flaco
1987
What do you mean Street Fighter 1 is bad?
The original Street Fighter is an infamously terrible game. There’s only one character to play, the controls are awful, and no one has ever done a special move in it on purpose. These are the things I’ve heard about the game for as long as I can remember, but as the existence of this piece might suggest, I think there’s actually more to the story. Street Fighter 1 is not only a good deal better as a game than its abysmal reputation suggests, it also serves as an intriguing and inspiring entry in the career of its creator that deserves more than we give it.
In Street Fighter 1, you maneuver on a 2D plane and try to land hits on your opponent by selecting from an arsenal of six normal attacks and three special moves (the same fireball, uppercut, and hurricane kick that fighting game players know today). You can jump to change your position or angle of attack and put pressure on a guard that can be either high or low. You can walk forward and backward and threaten space with your normals, control the screen with fireballs and dragon punches… it's a fighting game! There may not be any throws or combos or okizeme, and what is there may only half-work in the first place, but the blurry image of 2D fighting fundamentals is absolutely here on display, in a way that makes it easy to see how games just a few years later would pick up that torch and run with it. It may pale in comparison to its sequel, but it’s hardly the clueless jumble that many people make it out to be. It’s easy to see the future just by playing it.
Of particular note to me is the way special moves work. Just about every single conversation about Street Fighter 1 features the derogatory claim that special moves are more or less impossible to execute in the game. This is actually not true at all! Anyone can pull off specials in SF1, they just need to know the trick. See, possibly as a result of the game’s conversion from its original (awful) pneumatic punching pad controls to a more standard (but still innovative) six pushbutton layout, special moves in SF1 are executed not when the player presses a button down, but when they release a button.
STREET FIGHTER 1 HAS NEGATIVE EDGE, WHY DID NOBODY EVER TELL ME THIS.
When you use button releases for your special move inputs rather than button presses, throwing fireballs is about as easy as in any other game. What fascinates me about this is that these moves require you to know the specific trick to them. Fighting game players today sometimes feel nostalgic for the arcade era, an age where information traveled slowly via smaller-scope, person-to-person conversation within a community, rather than the current online environment where games are immediately picked apart and put back together in a global whirlwind, and knowledge circulates so quickly on social media that the “save that for nationals” mindset simply has no reason to exist anymore. Yet here we are in 2024, and an old game that sits at the very cornerstone of the whole genre has hidden technical knowledge that the vast majority of people don’t know about. Here is a game where to learn its secrets you still have to be told them by someone in the know. How cool is that? I only learned this quirk of the special moves from a random forum post from like fifteen years ago, and from all the conversations I’ve seen about the game most people don’t know about it either! I think that mystical, mysterious quality is something rare and special nowadays, and SF1 has it.
Outside of its merits as a fighting game (which I admit are pretty slim, I wouldn’t want to play it competitively), Street Fighter 1 inspires me because I can feel the hand of its creators in the game, especially that of its director Takashi Nishiyama.
SF1 feels to me like a key touchstone in a creative project Nishiyama was embarking on for much of his career. In 1984, three years before SF1’s release, he designed Kung-Fu Master, a game frequently credited with birthing the beat ‘em up genre. In Kung-Fu Master, the player moves across the screen, beating back enemies with a punch button and a kick button that they can also use while jumping or crouching for aerial or low attacks. At the end of the first stage, an enemy martial artist stands in the player’s way, and to defeat them the player has to reactively block the enemy’s attacks either high or low while sneaking in their own strikes, or else briefly back up out of the enemy’s range and then take advantage of their whiffs. It may be primitive looking, but years before even SF1 you can easily find in Nishiyama’s games the embryonic form of what would become classic fighting game combat.
Several years later Nishiyama would also design Avengers, a top-down beat ‘em up where players took the role of a fighter with punch attacks, kick attacks, and even a special whirling roundhouse move that, to me at least, immediately calls to mind a Street Fighter tatsu. It has the mark of an artist circling around an idea in their work. When I play games like these it feels to me that their creator was striving towards something, taking multiple stabs at an idea they found exciting.
Despite saying in his rare interview appearances that he only ever designed for the mass market and didn’t make games to cater to his own personal taste, at the time of Street Fighter’s development Nishiyama was an active student of martial arts, and in another interview he speaks with excitement about the various fighting styles he wanted to have represented in Street Fighter, noting that seeing those mismatched styles square off against each other would be a key appeal. He designed other games that don’t resemble Street Fighter at all of course, scrolling shooter games and the endless runner genre ancestor Moon Patrol. But here is a designer who kept coming back to these 2D combat games, always adding in little complications like separate punch and kick buttons and varied block-heights, because they made the games more fun to play, but maybe also because there was something about those complications that he needed to explore.
We give a lot of credit to many artists, our assorted Lynches and Kojimas and Miyazakis and others, for navigating a path through their own creative fixations across the breadth of their work. I can’t claim to know anything about the mind of Takashi Nishiyama, but in his games I feel that creative fixation. Fighting games are very important to me, and I truly think a game like the original Street Fighter deserves to be seen positively in the context of its creators’ work. After SF1, Nishiyama would leave Capcom to head his own division at SNK, and soon after he would direct Fatal Fury, a more sophisticated take on fighting games that he has likened to his own Street Fighter II. Together with the team he brought with him from Capcom, including his frequent collaborator Hiroshi Matsumoto (who is essential to the history of the genre in his own right, having the planner credit on Street Fighter 1 and numerous executive producer credits on later fighters), Nishiyama would be at the forefront of SNK’s development teams, leading the company to become the pillar of the fighting game genre we know them as today. He later founded Dimps, the studio that developed Street Fighter IV. The guy just couldn’t stay away from good old punching and kicking games.
It heartens me as a player, designer, and lover of videogames that it's possible to play these games and feel something so human in them, to see an artist toying with an idea, teasing out its essence and refining their craft. Street Fighter 1 feels like an important piece of that to me. It may not be a great fighting game, but it was part of something special, and to me that’s worth celebrating.
The original Street Fighter is an infamously terrible game. There’s only one character to play, the controls are awful, and no one has ever done a special move in it on purpose. These are the things I’ve heard about the game for as long as I can remember, but as the existence of this piece might suggest, I think there’s actually more to the story. Street Fighter 1 is not only a good deal better as a game than its abysmal reputation suggests, it also serves as an intriguing and inspiring entry in the career of its creator that deserves more than we give it.
In Street Fighter 1, you maneuver on a 2D plane and try to land hits on your opponent by selecting from an arsenal of six normal attacks and three special moves (the same fireball, uppercut, and hurricane kick that fighting game players know today). You can jump to change your position or angle of attack and put pressure on a guard that can be either high or low. You can walk forward and backward and threaten space with your normals, control the screen with fireballs and dragon punches… it's a fighting game! There may not be any throws or combos or okizeme, and what is there may only half-work in the first place, but the blurry image of 2D fighting fundamentals is absolutely here on display, in a way that makes it easy to see how games just a few years later would pick up that torch and run with it. It may pale in comparison to its sequel, but it’s hardly the clueless jumble that many people make it out to be. It’s easy to see the future just by playing it.
Of particular note to me is the way special moves work. Just about every single conversation about Street Fighter 1 features the derogatory claim that special moves are more or less impossible to execute in the game. This is actually not true at all! Anyone can pull off specials in SF1, they just need to know the trick. See, possibly as a result of the game’s conversion from its original (awful) pneumatic punching pad controls to a more standard (but still innovative) six pushbutton layout, special moves in SF1 are executed not when the player presses a button down, but when they release a button.
STREET FIGHTER 1 HAS NEGATIVE EDGE, WHY DID NOBODY EVER TELL ME THIS.
When you use button releases for your special move inputs rather than button presses, throwing fireballs is about as easy as in any other game. What fascinates me about this is that these moves require you to know the specific trick to them. Fighting game players today sometimes feel nostalgic for the arcade era, an age where information traveled slowly via smaller-scope, person-to-person conversation within a community, rather than the current online environment where games are immediately picked apart and put back together in a global whirlwind, and knowledge circulates so quickly on social media that the “save that for nationals” mindset simply has no reason to exist anymore. Yet here we are in 2024, and an old game that sits at the very cornerstone of the whole genre has hidden technical knowledge that the vast majority of people don’t know about. Here is a game where to learn its secrets you still have to be told them by someone in the know. How cool is that? I only learned this quirk of the special moves from a random forum post from like fifteen years ago, and from all the conversations I’ve seen about the game most people don’t know about it either! I think that mystical, mysterious quality is something rare and special nowadays, and SF1 has it.
Outside of its merits as a fighting game (which I admit are pretty slim, I wouldn’t want to play it competitively), Street Fighter 1 inspires me because I can feel the hand of its creators in the game, especially that of its director Takashi Nishiyama.
SF1 feels to me like a key touchstone in a creative project Nishiyama was embarking on for much of his career. In 1984, three years before SF1’s release, he designed Kung-Fu Master, a game frequently credited with birthing the beat ‘em up genre. In Kung-Fu Master, the player moves across the screen, beating back enemies with a punch button and a kick button that they can also use while jumping or crouching for aerial or low attacks. At the end of the first stage, an enemy martial artist stands in the player’s way, and to defeat them the player has to reactively block the enemy’s attacks either high or low while sneaking in their own strikes, or else briefly back up out of the enemy’s range and then take advantage of their whiffs. It may be primitive looking, but years before even SF1 you can easily find in Nishiyama’s games the embryonic form of what would become classic fighting game combat.
Several years later Nishiyama would also design Avengers, a top-down beat ‘em up where players took the role of a fighter with punch attacks, kick attacks, and even a special whirling roundhouse move that, to me at least, immediately calls to mind a Street Fighter tatsu. It has the mark of an artist circling around an idea in their work. When I play games like these it feels to me that their creator was striving towards something, taking multiple stabs at an idea they found exciting.
Despite saying in his rare interview appearances that he only ever designed for the mass market and didn’t make games to cater to his own personal taste, at the time of Street Fighter’s development Nishiyama was an active student of martial arts, and in another interview he speaks with excitement about the various fighting styles he wanted to have represented in Street Fighter, noting that seeing those mismatched styles square off against each other would be a key appeal. He designed other games that don’t resemble Street Fighter at all of course, scrolling shooter games and the endless runner genre ancestor Moon Patrol. But here is a designer who kept coming back to these 2D combat games, always adding in little complications like separate punch and kick buttons and varied block-heights, because they made the games more fun to play, but maybe also because there was something about those complications that he needed to explore.
We give a lot of credit to many artists, our assorted Lynches and Kojimas and Miyazakis and others, for navigating a path through their own creative fixations across the breadth of their work. I can’t claim to know anything about the mind of Takashi Nishiyama, but in his games I feel that creative fixation. Fighting games are very important to me, and I truly think a game like the original Street Fighter deserves to be seen positively in the context of its creators’ work. After SF1, Nishiyama would leave Capcom to head his own division at SNK, and soon after he would direct Fatal Fury, a more sophisticated take on fighting games that he has likened to his own Street Fighter II. Together with the team he brought with him from Capcom, including his frequent collaborator Hiroshi Matsumoto (who is essential to the history of the genre in his own right, having the planner credit on Street Fighter 1 and numerous executive producer credits on later fighters), Nishiyama would be at the forefront of SNK’s development teams, leading the company to become the pillar of the fighting game genre we know them as today. He later founded Dimps, the studio that developed Street Fighter IV. The guy just couldn’t stay away from good old punching and kicking games.
It heartens me as a player, designer, and lover of videogames that it's possible to play these games and feel something so human in them, to see an artist toying with an idea, teasing out its essence and refining their craft. Street Fighter 1 feels like an important piece of that to me. It may not be a great fighting game, but it was part of something special, and to me that’s worth celebrating.
This review contains spoilers
So, what the hell is Act 3?
Dragon Quest XI is full of endlessly endearing characters, constantly pleasurable combat, and a sense of warmth and wonder that few experiences can rival. I'd call it one of my favorite games. But, the thing my thoughts kept returning to for days after finishing it was Act 3. What the hell is it??
After DQXI's antagonist is defeated and the ending credits roll, a lengthy additional scenario for the player begins, generally referred to as the Post-Game or "Act 3." Taking place after the end credits, it's framed as an extra optional adventure, though some story elements from the main game only see their ultimate resolution in Act 3. I decided to play through Act 3 in order to see everything that DQXI had to offer. I loved the main game, after all!
I'd characterize my initial experience with Act 3 with two words: Whiplash and bafflement. Why why why is this game un-sticking its own landing to have me undermine its most emotionally impactful moments?
The scenario of Act 3 is built around using time travel to undo the death of the character and party member Veronica. Her death happens suddenly and silently in the main story; the player won't learn that she is dead until many hours after she sacrificed herself. There are no tearful last words, no encouragement to finish the quest from the dying, the player just gets separated from her at one point, and instead of a reunion, there's her body.
In a game principally concerned with the undiluted joys of love and friendship and the appeal of just spending time with people you care about, Veronica's death is titanic. DQXI semi-frequently punctuates its usually lighthearted fairy tale tone with moments of sadness, loss, and despair to contrast with and underscore the importance of its joyful themes, but Veronica's death is a step beyond. It constitutes a massive, tangible loss for both the principal characters and the player. Veronica stops being a playable character, she can no longer be a piece of any party composition in the dozens of battles to come, she won't be hanging out in camp, she won't have any optional dialogue, she won't feature in any story scenes going forward. These things may seem obvious but in the tens of hours I had been playing up til then, Veronica had become a staple of my experience in the game. She was an integral member of my band of friends and I had expected to return her to the party when I found her after all the characters were scattered at the end of "Act 1." After spending so many great hours with DQXI, her death cast a shadow of sadness over the rest of my experience.
She's survived by her sister Serena, who resolves to continue adventuring with the player and to live for the both of them. She cuts her hair and inherits a piece of Veronica's spirit, and from then on in gameplay Serena possesses the powers and abilities of both herself and her sister. She quietly carries Veronica's memory with her for the rest of the game, and every time the player uses her to cast one of Veronica's spells during combat they are reminded that no one is ever truly gone forever. It's a simple, beautiful way to imbue the basic fabric of a game with emotional resonance. Act 3 is about taking all that away.
That is maybe a bit uncharitable to say, but it is fundamentally true. Act 3 sees the hero traveling back in time to keep Veronica from dying and then saving the day all over again with her in tow. In this reality, Serena never suffers that loss and never resolves to remain strong in the face of grief. The bonds of the party are never strained and strengthened by the loss of their loved one. Similarly, other hard lessons are unlearned as well. Another party member, Erik, has his confrontation and reconciliation with his sister erased and replaced with an altogether more abridged and tidy reunion. Michelle the mermaid never sees her tragic story concluded, Sylvando never finds purpose forming a traveling troupe to bring joy to a despairing world. People all over Dragon Quest XI's world never experience the dark era of strife brought on by the game's antagonist. In the main story the hero fails to stop him at the end of Act 1, and the player is made to live with the cataclysmic consequences while experiencing both struggle and hope in the process of rebuilding. In Act 3's revised history, all this darkness is made squeaky clean by comparison. In a game that previously seemed to be putting forth the importance of hope and perseverance in the face of life's tragedies, Act 3 seems to be saying that hardship is fundamentally inappropriate to a happy life, and that it would be better for those hard lessons to never be learned at all, fantasizing that all the bad in the world can be magically painted over, completely exiting any emotional reality that a player could experience themselves in their own life.
This is roughly the message I got from Act 3 at first blush. However, I want to challenge my own premise here, because after some time and a lot of thought, I've come to view Act 3 in a different way that, while not fully making me love its direction, helps me to appreciate and reconcile it with the overall shape of DQXI as a piece of art.
For me to make peace with Act 3, I first had to accept that it's primarily an exercise in wish-fulfillment. At the end of the main game I had so much affection for those characters that a chance to spend dozens more hours with them was everything I could ask for! Act 3 is wish-fulfillment on a deeper thematic layer too. The main story spends a lot of its focus on imparting its ostensibly light-hearted storybook narrative with a sense of emotional tangibility. It reaches out to the player with moments of irrevocable sadness followed by moments of joy, friendship, and solidarity despite it all, and asks the player to see the value in these things. In reality you can't take back regrets or bring back the people you lose. The purpose of Act 3 is to willfully engage in a fantasy contrary to the rest of the game, though just because it's contrary doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
By doing the impossible and rewriting history in Act 3, the player and the hero perform a service out of love for the people they care about. Their friends will never know the strife that might have been. Given the opportunity, What lengths would you not go to, to protect the ones you love from pain? Given that very opportunity, the hero of Dragon Quest XI changes the entire fabric of the world, because reality is a small price to pay to see a friend smile again. The world is already full to bursting with hurt and sadness, it won't miss the little that you take away.
Act 3 taps into the impulse to wish you could truly save the day and make everything okay for the people that matter to you. In real life, this can be an impossible and even unhelpful idea when pushed too far, and I'm personally more drawn to the world of real emotional consequence presented by the main story, so the real Dragon Quest XI will always sort of end for me at the conclusion of Act 2. But Act 3 lets the player spend time in the fantasy, spend more time with their friends, be the hero they cannot be in real life. It's a videogame, why not take this chance to live inside it as you cannot outside it? As a purely additional coda to a game all about the connections we make, it strikes me as somewhat beautiful that in Act 3, you never have to say goodbye.
Dragon Quest XI is full of endlessly endearing characters, constantly pleasurable combat, and a sense of warmth and wonder that few experiences can rival. I'd call it one of my favorite games. But, the thing my thoughts kept returning to for days after finishing it was Act 3. What the hell is it??
After DQXI's antagonist is defeated and the ending credits roll, a lengthy additional scenario for the player begins, generally referred to as the Post-Game or "Act 3." Taking place after the end credits, it's framed as an extra optional adventure, though some story elements from the main game only see their ultimate resolution in Act 3. I decided to play through Act 3 in order to see everything that DQXI had to offer. I loved the main game, after all!
I'd characterize my initial experience with Act 3 with two words: Whiplash and bafflement. Why why why is this game un-sticking its own landing to have me undermine its most emotionally impactful moments?
The scenario of Act 3 is built around using time travel to undo the death of the character and party member Veronica. Her death happens suddenly and silently in the main story; the player won't learn that she is dead until many hours after she sacrificed herself. There are no tearful last words, no encouragement to finish the quest from the dying, the player just gets separated from her at one point, and instead of a reunion, there's her body.
In a game principally concerned with the undiluted joys of love and friendship and the appeal of just spending time with people you care about, Veronica's death is titanic. DQXI semi-frequently punctuates its usually lighthearted fairy tale tone with moments of sadness, loss, and despair to contrast with and underscore the importance of its joyful themes, but Veronica's death is a step beyond. It constitutes a massive, tangible loss for both the principal characters and the player. Veronica stops being a playable character, she can no longer be a piece of any party composition in the dozens of battles to come, she won't be hanging out in camp, she won't have any optional dialogue, she won't feature in any story scenes going forward. These things may seem obvious but in the tens of hours I had been playing up til then, Veronica had become a staple of my experience in the game. She was an integral member of my band of friends and I had expected to return her to the party when I found her after all the characters were scattered at the end of "Act 1." After spending so many great hours with DQXI, her death cast a shadow of sadness over the rest of my experience.
She's survived by her sister Serena, who resolves to continue adventuring with the player and to live for the both of them. She cuts her hair and inherits a piece of Veronica's spirit, and from then on in gameplay Serena possesses the powers and abilities of both herself and her sister. She quietly carries Veronica's memory with her for the rest of the game, and every time the player uses her to cast one of Veronica's spells during combat they are reminded that no one is ever truly gone forever. It's a simple, beautiful way to imbue the basic fabric of a game with emotional resonance. Act 3 is about taking all that away.
That is maybe a bit uncharitable to say, but it is fundamentally true. Act 3 sees the hero traveling back in time to keep Veronica from dying and then saving the day all over again with her in tow. In this reality, Serena never suffers that loss and never resolves to remain strong in the face of grief. The bonds of the party are never strained and strengthened by the loss of their loved one. Similarly, other hard lessons are unlearned as well. Another party member, Erik, has his confrontation and reconciliation with his sister erased and replaced with an altogether more abridged and tidy reunion. Michelle the mermaid never sees her tragic story concluded, Sylvando never finds purpose forming a traveling troupe to bring joy to a despairing world. People all over Dragon Quest XI's world never experience the dark era of strife brought on by the game's antagonist. In the main story the hero fails to stop him at the end of Act 1, and the player is made to live with the cataclysmic consequences while experiencing both struggle and hope in the process of rebuilding. In Act 3's revised history, all this darkness is made squeaky clean by comparison. In a game that previously seemed to be putting forth the importance of hope and perseverance in the face of life's tragedies, Act 3 seems to be saying that hardship is fundamentally inappropriate to a happy life, and that it would be better for those hard lessons to never be learned at all, fantasizing that all the bad in the world can be magically painted over, completely exiting any emotional reality that a player could experience themselves in their own life.
This is roughly the message I got from Act 3 at first blush. However, I want to challenge my own premise here, because after some time and a lot of thought, I've come to view Act 3 in a different way that, while not fully making me love its direction, helps me to appreciate and reconcile it with the overall shape of DQXI as a piece of art.
For me to make peace with Act 3, I first had to accept that it's primarily an exercise in wish-fulfillment. At the end of the main game I had so much affection for those characters that a chance to spend dozens more hours with them was everything I could ask for! Act 3 is wish-fulfillment on a deeper thematic layer too. The main story spends a lot of its focus on imparting its ostensibly light-hearted storybook narrative with a sense of emotional tangibility. It reaches out to the player with moments of irrevocable sadness followed by moments of joy, friendship, and solidarity despite it all, and asks the player to see the value in these things. In reality you can't take back regrets or bring back the people you lose. The purpose of Act 3 is to willfully engage in a fantasy contrary to the rest of the game, though just because it's contrary doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
By doing the impossible and rewriting history in Act 3, the player and the hero perform a service out of love for the people they care about. Their friends will never know the strife that might have been. Given the opportunity, What lengths would you not go to, to protect the ones you love from pain? Given that very opportunity, the hero of Dragon Quest XI changes the entire fabric of the world, because reality is a small price to pay to see a friend smile again. The world is already full to bursting with hurt and sadness, it won't miss the little that you take away.
Act 3 taps into the impulse to wish you could truly save the day and make everything okay for the people that matter to you. In real life, this can be an impossible and even unhelpful idea when pushed too far, and I'm personally more drawn to the world of real emotional consequence presented by the main story, so the real Dragon Quest XI will always sort of end for me at the conclusion of Act 2. But Act 3 lets the player spend time in the fantasy, spend more time with their friends, be the hero they cannot be in real life. It's a videogame, why not take this chance to live inside it as you cannot outside it? As a purely additional coda to a game all about the connections we make, it strikes me as somewhat beautiful that in Act 3, you never have to say goodbye.
1999
Remote Control Dandy has it all. It has a complex set of mechanics and systems with 2 player characters that ride the line between deep simulation and deep tedium, it has an ongoing narrative with likeable characters, it has progression systems and a lightweight strategic layer that tie directly into the player's performance in missions.
Playing this I can see how all these great elements are still embryonic in Remote Control Dandy. Everything in this game is begging to be pushed further. It shows me a blueprint to a masterpiece videogame that exists in my head.
I intend to investigate this little genre further and see if that masterpiece exists elsewhere as well.
Playing this I can see how all these great elements are still embryonic in Remote Control Dandy. Everything in this game is begging to be pushed further. It shows me a blueprint to a masterpiece videogame that exists in my head.
I intend to investigate this little genre further and see if that masterpiece exists elsewhere as well.
Hey I also published a version of this with some pretty pictures on medium
At first blush Germs: Nerawareta Machi is another entry in that class of oddball PSX Japan-only curios, a game good for glancing at and then digesting into a piece of trivia or a short youtube video. "Do you know about this weird game Germs?? Check out the cover art."
When you dig deeper into it though, Germs reveals itself to be a genuinely fascinating and worthwhile work of art about the terror of change, full of ideas and ambition so great the game itself can struggle to contain it all. A team of just six developers crafted a 3D open-world narrative action-adventure game set in a single explorable city, on console, in 1999. Germs's use of space anticipates the contemplative, barren landscape of Shadow of the Colossus. It had a fully 3D drivable open world two years before Grand Theft Auto did. It features survival elements that would become ubiquitous in popular games in the 2010s. It predates Deadly Premonition by over a decade. There's still nothing quite like it.
Germs sees its protagonist coming back home after many years away. They left to work as a journalist at a respected newspaper, but all these years later a series of strange occurrences in their hometown have inspired them to return and investigate the mystery while working for the local paper. Germs opens on a foreboding note, the brooding soundscape suggesting that perhaps this old city was better left alone.
But the temptation is too great, something remarkable is definitely happening in the town. Reports have come in of a shining ball of light flying over the mountains. A strange office has appeared in town that sends emails to residents about viruses, change, evolution, and ascension. Dozens of citizens are found wandering out of the abandoned coal mine in a state of fear and confusion; nobody ever goes in but people keep coming out. A tale of invading aliens using a virus to mutate humans gets underway, and it's up to the player to get to the bottom of it all.
The player is lowered into this mystery with minimal guidance. The computer terminal at their office has a few unread emails that point in the right direction, and their assistant suggests they ask around the information center nearby, and that's it. Germs offers an open-ended adventure where the player can poke around the town at their leisure, and investigate the leads in their emails in a non-linear order.
The world outside the office is rendered in stark black and white. Recalling the paranoia of films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Them!, the grayscale visuals present the town as full of latent danger yet drained of energy, a place no one should inhabit. The coal mine the town was built around has long since closed down, and the rows of blocky buildings form a giant skeleton that houses only a few sources of life. The game's interior spaces are in color, as if the survivors in the town are the only remaining sparks of life hiding from the oppressive atmosphere outside. This eerie environment is one of the most striking I've ever inhabited in a videogame. It feels like a surreal nightmare bottled and preserved. The world is inert. For the protagonist, being back home is like being trapped in a faded photograph.
At the start of the game, upon receiving an email from an old friend asking the protagonist to meet them at their house, the player is faced with Germs's first and most definitive challenge: to figure out how public transportation works in the city. There are multiple bus routes, an underground metro, and a train in Germs's city, all on top of the car the player is given from the start. This series of transportation systems is realized with beautiful detail. The large scale of the city makes learning their operation essential for getting around, and their interconnections make the overall world design the greatest single aspect of Germs as a work of interactivity. This is a game that turns remembering directions for taking the subway and walking a few blocks into a thrilling experience.
Nearly as impressive is the game's approach to narrative design. Germs's narrative plays out in a modular series of events, which the player can tackle non-linearly. Each key building in the game goes through several major story states, from pre-invasion, to invasion, to liberation. Locations in Germs get recontextualized from mundane spaces to dungeons full of combat encounters, then back again, which makes the sense of invasion feel all the more real. Tied into these main beats are the stories of several characters, from some old friends of the protagonist, to a mad scientist, to a secret agent tasked with investigating the town. Their narratives progress as the player liberates buildings and visits them in optional sequences, which makes the overall narrative design lightweight and fluid, especially for a game of this era. Empowering the player to talk to people and clear out locations in the order they choose helps to ground them in the city, and allowing them to help dictate the narrative's progression makes the town feel like a real place in real danger. Finally of note is Germs's unique fail state. If the player is defeated in combat they do not get a Game Over, instead they're reborn in the coal mine as the sort of mutant they've been killing. In this state they can talk to the other mutants peacefully and carry on with their life, though they won't be able to progress further in the game until they get cured at the hospital. On top of all the other interesting things Germs was doing in 1999, it also turns a player's failure into a narratively and mechanically intriguing, thematically resonant feature, something most games two decades later are struggling to do.
Despite its achievements in narrative and world design, the game is not without its share of rough edges. The combat is clunky at best, though it doesn't commit the sin of also being challenging. Circle strafing or ducking behind corners with a decent weapon is all it takes to defeat any mutant, and frankly this is a positive. In an experience full of friction the combat itself proves mercifully straightforward.
Likewise, Germs's integration of role-playing and survival simulation mechanics is forward thinking but embryonic in execution. The player has to manage hunger that doubles for health, damage to their individual limbs, and the need for sleep. The game also features an experience point system that lets the player level up their competency with individual weapon types as they use them, increasing accuracy. The kitchen sink-ish inclusion of these elements adds to Germs's overall ambitiousness in design, but in the course of play they end up feeling a bit perfunctory. Keep your health up at restaurants, see a doctor and sleep at the end of the day, and stick to one good weapon to make it accurate, that's the extent of the decision making.
The area where Germs's various design elements do cohere into brilliance is in the interplay between the health system and the aforementioned world design. To get through a building full of mutants, the player will want as much health as possible going in, and since their health depletes slowly over time, they're incentivized to get from place to place as efficiently as possible. This means skillful play in Germs is not in the shooting, it's in the navigation. The game trains you to plan a day trip to the coal mine by learning the fastest route to a delicatessen to get food to go, then knowing which bus will get you to the closest station for the special train that heads north to the mine, and then knowing the quickest way to get back to the hotel via the subway so you can squeeze in a visit to the strange old man living near the mountains before bed.
Germs's somewhat sparse story speaks to the pain and fear that comes with change, and the fear that stasis might be even worse. Two of the major characters are old friends of the protagonist. One of them is coming back to town for a job, what else, and by the end she feels the virus welling up within her, stuck between the human she was and the deformed thing she might soon become. The other friend never left, he stayed and dried up along with his hometown, and all he has now is his endless study of the virus. Even when the invasion has been stopped and the mutants killed, he just thanks you politely before stating that he really ought to get back to his research. The alien virus engulfing the town changes the host into some other type of being, and the transformation is described by turns as either horrific or sublime, and often both. The long abandoned town is now the site of cataclysmic change, and interestingly, the protagonist has come back to their lifeless home in order to stop that change.
I come from something of a ghost town myself. It's a small place with lots of dead ends that seemed to me growing up like it was specially built to be moved away from. The idea that I could one day go back there, take up a job, and pick up my old life, gives me a sort of creeping sensation like I can feel my body decaying around me. But on the other hand as I move forward in life and set big goals that I inevitably fail to reach, I feel the fear of the unknown future, wondering if I'm up for whatever strange and difficult form it's sure to take. Germs speaks to me as an examination of that tension, staying still is unthinkable but moving forward is terrifying. The understated tragedy at the heart of Germs's slim narrative lies in how, after defeating in the final boss the part of themself that wishes to embrace the grotesque future of mutation, the protagonist dismantles the source of the change in the name of safety. The choice makes sense, it's an alien invasion after all, but what is left in the end? The game has no distinct ending, no fade to black with credits rolling. The player is just sent right back to their office at the newspaper, the only change being that the citizens are more grateful and fewer in number now. Color does not find its way back to the targeted city, it's just the same old town. No alien invasion killed this place, it was already dead. The ending of Germs: Nerawareta Machi is just that faded photograph, an endless, quiet purgatory. The future the aliens promised may have been horrific, but without it what the hell is the present? It's a brilliant, haunting non-ending that follows the player even after the game is shut off for the last time.
Germs deserves to be more than trivia. It's shockingly prescient, systems-rich, full of harmony between narrative and mechanics, and the only game from a small team of artists biting off the biggest goddamn gulp they could imagine with zero thought as to how they might chew it. I love it, it's one of the finest pieces of foreboding and alienation I've ever played.
At first blush Germs: Nerawareta Machi is another entry in that class of oddball PSX Japan-only curios, a game good for glancing at and then digesting into a piece of trivia or a short youtube video. "Do you know about this weird game Germs?? Check out the cover art."
When you dig deeper into it though, Germs reveals itself to be a genuinely fascinating and worthwhile work of art about the terror of change, full of ideas and ambition so great the game itself can struggle to contain it all. A team of just six developers crafted a 3D open-world narrative action-adventure game set in a single explorable city, on console, in 1999. Germs's use of space anticipates the contemplative, barren landscape of Shadow of the Colossus. It had a fully 3D drivable open world two years before Grand Theft Auto did. It features survival elements that would become ubiquitous in popular games in the 2010s. It predates Deadly Premonition by over a decade. There's still nothing quite like it.
Germs sees its protagonist coming back home after many years away. They left to work as a journalist at a respected newspaper, but all these years later a series of strange occurrences in their hometown have inspired them to return and investigate the mystery while working for the local paper. Germs opens on a foreboding note, the brooding soundscape suggesting that perhaps this old city was better left alone.
But the temptation is too great, something remarkable is definitely happening in the town. Reports have come in of a shining ball of light flying over the mountains. A strange office has appeared in town that sends emails to residents about viruses, change, evolution, and ascension. Dozens of citizens are found wandering out of the abandoned coal mine in a state of fear and confusion; nobody ever goes in but people keep coming out. A tale of invading aliens using a virus to mutate humans gets underway, and it's up to the player to get to the bottom of it all.
The player is lowered into this mystery with minimal guidance. The computer terminal at their office has a few unread emails that point in the right direction, and their assistant suggests they ask around the information center nearby, and that's it. Germs offers an open-ended adventure where the player can poke around the town at their leisure, and investigate the leads in their emails in a non-linear order.
The world outside the office is rendered in stark black and white. Recalling the paranoia of films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Them!, the grayscale visuals present the town as full of latent danger yet drained of energy, a place no one should inhabit. The coal mine the town was built around has long since closed down, and the rows of blocky buildings form a giant skeleton that houses only a few sources of life. The game's interior spaces are in color, as if the survivors in the town are the only remaining sparks of life hiding from the oppressive atmosphere outside. This eerie environment is one of the most striking I've ever inhabited in a videogame. It feels like a surreal nightmare bottled and preserved. The world is inert. For the protagonist, being back home is like being trapped in a faded photograph.
At the start of the game, upon receiving an email from an old friend asking the protagonist to meet them at their house, the player is faced with Germs's first and most definitive challenge: to figure out how public transportation works in the city. There are multiple bus routes, an underground metro, and a train in Germs's city, all on top of the car the player is given from the start. This series of transportation systems is realized with beautiful detail. The large scale of the city makes learning their operation essential for getting around, and their interconnections make the overall world design the greatest single aspect of Germs as a work of interactivity. This is a game that turns remembering directions for taking the subway and walking a few blocks into a thrilling experience.
Nearly as impressive is the game's approach to narrative design. Germs's narrative plays out in a modular series of events, which the player can tackle non-linearly. Each key building in the game goes through several major story states, from pre-invasion, to invasion, to liberation. Locations in Germs get recontextualized from mundane spaces to dungeons full of combat encounters, then back again, which makes the sense of invasion feel all the more real. Tied into these main beats are the stories of several characters, from some old friends of the protagonist, to a mad scientist, to a secret agent tasked with investigating the town. Their narratives progress as the player liberates buildings and visits them in optional sequences, which makes the overall narrative design lightweight and fluid, especially for a game of this era. Empowering the player to talk to people and clear out locations in the order they choose helps to ground them in the city, and allowing them to help dictate the narrative's progression makes the town feel like a real place in real danger. Finally of note is Germs's unique fail state. If the player is defeated in combat they do not get a Game Over, instead they're reborn in the coal mine as the sort of mutant they've been killing. In this state they can talk to the other mutants peacefully and carry on with their life, though they won't be able to progress further in the game until they get cured at the hospital. On top of all the other interesting things Germs was doing in 1999, it also turns a player's failure into a narratively and mechanically intriguing, thematically resonant feature, something most games two decades later are struggling to do.
Despite its achievements in narrative and world design, the game is not without its share of rough edges. The combat is clunky at best, though it doesn't commit the sin of also being challenging. Circle strafing or ducking behind corners with a decent weapon is all it takes to defeat any mutant, and frankly this is a positive. In an experience full of friction the combat itself proves mercifully straightforward.
Likewise, Germs's integration of role-playing and survival simulation mechanics is forward thinking but embryonic in execution. The player has to manage hunger that doubles for health, damage to their individual limbs, and the need for sleep. The game also features an experience point system that lets the player level up their competency with individual weapon types as they use them, increasing accuracy. The kitchen sink-ish inclusion of these elements adds to Germs's overall ambitiousness in design, but in the course of play they end up feeling a bit perfunctory. Keep your health up at restaurants, see a doctor and sleep at the end of the day, and stick to one good weapon to make it accurate, that's the extent of the decision making.
The area where Germs's various design elements do cohere into brilliance is in the interplay between the health system and the aforementioned world design. To get through a building full of mutants, the player will want as much health as possible going in, and since their health depletes slowly over time, they're incentivized to get from place to place as efficiently as possible. This means skillful play in Germs is not in the shooting, it's in the navigation. The game trains you to plan a day trip to the coal mine by learning the fastest route to a delicatessen to get food to go, then knowing which bus will get you to the closest station for the special train that heads north to the mine, and then knowing the quickest way to get back to the hotel via the subway so you can squeeze in a visit to the strange old man living near the mountains before bed.
Germs's somewhat sparse story speaks to the pain and fear that comes with change, and the fear that stasis might be even worse. Two of the major characters are old friends of the protagonist. One of them is coming back to town for a job, what else, and by the end she feels the virus welling up within her, stuck between the human she was and the deformed thing she might soon become. The other friend never left, he stayed and dried up along with his hometown, and all he has now is his endless study of the virus. Even when the invasion has been stopped and the mutants killed, he just thanks you politely before stating that he really ought to get back to his research. The alien virus engulfing the town changes the host into some other type of being, and the transformation is described by turns as either horrific or sublime, and often both. The long abandoned town is now the site of cataclysmic change, and interestingly, the protagonist has come back to their lifeless home in order to stop that change.
I come from something of a ghost town myself. It's a small place with lots of dead ends that seemed to me growing up like it was specially built to be moved away from. The idea that I could one day go back there, take up a job, and pick up my old life, gives me a sort of creeping sensation like I can feel my body decaying around me. But on the other hand as I move forward in life and set big goals that I inevitably fail to reach, I feel the fear of the unknown future, wondering if I'm up for whatever strange and difficult form it's sure to take. Germs speaks to me as an examination of that tension, staying still is unthinkable but moving forward is terrifying. The understated tragedy at the heart of Germs's slim narrative lies in how, after defeating in the final boss the part of themself that wishes to embrace the grotesque future of mutation, the protagonist dismantles the source of the change in the name of safety. The choice makes sense, it's an alien invasion after all, but what is left in the end? The game has no distinct ending, no fade to black with credits rolling. The player is just sent right back to their office at the newspaper, the only change being that the citizens are more grateful and fewer in number now. Color does not find its way back to the targeted city, it's just the same old town. No alien invasion killed this place, it was already dead. The ending of Germs: Nerawareta Machi is just that faded photograph, an endless, quiet purgatory. The future the aliens promised may have been horrific, but without it what the hell is the present? It's a brilliant, haunting non-ending that follows the player even after the game is shut off for the last time.
Germs deserves to be more than trivia. It's shockingly prescient, systems-rich, full of harmony between narrative and mechanics, and the only game from a small team of artists biting off the biggest goddamn gulp they could imagine with zero thought as to how they might chew it. I love it, it's one of the finest pieces of foreboding and alienation I've ever played.
2017
Superficially a dopamine-pipeline tappy timewaster, but on a deeper level it... still is that but done by Yoshiro Kimura!
It's got the humor, the style, the whimsy, all the elements that make his projects something special. Don't sleep on this game on account of the slimness of its design and content, it punches well above its weight.
It's got the humor, the style, the whimsy, all the elements that make his projects something special. Don't sleep on this game on account of the slimness of its design and content, it punches well above its weight.
2022
Much has been said about this game’s interpolation of Zelda and Dark Souls (and Fez), and like many I think the results are mixed when it comes to the extent to which Tunic hangs its hat on Souls-y attrition based exploration and combat, when the game’s combat is usually serviceable at best and downright dull at worst. However, like in my Scorn review a while back I want to look past the conversation about this game’s combat, sidestep the dodgy dodge-rolls, and just talk about the specific bits of design in Tunic that wowed me.
The reason I wanted to write something about Tunic is that its mystery and progression has a particular flavor to it that I found really unique. Whereas the original Zelda cultivated an air of exploration and intrigue by showing players a vast, untamed wilderness, and Dark Souls rewards exploration by unlocking interconnections throughout regions of a hostile gameworld, Tunic is all about the unfolding wonder of what was there all along. What looks mundane at first can actually house the key to huge mysteries.
The camera is used incredibly to this end. Its static isometric view combined with well-placed objects cleverly hide all the shortcuts in the game’s levels. Where in Zelda and Souls you often need a key to open up a connection between two places, in Tunic the shortcut was there the whole time under your nose, you just didn’t know where to look. In my playthrough I don't think I found a single major shortcut before the game wanted me to, but every time it felt like I could have, even should have seen it earlier. Out of all the things games can accomplish through their curation of digital space, Tunic's level design is finely tuned to produce delight. This is games doing the sort of things I want games to do. This is Charismatic Game Design.
Nowhere is Tunic’s approach to mystery more on display than in its manual. Information is your greatest asset in Tunic, and a new manual page is by far the most exciting treasure you can find in your journey. Essential pages are doled out throughout the game to tutorialize key concepts, but many pages are completely non-essential to the critical path and they’re all filled with references to other pages, oblique hints, and portentious markings. The game hides entire mechanics and systems behind the hints in manual pages, leaving much for the player to figure out through experience, and the confidence on display, knowing just what to tell the player and what to keep a secret, is wonderful. The final magic trick that Tunic locks its true ending behind, where the manual itself is radically recontextualized to reveal a bevy of secrets that were there the entire time, is a brilliant culmination and a massively satisfying puzzle to solve. That solving the puzzle lets you skip the final bossfight, using your wisdom to transcend the violent cycle at the heart of the game’s narrative, is the perfect icing on the cake.
Tunic is one of the most successful games I’ve played at unfolding, revealing, and recontextualizing, and the most impressive thing about it is that it plays fair. The secrets were always in front of your eyes, it lets you look inside the hat before it somehow pulls the rabbit out, and that's a special thing.
The reason I wanted to write something about Tunic is that its mystery and progression has a particular flavor to it that I found really unique. Whereas the original Zelda cultivated an air of exploration and intrigue by showing players a vast, untamed wilderness, and Dark Souls rewards exploration by unlocking interconnections throughout regions of a hostile gameworld, Tunic is all about the unfolding wonder of what was there all along. What looks mundane at first can actually house the key to huge mysteries.
The camera is used incredibly to this end. Its static isometric view combined with well-placed objects cleverly hide all the shortcuts in the game’s levels. Where in Zelda and Souls you often need a key to open up a connection between two places, in Tunic the shortcut was there the whole time under your nose, you just didn’t know where to look. In my playthrough I don't think I found a single major shortcut before the game wanted me to, but every time it felt like I could have, even should have seen it earlier. Out of all the things games can accomplish through their curation of digital space, Tunic's level design is finely tuned to produce delight. This is games doing the sort of things I want games to do. This is Charismatic Game Design.
Nowhere is Tunic’s approach to mystery more on display than in its manual. Information is your greatest asset in Tunic, and a new manual page is by far the most exciting treasure you can find in your journey. Essential pages are doled out throughout the game to tutorialize key concepts, but many pages are completely non-essential to the critical path and they’re all filled with references to other pages, oblique hints, and portentious markings. The game hides entire mechanics and systems behind the hints in manual pages, leaving much for the player to figure out through experience, and the confidence on display, knowing just what to tell the player and what to keep a secret, is wonderful. The final magic trick that Tunic locks its true ending behind, where the manual itself is radically recontextualized to reveal a bevy of secrets that were there the entire time, is a brilliant culmination and a massively satisfying puzzle to solve. That solving the puzzle lets you skip the final bossfight, using your wisdom to transcend the violent cycle at the heart of the game’s narrative, is the perfect icing on the cake.
Tunic is one of the most successful games I’ve played at unfolding, revealing, and recontextualizing, and the most impressive thing about it is that it plays fair. The secrets were always in front of your eyes, it lets you look inside the hat before it somehow pulls the rabbit out, and that's a special thing.
2022
Scorn has been met with a mixed reception thanks to a solid handful of faults. The hyper-grim tone stays static throughout, missing out on the dynamics of tension and peace that make the best horror experiences shine. The story, such as it is, coasts largely on vibes and might not amount to a satisfying punch for some players. And of course… there's that unfortunate combat.
However, I want to let those problems lie where they may and spend a little time talking about what I liked about Scorn. I want to speak briefly about something Scorn did that interested me as a designer, and hopefully you'll find that thing at least a bit interesting too. First, though, I've got to mention the most obvious aspect of the game that impressed me: The way it looks!
Without a doubt, the visuals are gorgeous. Dense fog and dust blanket the bulbous alien architecture with eye-popping beauty. The quality of texture and material, and of the light passing through the cracked ceilings and obscured skies of Scorn come together to create a genuinely credible nightmare world that's a morbid pleasure to inhabit. It could definitely be said that Ebb Software gets no points for originality, lifting Giger and Beksiński wholesale and dropping them into a videogame landscape, though I want to give them their due for realizing those artists' aesthetics so confidently. It takes more than just having big tube-shaped things push themselves into holes to properly nail that vibe, and Scorn goes all out to really give it the detail it deserves. Besides, I've always wanted more games with precisely this aesthetic anyway so why get too hung up on originality?
The gameplay itself is, at least at first blush, nearly bog-standard. You walk around and solve various puzzles, pressing buttons and flipping switches.
Beneath that first layer of tissue though, I think Scorn is doing something at least interesting from a design perspective. It exploits the arbitrary nature of adventure game puzzle design to make the game world feel all the more alien. Playing the first level of Scorn, I was introduced to half a dozen technological devices whose purpose I truly couldn't even imagine. The odd glove-shaped holes and big mechanical arms with some sort of melon baller or ice cream scooper at the end, they didn't read as puzzle elements to me, they barely read as game elements at all. Am I being shown a lock, or a key? They were just pieces of this world with a function as unfathomable as the rest of my environment.
Usually when an adventure game has me climb up a rope of neckties and use a piece of corral to fashion a makeshift grappling hook so I can then use a balloon animal and some bread all to steal some pigeon eggs which are good for… something, it feels like an annoying, synthetic solution to an annoying, synthetic problem. But in Scorn these things feel all too natural, just of a sort of nature very, very far removed from me. Scorn uses its puzzle elements to heighten its sense of alienation through the gameplay, and in doing so it takes one of the largest traditional weaknesses of adventure games and makes it into its own greatest strength. Something resembling a real alien logic only unspools itself gradually as you interact with the game's various semi-organic mechanisms. It wasn't until later into my trip through that introductory level, when the game placed into my care a miserable looking man-creature nested inside some sort of half shell, that those melon baller machines began to make sense…
The level design is operating on the same wavelength, as the circular architecture of the environments seem bent on purposefully disorienting the player and denying them mastery of the space. Repeated trips through previous locales begin to grant some familiarity, but I never felt fully confident in my mental mapping of the levels, which I'd say is a success on the part of the game.
Scorn has its share of issues, but I find myself thinking more about the grisly delights of its art direction and the way it puts a little twist on traditional game design elements in order to better sell its vibes. Yes, the combat is bad. But when a game is such a mixed bag as Scorn, sometimes I just want to look at the positives I can take from the experience.
However, I want to let those problems lie where they may and spend a little time talking about what I liked about Scorn. I want to speak briefly about something Scorn did that interested me as a designer, and hopefully you'll find that thing at least a bit interesting too. First, though, I've got to mention the most obvious aspect of the game that impressed me: The way it looks!
Without a doubt, the visuals are gorgeous. Dense fog and dust blanket the bulbous alien architecture with eye-popping beauty. The quality of texture and material, and of the light passing through the cracked ceilings and obscured skies of Scorn come together to create a genuinely credible nightmare world that's a morbid pleasure to inhabit. It could definitely be said that Ebb Software gets no points for originality, lifting Giger and Beksiński wholesale and dropping them into a videogame landscape, though I want to give them their due for realizing those artists' aesthetics so confidently. It takes more than just having big tube-shaped things push themselves into holes to properly nail that vibe, and Scorn goes all out to really give it the detail it deserves. Besides, I've always wanted more games with precisely this aesthetic anyway so why get too hung up on originality?
The gameplay itself is, at least at first blush, nearly bog-standard. You walk around and solve various puzzles, pressing buttons and flipping switches.
Beneath that first layer of tissue though, I think Scorn is doing something at least interesting from a design perspective. It exploits the arbitrary nature of adventure game puzzle design to make the game world feel all the more alien. Playing the first level of Scorn, I was introduced to half a dozen technological devices whose purpose I truly couldn't even imagine. The odd glove-shaped holes and big mechanical arms with some sort of melon baller or ice cream scooper at the end, they didn't read as puzzle elements to me, they barely read as game elements at all. Am I being shown a lock, or a key? They were just pieces of this world with a function as unfathomable as the rest of my environment.
Usually when an adventure game has me climb up a rope of neckties and use a piece of corral to fashion a makeshift grappling hook so I can then use a balloon animal and some bread all to steal some pigeon eggs which are good for… something, it feels like an annoying, synthetic solution to an annoying, synthetic problem. But in Scorn these things feel all too natural, just of a sort of nature very, very far removed from me. Scorn uses its puzzle elements to heighten its sense of alienation through the gameplay, and in doing so it takes one of the largest traditional weaknesses of adventure games and makes it into its own greatest strength. Something resembling a real alien logic only unspools itself gradually as you interact with the game's various semi-organic mechanisms. It wasn't until later into my trip through that introductory level, when the game placed into my care a miserable looking man-creature nested inside some sort of half shell, that those melon baller machines began to make sense…
The level design is operating on the same wavelength, as the circular architecture of the environments seem bent on purposefully disorienting the player and denying them mastery of the space. Repeated trips through previous locales begin to grant some familiarity, but I never felt fully confident in my mental mapping of the levels, which I'd say is a success on the part of the game.
Scorn has its share of issues, but I find myself thinking more about the grisly delights of its art direction and the way it puts a little twist on traditional game design elements in order to better sell its vibes. Yes, the combat is bad. But when a game is such a mixed bag as Scorn, sometimes I just want to look at the positives I can take from the experience.
Melee's knockback formula is like my E=MC².
The beautiful, dense web of the state machine behind its character controller is like my Starry Night.
So many things went right with Melee. The open ended damage percent and ring-out systems interact gorgeously with the way the game treats each character as its own physics object moving through the simulation. Flexible mechanics like wavedashing, DI, SDI, the depletable analog shield, and the tech system create near limitless potential for expression in offense, defense, and even basic movement. A single jump in Melee has 5 separate decisions baked into it that determine where you'll land. The open ended nature of the game combined with its extremely high execution ceiling reward dedication to technique, highly nuanced matchup strategy, and situational awareness like perhaps no other game.
20 year Melee veterans will boot up tonight and pull off some wild shit they've never seen before, and if pressed about it they'd just tell you "I knew it would work."
It is the intuition-based fighting game.
The beautiful, dense web of the state machine behind its character controller is like my Starry Night.
So many things went right with Melee. The open ended damage percent and ring-out systems interact gorgeously with the way the game treats each character as its own physics object moving through the simulation. Flexible mechanics like wavedashing, DI, SDI, the depletable analog shield, and the tech system create near limitless potential for expression in offense, defense, and even basic movement. A single jump in Melee has 5 separate decisions baked into it that determine where you'll land. The open ended nature of the game combined with its extremely high execution ceiling reward dedication to technique, highly nuanced matchup strategy, and situational awareness like perhaps no other game.
20 year Melee veterans will boot up tonight and pull off some wild shit they've never seen before, and if pressed about it they'd just tell you "I knew it would work."
It is the intuition-based fighting game.
2019
The Racing Game for Fighting Game players.
1997
Something that attracts me to this genre is that it’s sort of like Game Design as Album, and it lets the player participate in the songwriting and performance each time. The game has to showcase all its mechanics and systems in as few as 20 curated minutes. That’s a very tight timeline on which to take the player on an entire journey, though like the best records, the best shooters use their limited time to create a very dense and rewarding experience, and invite endless replays to drink it all in.
As an album, DoDonPachi is fierce, loud, progressive, deliciously paced, and so catchy that after practicing it for hours I can sing you the full layouts of entire stages.
You’ve got the graceful refrains in Stage 1, where the game teaches its chaining system by having you continuously sweep all the way across the screen from left to right and back again, like hitting every key on the piano as you clean throngs of enemies off the screen. It’s a wonderful, destructive warmup exercise.
Stage 2 introduces big, tanky enemies and obstacles that take extra time to kill while you deal with the smaller threats at the same time, creating a bass-y drone of suspense. Having to kill different enemies that die at different tempos complicates the composition; to really jam with DoDonPachi you’re gonna have to ride those different grooves simultaneously.
My favorite part of Stage 3 has a feature that DoDonPachi only rarely dabbles in: bullet cancels. As numerous big enemy fighters spawn on screen and unleash a cacophony of bullets, you can destroy the nearby frigates to completely wipe out all the bullets on screen, giving you just a moment’s rest. You don’t want to blast these frigates immediately, you need to wait as long as you can before firing, letting as many bullets rain down at you as you can manage before pulling the trigger and throwing the screen into silence. Here DoDonPachi lets you play the conductor, and as they say, the notes you don’t play are just as important as the ones you do.
The boss of Stage 4 is about making the record skip. There’s a glitch you can trigger where if you survive its initial onslaught, then get its health to within a few pixels of a certain target, you can get it to freeze in place and become a sitting duck. To do so you’ll need impeccable timing as you dodge between and then fire during the rhythm of its twin cannon shots. Bam, bam. Bam, bam. Bam, b-... Bump the table right at the end of the measure and the needle slips, and the boss is helpless, the song of its cannons turned into an interminable rest.
If pulling one over on DoDonPachi and taking control of the song in Stage 4 felt empowering, Stage 5 is hellbent on taking that feeling away. The stage is infamous for a section that throws a sheer curtain of hundreds of enemies and bullets at you for the better part of a minute straight. If other encounters in DoDonPachi bring a prog rock sensibility to the genre, this section is a dive straight into harsh noise. It’s blunt, it’s punishing, it bangs and screams and scrapes at the same note on and on. But if you don’t crumble under the reverberating waves of death hurled at you, you will find a moment of peace on the other side. The boss of the stage has an exploit that allows you to sit in a safe spot right in front of its face. Inside that bubble of tension, the game offers a few breaths of serenity.
The finale occurs across the whole of Stage 6, where DoDonPachi brings to bear every trick, lick, dynamic and instrument it has in an attempt to blow you the hell up. It’s a two-and-a-half minute maximalist concerto and as the star soloist you had goddamn better know your part. Giant high-speed tanks slide onto screen and slam percussive, bunched up globs of bullets your way 40 at a time. Massive metal bees spawn repeatedly from the same spot while you try to deal with everything else, forming a downbeat for you to keep up with lest they have a chance to rev up and overwhelm you. The final boss has an array of deadly patterns it moves through in a set order, a last song-within-a-song for you to master. If you’ve made it this far and can still listen to what DoDonPachi is playing over the sound of your own heartbeat on this last track, you’ll be properly rewarded as all the lights go up, all the pyrotechnics flare, and the boss goes down with one final deafening power chord. Wipe the sweat off your brow, take the earplugs out, show’s over.
Of course, for the very best players, DoDonPachi lets you flip it over for a Side B that runs through all the same songs as before but with even more intensity, and with a special bonus track at the end: “Hibachi.” A true final boss to terrify even the most seasoned STG player, a blistering speed-metal apocalypse that I can only dream of getting good enough to experience live one day.
Like all the best albums, DoDonPachi rewards listening close, spinning it again and again, and picking out new nuances every time. It’s an impeccable journey, a delicately balanced and focused project, and a badass jam.
As an album, DoDonPachi is fierce, loud, progressive, deliciously paced, and so catchy that after practicing it for hours I can sing you the full layouts of entire stages.
You’ve got the graceful refrains in Stage 1, where the game teaches its chaining system by having you continuously sweep all the way across the screen from left to right and back again, like hitting every key on the piano as you clean throngs of enemies off the screen. It’s a wonderful, destructive warmup exercise.
Stage 2 introduces big, tanky enemies and obstacles that take extra time to kill while you deal with the smaller threats at the same time, creating a bass-y drone of suspense. Having to kill different enemies that die at different tempos complicates the composition; to really jam with DoDonPachi you’re gonna have to ride those different grooves simultaneously.
My favorite part of Stage 3 has a feature that DoDonPachi only rarely dabbles in: bullet cancels. As numerous big enemy fighters spawn on screen and unleash a cacophony of bullets, you can destroy the nearby frigates to completely wipe out all the bullets on screen, giving you just a moment’s rest. You don’t want to blast these frigates immediately, you need to wait as long as you can before firing, letting as many bullets rain down at you as you can manage before pulling the trigger and throwing the screen into silence. Here DoDonPachi lets you play the conductor, and as they say, the notes you don’t play are just as important as the ones you do.
The boss of Stage 4 is about making the record skip. There’s a glitch you can trigger where if you survive its initial onslaught, then get its health to within a few pixels of a certain target, you can get it to freeze in place and become a sitting duck. To do so you’ll need impeccable timing as you dodge between and then fire during the rhythm of its twin cannon shots. Bam, bam. Bam, bam. Bam, b-... Bump the table right at the end of the measure and the needle slips, and the boss is helpless, the song of its cannons turned into an interminable rest.
If pulling one over on DoDonPachi and taking control of the song in Stage 4 felt empowering, Stage 5 is hellbent on taking that feeling away. The stage is infamous for a section that throws a sheer curtain of hundreds of enemies and bullets at you for the better part of a minute straight. If other encounters in DoDonPachi bring a prog rock sensibility to the genre, this section is a dive straight into harsh noise. It’s blunt, it’s punishing, it bangs and screams and scrapes at the same note on and on. But if you don’t crumble under the reverberating waves of death hurled at you, you will find a moment of peace on the other side. The boss of the stage has an exploit that allows you to sit in a safe spot right in front of its face. Inside that bubble of tension, the game offers a few breaths of serenity.
The finale occurs across the whole of Stage 6, where DoDonPachi brings to bear every trick, lick, dynamic and instrument it has in an attempt to blow you the hell up. It’s a two-and-a-half minute maximalist concerto and as the star soloist you had goddamn better know your part. Giant high-speed tanks slide onto screen and slam percussive, bunched up globs of bullets your way 40 at a time. Massive metal bees spawn repeatedly from the same spot while you try to deal with everything else, forming a downbeat for you to keep up with lest they have a chance to rev up and overwhelm you. The final boss has an array of deadly patterns it moves through in a set order, a last song-within-a-song for you to master. If you’ve made it this far and can still listen to what DoDonPachi is playing over the sound of your own heartbeat on this last track, you’ll be properly rewarded as all the lights go up, all the pyrotechnics flare, and the boss goes down with one final deafening power chord. Wipe the sweat off your brow, take the earplugs out, show’s over.
Of course, for the very best players, DoDonPachi lets you flip it over for a Side B that runs through all the same songs as before but with even more intensity, and with a special bonus track at the end: “Hibachi.” A true final boss to terrify even the most seasoned STG player, a blistering speed-metal apocalypse that I can only dream of getting good enough to experience live one day.
Like all the best albums, DoDonPachi rewards listening close, spinning it again and again, and picking out new nuances every time. It’s an impeccable journey, a delicately balanced and focused project, and a badass jam.
1993
There's kind of a weird amount of Cuphead in this.
Maybe the premier example of Character Controller As High Art.
1995
CAVE looks for magic right off the bat and doesn’t quite find it.
DonPachi serves up a meat and potatoes bullet hell experience in the early days of the subgenre. Being the first game from CAVE and in multiple ways a torchbearer for Toaplan’s legacy, DonPachi has a lot to prove. As a promise of great things to come it gets high marks, but as CAVE’s grand arrival in itself? It leaves me craving something more.
Don't get me wrong, I like DonPachi a lot and there's plenty to appreciate here. This game introduced three iconic ship types of varying strengths and weaknesses, nailed down the series-staple rapid shot/focused laser weapon that existed in embryonic form in V-Five, and brought with it an innovative scoring system based on killing chains of enemies in rapid succession to stack up massive point multipliers. DonPachi tries so much and gets so much right, and it's easy to see the ways that CAVE's later classics stand on its shoulders.
The chain-based scoring system and iconic ship types lend the game a nice flavor, but even with a good flavor DonPachi can be a dry, tough steak sometimes. The stage layouts are fun but a little muted, rarely blasting off into the full-blown controlled chaos and mayhem that the very best STGs trade in. The sound is muddy as hell and the soundtrack isn't hitting. The final two stages of the game are each fully five minutes long (double the length of stage 3), and the encounters within them can't save it all from becoming a bit of a slog. The chain system is a solid blueprint but the timer is so short and strict that it's limiting; the sequel would loosen that timer up a bit, allowing for more intricate routing and the ability to chain entire stages.
CAVE's debut is a very good time, but it has neither the flash and fire of its older cousin Batsugun, nor the refinement of its younger brother DoDonPachi.
That announcer does own though.
DonPachi serves up a meat and potatoes bullet hell experience in the early days of the subgenre. Being the first game from CAVE and in multiple ways a torchbearer for Toaplan’s legacy, DonPachi has a lot to prove. As a promise of great things to come it gets high marks, but as CAVE’s grand arrival in itself? It leaves me craving something more.
Don't get me wrong, I like DonPachi a lot and there's plenty to appreciate here. This game introduced three iconic ship types of varying strengths and weaknesses, nailed down the series-staple rapid shot/focused laser weapon that existed in embryonic form in V-Five, and brought with it an innovative scoring system based on killing chains of enemies in rapid succession to stack up massive point multipliers. DonPachi tries so much and gets so much right, and it's easy to see the ways that CAVE's later classics stand on its shoulders.
The chain-based scoring system and iconic ship types lend the game a nice flavor, but even with a good flavor DonPachi can be a dry, tough steak sometimes. The stage layouts are fun but a little muted, rarely blasting off into the full-blown controlled chaos and mayhem that the very best STGs trade in. The sound is muddy as hell and the soundtrack isn't hitting. The final two stages of the game are each fully five minutes long (double the length of stage 3), and the encounters within them can't save it all from becoming a bit of a slog. The chain system is a solid blueprint but the timer is so short and strict that it's limiting; the sequel would loosen that timer up a bit, allowing for more intricate routing and the ability to chain entire stages.
CAVE's debut is a very good time, but it has neither the flash and fire of its older cousin Batsugun, nor the refinement of its younger brother DoDonPachi.
That announcer does own though.
1993
The joy of blowing things up.
Batsugun marks an inflection point in the history of scrolling shooters. The joys of good ol’ dodging and shooting had been long established in the genre, and Toaplan themselves had done much to further amp up their intensity in games like Dogyuun and V-Five. But Batsugun takes those fundamental pleasures and finds a freshly maximalist lens through which to express them. Batsugun goes BIG. Dozens and dozens of fiery bullets scream down the battlefield while the player hurls just as many back, and when fully powered up the player’s fire can completely blanket the screen. The player’s bomb shocks the eyes with a sea of blue light, destroying anything in sight and providing just a moment to breath and to blink. The extremely charismatic visuals and soundtrack back up the bombast of the gameplay, declaring to anyone who’ll listen with deafening, electric clarity that bullet-hell has arrived.
Part of what makes Batsugun really special though, is not just the scale of the experience but the clear consideration to detail throughout it. Various targeted choices in the game design are made to facilitate this new sort of mayhem. The hitbox of the player’s ship is made smaller than usual for the genre up till now (but not quite small enough!). Players respawn on death right where they died, no checkpoints to have to return to, with powerup items spawned on screen with them to get them back up to proper lethality. There’s even an RPG-inspired leveling system, where as players destroy enemies they earn XP, and each new level represents a new, higher floor for their destructive capabilities, which ensures that a death on stage 5 isn’t the end of a run, just a recoverable setback. Not all of these ideas were new, but Batsugun uses them all in combination with mostly excellent encounter design and bullet patterns to create lightning in a bottle.
The bosses are showstoppers, hulking metal monsters that look like they could take a zillion bullets and then a few more. Of these the most imposing is easily the stage 4 boss, Jupiter, a flying warship that stretches beyond the far edge of the screen. You have to creep up its bulk steadily, dodging curtains of flak and blasting it apart piece by piece until one or both of you is reduced to a lump of hot metal and cast back down to earth. These bosses showcase that delicious mixture of simultaneous fixed and aimed bullet patterns that would be a staple of future games by CAVE, and there’s an addictive quality to learning to speak their language, reading a pattern and weaving through it on a mixture of knowledge, intuition, and breakneck gumption.
Scoring is both brutal and busted, punishing deaths harshly and requiring a drawn out milking strategy on the aforementioned stage 4 boss, but sticking to survival is more than enough for this one. The later revision Batsugun Special makes a few tweaks to the scoring, shrinks the player hitbox even further, and also grants players a shield that will protect them from a single shot, and which regenerates on every level up. That small cushion of protection is just enough for less skilled players (like myself) to buy in to the apparent brutality of this genre and say to themselves “I can actually do this.” It’s a testament to the talent of the craftsmen at Toaplan that with their final game they not only created a work worthy of their storied history, but also brought to life something so confident and original.
Game absolutely rips. You should play it!
Batsugun marks an inflection point in the history of scrolling shooters. The joys of good ol’ dodging and shooting had been long established in the genre, and Toaplan themselves had done much to further amp up their intensity in games like Dogyuun and V-Five. But Batsugun takes those fundamental pleasures and finds a freshly maximalist lens through which to express them. Batsugun goes BIG. Dozens and dozens of fiery bullets scream down the battlefield while the player hurls just as many back, and when fully powered up the player’s fire can completely blanket the screen. The player’s bomb shocks the eyes with a sea of blue light, destroying anything in sight and providing just a moment to breath and to blink. The extremely charismatic visuals and soundtrack back up the bombast of the gameplay, declaring to anyone who’ll listen with deafening, electric clarity that bullet-hell has arrived.
Part of what makes Batsugun really special though, is not just the scale of the experience but the clear consideration to detail throughout it. Various targeted choices in the game design are made to facilitate this new sort of mayhem. The hitbox of the player’s ship is made smaller than usual for the genre up till now (but not quite small enough!). Players respawn on death right where they died, no checkpoints to have to return to, with powerup items spawned on screen with them to get them back up to proper lethality. There’s even an RPG-inspired leveling system, where as players destroy enemies they earn XP, and each new level represents a new, higher floor for their destructive capabilities, which ensures that a death on stage 5 isn’t the end of a run, just a recoverable setback. Not all of these ideas were new, but Batsugun uses them all in combination with mostly excellent encounter design and bullet patterns to create lightning in a bottle.
The bosses are showstoppers, hulking metal monsters that look like they could take a zillion bullets and then a few more. Of these the most imposing is easily the stage 4 boss, Jupiter, a flying warship that stretches beyond the far edge of the screen. You have to creep up its bulk steadily, dodging curtains of flak and blasting it apart piece by piece until one or both of you is reduced to a lump of hot metal and cast back down to earth. These bosses showcase that delicious mixture of simultaneous fixed and aimed bullet patterns that would be a staple of future games by CAVE, and there’s an addictive quality to learning to speak their language, reading a pattern and weaving through it on a mixture of knowledge, intuition, and breakneck gumption.
Scoring is both brutal and busted, punishing deaths harshly and requiring a drawn out milking strategy on the aforementioned stage 4 boss, but sticking to survival is more than enough for this one. The later revision Batsugun Special makes a few tweaks to the scoring, shrinks the player hitbox even further, and also grants players a shield that will protect them from a single shot, and which regenerates on every level up. That small cushion of protection is just enough for less skilled players (like myself) to buy in to the apparent brutality of this genre and say to themselves “I can actually do this.” It’s a testament to the talent of the craftsmen at Toaplan that with their final game they not only created a work worthy of their storied history, but also brought to life something so confident and original.
Game absolutely rips. You should play it!