text by Thom Moyles

☆☆☆☆

“IS THE MOST WORTHWHILE PIECE OF SOFTWARE THAT YOU COULD PUT IN YOUR DS.”

Electroplankton is definitely my favorite piece of software for the DS, probably one of the best portable pieces of software I own and one of the most pleasing pieces of electronic entertainment that I’ve devoted my time towards. It’s a ballsy experiment that wants to be loved, a joyful piece of work that’s happy without making you want to throw up in your mouth (Mario (since the N64), I’m looking at you). Yet, I’m giving it zero stars (out of four). I’m doing this because Electroplankton isn’t a game. And heck, this is a site for game reviews.

Now, this is a little unfair. After all, I’m not going to follow this up with successive zero-star reviews of kanji dicitionaries or any of the other assorted titles for the DS that are clearly not games. That would be a pretty jerky move and would be like if we suddenly started giving zero-star reviews to motorcycles because hey, those aren’t games either. No, Electroplankton is a pretty unique case, in that while it’s not a game, it’s not clearly something else, since generally those other DS titles have a purpose, like trying to teach you Japanese characters or simulating a guitar. Electroplankton, in comparison, is enough like a game to confuse people. After all, there aren’t any explicit goals, which both eliminates it from being a purposeful piece of software like a kanji dictionary and hilariously enough, also from what we typically think of as a game.

Electroplankton‘s modules are based on the theory of “found music” or musique concrète, which basically boils down to “music can be what you find, rather than what you create”. These modules are set up so that a series of small interactions on the part of the user act as triggers for generating musical sequences. The interactions are simple enough that the user can figure out how to manipulate each module in a short period of time and vague enough that the user is never really composing in the traditional sense. They’re hitting things to see what happens and most of the time, you’ll eventually get something you like. The key to the success of Electroplankton in this area is that the modules are mostly very well-designed, allowing the user to generate a wide variety of pleasing tones without sounding like a 5-year-old smashing their hands on a piano.

A major part of musique concrète is the concept of play, which is why Electroplankton is such a confusing piece of software. The best way to put it seems to be that you don’t play Electroplankton, you play with it. The semantic assumption of the latter is that the act of playing is teleological, or to be less of a dick about it, that there’s an end to the means. The way that we understand how to play a game is to progress. It’s this lack of progression that separates Electroplankton from something like SimCity. Electroplankton is a pure sandbox in the sense that the entirety of the experience is to create something temporary, an aural equivalent of the Zen Sand Tray that’s supposed to help executives relax their balls. These things are commonly referred to as ‘toys’ and that’s a good enough term for what Electroplankton does, with the caveat that the usual reaction to ‘toy’ is to assume a lack of significance, which is indicative of a disturbing lack of imagination.

When Electroplankton was shown to a dementedly grinning E3 audience, it was presented by a DJ with a full set of rack-mounted equipment and accompanied on the big screen with quick cuts of gnarly graphics and effects, all while Reggie Fils-Aime gyrated and gurned on-stage. This was, of course, viciously &^#$#ed. If you’re going to make techno music, get a sampler and a synthesizer. Hell, the way things are going now, you’d probably just need the sampler. Using Electroplankton as part of your compositions would be a gimmick, a chiptune-esque trope that says “the most important thing about my music is not my music”. While the actual presentation was astonishingly dumb, I can’t really blame Nintendo for taking the easy way out. Wheeling out somebody on a bed who’s using a nice set of headphones, who just noodles around for 10 minutes before finding something that they find particularly pleasing and then maybe stretches their head back with their eyes closed, while this is nice, while this is a great example of how Electroplankton is the most worthwhile piece of software that you could put in your DS, this is not exactly something that’s going to set Reggie’s loins on fire. Better have Shiggy come out with a sword and shield then.

There is some pandering taking place. The plankton that are basically a collection of samples from Mario Bros. are a one-trick pony wearing a garish red cap and vomiting liquid cotton candy all over your Legend of Zelda bedsheets. In other words, it’s horribly boring and a little repugnant after you get over the novelty of it all. The 4-track recording plankton is also more of a grudging acknowledgement of the DS’s microphone than a good foundation for musical creation. In either of these cases, you’d be much better off getting an actual 4-track or making actual chiptunes than playing around with something that can’t give you the complete functionality of what it’s emulating without offering you anything special on its own.

This is not to say that there’s anything especially profound about Electroplankton. It’s an honest little piece of code that lets you make fun noises through tactile interactions. It succeeds at what it does because it was made by somebody who has a good idea of what sounds good and how people might want to generate sounds, not to mention an interface and graphical style that’s charming without being twee. It’s a success that’s blemished by the wondering and waffling over whether it’s a game or not. This is similar to the too-common message-board argument of whether games are “art” or what “art” is. Ultimately, it’s a waste of everybody’s time and it was with that in mind that a precedent had to be set, that a flag had to be stuck in the ground..

text by Bennett

★★★☆

“NOT A DRIVING GAME. THANK GOD.”

Genre is a tricky thing. In videogames, genre has a status which is unmatched in any other creative form. Every game review site divides the games by console and then by genre. We know that an RPG will sell best in Japan, and an FPS will do better in North America. Games are pitched and funded according to genre, and when the market is flush with games of a particular genre, it is perceived that there is a problem. When a console launches, it needs one game from each major genre.

The problem is that in videogames, genre is bullstuff. It can stop a good game from getting good reviews. It can even stop you from enjoying a good game. Burnout: Dominator is a game which suffers from the industry’s obsession with genre.

A number of people, including me, were disappointed when they played their second Zelda game. Imagine you played Ocarina of Time and then Twilight Princess. You would be thinking to yourself, ‘Wait, the plot is exactly the same. The moves are exactly the same. The equipment and locations are the same. This is the same game.’ A person who thinks this is a person who mistakes Zelda for an action adventure game. But Zelda is a puzzle game, and the puzzles do change from one Zelda game to the next – at least as much as they did between Bomberman and Bomberman II. The sword, the shield, the evil wizard and princess all make Zelda seem like it is related to Dragon Quest, but they are all completely irrelevant to the design, and to your enjoyment of the game.

Just like Zelda is filed under ‘Action Adventure’ at Gamespot, Burnout: Dominator is filed in the ‘Driving’ or ‘Racing’ section of every magazine, every website and every game store. It has cars, it has tracks, it has races, and it should be pretty obvious to everyone that it is a racing game. Only it isn’t.

Dominator lets you know that it isn’t a racing game in subtle ways. For example, in Dominator, as in every other Burnout game, if you are holding the d-pad towards the right when you slam into the outside edge of a right turn, you don’t crash and explode. Instead, your car slows down and gently bumps towards the correct direction. So long as you know whether the road is heading left or right, you are not penalized for missing the corners. Of course, you lose some time when this happens. But as in other Burnout games, the dramatic rubber-banding AI means that a loss of time is not actually a penalty. Very few of the events even record your time.

There is only one penalty for missing a turn. The penalty is this: your turbo-boost meter turns from blue to orange. As long as the meter stays blue, you can chain an unlimited number of boosts together. Drift uninterrupted around a corner, and the meter will stay blue. The second time you do this, you start to accrue double points. Then triple, then quadruple. The moment you screw up a corner, you lose your combo multiplier. This may sound familiar to you if you play games of a certain genre, though I’d guess that most buyers of Dominator have never done so.

The biggest hint as to what kind of game Dominator is comes from the titular gameplay mode. The ‘Dominator’ mode awards a score based mainly on how many turbo boosts you can chain together. The final, game-ending mission is itself a Dominator event which requires you to boost continuously for three laps to rack up the required score. If you break your boost chain even once during the three laps, you lose.

This is where Dominator differs from previous Burnout games. To win a race, no matter which track you are on and no matter which car you are driving, you must chain one boost into another. As long as you corner well and drive on the wrong side of the road, you can boost forever and your score multiplier will increase. Dominator has three separate mission types which essentially measure your ability to generate boost combos. It has two race modes where you always win if you continuously chain boosts. It has a single timed mode which requires you to score a number of boost combos, and finally it retains the ‘Road Rage’ mode which asks you to smash opposing cars. This last mode is the one aberration in a game which is otherwise a completely pure rhythm game.

Like Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Or like Dance Dance Revolution. The circuits are songs, and the corners are beats or notes in the melody. To fully appreciate this metaphor, of course, you will need to switch off the terrible ‘EA Traxx’ music while you play.

The genre trappings of Dominator sometimes detract from its rhythm-game purity. It offers a large number of cars, which handle slightly differently but ultimately turbo boost in the same exact way. I cleared every event but I can’t tell you what even one of the tracks was like. On the plus side, the PSP is a much better platform for a rhythm game than it is for a driving game. I played it from start to finish using the d-pad to steer, which worked beautifully since it didn’t matter if I got the correct racing line or not. The PSP is incapable of the motion blur effects which helped popularize the series on consoles, but that would only matter if it was a driving game.

Unfortunately, whenever Dominator is mistaken for a driving game, its strengths and its weaknesses are totally overlooked. Burnout: Dominator is a horrible driving game. Your racing line is irrelevant, you can’t lose the races and the cars and tracks are all identical. As a rhythm game, it is great, but the genre trappings often interfere with the design. If the next Burnout game ditches the cars, the tracks and the enemy cars, I’ll give it full marks.

As it is, it gets three quarters. In my book, that makes it by far the best game for the PSP.

text by Andrew Toups

★★★☆

“A HELL OF A LOT BETTER THAN I REMEMBER.”

Well, let me clarify. Like every tucked-in-Aerosmith-t-shirt-wearing youth in the US in 1991, I owned a Super NES, and I begged my parents to buy me the new Zelda game, which I consumed like an 8-year-old consumes Pixy Stix (which is to say: effortlessly, joyously, in a single moment and without a second thought). I completed the game countless times, memorized all the puzzles, and even recorded the ending theme on a tape recorder for part of an imaginary videogame music radio show I made with some of my friends (Jake Millet, if you’re out there reading this: hi! I hope you’re a successful comic book illustrator by now!) From those days, I still remember the game as being great.

But soon after that, the N64 appeared, and a new Zelda with it, which I endured like a 15-year-old endures watching scrambled late-night cable porn (which is to say: eagerly, with great frustration, and with a nagging sense of guilt, ultimately culminating with disappointment). Following this, I largely lost interest in videogames, as the only games which could satisfy my then pulsing adolescent urges (read: Final Fantasy vii/viii) were exclusive to another console which my parents could not be convinced to purchase. In this time I did not play many videogames, but when I did, I was reliving the great games of my youth: Final Fantasy II (as I knew it back then), Chrono Trigger, Soul Blazer, and, of course, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. And it was at this period in my life when I realized that many of these games were meant to be consumed like an ear of corn: the first time around it’s delicious; the second time around, you’re just scraping for those last few kernels.

A Link to the Past is considerably more contrived than either of its predecessors. The original Legend of Zelda (still one of my all-time favorites) was ultimately about exploration and survival. Yes, you could buy items, upgrade abilities, and occasionally you were asked to solve rudimentary puzzles to proceed. Yet even in the dungeons, the challenge was not so much figuring how to get out of the room you were stuck in (hi Twilight Princess!), but merely making sense of where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there, and then actually doing it without dying. The overworld was laid out to encourage an order of playing the dungeons without forcing one. The idea of gaining new abilities which then “unlocked” other areas of the gameworld did not exist so concretely in the minds of game developers in that era.

The Legend of Zelda, like many early NES games, is not very fair. You are often thrown into situations that, thanks to unpolished controls, would inevitably rob you of a few hearts, regardless of your valiance. And so it is: once you know the route, you must buckle down, maybe buy a potion, and hope to survive the gauntlet between you and that precious, glowing triangle hiding in the dungeon’s bowels. Those desperate moments, lost deep within the maze, with nothing but your sword, boomerang, and wits, down to your last heart, are still among the most cathartic found in any videogame made since.

Link to the Past is a game of revision. Unlike Zelda II, it largely retains the framework of first game. It polishes what needs polishing, and expands upon what needs expanding upon. The controls are smooth and the combat is fair. Instead of Zelda‘s barren, abandoned overworld, the Hyrule of Link to the Past is a place where people live and things happen. There is a village, and there are country homes, and occasional scenes of dialogue. In the place of Zelda‘s winding, war-of-attrition dungeons are dungeons which are self-consciously puzzles. There is a much wider variety of switches, keys, and trap doors; often the layout of the dungeon is itself a puzzle.

These are the things that I pondered when other people my age were busy experimenting with booze and loose women. The problem was, my 17 year old self reasoned, once you knew how to kill each enemy, and once you know the secret to each dungeon, there’s no thrill left. If the first playthrough is rote memorization, subsequent ones are rote repetition. Why bother?

I decided to start a band, myself.

Well, now, fifteen years after the game’s release, seven after the birth of my ill-fated music career, and (perhaps more importantly), three major Zelda installments later, I play the game with a bit more perspective. My 17-year-old self’s criticisms are perfectly valid, but they overlook some important virtues.

For one, this is a dramatic game. While The Legend of Zelda begins with a man warning you to use a sword or face your death, Link to the Past opens with a lengthy, atmospheric sequence in which you hear a captured princess speak to you in your dreams, witness the death your uncle, and sneak your way into a well-guarded castle as rain falls from the midnight sky; by the time this sequence is over, you will have valiantly fought through those guards, rescued the princess, and led to her to safety, only to find yourself faced with the task of clearing your name for being her kidnapper. Thanks, however, to Dark Forces At Work, this can never be, and only by unraveling and fulfilling a Great Legend can things be set right.

On the one hand, yes this is obnoxious. Shouldn’t playing the game be motivation unto itself? After all, unless you actually had the patience to wait for the less-than-inspirational introductory scrolling text on the title screen, the original Zelda doesn’t even tell you where you are or what you are doing, and yet we still found it within ourselves to face that game’s challenges. On the other hand, though, the way Link to the Past drops you in the middle of a compelling dramatic situation is infinitely preferable to the way the subsequent games have started. Following the mysterious telepathic commands of a damsel in distress is indescribably more compelling than farting around a village for two hours wondering whose arbitrary whims you’ll have to satisfy just to progress the plot. That Link to the Past manages to maintain this kind of motivation throughout the game is simply because its inhabitants rarely, if ever, assume you have nothing better to do than perform an inane favor for them. Yes, heart containers are broken into pieces here, but at least they are tucked away in caved-in caverns and forgotten forest groves, where they belong.

While the game is indeed easy, it’s not that easy. There’s a lot of nuance and trickiness to killing the enemies. This is important: if you stop paying close attention, you will die. Thanks to fairies, bottles, and a bug catching net, you are granted a bit more leeway. But successful combat is thankfully not solely a matter of holding Z and bashing A. In the game’s lengthier, more convoluted dungeons, those few slip ups you occasionally make start to add up.

Here’s another hidden virtue cast into sharp relief by the Church of Latter Day Zelda: the game’s overworld design is really, really great. I understand, of course, that Ocarina of Time‘s wide open fields are perhaps closer to Miyamoto’s original vision than the screen-by-screen setpieces of the original games. But honestly: once you get past the “whoa” factor of seeing Hyrule Field for the first time, what, really, do you have? A big empty space that’s confusing to navigate without giving you anything to sink your teeth into in the meantime. The screen by screen layout of the first game is more mechanical, yet it’s also more memorable; and then Link to the Past outdoes even it by not only having screens which are, in fact, larger than the screen, but by having two alternate versions of the overworld with subtle (but often crucial) differences.

The layout of Link to the Past‘s Hyrule is open yet populated with enough landscape and locales to keep things interesting. Between any two points you have a variety of routes, divided by river, lake, forest, and rock structures; as you gain equipment, it generally only means new paths are opened up instead of new areas. Exploring the world, then, is not determined by how much the designer wants to you see at that given time, but instead by how motivated you are to find it. As you progress, new abilities subtly redefine the layout. The light/dark world mechanic, in addition to injecting the game with some much-needed atmosphere (as well as a heckin’ badass musical theme), deepens your methods of exploration. It’s possible to switch from dark world to light at will, and if you’re observant enough, you’ll take advantage of that trick to find even more shortcuts and hidden places.

All the little things this game does well make it seem so elegant compared to the beast the series has become since then. While it’s more talkative and assertive than the original classic, it’s ultimately an understated game. What’s more, the basic compelling elements are still intact: you’ve still got those white-knuckle moments when you’re down to your last few hits, and every encounter is a matter of life and death, and if only you could survive a few more screens you might find a fairy or at least a few hearts; they just come a little later in the game. You’ve still got that sense of wonder and exploration, and the satisfying feeling of finding a new shortcut or realizing the ways different areas connect; they’re just stretched over a greater period of time. What the game loses in intensity it gains in subtlety, all while maintaining the essential flavor of the original. While Link to the Past is still low on my own personal ranked list of Zelda games (I still prefer the rawness of the NES original, the gloomy atmosphere of the sequel, and the dreamlike goofiness of the Gameboy iteration), it succeeds in being epic in scope without ever ceasing to be compelling moment-to-moment. In light of where the series has gone since, this achievement is more praise-worthy than ever.

text by Thom Moyles

★☆☆☆

“NOT INSULTING, IT'S JUST DUMB.”

When Sega Classics came out, there was a hue and cry about how horrible the remake of Golden Axe was, about how it was a desecration of the original game, how an all-time classic had been destroyed, etc. This is funny because it’s actually a faithful recreation of the original. It’s just uglier (okay, far uglier). That the game was now rendered in blocky 3D should have been enough to pull the wool from everybody’s eyes and reveal that really, Golden Axe is a terrible game. Only nobody could take the shock of this revelation and instead pretended that it was this new version of Golden Axe that was awful, that their memory of the original was actually as great as it seemed when they wandered up to the towering arcade cabinet and gasped at the gigantic sprites and impressive visual effects, that when they finally built up the courage to put their popsicle-sticky hands on the buttons and put in quarter after quarter, they had been experiencing gaming at its finest. People will believe just about anything to let themselves think that they’ve never been fooled.

You know, I have some fond memories of reading Archie comics in the mountain sun while on vacation with my parents. This doesn’t mean, were I to go back to the yellowed and brittled comics still stuck in an outhouse somewhere north of Yosemite, that I’m somehow obligated to argue that they’re actually any good. I’m older now and besides a brief nostalgic burst when I first see something that rises to the surface of my memory from decades in the murk, I can’t ignore the often-sloppy penmanship, the banal plots or the insipid jokes. Likewise, when I see Golden Axe, I’ll put in a quarter, remember playing it on a boardwalk with a kid twice my age and doing better than him and I still won’t be able to stop thinking about how slow your character moves, how cheap some of the enemies are and how, if you really want to get to the end of the game, all you’re going to need is what would have been a fairly flush bankroll for a 10-year-old in the 1980s (or just a lot of patience, if you’re lucky enough to be near one of those second-run arcades that charges a flat fee and sticks all the old machines in the back on free play).

Even though I have pleasant memories of Golden Axe, they’re also pretty damning, in that I can vividly remember seeing the ending, which was the first time that I’d ever seen an ending for an arcade game. What I can’t remember is whether I beat the game or whether I was just watching some other kid blow his wad to the tune of 4 dollars in change. Now, I also remember the fight against Death Adder, so it’s most likely that I did in fact beat the game myself, especially since I remember putting in about two bucks worth of quarters during that fight because God Dammit Mabel, not today, not today! That I can’t remember whether I did so or not personally is because playing Golden Axe was not a matter of skill, it was a matter of attrition aimed at your wallet. It was a movie, only if the usher kept jabbing you every minute or so for your spare change and if you didn’t give it to him, they drew the curtains.

There were two times in my life where I was crushed by the difference between a console port and the arcade original. The first, Cyberball for the Genesis, redeemed itself after my initial shock because the developers realized that with the change from the quarter-pushing glitz and emphasis on multi-player of the arcade to the ugly sprites, tinny sound and unilimited-tries context of the family den, that the game itself had to change to match the context. So the game slowed down, became more strategic and the money you used to upgrade your team was now based on scoring and gaining yards, rather than pushing in quarters. Golden Axe, on the other hand, was the same game, just uglier. In the same way that the Cyberball port disguised the shallowness of the original, Golden Axe on the Genesis set the shortcomings of the underlying design in sharp relief.

Without those huge colorful sprites, the game was fully revealed as the quarter-sucker that it was a decade before the Sega Classics remake caused a massive Selective Memory Event. Without the draw of seeing what would come next (okay, maybe there was some draw in seeing how spectacularly disa ppointing the end result would be when compared to the original arcade version), there wasn’t much point to slowly walking right and taking turns trading glacial blows with other brown-ish looking sprites until you eventually got bored and put in something worthwhile, in much the same way that once you’d been all the way through the arcade version, there wasn’t any point in doing so again.

Now, don’t let this make you think that I hate Golden Axe. Golden Axe isn’t insulting, it’s just dumb. It’s a relic of older days worn smooth by adoring hands. To those of you who still cherish your sepia-toned memories of Golden Axe, I urge you to hang on to them for dear life and remember, you can’t go back again.

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“AT TIMES ADMIRABLE AND CUTE AS SOME WEIRD ENGRISH SPOKEN BY A SHOP-KEEPER IN A BARELY-KNOWN 8-BIT GAME TRANSLATED BY A TEAM OF TWO JAPANESE GIRLS AND FOUR DICTIONARIES.”

There’s a track by Ryuichi Sakamoto in Seiken Densetsu 4 (aka Dawn of Mana) — the back of the box says so — life-long listener though I am, it took me Actual Internet Research to figure out which track that was. This says many things: first of all, that it’s not clear which of the many bouncy cut-scenes that opens the game is the “opening”, because I reckon if you’re going to get Ryuichi Sakamoto to do a track for your conceptually bland action-adventure videogame, you’d probably want to make it the opening. There’s a scene narrated by an old man with a semi-hateful, mouthful-of-gravel voice, there’s a scene where the elemental spirits from the earlier “Mana” games float and bob around and talk to each other in portentous tones and helium voices about the big events that are probably happening soon, and there’s a scene where a boy and a girl frolic in a field. There’s a scene with credits, too, and the credits are in English, and they say “Opening theme by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Music by Kenji Ito”. Does that mean that the music that’s playing at that scene is the “opening theme”? Well, some games list the performer / composer of the “ending theme” in the opening credits, don’t they? It’s puzzling, after a while.



The composer of the rest of the music in this game, a Mr. Kenji Ito, has been aspiring the Ryuichi Sakamoto’s virtuoso for years, along with other bright game composers, such as Yasunori Mitsuda. What my ears told me when I first played this game was somewhat profound: Kenji Ito is able to surround a single track by Ryuichi Sakamoto and render it invisible. For years, those in the know have understood that Kenji Ito knows what the hell he’s doing — he’s perhaps the top of the top class of Japanese game composers, able to give background music for a Generic Snow Village in, say, Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song the produced roundness and fullness of a hit pop number. He’s not just a “game music composer” — he’s a musician. Conversely, one could argue that Ryuichi Sakamoto has been making Japanese RPG soundtrack music since before videogames ever existed.

The most interesting thing about Sakamoto’s presence in this game at all is that it represents a rare, shining beam of artistic conscience from Square-Enix, who has recently been content to put Mickey Mouse in a black robe and have him murder monsters with a giant key. For Final Fantasy XII, Square had the kind of sneering arrogance to assume that they could make a star out of whoever they let sing the theme song, hence the selection of limp-voiced big-haired piano-banging she-geek Angela Aki. This was evidence that Square had pride in Final Fantasy XII as a game — either that, or they were over-budget, and wanted to hire someone who wasn’t expensive. For Kingdom Hearts, they’ve been hiring hot young pop-star Hikaru Utada, whose English lyrics make me wish I owned a pistol. Why put a world-class, historically important, undeniably “Japanese” super-man like Ryuichi Sakamoto to work on Seiken Densetsu 4? To draw attention to the game, of course. Seiken Densetsu — or, “The Mana Series” is as dead as it is alive; it’s the purgatory of Japanese RPGs. The second one — released in America as “Secret of Mana“, was awesome because you could play it with two friends. The third-one was paper-thin and beloved. The numerous recent spin-offs (including an obnoxiously thin DS outing) have taken the series apart and given players only a shard of what they might have been able to love in a previous installment.

None of the game itself is as illustrious as the career of Mr. Sakamoto, though the physics engine is quite nice. You play the game as a big-haired boy wearing too many garments. You can fight enemies with a sword, a whip, or a slingshot. There’s a weird net-like feeling of physics drifting down on top of the whole package — you can whap objects with your sword, and if you aim them right, they’ll smack into and kill enemies. There might be a stack of objects — hit it with your sword and watch it jiggle. It’ll never jiggle the same way twice. Grab a rock with the whip and throw it; watch stuff break. Hit something with a slingshot, and it moves. The physics are finely tuned, though in the most bizarre little way. It feels like everything’s totally random, even when it’s most obviously not. Most applause-worthy is the sheer number of physics objects. They’re seriously all over the place — Square had already licensed the Havok Physics Engine, so god damn it, they were going to use it as much as possible.

Part of me wants to sigh and/or groan at this game for being linear and kind of boring. There’s a cut-scene involving cartoon-headed characters that are supposed to evoke nostalgic yiffing, and though I loved Secret of Mana like any other man who was once a boy, I do not yiff; then there’s a title card, and then you’re in a dungeon. Progress through the dungeon, whomping physics objects, knocking over enemies, picking up millions of little colored baubles and being congratulated via quick onscreen messages whenever your maximum hit points or some other statistic raise by some small integer. Eventually you’ll reach a locked door; kill the right enemy to get the key, open the door, continue romping through the dungeon. The dungeon ends with another snore-tastic cut-scene in which characters yip and/or weep, and then there’s another dungeon, which you start with your levels reset to zero. It’s all very linear and kind of boring in the context of real-world joy (candlelit sex, et cetera), though at least it’s honest about itself: it’s a dungeon-blaster. It’s an action videogame. It’s colorful, quick, kinetic, bursty, and poppy. It’s not great, and it doesn’t solve the mystery of nuclear fusion or find my missing guitar pick or anything, though it’s still a nice, cute little game that sometimes has some neat little spikes of challenge.

Many fans were outraged or, at the least, disappointed to hear that this game would be just one-player, and that it would apparently just be a stage-based action-adventure thinking-man’s beat-em-down. Says a “customer preview” on Gamestop.com’s list page for Dawn of Mana: “I for one would rather they stick to the traditional 2D graphics for this one.” Another reader calls the series — up until this bastardizing installment, of course — “near-perfection”. This is kind of a shame. This is evidence that, more dangerous than narcotics or alcohol is our children’s tendency to not understand what they really want. I say, if you want 2D graphics, play the original Secret of Mana again. Or play Children of Mana for DS. With a couple of friends on Wi-Fi, it’s not so terrible, and it has some sparkling Kenji Ito music.

Dawn of Mana is something new, as weird as that is for Square (unless you liked and/or remember Threads of Fate), and it mostly works. It’s the physics engine that nails it in. Though it acts weird sometimes, it rarely stops being fascinating. It’s hard to believe that Square would put such a rock-solid, crunchy core into a game that they were convinced could have been nothing at all and still sold thousands of copies to “devoted series fans”. It’s nice to see the effort, though it’s weird that they give the physics objects a name: they call them “MONO” — in all English letters, like that. (“MONO” is Japanese for “object”.) This is really weird and jarring when the first couple help windows describe how to use the physics objects to your advantage. Why give them a name?

Maybe it was because, since the Final Fantasy titles all became multi-hojillion-sellers, the producers at Square have required all RPGs to have an in-game “system” with an arbitrary name — the “Active Time Battle System” or “Active Dimension Battle System”, for example. If that’s why they called the physics objects “MONO”, then that’s kind of a hilarious little dodge, admirable and cute as some weird Engrish spoken by a shop-keeper in a barely-known 8-bit game translated by a team of two Japanese girls and four dictionaries.

Going back to the Gamestop page — sorry, I have to do this — the first three of four bullet points describing this game are as follows:



“Experience the beloved world of Mana in a fully 3D environment for the first time.

Explore sweeping plains and mountains that stretch as far as the eye can see, brought vividly to life by the detailed visuals that fans have come to expect from the Mana series.

*Experience an interactive world that encourages players to “touch” the world of Mana.“

Aren’t these three all describing the same hecking thing? Why not, I don’t know, encourage the kids who learned to read from online videogame retailers to hunt down (read: bittorrent) some culture by listing that the game “Features a theme song by virtuoso composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the father of new age and electronic music!” or even try to make the game sound fun, by saying that it “Features a new, detailed physics engine for countless battle possibilities”? Or is that what they’re talking about with a weird line about “‘Touch’ the World of Mana”?

So what we have here, ultimately, is a poppy, cute game with terrific music that can be listened to on its own without shame (if you, like me, are the type of person to ever have those Ryuichi Sakamoto Mood days), a drippingly schlocky story about people with too much hair who manage to wear entire wardrobes, set in a series that Square expects people to love because earlier entries in the series were pretty fun for gamers who managed to actually have friends when Nirvana was still the coolest band in the world. Square expected this game to sell by name alone, which was slightly weird behavior, seeing as the previous “World of Mana” game, Children of Mana for DS, didn’t sell at all. A funny story is that Square apparently under-shipped Final Fantasy III for DS because Children of Mana had sold less than half a million copies, proving to them that the DS was just a fad for the “non-gamers”. And then Final Fantasy III sold through half a million. This should have proved to Square that a game will sell if it is good enough to get people talking, though instead, it seems to have proved that games will sell if they have numbers in their titles. As a result, Seiken Densetsu 4 is now available at most Japanese game specialty shops for around $20 new. Which is to say, if the number in the title is what interests you in Seiken Densetsu 4: Dawn of Mana, you’ll probably enjoy it less than people who are just looking to have a good time with pseudo-real object physics.

text by Matthew Sakey

★⋆☆☆

“A LOW-MEGATON YIELD.”

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



“What’s not to get?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then you wait.

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

So you wait.

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

And you wait.

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

And you wait.

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

Someone just blinked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by Brendan Lee

★⋆☆☆

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

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

Hey, Lakitu!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by tim rogers

★★★★

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by tim rogers

☆☆☆☆

“THE VIDEOGAME EQUIVALENT OF A HATE CRIME.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by tim rogers

★★★☆

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

text by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh

★☆☆☆

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

text by Brendan Lee

★☆☆☆

“BENDING FROM THE WAIST.”

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

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

Did you just get scammed by that guy?

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

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

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

Clips right there onto the sweatpants!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give us some honesty.

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

text by Andrew Toups

★☆☆☆

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

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

Shame that the rest of the game is such stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by tim rogers

★⋆☆☆

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

text by Brendan Lee

★★☆☆

“ACTUALLY HECKING TRYING.”

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, you know: Hotel Dusk is good.

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

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

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

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