the UMD, and the Memory Stick all at once without expending the battery in thirty-five seconds.
This brings us to the main point of this critique: the PSP itself. The hardware limitations are this game’s ruin. Based on my hours of time playing it (to spite myself), and my seconds spent gazing at the advertisement on the Ginza Line, before the doors opened at my station and the ad slid into the abyss, I have come to the conclusion that any and all hope that this game will sell depends on, if not making the player feel like he or she truly is on a tropical island, at least reminding the player what a tropical island is like if he or she has gone, or imparting a little bit about what makes a tropical island great to players who have never had the opportunity to go to a tropical island.
At this goal, the game fails in all aspects. I could go into detail about how cheap the experience of actually “being” on the island feels, about how fast-travel forgives the laziness that prevents you from wanting to walk anywhere, how pressing a button to lie down in your bed feels clever until you realize now you’re staring at yourself in a bed, or how the island’s layout isn’t really that interesting, and most of the locations look the same. I won’t, however. I’ll just pick on the graphics and sound: the graphics look like little more than a polished-down PlayStation2 game. The sound — good samples, yes — is tinny and at a squeaky volume. It’s all very quiet and understated.
Let’s get it out in the open: This game is not virtual reality. This game is not a lucid dream. This game is definitely not the Holodeck on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
“Virtual reality” used to see bar patrons, six beers rich, paying four dollars to put on a plastic helmet and scream at flat-shaded pterodactyls for three minutes. There were maybe goals in this; the problem was it kept sobering people up, at which point they realized they were too old to pretend to do stuff that didn’t at least look real. Virtual reality, as an institution, collapsed, because ten years ago, when the most sophisticated polygons were in fighting games like Tekken, nothing a computer generated would end up looking worth the shame of putting on that plastic helmet. It would, in fact, be jarring, and disturbing, and sobering, though it might have been the developers’ intention to immerse the player in a world that felt real.
What I’m saying, then, Namco, is that until I can feel the sand between my toes, smell the sea, dip my toe into the waves, fall asleep, and work on a tan with the help of a computer program, please don’t make a game like Portable Island.
Well, I guess it’s a little too late for that.
Recently, the idea of virtual reality has started to creep back into the pop-culture pre-conscious. The head/movement-tracking technology necessary to make a game like Dactyl Nightmare more like a good dream is only recently being revisted, in the oddest little places, like Nintendo’s DS and Wii. Photorealistic graphics, as well, are being strived toward as we speak. In this light, we can pretend to appreciate Madden a little bit, as a game that, year by year, inches strategically toward total realism. Obviously, the average Madden fan doesn’t want to have to work like a football player to play the game, and that is why a sub-VR experience is fully tolerable. The ideal Madden would be, essentially, “realistic, interactive watching.” This is still a long way off. Though today’s fighting game characters look and move far more realistically than, say, they did ten years ago, if Oblivion is the best graphics can get in a game about a large, detailed world, then I’d say we’re a long way off of creating non-games that let mom star in her favorite soap-opera. How’s mom going to appreciate her favorite soap opera, if the male romantic lead in the game world looks uglier — and more like a haunted town’s female librarian — than she does in real life? See “The Uncanny Valley” for more.
In other words, there are technological leaps and bounds yet to be taken just to bring the audio/visual experience of gaming up to a level where something like Portable Island, a game about nothing, could be in the least bit successful. Then there’s the olfactory/tactile factor, and I reckon smellovision is still decades away.
So, until then, until that golden age where the “user interface” melts away, where all videogames will be “non-games,” until that day I can enjoy playing the part of Konstantin in Square-Enix’s Anna Karenina, I take it people will continue to escape from every day life with games that feature contests of wit and skill. You see, compared to a game of Gradius V, life is actually quite dull. There are many less meteors to dodge, fewer chances to fire lasers. To escape is not to relax — it is to live a fantasy. It is to fly, where we could previously only walk. To succeed at invented tests makes us feel proud. To fail at them makes us long to succeed, at times when there are so many real things around us that we need to maintain, we will gladly welcome a fleeting desire to succeed in something we can give up at any time. In games, we will run and jump, whereas in life, we seldom do more than walk.
There’s a hypothetical question for the moment, now that we’re thinking about it: could a game about walking be fun? Perhaps more poignantly, could a game about running be fun? Recently, Rockstar released a Table Tennis game, to the whoa whoa shocking shock of many games publications. People went nuts — “The makers of Grand Theft Auto bring you TABLE TENNIS!!!” — that the game didn’t involve killer prostitutes or, at least, selling drugs to minors, or shooting up high schools. Yet, one of the developers, interviewed in some videogame rag I read I don’t remember when, said they made the game out of a desire to perfect a representation of one simple action. So they chose the simplest action that could still be interesting and involving for two players: tennis. Well, table tennis, because the scale is smaller, and would allow them the breathing room to give optimal attention to all aspects of presentation. EA’s recent Fight Night: Round 3 tries the same thing — removing the “videogamey” elements of a sports game, forsaking life meters in favor of on-character damage indicators, telling us the score only as the score would be told if it were a real sporting event — that is, via voiced television announcers. Is this the future of sports games? Without a doubt. Is it the future of all other videogames? Only if a certain few designers like Fumito Ueda have their way.
Now, remember the first time you played Super Mario 64? It might have been at a demo kiosk somewhere. You might not have known how to hold the controller right away. Yet, eventually, it started to click. The idea of pushing the analog stick a little bit to make Mario walk, and pushing it all the way to make him run was a wonderful thrill. It was often said that you didn’t even have to enter the castle to have fun, the first time you played the game; of all the things the game did right (and, to some extent, wrong), the utter joy of your first run around the castle was a pop culture miracle in and of itself. Without music, without enemies, without the possibility of dying (outside of jumping off the top of the castle), we were able to have fun simply moving around in a videogame, and with the use of only two buttons, really. Future entries into the 3D platforming-adventure genre, such as the first Jak and Daxter, would later be criticized as “About as much fun as Super Mario 64 — if you couldn’t enter the castle.” Once we’d seen the thrills that lay inside the castle, the idea of just running around outside forever seemed ridiculous.
So it occurs to me, quite naturally, that before we can make a hypothetical videogame retelling of Anna Karenina (or, perhaps, War and Peace) that involves the player playing any role he wishes, we need to first make a game about running. And I don’t mean a kitschy simulation like cavia’s Naoko Takahashi’s Let’s Run a Marathon! — I mean, a game where the player actually presses buttons to run, all alone in a desert, or perhaps a city at night. The game will not allow the player to be free to enter buildings. However, it will be so enchanting in its simplicity and serenity that no one would dare think to enter a building. Why enter a building, when there is this thrill right here, this thrill of running?
Recall the scene in the film “Adaptation” where Robert McKee yells at Charlie Kauffman for accusing real life of being boring, with nothing happening. He says there are people dying everywhere, every day; there are people getting shot, people killing other people out of jealousy or politics. He says it’s presumptuous to try to make entertainment imitate your own life, just because your own life is boring. What he is implying is that if it is only possible to write what you know, and the only thing you know is idleness, and if idleness is not worth the time it takes to tell of, you should perhaps seek to know something else before seeking to tell a story.
Yet, in running, there is conflict. The goal changes from moment to moment. You will breathe differently as your heart is beating now than you will breathe when your heart is beating more quickly. When an exhale intersects with both feet being off the ground, the inhale feels different than it does at other times. The goal in running is to keep running. Simpler than Pong, with a ball and two paddles, this Hypothetical Videogame About Running would, ideally, seek to literally and concretely reconstruct, if only in audio-visual aspects, the perpetual struggle of a man against a believable road containing no obstacles. Without a single health gauge, ideally, the game’s conflict would be to not give in to tiredness; there would be no power-ups. At the end of a session, a player would not think he had wasted his time; he would not say, “I should have just gone out running for real,” because the game will impart on him the idea that all we do until we are killed by time is kill time. That all we can ever do is attempt to escape.
Perhaps that’s putting it a little desolately.
What I am perhaps endeavoring to say is that, in a videogame consisting of images on a screen (as in, not a VR program), starring a human character, game designers are responsible for
1. placing the character in an interesting situation
and/or
2. endowing the character’s every movement with a joy-like friction.
Perhaps I got a little too prosaic with that second rule.
There is no joy in the movement of the character in Portable Island. If there were, the designers wouldn’t see fit to include a fast-travel function for traveling around to the different parts of the island instantly. There is no contest, and no struggle. There are no interesting situations. That it was made by men who have played games “about nothing,” yet also feature struggles of the hand/eye or psychological variety, men who have no doubt made videogames about giant robots destroying buildings, or girls crying because of situations involving virus-carrying aliens. These are men whose “creative” switches have only two settings — nuts or nothing. One or zero. There’s nothing in between. Digital. No analog.
It’s tempting to say that the idea of a game where you do nothing, where nothing relies on skill, nor even on persistence, could be done well. It’s tempting to say that a game where you merely relax could, under some circumstances, be a tonic for a certain kind of life gone astray. Maybe girls who work in tough offices, and live with their stern parents, and enjoy taking the time to gaze at a far-off sunset in the palms of their hands, yearning for a life that turned out a little bit differently. These girls — these parasitic princesses of the modern era — deserve love, no doubt. They deserve flowers and they deserve the joy that comes with being told they are an essential ingredient of someone’s world.
Yet they also deserve the thrill of discovering how it feels when patience is awarded. They deserve the rush that comes with the realization that in this world, there are things that we can do. Portable Island wastes no time in advertising itself as a “soothing experience” for the soul. Therefore, it leaves itself wide-open for the following criticism:
Is this game a fitting escape, then, from our rigorous life at the office? What does it soothe? What needs soothing? The official site shows a picture of a man with Portable Island in his white PSP, kicking up a racket of sea sounds as he pounds away at some fierce code on his Sony Vaio. The game is positioning itself as something to be enjoyed passively, though I reckon any man with a computer can also download a music program to aid him in listening to sounds he’d prefer to hear over false ocean noises.
Another game tried, a while back, to appeal to the unfortunate princesses of the modern era. That game was Nintendogs; it sought to soothe the wailing desires of little boys and girls who wanted dogs and could have them. Yet, as a videogame, stupid as it was (I found it quite insipid and repetitive), it also contained real, momentarily flickering tests of circumstance. You throw the frisbee and watch it fly. There is joy in its flight. The dog catches it. There’s something nice about that. If your connection to the dog is a strong one — if your heart, as it were, is pure going into Nintendogs, it will entertain you for hours on end. A child unable to have a puppy could own this game and love it, and eventually be given a puppy for his or her birthday, and love the puppy for entirely different reasons. In the same way, yes, a human can love a robot, though only if the robot doesn’t, up front, guarantee it will be able to return this love — or, more specifically, if the robot makes it sparkling clear at the outset that “I am a robot; I cannot treat a human as a human would treat a human, because I am not a human. I am a robot.”
If Portable Island is indeed an effort to cure or a compensate for something lacking from our real lives, then I argue, on the basis of the above points, that it is a failure. There may be people on Amazon.co.jp who say they like it, though I reckon the girl who says “Children would find it boring; it’s clearly a game for adults who understand life’s finer pleasures” is a viral plant and the one guy who says the game “soothes” his worries gave Madonna’s album “Who’s that Girl?” four out of five stars, so he’s obviously a flake. (It deserves only three.) He also gave Nintendo’s Brain Training three stars out of five, indicating that he, too, might be a viral plant of Bandai-Namco.
Unlike Nintendogs or Animal Crossing, Portable Island is never a place we are; rather, it is a place someone we know has been. Inserting Portable Island into the PSP and flipping the POWER switch is not unlike sending your robotic butler to Hawaii and monitoring him with a hidden camera. On the island, he is free to do anything as long as it is possible to do, only he doesn’t seem to actually do any of these things, because he is a robot, and robots and butlers just don’t know what to do on vacation. Expecting him to turn around and do something fascinating in this vacuum of a world would be like expecting your coffee machine to start dispensing photocopies of gorilla handprints.
And so therein lies the rub; even a pacifist finds it impossible to play Grand Theft Auto without committing an act of violence, because the game is programmed with more attention to the physics that result from violence than the pyhsics that result from standing around doing nothing. In Portable Island, the pacifist is given a world where violence — or action — is not allowed even in imagination. While Grand Theft Auto might unknowingly aspire to be a mural painted by a naughty child, Portable Island is a postcard from a robot.
Repeat after me: we do not need postcards from robots. Though the robot might really be on the island in the photograph, the robot is only sending the postcard because someone else told him to. At least, when your aunt sends you a postcard from the Bahamas, she’s doing it because she’s thinking of you, or she wants you to think she’s thinking of you. Portable Island, a postcard from a robot, is not thinking of you, because it’s not thinking of anything. And that brings us to the problem with the world:
The most basic way to put it is that there is a problem with this world. That problem, put in simple words, tells us that “without war, there can be no peace; without hate, there can be no love.” Why is this so? Without yin, there cannot be yang; without light, there cannot be dark. Without the bad days, there can be no context for what makes good days so good. Every rock and roll band that stands on a stage in an arena faces sometimes tens of thousands of people who, without knowing it, are asking, deep in their hearts, “Why can’t it always be love? Why can’t it always be peace?” They are lacking in something; the rock and roll star, history’s greatest robot, without making a promise or a presumption, gives them what they need at that exact moment, and though the rock and roll star might create a memory or two in each of those people, it can’t guarantee them a safe and joyful future.
The problem with this world is that we can’t always be love, and we can’t always be peace. If this problem were willed human form, and it stood before you, what would you do? Would you punch it in the face with hopes of knocking its block off? Or would you jump to the ground and sink your teeth into its ankles? Would either course of action be the “right” one? The answer is simple, and at the same time, it is nothing at all. Let’s get pretentious and damning, then:
Each work of expression humankind creates will sit at the bottom of a gazed-down-upon canyon for centuries to come, as messages from the past. Portable Island is a message from a land so far away it might as well not even exist, from a person so dry they might not even be real. As an “artistic” endeavor, it is presumptuous, ankle-biting trash that the modern world would have been better off without.
That’s putting it simply.
note how they use a photo of a real island on the box. that fact will be important in the following section.
As mentioned, you can use the camera function to take a picture of the screen — maybe with a little zoom-in or zoom-out — and save the screenshots to your Memory Stick Duo. Yet, should you import the screenshots to your computer, maybe for printing out, you’ll find they are all watermarked in the lower-right corner with rather large white font:
COPYRIGHT 2006 BANDAI-NAMCO
What the hell is this, really? Is this at all necessary?
I can imagine printing one of these and taking it to my grandmother in the hospital. (Actually, my grandmother’s dead; roll with it, though.)
“Did you ever take that trip to the tropical island? Did those bad boys at that office of yours ever give you the time off?”
“Yeah, yeah they did, grandma.”
“Did you take a picture of the sunset for me?”
“Yes, I did, look.”
“Oh, this is lovely . . . wait, what’s this? Who’s . . . Ban-dai-Nam-co?”
“Oh, that, um . . .”
“ARE YOU GAY!?”
It would probably ruin her last few days on earth.
In a way, the idea of watermarking the screenshots the player takes within the game is pretty heavy. It raises a lot of questions. The watermark in Portable Island is such a sterile, ugly, huge one. It clutters up as large a chunk of the screenshot as possible, just so anyone looking at it knows exactly what company made this game.
Why not lighten up a little bit with it, though? Why not put the “Portable Island” logo down there, instead, plus a “Bandai-Namco” logo? Why make it so legal, and sterile?
Tiny font in the instruction manual reads, “Each screenshot will be watermarked for legal purposes.” What legal purposes? So that no one can use a screenshot from this game on their blog, and fool people into believing they’ve actually been to a tropical island? Are the graphics even good enough for that?
The only situation I can think of wherein having copyright information on each screenshot of the game would be a legally “necessary” thing would be if someone were to find a way to make the characters take on lewd poses or participate in scandalous situations. And then, the watermark would only exist to confirm to the public who is responsible for this mess. That’s a pretty sanctimonious reason for watermarking a screenshot.
If I were to ask a member of the development team about why the watermark appears on each screenshot, and why it’s so ugly, I’d no doubt be told, “Hey, it’s Japanese copyright law.” Yet, as one who lives his life by the letters of Japanese copyright law, I know it’s not necessary to protect such assets. You don’t have to put your name on each screenshot unless you’re overflowing with pride and want everyone to know it was you who did that. (That, or if you think people will use the screenshots for money purposes. Though trying to imagine anyone making money selling Portable Island screenshots to a vacation magazine only leads me to a conclusion that makes Namco look like assholes, so I’ll let go.)
Yet Namco is not proud. This game was appropriated a modest budget, was delayed for a while, was shrugged at by many executives, and somehow just emerged.
Once more, the fact that these Japanese game developers are all, on the average, run by chain-smoking combed-over sixty-something men with hair the color of cigarette ashes and teeth like fat-caked fishbones comes frighteningly into view. Bandai-Namco must put their name on the screenshots generated by the game because
1. The screenshots contain no characters immediately recognizable to the general public as Bandai-Namco properties (Pac-Man, Gundam, M.O.M.O, Tekken‘s Panda or Marshall Law)
2. If this situation had come up in the past, this is certainly how the elders would have handled it.
For heck’s sake, though, you’re spoiling how people enjoy games. They enjoy showing things and saying, “I took this picture in this videogame.” If they say, “Hey, I took this picture in this game called Portable Island,” if they let the name of the product emerge naturally in one conversation, then that’s a larger commercial success than subjecting a thousand indifferent people to your watermark. I mean, really, do you think the average consumer is going to look at a picture of a computer-generated polygon man in a hammock and say, “BANDAI-NAMCO, HUH? I SURE HAVE A LOT OF RESPECT FOR THAT CORPORATE CONGLOMERATE, NOW!”
Get over yourselves!! If your game was interesting to begin with, people would ask the name when they saw the screenshot. They’d say, “Hey, what game is that from?” Maybe you’re afraid that’s never going to happen? As it is now, putting your name on a screenshot of a generic island paradise is like hanging your kid’s C-minus on your refrigerator, because you’re pretty sure he couldn’t do any better if you asked him nicely.
(And while we’re at it — videogame websites, stop watermarking screenshots. You didn’t hecking make the games. Even if you took the screenshots.)
A recent Famitsu shows that Sega will release a PSP version of their Homestar home planetarium in October. The original homestar was something you place in your living room and turn off the lights, and suddenly, right there, on your ceiling, there’s a starry sky the likes of which you’ll never see in Tokyo (light pollution, you see). The Homestar was popular to a point where it’s now marked down enormously in electronic stores all over Japan.
Well, bewilderingly, there’s a PSP “version” coming. In addition to allowing you to gaze at the starry sky in the palm of your hand, there will be trivia modes and educational tours of the cosmos.
I can understand a home planetarium working on a ceiling, though come on, in the palm of your hand? There was a survey recently that said most PSP gamers in Japan play their PSPs at home. I guess this game is meant to be the evolution of reading a book under the covers with a flashlight?
Still, though: No. For one thing, my PSP screen has five or six dead pixels in it. What if I mistake a dead pixel cluster for the North Star? The educational aspect of the software would be failing then, wouldn’t it?
This is the latest in a fleet of “non-games” for the PSP, flagshipped by Portable Island. I watch each of them come, and think Nintendo really needs to hurry up, release the Wii, blow away the public, and convince every developer that the DS isn’t just a pop-culture fad-fluke. They need to show these people a little discipline.
What if I want to gaze at stars on the train to work? The PSP’s screen is so shiny that the black background would reflect the harsh train lighting. This would mean I’d be gazing at my own face and not imaginary stars. In the same way, I can mess with the timezones on my Portable Island, by locating the magical clock-idol deep in the island jungle (or by warping to the general vicinity), and make it so the sun is setting when I wake up in the morning, making the sky over the beach on my ride to work splattered with stars. The harsh orange lights on board the Ginza Line reflect in the PSP screen, and there I am, seeing up my own nostrils. My nose is kind of oily. I should quit eating some of the things I eat. I should probably try to be healthy, like I keep saying I will be, eventually. “Eventually” is a rough concept. I should quit listening to music that makes me yearn to make things better, and start actually trying to make things better. For myself, I mean.
I soak in some air-conditioning and think back to that advertisement on the train. Why release this game in the summer? Why not release it in the winter? It would make more sense to release it in the winter, especially with the slogan being “On Portable Island, it’s always summer.”
Hey. I know another place where it’s always summer. Yeah. A tropical island.
–tim rogers wanted to find a reason to mention that you fly to Portable Island on ‘ban-nam airlines’
2007
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“TOO MUCH HARDER THAN HAVING A REAL BAND.”
Well, the time has finally come. Here I am, reviewing Harmonix and EA’s Rock Band in an effort to make May “reader wish-fulfillment month” here at Action Button Dot Net (that’s “ABDN” on the NASDAQ), and I’m giving it two stars. Before you accuse me of having never played the game, I will accuse myself: I had never played Rock Band or its older, club-footed cousin Guitar Hero prior to just two weeks ago. Now, after the lovable peons (hey, I said “lovable”) in my office have spent the entirety of two months’ worth of lunch breaks increasing their band’s “popularity” meta-numbers, and after joining them on drums for two songs and practicing the guitar part of Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade” in Guitar Hero III by myself at the local air force base BX, while a fat man stood by sipping a two-liter of red Mountain Dew, marveling that I was able to sing all the words while playing on “Hard” and actually not losing, I consider myself one hundred percent fully permitted to write a review of this game.
First, a summary of the times: here we are, escapists and refugees from reality. If you care enough about videogames to read the entire first paragraph of this writing, you no doubt find something lacking in your Actual Life. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. People who are satisfied are usually chided for being happy, and eventually become the victims of hate crimes. Videogames are a nice enough cure-all for boredom of the real-life variety; if nothing else, accusing an invisible Halo opponent of being black and/or gay feels exponentially better to the typical hillbilly than, say, being stuck in traffic for six hours.
It used to be that we didn’t have much to do outside of existing in reality and sleeping; toward the middle of the twentieth century, as the mass media became a toy for everyone — not just scientists — to enjoy, typically bored people started to get the idea in their heads to become “famous”. Human beings are irrational creatures; in the context of life as a cycle of genetic proliferation, homosexuality, for example, is no weirder than watching television, or wearing clothes. The people who saw Chuck Berry performing “Johnny B Goode” on television and decided that they, too, would someday wield guitars and flog the demons of tedium live, in front of thousands of gaping-mouthed spectators, might have, hundreds of generations past, been the strongest warriors, the fastest runners, the wearers of the best and finest genes. Too many truths abound over the years: the “strongest” warrior might not have just described the one most capable of prying a sabertooth tiger’s jaws open, shattering the poor beast’s skull — it might have described the warrior shrewd enough to lie in wait in shadows on a hillside, and roll boulders down at his prey. In this light, the heaviest, most meatheaded metal music becomes a platinum-coated object of respect: buff dudes tapping out exquisite, precise, thoughtful solos amidst aloof grimaces.
Did rock and roll die? Some will shout “rock and roll will never die” at the drop of a hat. Others with sigh and point to the fact that entering “Rock Band” after the “/wiki/” in “en.wikipedia.org/wiki” takes you immediately to a page describing the origin and sales history of the Rock Band videogame, instead of simply stating that “a ‘Rock Band’ is what you call it when you find a guitar, your friend steals a bass, and you persuade your neighbor to buy a snare drum and let you use his garage, and/or get famous doing so”. Others still will shudder, strung-out on coffee and cigarettes, and link you to Youtube video clip of the Ellen Degeneres show, in which a twelve-year-old kid plays through DragonForce’s “song” “Through the Fire and the Flames” on the hardest difficulty. The point you’re supposed to be watching for, here, is the amazed reaction of the audience when they realize that this child is only twelve years old, and he’s so good at Guitar Hero. Which is, yes, a videogame simulating playing the guitar. In other words, the tides of time have turned, and suddenly people are impressed that a child possesses the ability to pretend. Holy stuff! Even the doomsayers, who foretold that the cheap availability of simulations that let you pretend to play music would eventually usurp the real-life desire to play real music, are no doubt surprised by how quickly even the mainstream — those who neither play music nor pretend to play music — have taken to considering fake music, when played perfectly, a thing of applause-worthy spectacle. It used to be that awesome dudes like Steve Albini warned us that digital recording was the devil, and that analog was life, that life was analog; now, here’s Guitar Hero, and Rock Band; society’s head is so far up digital make-believe’s ass that the only people who notice exist so far outside the standard deviation (they pay upwards of $100 a month to be shouted at in sick-black basements by the sound of screaming fax machines), and care so little about “real” rock and roll that whatever they’re saying can’t be right, as far as the conservatives are concerned.
Tossed on top of this heap of Americana is a host of recent controversies, like the thing about Gibson, long-time supporters and spiritual godfathers of the Guitar Hero franchise (they put their name on the guitar controllers) throwing down a trump-card copyright infringement suit, saying that Guitar Hero had been violating a copyright they’d held for over a decade now. They went so far as to request that retailers stop selling the game — though, of course, only after it had sold millions and millions of copies. Sigh, that Gibson, innovators of electric guitars for decades, with used sales of their original relics eclipsing sales of their new guitars, which are all being eclipsed by the sale of flimsy plastic guitar-simulating tools, is reduced to stepping out of the shadows of lone-wolf rock-and-roll solitude to take potshots at technology. Marvel at how Gibson’s original copyright, for a guitar-performance simulator with numerical rankings for the players’ skill, skimmed very close to describing Konami’s Guitar Freaks games, in development in Japan since 1996. Fast-forward, and then rewind a bit, to the fact that Guitar Hero had only ever been its creators’ idea to jam their proverbial feet in the door, to warm the public up to music-simulation software and Expensive Plastic Controllers, before selling out to EA and revealing the real game they’d wanted to make — Rock Band, now with co-op play and even more Expensive Plastic Controllers. There’s some genuine marketing genius in there, somewhere — introducing people to plastic, and in a few short years convincing them that they needed that plastic like they needed oxygen; likewise, compare and contrast the consumer’s behavior with the behavior of Gibson, who no doubt was a tiny bit wrong if they assumed the Guitar Hero was stealing potential real-guitar sales (the thing about “expanding markets”, as it were, is that it leads every party involved to believe that they deserve everyone else’s money). Either way, about ninety-percent of me can’t help feeling that “genuine marketing genius” is about as anti-rock as you can get.
I have hesitated to review Rock Band or Guitar Hero, as videogames, for a long time, because I possess something that might be described by a lawyer as a “conflict of interest”: I like rock and roll music quite a great deal — enough to feel cheap using the word “love” — and it would be so very hard for me not to immediately dismiss the game without playing it, and say “you should just buy a real guitar”. That would get me thousands upon thousands of hate mails, I’m sure, and some of them would be so precious that I’d print them out, write “B+” in green crayon on them, and magnet them to my refrigerator. The longer I hesitated to write this review, the more I came to understand, quite poignantly, that not everyone wants to be a rock star in real life. Hell, not everyone even wants to touch a real guitar. The shocking fact of the matter, I found, is that not nearly everyone even likes any of the music they’re playing in Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Once again, I recall the parable of Gundam: Gundam is a multi-media-spanning project involving television shows, movies, videogames, action figures, plush toys, and plastic models, where any one of these representations is a cordial invitation to purchase and enjoy everything else related to Gundam. A single touch of the plastic of a well-molded, high-quality action figure might be enough to hook a three-year-old boy for life. Likewise, Guitar Hero and Rock Band‘s controllers are made of the cutest, crispiest plastic, and everyone touching that plastic seems to be objectively enjoying his or her self. The uninitiated observer will immediately assume any one of many things: these people enjoy guitars, these people enjoy rock and roll music, these people enjoy one another’s company, these people enjoy videogames, these people enjoy being shown a numerical representation of their efficiency in a particular activity, these people enjoy the posery images of flailing rockers on the television screen, these people enjoy pressing buttons. When a casual glance turns into a three- or four-second stare, it might eventually become apparent that not all of these things are true; however, everyone gathered around the television is so intently involved that no one can deny that something is happening. Anything so carefully positioned to look fun while at the same time inducing such states of fevered concentration can’t, objectively, be bad for you. If you have no real-life, burning desire to play a bitching guitar solo in front of thousands, maybe with your show being simulcast to movie theaters in shopping malls all over the American Midwest, maybe Guitar Hero, as an exercise in pressing buttons and watching Numbers Go Up, is all you really, spiritually need.
If you desire real rock, if you have the lion of rock awake and prowling in the jungle of your heart, so to speak, Rock Band will probably not do it for you. You will find the “video” elements of this game disgusting — big-haired, ugly-ass tattooed rockers flailing with scientific-calculator anti-precision on stage, giant, colorful, candy-like buttons and score numbers streaming by, a visual representation of the very “press buttons, be patronized” fetish we call “videogames”. In a way, Nintendo’s Ouendan / Elite Beat Agents series of games is a thousand times more inspirational to the would-be real-life rocker. Beware — I say this as a person who hates the Ouendan games, who once went on record in front of a federal jury as saying that he would rather “rhythmically beat an issue of Shonen Jump with disposable chopsticks while listening to J-pop on my iPod on the bus” than play Ouendan. Still, it deserves a small, paper-cake-plate of props, for having the balls to take the things I and many other man-children like me see in my head while listening to great pop-music (I imagine myself singing the song, on a bicycle, riding down a wide, empty street, with dozens of Japanese schoolgirls high-speed ballroom-dancing with one another, keeping pace with my bike, et cetera) and turn them into an actual videogame. Remember that C&C Music Factory: Make The Video game for the Sega CD, or whatever it was called — Ouendan is to that as Super Mario Bros. is to Pong.
And Rock Band is just pornography for people who like to know when they’re doing something right. I had a geography teacher in ninth grade, name Mr. Gulde, who actually quit his entire teaching career, one day, when a student, responding to Mr. Gulde’s question of “Are there any questions?” raised his hand, was called on, and asked, “Mr. Gulde, are you gay?” Mr. Gulde had something he called “The Gulde Method” for memorizing the names of countries in continents. It went like this: point at a country on a blank map with numbers on each country, say its name. If you know the name of the country is correct, point at the next country, and say its name. If you reach a point where you know you don’t know the name of a country, look at the numbered list on the other side of the paper. Then, start over from #1. This is basically how Rock Band teaches you to “play” a “song”.
In my first game of Guitar Hero, which was played on “Hard” difficulty, I messed up the first two notes of a song — I’d never so much as held the controller before — and the performance immediately ended. There was no “you lose” or “you suck” — just a freeze and a quick fade to black. I suppose that was kind of nice, though it sure as hell hadn’t taught me anything about how to do it correctly. With Rock Band, I had endured the sound of sticks clicking on plastic, that sound of a distant homeless man doing his “laundry”, for half a lunch break before I gravitated toward the break room and was asked if I wanted to play the drums. A co-worker assured me that the drums are “almost like playing real drums”. Yet there was such a sharp, gross penalty for missing a single beat. In no time, the drums were “retired” from the song, leaving the performance a husk. Everything went south after that — bands need drummers just like tigers need beating hearts.
I’ve heard tell of people’s Desire to Rock being awakened by Rock Band or Guitar Hero — people who didn’t know that they loved rock and roll until they were half-drunk and had a piece of plastic shoved into their hands at a frat party. Many of these people go on to purchase real guitars, or real drums, or real bass guitars, and start real bands. In this light, Gibson — or anyone else — is foolish to consider Rock Band or Guitar Hero a cannibal feeding on the heart-meat of would-be real musicians. To me, these games are an above-excellent litmus test: if you play them, and feel something, and realize there’s something missing inside you, and all at once damn the games to hell and search for a real instrument, then you are indeed a rock and roller. Those ensnared by the sweet visage of Numbers Going Up, by the transient joy of watching the number of “fans” at your Rock Band “show” stay steady, and then, miraculously, grow, don’t need to be real rock and rollers, and rock and roll doesn’t need those people to survive, in full health, for as long as there are soundproofed basements deep beneath the metropolises of this world. These people would never touch real guitars, and no real-guitar-player I feel comfortable saying I “know” would give up his real instrument for a life of Guitar Hero‘s sweet palliative.
In the end, the only “change” these games are affecting on gamers is a little bit of rhythm training, and an increased awareness in the Awesomeness of Rock. I saw a thing recently about some band releasing a song directly as a downloadable for Rock Band; some lifelong rock-rebels booed and hissed; I say, in this world where everyone’s sound system is hooked up to their HDTV, what’s the heckin’ difference? If you’ve got rock, put it out there. These games are as good a sheer cliff face as any for the wind-battered lichen of rock to exist on until eternity. I’d give it four stars out of ice-cold courtesy, for sheer social impact, if I’d ever been able to play it in a place where the TV volume is high enough to hear the vocals — and not hear the sound of the drumsticks repeatedly raping drum-plastic.
So, the conclusion of this review is that Rock Band is not detrimental to society. Though it may be ugly in the graphic design, heavy in the box, and have ridiculous characters that promote unfair stereotypes of rock and rollers or would-be rock and rollers, it’s not killing anyone, nor is it even food-poisoning anyone. In fact, I believe I have concluded that, in the right doses, these games are better party starters than Wii Sports, for example, because, for starters, it lets a medium-sized group of people know for certain when they are doing something, however unnecessary that something is, as well as it can be done, whereas Wii Sports only brings you farther from being able to play actual golf — and doesn’t involve Nirvana in any way.
That’s me rating this game in terms of its effects on society; what of its effects on me? Well, to be blunt, it made me feel like stuff. I’ve been playing the guitar for about a year and a half now, and every once in a while, I’ll sit down and try to play some old three-chord folk / punk / pop / rock song, singing along to the simple sound, and I’ll always get bored. I’ve sat in parks on days off with cans of Coca-Cola Zero, and I’ll riff on classic rock songs, and sing a few words, and a few girls will ask me my name, and a few guys will ask me if I’m in a band. Yet I’ve never played a song with “structure”, to “completion”. I just riff and vocalize. Me and my friend Andrew Bush will go into a studio sometimes and just blast the hell out of some instruments. I’ve thought, for the longest time, that I wanted my own “band” to lean more toward the cleaner side of noise rock; I switched from vocals (to drums to vocals) to guitar -vocal so that I could have more control over the shape of the songs we’re performing, though this was a double-edged blade, what because I had never played the guitar, and my “singing” “ability” suffers tremendously when I have this guitar in my hand and am raking it like a glue-sniffer. I’d felt comfortable, for a long time, exploiting the underground practice studios scattered around my megalopolis of choice like drunken salary men might exploit karaoke parlors: it’s something to do, in the private, in the dark.
Witnessing a group of perhaps-rock-ignorant individuals earn a perfect score on a “difficult” song in Rock Band deflated me partially — here are people, working together toward a goal of precision, and nailing it. Why can’t I have that precision? Why can’t I find someone else who wants it? In the interest of full disclosure, here is a video of what happened the last time I entered a basement practice studio with another human being with a “complete” “song” in mind, and tried to perform it to the end. We played the song maybe four more times after that video was filmed, and I kind of threw up water all over the sidewalk outside afterward, for no good reason. I avoided looking at the video for the longest time, and now that it’s on YouTube, I listen to it every once in a while, fancy the tune of the snare, and feel this bizarrely perhaps-unhealthy feeling of “accomplishment”. In the further interest of full “disclosure”, this is what happened the first time I decided to take my months of at-home guitar-practicing into a studio and jam with a drummer (and no microphone). I listen to that, and I feel pretty good, though I also feel like I need a lot more work. I’m almost twenty-nine years old, for god’s sake. Jimi and Kurt had been dead for two years at this point. There’s a moment in that recording, right there, I think it’s about two and a half minutes in, where I heard a voice in my head, saying “scream, and then play a guitar solo”, and I did as the voice insisted, and though I might have made hella mistakes up until that point, everything felt amazing for thirty seconds, as the drummer caught on to what was happening and started pounding the cymbals harder and harder.
In Rock Band, when you mess a song up, it becomes a chaotic, objective mess: instruments fade in and out of audibility, muting and unmuting and slowing down all over the place. Whether or not they possess knowledge of music theory that enables them to identify the cacophony as “Absolutely Not Music”, it is increasingly apparent to the players that they are Not Doing It Right, so they aim to do better next time. If nothing else, the song I linked above is an example of two guys, one with a real guitar, one with a real drum kit, Not Doing It Right, and feeling good anyway. (I pause to mention that the song linked above is not a “real” song, nor is it meant to resemble a “real” song; I will not link one of my “real” songs in a videogame review because that would entail me putting all my balls on the table, saying, “This is all I got.”) Here I face a fork in the road: I can either scorn Rock Band for not letting the people of the world experience the beautiful bounty of Enjoying One’s Mistakes, or I can scorn Real Life, for never letting me know, with absolute legible precision, when and how much I suck. It’s a coin toss, the outcome fluctuating from moment to moment: sometimes, we just want rock, and we don’t care what the world says, and sometimes, we want that stuff to be beautiful. More than most of the time, I find myself somewhere in between.
I can’t deny, at this point, that I will at least want to be a rock and roll star until the day I die; the point is to not wonder why I haven’t become one yet, or what happens when I do. We’d probably get kicked out of the Budokan for that performance right there, and possibly arrested, though I can sit here at my computer in my corporate office, convinced that somewhere on earth, there’s a basement where the (most likely ignorant) kids would stare saucer-eyed and find that guitar solo right there a thing of awesome beauty. I think for a second that that makes me a better person than, say, a man-mongrel begging for change outside a donut shop, with an empty beer bottle in a paper bag, I mean, throw that beer bottle away already, it’s empty, though I hesitate to say it makes me better at living This Human Life than the self-satisfied number-pushers in the office Rock Band circle. Might the feeling they feel, when seeing words like “PERFECT” flash on the screen, be just about equal to the feeling I feel wherein I imagine a fairy-tale basement where the Kids Don’t Hate Me? And would it be possible, someday, for me to be lulled away from my idiotic dream to Rock Before Others, to Be Satisfied with considering myself a rock-star, like Wesley Willis did, only without having to be laughed at by drunk frat boys — that is, thanks to a simulation I can enjoy at home, privately? Can a simulation ever make me feel good enough? Some people — usually the hideous ones — they’ve got Love Cancer, and pornography is good enough for the rest of their lives; they jerk off before they get out bed the same way some people drink coffee, and you know what? They’re not terrible human beings. They function, and they even, eventually, become happy, and not just when they’re six feet underground. If game designers can ever make my near-bulletproof embryonic rock ego feel good enough with one of these games, if they can make me feel dead in a good way — it would start with letting me noodle the god damn notes in the empty spaces (just program it so that the game remembers the most recent chord or note attached to a certain button press — I mean, the very first rhythm game ever, Parappa the Rapper, required you to improvise by slamming the button rhythmically! let’s not forget that!) — then I would give that game four stars, and I would give up.
As-is, these games are still light-years away from that. It’s one thing to tell me I hit 98% of the notes; it’s another thing to tell me that my playing was so good that 17,388 people materialized out of nowhere and entered the already-packed arena. It’s jarring and weird and depressing, and it’s harder to swallow than the voice of a gunmetal-colored robot monotoning “YOU DID WELL. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT.” It kind of makes me vaguely scared that there’s someone literally outside my house, waiting for me to fall asleep, so they can suck the breath out of my mouth with a vacuum cleaner, until I suffocate, until I am no more. Quite frankly, it’s scarier than a serial killer that everyone I know who plays these games hardly keeps the television volume above a whisper while doing so. And that’s putting it politely.
I believe the question was, “Could a simulation ever make me give up the real thing?” That’s the central question of this particular review, and it has a somewhat frightened answer: “I hope not.”
For me, if you consider the “goal” of having a “real” band “to be satisfied with one’s self”, then I would say that, as a “game”, Rock Band is “probably easier” than having an actual band, because it shows you numbers, and you can take them or leave them; you can care about them, or you can choose not to give a stuff. As a life experience, for me, it’s just too much harder than having a real band, because I just don’t feel right trying to be perfect, much as I’d love to be perfect, much as I’d gladly put perfection in my pocket if I found it lying in the street one day.
–tim rogers
(That said, I would buy Guitar Hero III if it was less than $60 and The Stone Roses’ “Breaking Into Heaven” was at least available via download.)
(The first electric guitar amplifier manufacturer to make an amp with a little LCD-equipped electronic selector to choose what song you want to play along to, and feature the ability to remove the original guitar track from said song with a single press of a button will be a millionaire overnight. Sure, plugging your iPod into the auxiliary input jack is always an option, though man, being able to do it karaoke style would be amazing. Man, they should make an amp with “Breaking Into Heaven” built in, and if you play the lead guitar note for note, the amp explodes at 5:46.Or not. Call it the “Guitar Hero Amp”, if you want. Put the logo on there and everything. Marshall should jump on that stuff.)
(*Actually, maybe someone could make a whole game out of “Breaking Into Heaven”. Make it just one stage, and exceedingly difficult. It’d be kind of like Ouendan — one fantasy-like music video based very roughly on the song’s lyrics, only maybe it would play like an action game, with hundreds of dudes assaulting you at once, with tweaking the analog stick translating to rotating your dude / chugging the bass and each punch being a note on the lead guitar.)
★★☆☆
“TOO MUCH HARDER THAN HAVING A REAL BAND.”
Well, the time has finally come. Here I am, reviewing Harmonix and EA’s Rock Band in an effort to make May “reader wish-fulfillment month” here at Action Button Dot Net (that’s “ABDN” on the NASDAQ), and I’m giving it two stars. Before you accuse me of having never played the game, I will accuse myself: I had never played Rock Band or its older, club-footed cousin Guitar Hero prior to just two weeks ago. Now, after the lovable peons (hey, I said “lovable”) in my office have spent the entirety of two months’ worth of lunch breaks increasing their band’s “popularity” meta-numbers, and after joining them on drums for two songs and practicing the guitar part of Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade” in Guitar Hero III by myself at the local air force base BX, while a fat man stood by sipping a two-liter of red Mountain Dew, marveling that I was able to sing all the words while playing on “Hard” and actually not losing, I consider myself one hundred percent fully permitted to write a review of this game.
First, a summary of the times: here we are, escapists and refugees from reality. If you care enough about videogames to read the entire first paragraph of this writing, you no doubt find something lacking in your Actual Life. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. People who are satisfied are usually chided for being happy, and eventually become the victims of hate crimes. Videogames are a nice enough cure-all for boredom of the real-life variety; if nothing else, accusing an invisible Halo opponent of being black and/or gay feels exponentially better to the typical hillbilly than, say, being stuck in traffic for six hours.
It used to be that we didn’t have much to do outside of existing in reality and sleeping; toward the middle of the twentieth century, as the mass media became a toy for everyone — not just scientists — to enjoy, typically bored people started to get the idea in their heads to become “famous”. Human beings are irrational creatures; in the context of life as a cycle of genetic proliferation, homosexuality, for example, is no weirder than watching television, or wearing clothes. The people who saw Chuck Berry performing “Johnny B Goode” on television and decided that they, too, would someday wield guitars and flog the demons of tedium live, in front of thousands of gaping-mouthed spectators, might have, hundreds of generations past, been the strongest warriors, the fastest runners, the wearers of the best and finest genes. Too many truths abound over the years: the “strongest” warrior might not have just described the one most capable of prying a sabertooth tiger’s jaws open, shattering the poor beast’s skull — it might have described the warrior shrewd enough to lie in wait in shadows on a hillside, and roll boulders down at his prey. In this light, the heaviest, most meatheaded metal music becomes a platinum-coated object of respect: buff dudes tapping out exquisite, precise, thoughtful solos amidst aloof grimaces.
Did rock and roll die? Some will shout “rock and roll will never die” at the drop of a hat. Others with sigh and point to the fact that entering “Rock Band” after the “/wiki/” in “en.wikipedia.org/wiki” takes you immediately to a page describing the origin and sales history of the Rock Band videogame, instead of simply stating that “a ‘Rock Band’ is what you call it when you find a guitar, your friend steals a bass, and you persuade your neighbor to buy a snare drum and let you use his garage, and/or get famous doing so”. Others still will shudder, strung-out on coffee and cigarettes, and link you to Youtube video clip of the Ellen Degeneres show, in which a twelve-year-old kid plays through DragonForce’s “song” “Through the Fire and the Flames” on the hardest difficulty. The point you’re supposed to be watching for, here, is the amazed reaction of the audience when they realize that this child is only twelve years old, and he’s so good at Guitar Hero. Which is, yes, a videogame simulating playing the guitar. In other words, the tides of time have turned, and suddenly people are impressed that a child possesses the ability to pretend. Holy stuff! Even the doomsayers, who foretold that the cheap availability of simulations that let you pretend to play music would eventually usurp the real-life desire to play real music, are no doubt surprised by how quickly even the mainstream — those who neither play music nor pretend to play music — have taken to considering fake music, when played perfectly, a thing of applause-worthy spectacle. It used to be that awesome dudes like Steve Albini warned us that digital recording was the devil, and that analog was life, that life was analog; now, here’s Guitar Hero, and Rock Band; society’s head is so far up digital make-believe’s ass that the only people who notice exist so far outside the standard deviation (they pay upwards of $100 a month to be shouted at in sick-black basements by the sound of screaming fax machines), and care so little about “real” rock and roll that whatever they’re saying can’t be right, as far as the conservatives are concerned.
Tossed on top of this heap of Americana is a host of recent controversies, like the thing about Gibson, long-time supporters and spiritual godfathers of the Guitar Hero franchise (they put their name on the guitar controllers) throwing down a trump-card copyright infringement suit, saying that Guitar Hero had been violating a copyright they’d held for over a decade now. They went so far as to request that retailers stop selling the game — though, of course, only after it had sold millions and millions of copies. Sigh, that Gibson, innovators of electric guitars for decades, with used sales of their original relics eclipsing sales of their new guitars, which are all being eclipsed by the sale of flimsy plastic guitar-simulating tools, is reduced to stepping out of the shadows of lone-wolf rock-and-roll solitude to take potshots at technology. Marvel at how Gibson’s original copyright, for a guitar-performance simulator with numerical rankings for the players’ skill, skimmed very close to describing Konami’s Guitar Freaks games, in development in Japan since 1996. Fast-forward, and then rewind a bit, to the fact that Guitar Hero had only ever been its creators’ idea to jam their proverbial feet in the door, to warm the public up to music-simulation software and Expensive Plastic Controllers, before selling out to EA and revealing the real game they’d wanted to make — Rock Band, now with co-op play and even more Expensive Plastic Controllers. There’s some genuine marketing genius in there, somewhere — introducing people to plastic, and in a few short years convincing them that they needed that plastic like they needed oxygen; likewise, compare and contrast the consumer’s behavior with the behavior of Gibson, who no doubt was a tiny bit wrong if they assumed the Guitar Hero was stealing potential real-guitar sales (the thing about “expanding markets”, as it were, is that it leads every party involved to believe that they deserve everyone else’s money). Either way, about ninety-percent of me can’t help feeling that “genuine marketing genius” is about as anti-rock as you can get.
I have hesitated to review Rock Band or Guitar Hero, as videogames, for a long time, because I possess something that might be described by a lawyer as a “conflict of interest”: I like rock and roll music quite a great deal — enough to feel cheap using the word “love” — and it would be so very hard for me not to immediately dismiss the game without playing it, and say “you should just buy a real guitar”. That would get me thousands upon thousands of hate mails, I’m sure, and some of them would be so precious that I’d print them out, write “B+” in green crayon on them, and magnet them to my refrigerator. The longer I hesitated to write this review, the more I came to understand, quite poignantly, that not everyone wants to be a rock star in real life. Hell, not everyone even wants to touch a real guitar. The shocking fact of the matter, I found, is that not nearly everyone even likes any of the music they’re playing in Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Once again, I recall the parable of Gundam: Gundam is a multi-media-spanning project involving television shows, movies, videogames, action figures, plush toys, and plastic models, where any one of these representations is a cordial invitation to purchase and enjoy everything else related to Gundam. A single touch of the plastic of a well-molded, high-quality action figure might be enough to hook a three-year-old boy for life. Likewise, Guitar Hero and Rock Band‘s controllers are made of the cutest, crispiest plastic, and everyone touching that plastic seems to be objectively enjoying his or her self. The uninitiated observer will immediately assume any one of many things: these people enjoy guitars, these people enjoy rock and roll music, these people enjoy one another’s company, these people enjoy videogames, these people enjoy being shown a numerical representation of their efficiency in a particular activity, these people enjoy the posery images of flailing rockers on the television screen, these people enjoy pressing buttons. When a casual glance turns into a three- or four-second stare, it might eventually become apparent that not all of these things are true; however, everyone gathered around the television is so intently involved that no one can deny that something is happening. Anything so carefully positioned to look fun while at the same time inducing such states of fevered concentration can’t, objectively, be bad for you. If you have no real-life, burning desire to play a bitching guitar solo in front of thousands, maybe with your show being simulcast to movie theaters in shopping malls all over the American Midwest, maybe Guitar Hero, as an exercise in pressing buttons and watching Numbers Go Up, is all you really, spiritually need.
If you desire real rock, if you have the lion of rock awake and prowling in the jungle of your heart, so to speak, Rock Band will probably not do it for you. You will find the “video” elements of this game disgusting — big-haired, ugly-ass tattooed rockers flailing with scientific-calculator anti-precision on stage, giant, colorful, candy-like buttons and score numbers streaming by, a visual representation of the very “press buttons, be patronized” fetish we call “videogames”. In a way, Nintendo’s Ouendan / Elite Beat Agents series of games is a thousand times more inspirational to the would-be real-life rocker. Beware — I say this as a person who hates the Ouendan games, who once went on record in front of a federal jury as saying that he would rather “rhythmically beat an issue of Shonen Jump with disposable chopsticks while listening to J-pop on my iPod on the bus” than play Ouendan. Still, it deserves a small, paper-cake-plate of props, for having the balls to take the things I and many other man-children like me see in my head while listening to great pop-music (I imagine myself singing the song, on a bicycle, riding down a wide, empty street, with dozens of Japanese schoolgirls high-speed ballroom-dancing with one another, keeping pace with my bike, et cetera) and turn them into an actual videogame. Remember that C&C Music Factory: Make The Video game for the Sega CD, or whatever it was called — Ouendan is to that as Super Mario Bros. is to Pong.
And Rock Band is just pornography for people who like to know when they’re doing something right. I had a geography teacher in ninth grade, name Mr. Gulde, who actually quit his entire teaching career, one day, when a student, responding to Mr. Gulde’s question of “Are there any questions?” raised his hand, was called on, and asked, “Mr. Gulde, are you gay?” Mr. Gulde had something he called “The Gulde Method” for memorizing the names of countries in continents. It went like this: point at a country on a blank map with numbers on each country, say its name. If you know the name of the country is correct, point at the next country, and say its name. If you reach a point where you know you don’t know the name of a country, look at the numbered list on the other side of the paper. Then, start over from #1. This is basically how Rock Band teaches you to “play” a “song”.
In my first game of Guitar Hero, which was played on “Hard” difficulty, I messed up the first two notes of a song — I’d never so much as held the controller before — and the performance immediately ended. There was no “you lose” or “you suck” — just a freeze and a quick fade to black. I suppose that was kind of nice, though it sure as hell hadn’t taught me anything about how to do it correctly. With Rock Band, I had endured the sound of sticks clicking on plastic, that sound of a distant homeless man doing his “laundry”, for half a lunch break before I gravitated toward the break room and was asked if I wanted to play the drums. A co-worker assured me that the drums are “almost like playing real drums”. Yet there was such a sharp, gross penalty for missing a single beat. In no time, the drums were “retired” from the song, leaving the performance a husk. Everything went south after that — bands need drummers just like tigers need beating hearts.
I’ve heard tell of people’s Desire to Rock being awakened by Rock Band or Guitar Hero — people who didn’t know that they loved rock and roll until they were half-drunk and had a piece of plastic shoved into their hands at a frat party. Many of these people go on to purchase real guitars, or real drums, or real bass guitars, and start real bands. In this light, Gibson — or anyone else — is foolish to consider Rock Band or Guitar Hero a cannibal feeding on the heart-meat of would-be real musicians. To me, these games are an above-excellent litmus test: if you play them, and feel something, and realize there’s something missing inside you, and all at once damn the games to hell and search for a real instrument, then you are indeed a rock and roller. Those ensnared by the sweet visage of Numbers Going Up, by the transient joy of watching the number of “fans” at your Rock Band “show” stay steady, and then, miraculously, grow, don’t need to be real rock and rollers, and rock and roll doesn’t need those people to survive, in full health, for as long as there are soundproofed basements deep beneath the metropolises of this world. These people would never touch real guitars, and no real-guitar-player I feel comfortable saying I “know” would give up his real instrument for a life of Guitar Hero‘s sweet palliative.
In the end, the only “change” these games are affecting on gamers is a little bit of rhythm training, and an increased awareness in the Awesomeness of Rock. I saw a thing recently about some band releasing a song directly as a downloadable for Rock Band; some lifelong rock-rebels booed and hissed; I say, in this world where everyone’s sound system is hooked up to their HDTV, what’s the heckin’ difference? If you’ve got rock, put it out there. These games are as good a sheer cliff face as any for the wind-battered lichen of rock to exist on until eternity. I’d give it four stars out of ice-cold courtesy, for sheer social impact, if I’d ever been able to play it in a place where the TV volume is high enough to hear the vocals — and not hear the sound of the drumsticks repeatedly raping drum-plastic.
So, the conclusion of this review is that Rock Band is not detrimental to society. Though it may be ugly in the graphic design, heavy in the box, and have ridiculous characters that promote unfair stereotypes of rock and rollers or would-be rock and rollers, it’s not killing anyone, nor is it even food-poisoning anyone. In fact, I believe I have concluded that, in the right doses, these games are better party starters than Wii Sports, for example, because, for starters, it lets a medium-sized group of people know for certain when they are doing something, however unnecessary that something is, as well as it can be done, whereas Wii Sports only brings you farther from being able to play actual golf — and doesn’t involve Nirvana in any way.
That’s me rating this game in terms of its effects on society; what of its effects on me? Well, to be blunt, it made me feel like stuff. I’ve been playing the guitar for about a year and a half now, and every once in a while, I’ll sit down and try to play some old three-chord folk / punk / pop / rock song, singing along to the simple sound, and I’ll always get bored. I’ve sat in parks on days off with cans of Coca-Cola Zero, and I’ll riff on classic rock songs, and sing a few words, and a few girls will ask me my name, and a few guys will ask me if I’m in a band. Yet I’ve never played a song with “structure”, to “completion”. I just riff and vocalize. Me and my friend Andrew Bush will go into a studio sometimes and just blast the hell out of some instruments. I’ve thought, for the longest time, that I wanted my own “band” to lean more toward the cleaner side of noise rock; I switched from vocals (to drums to vocals) to guitar -vocal so that I could have more control over the shape of the songs we’re performing, though this was a double-edged blade, what because I had never played the guitar, and my “singing” “ability” suffers tremendously when I have this guitar in my hand and am raking it like a glue-sniffer. I’d felt comfortable, for a long time, exploiting the underground practice studios scattered around my megalopolis of choice like drunken salary men might exploit karaoke parlors: it’s something to do, in the private, in the dark.
Witnessing a group of perhaps-rock-ignorant individuals earn a perfect score on a “difficult” song in Rock Band deflated me partially — here are people, working together toward a goal of precision, and nailing it. Why can’t I have that precision? Why can’t I find someone else who wants it? In the interest of full disclosure, here is a video of what happened the last time I entered a basement practice studio with another human being with a “complete” “song” in mind, and tried to perform it to the end. We played the song maybe four more times after that video was filmed, and I kind of threw up water all over the sidewalk outside afterward, for no good reason. I avoided looking at the video for the longest time, and now that it’s on YouTube, I listen to it every once in a while, fancy the tune of the snare, and feel this bizarrely perhaps-unhealthy feeling of “accomplishment”. In the further interest of full “disclosure”, this is what happened the first time I decided to take my months of at-home guitar-practicing into a studio and jam with a drummer (and no microphone). I listen to that, and I feel pretty good, though I also feel like I need a lot more work. I’m almost twenty-nine years old, for god’s sake. Jimi and Kurt had been dead for two years at this point. There’s a moment in that recording, right there, I think it’s about two and a half minutes in, where I heard a voice in my head, saying “scream, and then play a guitar solo”, and I did as the voice insisted, and though I might have made hella mistakes up until that point, everything felt amazing for thirty seconds, as the drummer caught on to what was happening and started pounding the cymbals harder and harder.
In Rock Band, when you mess a song up, it becomes a chaotic, objective mess: instruments fade in and out of audibility, muting and unmuting and slowing down all over the place. Whether or not they possess knowledge of music theory that enables them to identify the cacophony as “Absolutely Not Music”, it is increasingly apparent to the players that they are Not Doing It Right, so they aim to do better next time. If nothing else, the song I linked above is an example of two guys, one with a real guitar, one with a real drum kit, Not Doing It Right, and feeling good anyway. (I pause to mention that the song linked above is not a “real” song, nor is it meant to resemble a “real” song; I will not link one of my “real” songs in a videogame review because that would entail me putting all my balls on the table, saying, “This is all I got.”) Here I face a fork in the road: I can either scorn Rock Band for not letting the people of the world experience the beautiful bounty of Enjoying One’s Mistakes, or I can scorn Real Life, for never letting me know, with absolute legible precision, when and how much I suck. It’s a coin toss, the outcome fluctuating from moment to moment: sometimes, we just want rock, and we don’t care what the world says, and sometimes, we want that stuff to be beautiful. More than most of the time, I find myself somewhere in between.
I can’t deny, at this point, that I will at least want to be a rock and roll star until the day I die; the point is to not wonder why I haven’t become one yet, or what happens when I do. We’d probably get kicked out of the Budokan for that performance right there, and possibly arrested, though I can sit here at my computer in my corporate office, convinced that somewhere on earth, there’s a basement where the (most likely ignorant) kids would stare saucer-eyed and find that guitar solo right there a thing of awesome beauty. I think for a second that that makes me a better person than, say, a man-mongrel begging for change outside a donut shop, with an empty beer bottle in a paper bag, I mean, throw that beer bottle away already, it’s empty, though I hesitate to say it makes me better at living This Human Life than the self-satisfied number-pushers in the office Rock Band circle. Might the feeling they feel, when seeing words like “PERFECT” flash on the screen, be just about equal to the feeling I feel wherein I imagine a fairy-tale basement where the Kids Don’t Hate Me? And would it be possible, someday, for me to be lulled away from my idiotic dream to Rock Before Others, to Be Satisfied with considering myself a rock-star, like Wesley Willis did, only without having to be laughed at by drunk frat boys — that is, thanks to a simulation I can enjoy at home, privately? Can a simulation ever make me feel good enough? Some people — usually the hideous ones — they’ve got Love Cancer, and pornography is good enough for the rest of their lives; they jerk off before they get out bed the same way some people drink coffee, and you know what? They’re not terrible human beings. They function, and they even, eventually, become happy, and not just when they’re six feet underground. If game designers can ever make my near-bulletproof embryonic rock ego feel good enough with one of these games, if they can make me feel dead in a good way — it would start with letting me noodle the god damn notes in the empty spaces (just program it so that the game remembers the most recent chord or note attached to a certain button press — I mean, the very first rhythm game ever, Parappa the Rapper, required you to improvise by slamming the button rhythmically! let’s not forget that!) — then I would give that game four stars, and I would give up.
As-is, these games are still light-years away from that. It’s one thing to tell me I hit 98% of the notes; it’s another thing to tell me that my playing was so good that 17,388 people materialized out of nowhere and entered the already-packed arena. It’s jarring and weird and depressing, and it’s harder to swallow than the voice of a gunmetal-colored robot monotoning “YOU DID WELL. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT.” It kind of makes me vaguely scared that there’s someone literally outside my house, waiting for me to fall asleep, so they can suck the breath out of my mouth with a vacuum cleaner, until I suffocate, until I am no more. Quite frankly, it’s scarier than a serial killer that everyone I know who plays these games hardly keeps the television volume above a whisper while doing so. And that’s putting it politely.
I believe the question was, “Could a simulation ever make me give up the real thing?” That’s the central question of this particular review, and it has a somewhat frightened answer: “I hope not.”
For me, if you consider the “goal” of having a “real” band “to be satisfied with one’s self”, then I would say that, as a “game”, Rock Band is “probably easier” than having an actual band, because it shows you numbers, and you can take them or leave them; you can care about them, or you can choose not to give a stuff. As a life experience, for me, it’s just too much harder than having a real band, because I just don’t feel right trying to be perfect, much as I’d love to be perfect, much as I’d gladly put perfection in my pocket if I found it lying in the street one day.
–tim rogers
(That said, I would buy Guitar Hero III if it was less than $60 and The Stone Roses’ “Breaking Into Heaven” was at least available via download.)
(The first electric guitar amplifier manufacturer to make an amp with a little LCD-equipped electronic selector to choose what song you want to play along to, and feature the ability to remove the original guitar track from said song with a single press of a button will be a millionaire overnight. Sure, plugging your iPod into the auxiliary input jack is always an option, though man, being able to do it karaoke style would be amazing. Man, they should make an amp with “Breaking Into Heaven” built in, and if you play the lead guitar note for note, the amp explodes at 5:46.Or not. Call it the “Guitar Hero Amp”, if you want. Put the logo on there and everything. Marshall should jump on that stuff.)
(*Actually, maybe someone could make a whole game out of “Breaking Into Heaven”. Make it just one stage, and exceedingly difficult. It’d be kind of like Ouendan — one fantasy-like music video based very roughly on the song’s lyrics, only maybe it would play like an action game, with hundreds of dudes assaulting you at once, with tweaking the analog stick translating to rotating your dude / chugging the bass and each punch being a note on the lead guitar.)