Poverty Game Night

Seriously, Like, C'mon

2014-08-28T23:55:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I get something annoying stuck in the back of my mind and it periodically returns to the forefront to annoy me further. That something has lately (a while ago now) been the situation with Mighty Number 9's new community manager. For those that do not know, basically, Comcept (or whoever is in charge of this part of the Mighty Number 9 project) hired a community manager, Dina Abou Karam, and after it was announced to the community, the community discovered that she(!) was possibly a feminist(!!) that might not be a huge Mega Man fan(!!!). For those that can't tell, those are sarcastic exclamation points (sarcasclamation points?) because, seriously, why does anyone care. So, let me explain exclamation point by exclamation point why it is that I don't care.

!. It would nice if I didn't have to explain this one, but given the way that "gamers" have reacted, I guess I do. You see, I have this crazy idea that women are people, and that they are capable of being community managers for videogames. This is one of many reasons I don't like to identify myself as a "gamer." On top if the general perception that "gamers" are dudes that spend their free time yelling at and shooting teenagers online, there are also people that identify as "gamers" that think it's cool to harass people for who they are. The subset of people that play video games is much larger and more diverse than the subset of people that fall into the subset of people that are actually like what the public perceives "gamers" to be. I consider myself to be a person that plays videogames, just as Dina Abou Karam is a person that is a woman. This comparison is starting to feel a bit forced, and I fear it may be unfair, as being a woman is quite a bit different than being a person that plays videogames. I'm not trying to lessen the importance of being a woman, just using a comparison to make "gamers" feel bad about themselves, which I'm pretty sure means that "gamers" will now consider me the great Satan. I'm making this too much about me. The point is there is a large amount of diversity in the people that enjoy video games, and the is no reason that diversity should not be present in the groups that make video games or manage their communities.

!!. Let's assume that she is the most radical feminist there is. What is the worst thing the most radical feminist could do in the position of community manager for Mighty No. 9? Is she going to manage all the men out of the community? Is she going to lobby the developers to put robot pants on all of the robot ladies? Come the fuck on. All of this is just people freaking out because they believe that Anita Sarkeesian is somehow destroying videogames. The thing about the Feminist Frequency videos is that they don't actually contain particularly inflammatory opinions. Most of the internet rage seems to be blatant misogyny disguised as rage about the money raised on Kickstarter. The way Kickstarter works is that if you want to support something you throw money at it. If you don't like something but someone else funds it, you're not out a god damn thing, so what are you mad about? It doesn't affect, unless of course the mere existence of a video series raising the issue of the media's problematic portrayal of women harms you in some measurable way, in which case you must be have some serious issues.

!!!. The thing about being a fan is that if you are not one, then you can become one. The whole idea that someone who is not a fan of Mega Man can't like Mighty No. 9 is awful. The fan base of Mega Man has been shrinking or drifting away for a long time now, and if Mighty No. 9 is meant solely for those that are left, then Comcept should just quit right now. Mighty No. 9 needs to get new fans, and who is to say that someone that is not already a fan of either can't become one? Quit trying to throw people out of their club and invite them in. It would be best for everyone. You are not the sum of the things you like and nobody is trying to steal or appropriate your identity (except maybe big corporations trying to sell t-shirts). Be nice to people that want to get into a thing because it is cool to talk to people that are interested in the same things as you, even people who don't look just like you and wear shitty fedoras with shitty t-shirts. Also, even if the community manager never cares deeply about Mighty No. 9, the developers clearly do, and that's what matters. Capcom currently has great community managers that love the company's history, but it is easy to get the feeling that the developers don't, and that is one of the reasons things seem so screwed up.

It's been about five months since I originally started writing this, and while I have to admit most of my reasons for thinking about this specific situation has been because I wanted to finish writing this, it still annoys me. Regardless, it was really just a jumping off point to write about my feelings regarding various problems with "gamer culture." I'd like to think that the furor of stupidity over the issue has calmed down, but it has likely just moved elsewhere. Meanwhile, Dina has been doing a fine job of providing info to the backers of Mighty No. 9 and has yet to find a way to properly destroy their millions of dollars/dreams.

It’s been about three months since the last rewrite, and the world is still a stupid place. People are still flatly stating their opinions and other people are responding not by simply explaining that they disagree, but by calling people fucking monsters. Of course, anyone is free to say whatever, but I just wish people would think about why it needs to be said and how it will have an impact. For example, I am writing this because it bothers me when people act shitty and I want people to be more considerate. This is coming from a place of anger and frustration, but not a place of hate. I want things to be better. I want people to be better. If you are arguing on the internet with someone you don’t personally know, personal attacks are really not the way to go. Maybe don’t call the person you disagree with a slut. Maybe try stating your opinion without being an asshole. Maybe try not having an opinion that another person is subhuman.

The Call of Duty Dog and You

2013-05-23T15:01:00.001-04:00

With the recent reveal of Call of Duty: Ghosts, people have been very excited about the inclusion of a tactical dog partner. The reasons are obvious, the dog is cute and the footage of a real dog being motion captured was even more cute. I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but this can only end in one of a few ways, especially with the writer talking about how he expects you to be forming all these deep, personal bonds with the characters.

1. The Dog Dies

Near the end of the game, about forty five minutes in, the dog will die in either a cheesy heroic act or a cheesy “shocking” and sudden cutscene. With the franchise's history of low brow shock value moments, my money is on the latter. The player character will be all sad for a few moments, and the player will be at least a little sad because a dog dying is always sad, but the moment will undermined by the fact that the player character has, up to this point, already killed hundreds of human beings, whom will never go home to their families or pet dogs again.

2. You Die

The player character dies because this is war and that sort of thing happens. The last thing the player sees is the dog looking sad and licking the player character's face, which is to say the screen. It would be a bit schmaltzy, but this is probably the best case scenario.

3. You Are The Dog

This isn't going to happen, but I might actually play a new Call of Duty game if the assumed player characters dies in the opening cutscene, then the player goes on a rampage of revenge as the dog with a side-mounted chain-gun and the ability to bark in air strikes.

The Horrible World of Smartphone Bootleggery

2012-10-12T17:36:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid my family would annually go on vacation to Florida to see family and do vacation stuff. We would often go to flea markets and outlet malls and stuff like that to find weird stuff for whatever reason was not in the flea markets and outlet malls of Michigan. At one point I got a wall scroll of Iori from The King of Fighters, and another I got an amazing bootleg toy of Zero from Mega Man X. It was clearly based off of the mold for the old Bandai model kits, but it was already assembled and the colors were all wrong. All his armor was metallic silver and his hair was blue. Sure it was janky, but it also looked cool and it was very cheap. Also, the paint was so thick, though probably also poisonous, that the joints would actually stay together, unlike a certain X model. My point is that bootlegs are awful, but entertaining, and on occasion might accidentally do something right.

I love "super fighters" and "mortal kombats"!

This memory came to me recently as I was browsing the Google Play store, looking for some new games to waste two minutes of my day, and I got much the same feeling as I had when browsing shady flea markets. Everyone knows of the big cases, Gameloft has made a great deal of money aping popular console titles, particularly with their Modern Combat series that follows the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games. And of course there is Zynga, which has become a mobile and social gaming juggernaut, mainly by stealing games and painting over them with their terrible art style. I'd like to say that Zynga is the The Asylum of video games, but that doesn't really fit. The Asylum is a small company eating the table scraps of Hollywood by making mockbusters. If the Asylum were actually like Zynga, then Transformers would be a small indie movie, and Transmorphers would have made millions.

No, games in the Google Play store are often much more like those bootleg toys found in flea markets, made as cheaply as possible to capitalize on the work of others. FYI, I am not going to link to the games because I don't think people should actually install them. Searching for The King of Fighters, the first result is not The King of Fighters Android, the official version of KoF for the platform, but King of Fighters – History by Boxing Games. This game uses the name of KoF, has an icon that is from Street Fighter Alpha 2, and the game itself is just an emulated version of Data East's Fighter's History. I appreciate the irony, and I would probably laugh the whole thing off it weren't for the fact the game has banner ads, and someone is theoretically making money off of it.

Just under KoF is Kung Fu Do Fighting by WaGame, starring a main character that looks something between Kim Kaphwan and his son Kim Jae Hoon from the Fatal Fury series in a Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Ryu intro pose. The sprites are too small and poorly animated to have been directly copied from anything, but the design inspirations are obvious. The game is just way too limited to be good in any way. It's not even possible to crouch, and the only thing need to win is to hold forward and hit the single attack button until the opponent is done, possibly pressing the super button when the bar is full. The classiest bit about the game is probably the banner ads that cover up life bars and the video ads that play between matches.

Capcom is not immune to this sort of shenanigans either. A search for Street Fighter quickly turns up the game Super Fighter Heroes, referred to as Street Fighter Heroes in game menus, by successful copyright infringer (and probably the same company/person as Boxing Games) LOVEMARIO LTD. For some reason they didn't just use the rom of Street Fighter 2, and the game is actually an emulated version of Jaleco's Brawl Brothers. It even says so right there on the character select screen, which is the first screenshot on the game's page. Of course, there are ads abound. Also of note is LOVEMARIO LTD's Zombies Hunt - Save The People, which is Zombies Ate My Neighbors. Another rom with banner ads is Fatal Mission-MegaMan X by HAPPY MOBILE LTD (AKA the same people again), which, obviously, Mega Man X.

On the slightly higher end are the games from Playphone. While they certainly steal ideas, art, designs, and general aesthetics from others, they at the very least make their own games with some minimum amount of quality. For example, a search for Castlevania will turn of Castle of Shadows, a game that looks to be trying extremely hard to be an IGA Castlevania game. Sadly, it is only like one in looks because it is a very boring, linear, hack and slash game. The type where everything is just a clusterfuck of explosions and numbers.

Another game from them is Street Fight, which is a beat 'em up with a whole lot of artistic theft. Most obvious is that the main character's portrait is clearly the a drawn over version of Kyo's The King of Fighters XIII art, while the female lead is swiped King. The art on the game's page includes K', Maxima's back, and a bunch of character portraits from The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match. Why make your own shit when you can just throw your logo over a screenshot from the intro of 02UM? Other bits of lacking originality can be found in the main character's special moves. And to top it off, the loud screens feature King from Tekken for some reason.

Totally not K's Crow Bites.

Totally not that one move Benimaru does.

I've always liked Metal Slug, but I always thought it was just too precisely controlled, well animated, and fun to play. Thankfully Playphone has my back with Assaulter and Metal Slugs, a knockoff of Metal Slug that plays itself. All the player has to do is wag his or her finger around to move and the game will do all the aiming and shooting. The Metal Slug always had a lot of shit going on screen, but it was always manageable and understandable. With Assaulter, it doesn't matter that the game is a clusterfuck of explosions and numbers because the player doesn't need know what is going on because the game plays itself.

There are many other curious games on Google Play. Zombie Hunt for Resident Evil by digicave is a simple zombie shooting gallery with gyroscopic controls that has Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City branding because fuck the police. Escape From Three O Four by Harris Co. Ltd is a point and click room escape adventure game Silent Hill branding because fuck you. Ken GO by iTsu Mobile Inc. is what I can only describe as a Ken Masters simulator because fuck fuck fuck fuck. I give up. I don't know how much money is being made off of this stuff, but it has to be something, and that is just wrong. I now feel bad about buying that bootleg Zero. I'm sorry Capcom, this is all my fault.

Yo Dawg...

2012-01-13T20:42:00.001-05:00

The fervor has died down now that the show has ended, but Pimp My Ride was a rather popular show for a while there. I remember hearing other people talk about it and I dismissed it as a stupid concept, but after actually watching the show I had to admit it is pretty entertaining. The host, Xzibit, comes off as a likable guy that just likes to help people out and do retarded things to cars. Near the end of the show's lifespan, in 2006, a video game developed by by Eutechnyx was released for the Xbox 360, PS2, PSP, and Wii. Eutechnyx is most known for their various racing games such as Big Mutha Truckers, so it is surprising that they resisted the urge to put racing into a game about cars.

Now, it has been a few years since I've seen the show, but based on my recollections and my experience with this game, I can guarantee that every episode of Pimp My Ride went something like this:

Xzibit shows up at some fan's house and he or she completely loses his or her shit.
The owner explains how busted the car is while showing it off, and at one point during this Xzibit slowly turns to the camera with a facial expression that says “Is this dude serious?!”
Xzibit takes the car, stranding the owner for an undetermined amount of time.
The shop guys fix up the car, pausing exactly twice for hijinks.
The owner is brought in to see the car that he or she can no longer afford insurance on and promptly covers his or her mouth with a fist with one hand and pointing at the car with the other, all the while making a “doooooooooooo” sound.
Xzibit says that he heard that the owner likes some variable, so they put that variable in the car.
The owner takes the car home, and after Xzibit and the cameras leave the owner turns to the gathered friends and family and asks “Who the fuck told Xzibit that I 'like bugs'? Because I really didn't need my sun roof turned into a fucking ant farm!”

Pimp My Ride: The Show: The Game isn't quite that complicated. In the game, the player is some sort of assistant to Xzibit, that most of the work on the show. Unlike reality, the show doesn't work with a specific shop on the West Coast, but contracts every bit of the car out to separate shops in Pimp City. Pimp City, “home to some of the sweetest rides and tightest whips in the world,” exists as a simple sandbox to make the player drive around. The basic premise is the still the same, Xzibit takes some messed up car and gets it pimped out. To make it more like a game, the element of a rival shop that will go out and take the exact same car that Xzibit is pimping and pimps it in their own way, so the player needs to outpimp the competition in order to win. This whole setup seems like a poor business decision on both sides.

The actual mechanics of the game are dirt simple, split between boring open-world driving and bland QTE/rhythm minigames. First, the player selects a target whose car shall be pimped, then it is necessary to gather up a minimum amount of cash to upgrade the car. The ways this is done is to drive around town and show off the player's current vehicle. I don't know how yelling at people in the street, running into cars, or dancing next to a moving vehicle gets cash, but that is just how things work in Pimp City. In order to holla at passerby's the player needs to drive slowly past a group of people, put the car in cruise control, and then press the prompted random series of buttons (see: QTE).

The “best” part of the game is the Ghost Ride The Whip minigame, which is basically just a dancing minigame, but the character is dancing alongside a moving car instead of on some stupid dance floor. What confuses me about this is that it might be controlled in one of two ways. In one, the buttons that need to be pressed scroll along the bottom of the screen and the player needs to press it during the short period of time that it passes through a couple of bars that get progressively closer together. Since the highest rating that can be achieved on a single step is “pimpin',” I refer to this period of time as the “pimp window.” The other variation on this minigame has the player being repeatedly prompted with a series of buttons, which needs to be pressed before a certain amount of time runs out. Neither of these are very fun, but it is probably the best part of the game simply because it is funny to watch.

After gathering up the proper amount of cash, the player drives to the target's house, Xzibit makes fun of the fictional person's fictional car, then the player is given a limited amount of time to drive around to various shops in Pimp City and get the car upgraded. Each target has a specified career or interest, so getting the most expensive parts that are related to that person will get the best results. This part is annoying because there is a strict time limit (starting at two minutes, though it can be extended), so it is important to plot routes between all the shops. Each time the player purchases a part, a very short minigame, that generally consists of wagging a stick or mashing buttons, is played in order to reduce the final price of the part. When this part of the game is over, Xzibit shows off the car to the target, and then the target chooses between the player's car or the rivals.

The target is declared to have been officially pimped and it is on to the next one. There is just hardly a game here, and I can't imagine how anyone could enjoy it enough to do more than target. The only thing that I can imagine would get anyone to this point is the fact that the final target is Xzibit. I didn't get that far, so I will forever imagine the final portion of the game as a CG Xzibit presenting a car to another CG Xzibit, and that car contains a third CG Xzibit, but just don't trust the game to end in such a strong manner. Since that doesn't actually exist, my favorite part of Pimp My Ride is that the back of the box advertises www.myspace.com/xzibit. I guess that's better than giving out an AOL Keyword.

Perfect Dark: Flawed Color

2012-01-07T01:41:00.000-05:00

I'm a big fan of Perfect Dark, a fact found in the couple of hundred hours I put into the game on the N64, because it just does a lot of stuff that I like. It has a near-future science fiction setting, a strong female lead, objective-based level design, a bunch of crazy weapons, and some great multiplayer maps. Sadly, I am not here to illuminate the game I love, or even the embarrassing prequel everyone tries to forget that is Perfect Dark Zero, but the embarrassing prequel that most people have had the good sense to forget, Perfect Dark for the Game Boy Color. Also developed by Rare, though presumably by a different internal team, and released a couple of months after the original game in 2000, it is a game that offers very little justification for its own existence.

Going in, I wasn't really optimistic, but after the pleasant surprise of James Bond 007, and knowing about the quality of Metal Gear Solid (also known as Metal Gear: Ghost Babel), I at least had a little bit of hope. This was a foolish hope because there just isn't much of anything worthwhile in this version of Perfect Dark. The first thing one might notice about the game is the oversized cart and the requirement for AAA battery to power. . . something. I wasn't expecting something completely crazy like the light sensor in Boktai, but it was still disappointing to find out that it is a simple rumble pack. It isn't put to any particularly good use, and it's not very powerful, so it's kind of the opposite of the greatness found in Drill Dozer's cart.

Things start out on a high note with some quality music that, though it is coming from the Game Boy Color sound chip, feels like proper Perfect Dark music, with a distinct energetic composition. Any hopes for a quality sound track were quickly dashed as starting the game switched to a story sequence with horribly garbled voice samples played over text, and the music never came back. Yeah, throughout all of the actual play of the game, there is no music, just silence interrupted by gunfire and the garbled samples of guards screaming in their death throes.

The only thing I can be really complimentary on is the game's sprite work. They are big and surprisingly well animated, and pleasant to look at, but this actually causes many of the game's problems. The large sprites take up most of the screen, so it is impossible for the player to get a good sense of the surroundings. It wouldn't be such a big deal if it were a simple overhead run-and-gun game, but with an emphasis on stealth, and an early mission that requires stealth, it makes it a huge pain. I can't even count the number of times I tried to slowly move through an area, attempting to be stealthy, only to be spotted by a soldier just as they appeared on the edge of the screen.

I suppose I should detail how the game is actually played. Most of it is controlled from an overhead perspective, with pressing a direction causing Joanna to move in that direction and double tapping a direction making her run. The Select button loots dead guards, Start opens a menu to select weapons and items, B uses an item, and A fires a weapon in the direction Joanna is facing. One weird thing about the game's stealth is that guards are immediately alerted by the player running, but not by gunfire. I guess the guns could be silenced, but they don't appear to be. Taking enemies unaware is really useful because a close attack on an unaware guard kills them instantly.

While this is how the majority of game controls, there are also mini games forced upon the player, to break up the monotonous levels I guess. Entering doorways sometimes unexpectedly enters a shooting gallery mode. During this the directions will move a cursor, and the player needs to hit A to shoot the targets that pop up and B to reload. It is just really boring, and reeks of laziness on the developers part. Even more lazy are the door unlock sequences, which is just a simple color sequence matching game. I don't know who designed this security system, but it seems decidedly insecure compared to even a simple number keypad.

That's what I get for having hope. Perfect Dark is a perfect example of a crappy cash-in portable title based on a popular console game. For a long time I assumed that Perfect Dark Zero was Rare's way of saying that they just didn't really care about the franchise. If I had played this, maybe I would have known that they put all their love into the original title and just cashed out. I can easily say that I just don't like this Perfect Dark and that is it is a horrible mess. Years have passed since I last played Zero, back when it launched, so maybe I misjudged it. Maybe it isn't as bad as I recall, and I just hated it for not being what I wanted, but that's a topic for another day.

A Fate Worse Than Game Over

2011-12-16T13:11:00.000-05:00

One feature of video games I like that I don't seem to see as much as I'd like lately is the ability to fail without a simple game over or restart. I just think that is really entertaining to make a bad choice or just generally screw up in a game and be rewarded with the game changing in some way that is meant to make me feel guilty. It sort of bothers me when I see the lazier side of this, like in the first Assassin's Creed didn't do anything to discourage the player from wanting to kill civilians, so attacking them just drains the player's health. I find it way more interesting when a game predicts the bad behavior of its players and responds to it in a unique way. A good example of this is getting swarmed by angry cuckoos in Zelda games.

This phenomena used to be typified by the phenomena known as the “bad ending.” If the player doesn't do everything right, he or she is rewarded with a game ending in which things just don't work out. It is a neat way to use the interactivity of a game to alter a story, and sadly it doesn't happen as much lately because stories are so set in stone. The only modern example of the “bad ending” that I can think of is the ending of Mass Effect 2 in which everyone, including the main character, die. Sadly, the success of Metal Gear Solid's movie-like story structure has led to it becoming the norm. Granted, that approach has the advantage if the writers have a strong story, but it really should not have been seen as the only way to make a game.

One of my favorite “bad endings” is the one in Streets of Rage. After playing all the way to the final boss, the crime boss Mr. X, he offers the players to join him. From here, the players can refuse him and beat him down to get the “good ending,” or accept his offer and get sent back a few levels before fighting all the way back to him to beat him again and get the same ending. It works the same way in single player, but there is an extra ending if one player chooses to join and the other refuses. This leads to a death match between the two. If the player that chose to join wins, then chooses to refuse to join the second time Mr. X asks, then the player will kill Mr. X and take his place as the gang leader. The player is then treated to a credit sequence in which their character sits in the boss's chair and laughs maniacally.

Streets of Rage 3 didn't have such an evil ending, but it did have a couple of interesting failure endings. For example, if the difficulty is set below normal, the game is cut short, with the heroes defeating a Mr. X, seeing that he was a robot, and basically just going “what the fuck?” The robot then tells to step up and play the game on a real difficulty level. If playing on a higher difficulty level, the level after that has the player attempt to rescue a general before the poison in the room kills him. If he isn't saved the player is taken to an alternate final stage and gets another bad ending. If he is saved the player is taken to the actual final stage and fights the real final boss. During this boss fight a timer is counting down, and if the boss is defeated in time, everything is alright, but if not the player gets an almost good ending in which the enemy is destroyed, but his bombs go off and the city is fucked.

There are some games that I forget have multiple endings. I played the original Resident Evil so many times that I basically know exactly what to do when I play it, so I honestly don't know the particulars of how to get anything other than the best endings. Obviously, not getting the MO disks to free the other main character means that they will not be saved, but other than that the only other thing I know affects the plot is whether or Jill waits for Barry to return with rope after the fight with the snake. I know that Barry and Rebecca can die in Jill's and Chris's game respectively. The funniest ending, though, is the one in which the player is completely incompetent and doesn't kill the Tyrant. The self-destruct sequence isn't even activated, so I guess there would still be a bunch of zombies and BOWs wandering around the woods, too.

So, at this point pretty much everyone knows that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has a fake out ending in which the player kills Richter, and there is actually a whole inverse castle to go through. What I believe less people know, or at least less people have bothered to get, is the “worst ending.” To get this ending, the player has to obtain the glasses from Maria that allows Alucard to see what is controlling Richter, then kill him anyway. It is just a hilarious dick move on Alucard's part, and in the context the ending is incredibly awkward. Maria asks Alucard how Richter is, and when he says “I'm sorry” it almost sounds sarcastic. She then tells him that she won't stop until she finds out what was wrong with Richter, to which Alucard basically says “yeah, good luck with that, lady. Later.” What a bastard.

While Deus Ex: Human Revolution caught some flak for not being as malleable as its predecessors, and the main plot had only a little variance, there was actually a lot small, interesting ways that the player can affect future events. For example, if the player dillydallies too much before the first mission, most of the hostages, which normally can be saved, will be killed before the player even gets there. This is a good way to start off the game with people being pretty damned angry with Jensen. Later, there is a part in the game in which you can accidentally kind of ruin a guy's life. He shows up later blaming Jensen for his troubles. In my play through I told him I was sorry and that I'd help him get a new job and what not, but in my friend's play through he told the guy to fuck off and the dude pulled a gun on Jensen, a thoroughly suicidal choice of action.

Basically, I like games that reward incompetence or dickery with guilt and shame. It is just funny to me. The main reason that I find Heavy Rain entertaining is because it allows the player to be completely worthless and ineffectual, but the game continues on anyway. For example, I played Shelby as a complete coward, and it was hilarious in a really sort sad way. After seeing the jerk boyfriend go into the dead kid's mom's apartment, I walked up to the door, listened to her get beat up for a bit, knocked on the door, then after he came and yelled at me, I walked away instead of kicking in the door and fighting him. When the convenience store was being robbed I hid behind a rack of chips and watched as the robber murdered the clerk. The next time I saw the dead kid's mom her face was all bruised up from having been severely beaten. I'm a monster.

Poverty Haul 12/15/2011

2011-12-15T17:50:00.001-05:00

Today I was out shopping for the holidays, and I figured that, since I was out, I should hit up some of the usual spots in search of poverty games. I was in the same plaza as a Game Stop, so I went there first, but it was a waste of time as usual. There was some Friends trivia game for PS2 for a couple of bucks, and I probably could have been talked into purchasing it if I were out with friends, but since I was alone I walked away from it. Maybe another day. Next, I went to my preferred local used game store, Game On, which generally has games in pretty good condition for a reasonable price. They hadn't had a new influx of SNES or NES game in a while, so I was pleased to see that they had restocked a bit. I picked up Pit Fighter for the former because it is awful and StarTropics for the latter because I know people that like it.

Ever since I had started going there, they have always had all the PS1 games behind glass, and because there was quite a bit of stuff there it was tough to browse, but now they've moved out most of the crappier PS1 games to easily accessible shelving and only kept the games that are worth a shit behind the glass. It was here that I found a copy of the early 3D fighter Vs. From there I picked out three Game Boy games from the tub. I chose Perfect Dark for GBC because I forgot it existed, Heiankyo Alien because it has a weird name and label, and my personal favorite a mystery game. The employees always kindly offer to test it to see what it is, but I always tell them that would ruin the fun. Look forward to a future post in which the identity of the game is revealed. Hopefully it isn't just Tetris or something.

The total was around twenty bucks. From there I went to the nearby Goodwill, that always seems to have something bizarre to find. Today I found a the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for thirty dollars, but I left it there because I just don't care about the game. More to my liking is the Game Boy-shaped Game Boy travel case. Back before I had a Game Boy to call my own, my friend that did have one also had this case, so I am all nostalgic about it. For two bucks I couldn't say no. The section that usually contains video games was mostly picked clean, with only the games that blended in well with the CD's and a couple of SNES games to be found. I didn't need another copy of Donkey Kong Country, but I would pay sixty-nine cents for Star Fox just to have a picture of the silly Fox puppet on the label, let alone for the game. Not a bad day overall.

Mega Man & Bass: Not A Fishing Spinoff

2011-12-15T02:57:00.001-05:00

I've written about Mega Man quite a bit here on the site, probably because with the sheer amount of games in the series there is bound to be some overlooked gems and some bad games. I am quite fond of the series, so that is probably why I have mostly focused on the stuff that I like, so I guess that makes this article something of a turning point. Now, Mega Man & Bass isn't really a bad Mega Man game, but it isn't a great one either. Don't be surprised if I ever write about another game in the franchise that I like, considering I haven't written about Maverick Hunter X or the Zero series yet, but with this game it feels like things are probably trending down into the inevitability of things like Mega Man X7, Mega Man Network Transmission, and Mega Man Soccer.

Anyway, Mega Man & Bass has a rather bizarre history. It was originally released in 1998 on the Super Famicom under the title using the characters' Japanese names Rockman & Forte. Not only is 1998 a really late time to release a game for the system, but was also released after the series had already moved on to more newer systems like the Playstation and Saturn with Mega Man 8. The regression in system is probably why it was a spin off instead of being called Mega Man 9, though that didn't stop people from mislabeling the rom because it was some strange Japan-only Mega Man game that came out after 8.

That rom was the way I initially played the game, considering it wasn't initially released over here on account of the SNES being basically dead at that point making a localization financially stupid, but when the game was ported to the Game Boy Advance in 2002 an international release made more sense. It was probably a disappointment for most people that waited four years for it, but it is a solid, if mostly by-the-book, Mega Man game. Considering that Mega Man Zero came out a bit before, I can only imagine that Mega Man & Bass felt incredibly dated upon the time it was released on GBA.

Instead of focusing on anything that is within the usual Mega Man game formula, I'll explain what is different. The first and most obvious thing is the ability to play as not just Mega Man, but Bass. Thankfully, Bass isn't just a sprite swap, but actually has a unique play style that is somewhat closer to that of characters from the X series, though he can't wall jump. Instead of a slide he has dash that is executed by double-tapping forward, which combined with his ability to double jump allows him to jump further and higher than the Blue Bomber, but keeps him from getting under low walls and attacks. Similarly, instead of charge shots, Bass shoots a series of rapidfire shots. Holding down the button fires continuously and locks Bass into place, allowing him to fire in various directions.

The differences in playable characters is reflected in the strategies need to defeat enemies and the level designs, such that instead of one route there are sometimes branching paths or secret areas that can only be reached by a specific character. It's not very extensive, but it does make the levels a bit more interesting. Also meant to spice things up is the way levels are unlocked in a branching pattern and the shop system, similar to the one from Mega Man 8, that allows the player to purchase upgrades and extra lives.

Even though the game is largely derivative, reusing art assets and even a couple of bosses, from 8, it is still a new game with new levels, and the addition of a playable Bass makes it feel pretty fresh. And at least the reused bosses have completely new attacks and patterns, so even when it is familiar it is challenging. On the subject of challenging, the game is pretty difficult. It's not the hardest game in the franchise, but it is considerably less lenient than other Mega Man games of the late 90's. For me, being able to unlock the ability to combine Bass and his dog Treble and fly around makes the game charming enough for me to put up with it. Mega Man & Bass isn't a great, oft-forgotten Mega Man title, but it is an adequate one with enough gimmicks to keep it entertaining.

The Disappointment of APB

2011-12-10T13:14:00.001-05:00

Very few games have disappointed me as much APB: All Points Bulletin. I was initially sold on the concept alone: a GTA-style MMO based around cops and robbers. It seems like such a great idea, and since it was being developed by Realtime Worlds, the company formed from ex-GTA staff that made the excellent Crackdown, I had a lot of faith that it would be pulled off. Add on to that a really complex system of character customization, and I was really excited for the game. When I finally played the game I was massively disappointed because it just isn't fun. The concept is still great, and I don't think the game itself isn't salvageable, but it will never be the game I wanted it to be.

I actually got into the closed beta of APB the first time around, and I was really excited until I tried to run the game. My aging PC just wasn't up to the task and even though the game loaded, it was completely unplayable even at the lowest settings. I decided to put off playing the game until I got a new graphics card. Between the time of the closed beta and my getting better PC hardware, which was less than two years, APB was released, it did horribly, it was shut down, Realtime Worlds closed, the game was bought up by K2 Network, it was given to Reloaded Entertainment to work on, it remade into the free-to-play APB: Reloaded, and I got a closed beta invite for that.

Since I finally had a machine that could play it, I figured it was finally time for me to try out this APB thing, even if I had heard it wasn't very good. Thanks to K2's GamersFirst program being terrible, I wasn't actually able to download the game client, so I still couldn't play the game. So, I gave up again and forgot about the game for a few months. For whatever reason I ended up decided to try the game again a while after the Reloaded version officially launched, and few years I was finally able to play the game and be thoroughly let down by it.

The funny thing is, most of what I was excited about APB for was already realized in a better fashion while APB was still in development. I wanted an online game of cops and robbers in a large, open world, and GTA IV did that really well with its various online modes. APB just has a lot to live up to, and sadly in most ways it doesn't. The shooting is okay, but the driving is wonky, the city of San Paro isn't very interesting, and game balance that it promised just isn't there. Really, the only things that do work are the more esoteric features that may make the game interesting to the Second Life crowd, but don't actually constitute a reason to keep playing the game.

APB was billed as the first MMO that is completely skill-based, where the player that is better will win regardless of how much the other player grinds or whatever. Since it was based around gunfights, and it didn't have a stat or leveling system that would turn long-time players into bullet sponges compared to new players, this rather dubious claim makes at least a bit of sense. A head shot is a head shot, and players can't buy special body armor that makes them arbitrarily better than other players. The mechanics of shooting are solid enough that this should be the case, but it is completely fucked by the way new weapons are earned.

The starting guns aren't that good (they aren't very accurate at distance, don't shoot fast enough, have low amounts of ammunition, etc), and new guns are unlocked by completing missions, after which they must be purchased, which is to say, they are unlocked by grinding. At first I was irked that the cops' starting revolver, the exact type of weapon I prefer, was useless, and I didn't like that I needed to use the starting sub-machine gun in order to keep up with the other players, but the game didn't seem horribly unbalanced. Then I had an epiphany while a rocket screaming towards my face: “this shit just isn't fair.” I had played the game for 10 or so hours and I had only unlocked the ability to buy one new weapon, and I couldn't even afford to buy it.

That is exactly the sort of crap that I don't like about the leveling systems of modern tactical shooters, but taken to an insanely drawn out degree. The idea of balance gets completely thrown out the window in favor of making people more addicted by having them accumulate higher and higher numbers, and that makes absolutely no sense in a competitive game. Imagine if the next Street Fighter a Ryu player would need to get fifty wins before unlocking the hadouken or shoryuken. A new player is fucked because they don't have the same tools available to them. Though the competitive fighting game community seems be a lot more accepting of bullshit mechanics in their competitive games these days, I'm pretty sure they would draw the line at something like this. Anyway, the point is APB isn't balanced, and, for a game that is supposed to come down to skill, it actually forces the player to grind a great deal, all the while getting his or her ass kicked, in order to compete.

The driving controls are bad. Granted, there are very few games that make driving a car an enjoyable experience with mouse and keyboard. Generally I would only want to play a driving game with an analog controller, but for games like this that would be annoying. Mouse and keyboard is still superior on foot for shooting, so the only choice would be to switch back and forth on the fly, which is something I tried to do with San Andreas and GTA IV on PC, but I find that I always end up just using one or the other. I guess it doesn't really matter because I hate the way cars work in this game. The sense of momentum, the level of handling for turns, the way collisions work, and just everything feels wrong. If I could, I would run everywhere, but sadly the game sets objectives too far apart for this to be viable.

It is strange how dull and lifeless San Paro seems considering that it is populated by more real people than most open-world games. The architecture just seems dull compared the the crazy stuff found in Crackdown, and the intricacies of the alleys and areas that the player often runs around are just bland. The cities in GTA games often feel dirty and lived-in, but San Paro looks too clean. The way games are handled within the world is interesting, though. For example, a robber is given missions that basically come down to robbing some place, and the cops will send other players to stop the robber. What ensues is sort of like a death match or capture the flag game taking place in a shared world, so when going about one match, a player might cross paths with a bunch of other players doing their own thing. Sometimes it can be awkward, since players in separate games can't actually kill each other, presumably to prevent griefing, but it is cool to think of all the different stuff that is going on at one time.

Sadly, the features that are the most well-executed are those that have no bearing on making the actual game any fun at all. The character creation is really great, allowing for some really unique and great-looking characters instead of the ugly mess that comes from Elder Scrolls games. Other customizations are equally complex, with the ability to add custom designs on the character as tattoos, as well as on clothing. This is also held back by grinding, with clothing similarly locked and very expensive. I guess that could be the result of it going free-to-play, made that way in order to make people want to waste real cash on the game, but that is the state of the game as I played it. Another interesting feature is the ability to import a music collection that can be played from inside the cars the player drives, and if other players have the same track they will hear it coming from the car, and if they don't they will hear similar music matched from Last.fm. Players can also create their own music using in-game tools to compose it and share it with others.

I just wish APB had turned out to be the game I wanted it to be. The idea of a big open world, populated with a ton of players acting like cops and robbers battling one another is something I could really get into, but it just doesn't do those things well. The way the player gets into missions and conflicts doesn't feel fluid, the combat isn't the balanced, skill-based game that it should be, and it just isn't fun. I find the entire experience of playing the game to be depressing and incredibly disappointing. On the positive side, I never had to spend money on it, so I suppose it could have been worse.

SmackDown! 2 Knows My Roll

2011-12-08T16:53:00.001-05:00

I've said before that there are only two wrestling games worth playing: WWF No Mercy for the N64 and WWF SmackDown! 2: Know Your Role for the PS1. While the former is technically a better game, the latter has always been my favorite. It was made by Yuke's, whom make most all the wresting games since 2000, as well as UFC games, Berserk games, and the strange Evil Zone. SmackDown! 2 is fast paced, has a lot of wacky shit, and also happens to come from the era in which I watched the stuff. My opinion is no doubt clouded by nostalgia, but I contest that it is a fun game, with lots of entertaining things to do. At the very least, it is the only game I can think of that let me create a horrific effigy of Mega Man.

And that is definitely a huge factor in my love for SmackDown! 2, the options for character creation are completely insane. While most games only allow the player choose a general body type, this game allows a creator to choose the size of each individual portion of the body, thus Mega Man. I'm not going to say it is a great rendition of the character, but I still think it is pretty impressive considering the game. I mean, if I didn't mention that his helmet isn't actually a helmet, but a flatly colored turban, I don't think anyone would have figured it out. I liked using him so much that I also created Proto Man, who was decent; Bass, who was awful; and Roll, who looked like a deformed prostitute. I guess that is just how all women end up looking in the WWF.

Other interesting characters I created include Mr. T, who at least makes sense in the context of a wrestling game, and Michael Jackson. He doesn't make much sense in a wrestling match, but I was able to decently recreate him in Thriller style. It is a great deal fun watching these characters fight against some of the turn-of-the-millennium WWF stars, as well as some of the weirder bonus characters. My favorite bonus character is scrawny commentator Micheal Cole. The best part of this was that it was possible to take existing characters and edit them in various ways, which led to me creating SHIN MICHAEL COLE, a gigantic version of Michael Cole that had the moves of The Giant/Big Show.

My wackiness aside, it is a fun wrestling game. The player's moves are separated into striking and grapples, with X being one O being the other, and pressing various directions in combination with those buttons give the player different attacks. Square is a counter button that can catch striking attacks and put the player on the advantage. Some grapples may also be countered, but it is dependent on the characters current strength and also random luck. Triangle is the run button, and it, along with quick dodges performed by double tapping a direction and the general speed of striking attacks, makes the game go at a fast pace that is really enjoyable. There is a lot of maneuvering to get into the proper position to grab someone in just the right way.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is proof anything can happen in the World Wrestling Federation!

Each player also gets super bar. Each time they do damage to the opponent, it fills up, holding a stock of up to five (though the amount is adjustable and defaults at two) super strong finishers. There are two levels of grapples, the regular ones that will happen most of the time, and the dizzy ones that will only happen when the opponent is stunned. Dizzy grapples are considerably stronger, add more to the super bar, and most finishers are dizzy grapples, so dizzying the opponent is really important. The funny thing is, all of the best finishers hurt the opponent a lot, so if the player has enough stocked up, they can do one, pick the opponent up and do it again, repeating until the super bar is empty. The funniest part is that the bigger the finisher, the more super bar it gives, so instead of a fully stocked Undertaker being able to do five of his “the last ride” he can do eight in a row. I'm pretty sure if he did that in a match wrestling fans would shit their pants.

One thing that SmackDown! 2 gets right is the amount of variety it offers for matches. There are a ton of different types of matches, not just the typical normal matches, cage matches, and royal rumbles. Those are there, but so are ladder matches, casket matches, table matches, and my personal favorite, the Hell in a cell. Some of these are pretty janky, like how it is particularly difficult to grab the belt in a ladder match, but for the most part they are a lot of fun. Another favorite of mine are anywhere fall matches, in which it is possible to explore a rather large amount of interconnected rooms and attack the opponent with various odd weapons. There are things like shopping carts, plates, park benches, and stuff like that, but the best is the area that has routinely passing cars, which can be used to commit vehicular manslaughter. Nothing feels better than whipping Shane McMahon into an oncoming car and rolling out of the way at the last second.

SmackDown! 2 is just fucking crazy in so many ways it is hard not to love it. With the character creation, the fast combat, and the weird season mode, I just can't recommend it enough. It has some problems, particularly the atrocious load times and some weird glitches, most of which are associated with the season mode. I mean, it is funny when The Rock and The Rock are satisfied with their victory, standing next to each other conjoined at the shoulder and nodding at each other to show how satisfied they are. Still, it is a fun mode that really captures the weirdness of wrestling story lines. I don't know why people do back flips when hit with a Stone Cold Stunner (or the Mega Stunner as I call it when Mega Man uses it), but I'm sure glad they do.

D(imension) Force

2011-11-29T20:11:00.001-05:00

It has occurred to me that I haven't posted much about SNES games. This is mostly a product of my small SNES collection, so to help rectify this I've decided to write about some random SNES roms. After landing on a few Japanese-only RPGs, which I don't feel qualified enough to get into, I ended up with Dimension Force, which I had never heard of. There doesn't appear to be much of a difference between it and the North American, D-Force. This 1991 shooter was made by Asmik Ace Entertainment, a company that has been around since the NES era, and is still active today, but has never made much of importance. The most notable of their releases to me is the terrible The Ring: Terror's Realm for the Dreamcast.

D-Force is a mostly unremarkable vertical scrolling shooter. The most unique features it offers are the use of Mode 7 graphics effects and two types of levels. At first, the use of Mode 7 seems to just be a gimmick to make the game look nice during the helicopter's takeoffs and crashes, but it actually plays into the function of the second type of levels. The first type of levels, titled “shooting mode” levels, are regular scrolling shooter levels with a bunch of aircraft to contend with, powerups, and lots of bullets to avoid.

The second type of levels are titled “exploration mode,” or “technical mode” in the Japanese version, levels, and while there are still enemies, there are less bullets flying around and player gets no powerups. The biggest change, though, is the ability to change from two different height planes with the trigger buttons, and the background graphics will scale accordingly. This is fine for going from the higher plane to the lower one because it is possible to see the lower enemies in order to avoid them, but when going from the lower plane to the higher one, it is a blind guess as to whether an enemy will be there or not. That's some nonsense, and on more than one occasion I crashed because I switched planes right into an enemy.

Even with this unique feature, D-Force isn't a particularly interesting shooter. Granted, I'm not a big fan of the genre, and maybe fans of this type of game could get into it for some reason. To me, it is just an unremarkable shooter that the developers tried to spice up with the SNES's new technology and didn't really come together. The plane-switching thing could be interesting, but without the ability to see the higher plane and with the rough way it transitions, it just doesn't work. Supposedly the game is about overthrowing an evil Middle Eastern dictator, which seems reasonable until the dinosaurs show up.

Spider-Man vs. NYC

2011-11-22T16:52:00.001-05:00

I grew up playing Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin for the Genesis, and it is one of the earliest games for the system that my family owned. Maybe it was because of that, or because it was at the height of the comics boom, when everyone loved Spider-Man, but my brother and I loved this game. It's really not a very good game, but all that mattered was that it is a game that a kid can play as Spider-Man. It was the first game developed by Technopop, a company that only lasted through the nineties, whose only other notable game was the early console FPS Zero Tolerance, also for the Genesis.

Though it was later updated for the Sega CD, with added hilarious CD-i-quality cutscenes that I believe were entirely voiced by Cam Clarke, the story of Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin is pretty bad. The Kingpin puts a bomb in the city, then goes on television, not even giving his name, blaming Spider-Man for this hypothetically devastating bomb and offering a $10,000 award for his capture. I understand this causing vigilantes to try and stop him for the reward money, but for some reason the police also think that an uncorroborated rumor spread by a crime lord is enough reason to start attacking someone in the street. Also, since Kingpin's entire goal seems to be to troll the shit out Spider-Man, he has Mary Jane kidnapped.

This guy seems legit.

So, the premise is that Kingpin has a bomb that will go off in twenty-four hours unless Spider-Man finds all of the keys and disarm it before it blows up all of New York City. This causes one of the most annoying aspects of the game, a timer counting down at much faster than real time throughout most of the game, which will cause an instant game over. Another annoying feature is a limited supply of web fluid, requiring the player to take pictures of bosses in order to get money for more web fluid, even though being able to shoot web is essential to completing the game.

The worst problem with this game is that it feels awkward. It does okay with standard stuff like jumping, shooting web as an attack, and punching/kicking people. The problems are with the Spider-Man-specific techniques, specifically climbing on walls. It's not so bad in outdoor areas with building, where he can cling to walls in the background by holding down the jump button and climb higher by repeatedly jumping off of them, but once he gets indoors and needs climb walls in the foreground it can get annoying. The player needs to hold down the jump button, then press the direction of the wall or ceiling that he or she wants to cling to. Letting go of the jump button while pressing no direction causes Spider-Man to fall, but holding up while letting go causes him to leap up at a forty-five degree angle from the wall. It is just really weird and makes it difficult to navigate the platforming sometimes, especially in the enclosed vents.

He will keep trying to stab the air above Spidey's head forever.

On the positive side, web swinging around feels really good and gives the player a real sense of speed and momentum, as well as just he general sense of fun from the feeling of swinging around like Spider-Man. This is my favorite aspect of the game, though some levels are cramped inhibit the ability to freely use it. I also like that there are times when Spider-Man has to kick rats to death. It doesn't seem like something he would do, but it is quite comical. Another good thing is the way the game uses a great deal of Spider-Man's villains as bosses, and it will definitely please fans of the franchise from the time of the comic collectors boom of the 90's. There are even occasionally creative ways to deal with them, like spraying Sandman with a fire hydrant.

Superhero!

Sadly, combat in the game is also pretty damn awkward. The AI for many of the regular enemies is downright retarded, and some of the bosses and mid-bosses aren't much better. Bosses often follow a very strict pattern, going about their business no matter what Spider-Man is doing. The worst fight, though, is the final fight with Kingpin after the bomb is defused. Not only does the player need to continually hit him in his surprisingly small head, but also continually shoot web at Mary Jane to keep her from being lowered into a vat of boiling acid. It is really frustrating, but what makes it even worse is that the player can get a terrible ending in which Mary Jane is killed even if the Kingpin is defeated. On top of that, there is also an ending where Kingpin defeats Spider-Man and lowers him into acid with his wife, causing a game over and requiring the player to start the whole game over.

What the fuck? There are so many things wrong with this.

I'm just glad I didn't grow up with the Sega CD version, which has a theme song by Mr. Big. I'm all for giving Cam Clarke work, but that version is just horrifying. Also, for some reason it is dedicated to the memory of Brandon Lee, of The Crow and being Bruce Lee's son fame, and Patrick Lippert, the activist that organized the Rock the Vote campaign, I guess because it was made in 1993 and that seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Maybe the developers knew them and I'm just being a dick. I dunno.

A Defense of Tank Controls

2011-11-20T00:57:00.001-05:00

It has always bothered me that some people completely dismiss a game based on the way it controls. The goal of controls is to give the player a way to interact with the game, and, to me, a game has good controls if they facilitate logical interaction with a game. Basically, if the controls allow the player to do what needs to be done in the game, then they are good controls. Most complaints that a game has “bad controls” seem to boil down to a player that wants one game to control like another instead of attempting to understand why the other control scheme may be more suited the that particular game.

The Resident Evil series constantly gets shit for having tank controls, but I never understood this complaint. For one, a control scheme in which up is always forward makes sense in a game with multiple static camera angles. If the controls were camera-relative, pressing the direction the player wants to move based on the current camera angle, it would make things confusing when moving from one camera to another. While holding a single direction the character would move one direction, the camera angle would change, and then, while still holding down the same direction, would move in a different direction. The only way to use the “more standard” control scheme would be to completely change the way the cameras are set up to a simple overhead view, and that would completely destroy the artistic intent of making a B movie-like experience.

Another complaint is levied that the sluggish controls “hurt combat.” The thing is, in older Resident Evil titles combat wasn't really important, and so the player didn't need smooth combat controls. Bear with me. The enemies in the first few games don't do a whole lot or move very fast, so the player really doesn't need to be able to move and shoot, or lock on, or whatever thing people think they need. Some people just dismiss the games as poorly designed, but they are actually perfectly designed. The player is given all the tools that are needed in order to fight off everything in the game.

When later games added the ability to aim freely, the enemies were similarly crafted around the player's abilities. Enemies became able to move faster and attacked in larger groups, but they didn't use any weapons that could be considered “cheap.” Again, they never sent anything after the player that the player was not capable of handling with the controls at hand and a certain degree of skill. So what if Resident Evil doesn't control like the a modern FPS. It's not like the player is going to be engaged in gunfights with engaged in firefights with a bunch of dudes or blowing up national monuments or whatever the fuck happens in a Call of Duty game.

A game should be designed around a control scheme, and disregarding game because it doesn't have familiar controls is ignorant. How lame would it have been if Mega Man, Castlevania, and Super Mario Bros. all had the same jump physics and attack mechanics? Metal Gear games have always had unconventional control schemes, but they work for what needs to be done. It's important for games to have diverse controls because it allows for different experiences and encourages innovation. A game truly has bad controls when they don't give the player the reasonable ability to do what a game needs. Of course bad controls should not be confused with a high level of difficulty, but that is a topic for another time.

Brown Before It Was Cool: Desert Strike

2011-11-19T15:14:00.001-05:00

It's strange how much things stay the same. Back in 1992 EA's biggest success was a military shooter based around real world weaponry and a fictionalized version of a modern conflict in the Middle East. Some people were saying that it was in bad taste. It was a whole big thing. On the other hand, much of the success of Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf was based on the way it was different from the other shooters at the time. It isn't about just blowing up everything on screen and never getting hit by a single bullet, but about going around, completing objectives, and tactically dealing with any opposition there might be.

It is also strange to think that the giant, faceless company that EA is now once had its biggest success to date with a game that was designed and chiefly programmed by only one guy, Mike Posehn. It was originally suggested he make a game similar to Choplifter, but it seems closer to Raid on Bungeling Bay to me. The game is also labeled with “EA Air Force,” which makes me wonder if this was some sort of label for EA's flight-related games, or if it was only used for this game. At any rate, it wasn't used for the Strike sequels, but according to eBay they did make EA Air Force pins.

During a time when almost every game in which the player controls an aircraft was a scrolling shooter, Desert Strike was unique. The player controls an Apache helicopter, the game is viewed from an isometric perspective, and it uses character-relative controls, which is to say, tank controls. The controls do make the game slower than it might be, but it gives the game a methodical method and a believable feel. The methodical way the game is played is the most interesting feature of the game because it is, other than the different perspective and controls, what makes it so different from shoot 'em ups of the day.

Instead of having infinite ammo, crazy power ups, and a goal of getting from point A to B ending in a boss fight, this game takes a more realistic approach. Each level is a big square with various objectives that need to be met in order to complete the mission. When these objectives are done is completely up to the player, and that adds an element of strategy and planning to how missions are completed. Though the weakest machine gun on the helicopter has infinite ammo, the weapons that do real damage, two types of missiles, are in very limited supply and need to be frequently refilled by picking up ammo crates scattered throughout the levels.

I like the way it is important to pick up extra ammunition, fuel, and friendly troops in order to complete each level. This, combined with the methodical controls, makes the game more of a thinker's shooter than the average twitch reactions of shooters of the day. There are other things about the game that are charming, like the rocking music, detailed sprites, and simple joy of blowing stuff up. As smart as the game is, this didn't make EA think much about milking the success and releasing annual sequels with Jungle Strike, Urban Strike, and others. It's strange how much things stay the same.

Deadly Premonition

2011-11-16T19:28:00.001-05:00

This is video game blog Poverty Game Night. You can call it PGN. Everybody calls it that. For those that can't tell just by that reference, this post is about Deadly Premonition. I can't remember the last time I've had such a difficult time articulating what is so great about a game. Even though the game is flawed in most every way, it is more than the sum of its parts. It is a game that is utterly bizarre and strangely fascinating.

Deadly Premonition, known as Red Seeds Profile in Japan, was developed by Access Games, but was mostly the vision of the game's writer/director, SWERY. Other than this, he is best known for the strange Spy Fiction, but he was also the scenario writer for SNK's The Last Blade series. He may or may not be completely insane, but I suppose the same could be said of most auteur directors, like Hideo Kojima or Suda51. Though I am willing to guess that SWERY would prefer to be compared to David Lynch.

2010 was a strangely active year for the television series Twin Peaks considering that it had been twenty years since it premiered and eighteen years since its last entry. There was the excellent thriller game Alan Wake that was obviously influenced by the show's small Pacific Northwest town setting filled with various peculiar characters. There was also a mini-reunion in the form of the Psych episode "Dual Spires." All of this pales in comparison to Deadly Premonition, which is the most Twin Peaks-like experience since the show itself.

I didn't watch the show when it originally aired (I was five), but since it kept coming up in other things I liked I watched it somewhat recently. For a long time I just could not make heads or tails it, but I was engrossed by it and watched the whole thing through, and somewhere along the way I "got it." Everything makes sense following the show's twisted logic and general weirdness. I'm not too far into Deadly Premonition, and I don't know if it will all end up making sense in the end, but it emulates that feeling of weirdness and twisted logic perfectly. Playing it gave me the same sense of bewilderment I got from watching Twin Peaks, and that is something very few things do. Of course, the game plays up the connection to the show by showing the influence of it in the plot, characters, and setting of the game.

The main character is Special Agent Francis York Morgan, an FBI agent that has come to the small Pacific Northwest town of Greenvale to investigate the mysterious murder of a beautiful young girl. His strange behavior and position as an outsider puts him at odds with the local police. He may be decidedly more crazy, York has a strange fascination with the small town that makes him similar to Twin Peaks' Special Agent Dale Cooper. The story leads York to interact with the various odd residents of Greenvale.

With a premise like this, one might think that Deadly Premonition would be some sort of adventure game, but it is actually an open world survival horror game. As far as I know, this is the only game that blends these two genres. Remedy, the developers of Alan Wake initially planned to make the game with an open world framework, but that was ditched in favor of a more linear game for the sake of a more focused narrative. After playing this, I can understand why. It is hard to build and maintain tension when there are large portions of the game that have the player just driving around without incident.

Still, the open world mechanics benefit the bipolar nature of the game's story. One moment the game is highlighting a grisly murder and the next it is making light of one of the game's many quirky characters. There is no consistent tone to the game, and for some reason it is really charming. Sometimes the juxtaposition of the game's cheerier music with the serious nature of the dialogue is jarring, and that makes for greatly awkward atmosphere. On the subject of the music, it is really great, though eclectic. There is some smooth jazz, some eerie ambiance, and some guitar whistling that sounds like it could only have come out of K.K. Slider.

On the subject of mental disorder, York is literally crazy. He has dissociative identity disorder, and frequently has asides in which he speaks to his other personality, Zach. This is a stroke of insane genius on the writer's part because it gives York a reason to talk about what is going on without it being a boring internal monologue. It also gives York, and I guess by extension SWERY, the ability to directly address the player, as the player ostensibly is Zach. This leads a lot of the game's funny moments and meta commentary.

The action of the game makes for the majority of the survival horror elements of the game. Essentially, York will go to some area to investigate, he'll become isolated, and he'll start to experience weird stuff. This weird stuff includes red vines blocking off areas, usually a lot of rain, and zombie-like people that attack him. The combat is basically a poor man's version of Resident Evil 4, with similar controls that are a bit more sluggish and unwieldy. There are various strong melee weapons, but they have a limited amount of durability before they break. Luckily York's handgun has unlimited ammo and can be used for most everything, though stronger weapons with limited ammo are generally a good idea for dealing with stronger foes.

Even though the combat isn't that great, the atmosphere of the horror portions are really creepy and have an oppressive atmosphere. The mechanic of York holding is breath to become invisible to enemies is great at building tension. It's not up there in creepiness with a Silent Hill or something, but it's pretty good. The time when York is running and hiding from an ax murderer are quite frightening and incorporates an interesting split-screen between the player's view and the killer's, but it is marred by annoying quick-time events. These moments also double as an investigation or “profiling” section that has the player finding clues that help unravel parts of the mystery surrounding the mysterious events in Greenvale. It's not nearly as involved as something like the Ace Attorney games or Heavy Rain, but it gets the job done.

The open world portion of the game doesn't seem particularly necessary, but there is a lot of weird details in it. The player needs to have York shave and wear clean clothes or else his hygiene suffers, which probably affects something. Doing pretty much anything, from breaking boxes to exploring various places, gives the player cash which can be spent on all sorts of things about town. It is important to keep hunger and sleep requirements under control by eating food and sleeping, so it is a good idea to spend a decent amount of cash on food. Probably the worst part of the open world approach is the game's poor map, which doesn't zoom out far enough to get a grasp of the relation between different areas and doesn't have up always be north, but the direction the player is facing.

There is a bunch more weird stuff that York can do. He believes he can predict the future by looking at his cup of coffee, and so the player can choose to get a cup of coffee as a way of getting a fortune. There is fishing for some reason, so I guess for those people that are a fan of open world games, survival horror, and fishing, this is the game to play. Watching a weather report on television will give the player what weather to expect for the day. It is possible to talk to the various people as they go about their daily routines about town, but sometimes they lock themselves in their houses, and in that instance it might be a good idea to peek into their homes because the game lets York be a creeper like that.

At one point York needs to get into a room in the police station, but the guy with the keys lost them. Instead of just finding the key and returning it, the player finds various keys, differentiated by key-rings with different squirrels on them. Handing a key with the wrong type of squirrel on it will cause the guy to admonish York for not knowing his squirrels, then go into a long explanation of what makes that particular squirrel unique. This whole thing is like a bizarre attack on the way many survival horror games, like Resident Evil, have the player collect a bunch of keys marked with various symbols.

It seems the best way to explain how crazy this game seems to be just to flatly explain it, but I still feel like I haven't gotten across how completely weird Deadly Premonition is. I think the best that I can do is urge people to just play it (I got it for a mere eleven dollars new) and leave off with an example of something that happens in the game. This is the sort of game that, to me, justifies the existence of this site. It was a cult hit, but it isn't some giant blockbuster title, and it flew under the radar for most people. It's not a perfect game, but it is really interesting, extremely bizarre, and it deserves some attention for being something so insane.

The Legend of Moneypenny: James Bond 007

2011-11-15T21:28:00.001-05:00

Released amid the furor around Goldeneye for the N64, James Bond 007 for the Game Boy didn't get attention. There are quite a few reasons for this. For one, it was released in 1997, very late into the life-span of monochrome Game Boy games and not long before the release of the Game Boy Color, so it wasn't really a time in which any game for the system got a whole lot of attention. Secondly, the game could not be more different from the game that popularized first-person shooters on consoles. It is not surprising that the game goes overlooked considering the situation, but it is quite interesting. It is the first game from Saffire, a small developer formed out of Sculptured Software that didn't make anything particularly noteworthy before going out of business in 2004.

The best way to describe James Bond 007 for Game Boy is the unholy union between The Legend of Zelda and the old 2D Metal Gear games. I'm sure the latter makes sense, but I'm sure most readers are surprised or confused about the former. It sounds crazy, but it really is the best way I can describe it though. There isn't a big overworld like in Zelda games, but even with the game separated into levels, each one is sort of like a mini world of its own. There are NPCs to talk to and do quests for, hidden stuff to find, and places to infiltrate (see: dungeons).

Finding the hidden stuff and figuring out exactly what needs to be done next can be a bit of a pain, but most of the time the game gives enough hints to push things along. It may not be quite a Zelda game, but it has a similar structure, and that is kind of interesting in the context a Bond game, even if it is sometimes incongruous with the world-traveling espionage setting. Managing an inventory of weapons and tools that can be assigned to the different buttons is definitely familiar, but it works in the gadget-filled world of 007.

The game is like the old Metal Gear titles mostly in the aspects of combat and weapon selection. It doesn't really have the stealth mechanics, but since it is combat using melee and ranged attacks with modern weaponry shown from an overhead perspective it has a similar feeling. The way the player needs to hit to opponent fast and repeatedly before they can strike back is reminiscent of how battle goes down in Metal Gear, as is the way enemies swarm when alerted. Melee combat is a bit more complicated with the ability to block attacks, though the game doesn't use this in a way that requires to player to do much more than block/counterattack.

It may not be better at anything than the games that it reminds me of, but the power of the Bond license and the way the fact that it isn't just the usual platformer cash-in makes it quite entertaining. Goldeneye is definitely a fun game, and it adds objectives to an FPS that makes it more like a something that deserves the 007 name, but it doesn't quite capture the feeling of being Bond. In James Bond 007, the player flies around the world, does some snooping around, seduces a female adversary, steals documents, and uses a bunch of gadgets. That covers a great deal of the sort of stuff Bond should be doing, and that makes the game pretty charming, even if it lacks big set pieces and chase sequences.

Off on a Tangent: Piracy

2011-11-11T17:01:00.001-05:00

I don't think publishers these days understand how good they've got it. They love to complain about piracy and used game sales, and are intent on redefining the concept of software ownership in order to “protect” their works. Compared to how things have been, publishers have the most control over their games than ever before. Consumers no longer own software, they own a license to software, and this license allows the publisher to basically make any restrictions they want on the product. It just annoys me that publishers completely ignore the negative effects on the honest consumer out of fear of theoretically losing money.

Compared to the way things were on PCs in the early 90's, modern day publishers got it easy. It was so easy to copy a game from an official floppy disks to the computer and to other disks that it was extremely wide-spread. I don't know how anybody ever made money on PC games back then. Even with copy-protection schemes like the use of passwords out of user manuals was only a mild deterrent. I remember that my grandfather, who is admittedly more technologically savvy than the average grandpa, had a spreadsheet of all the possible passwords for The Incredible Machine. I also recall my brother outright guessing passwords for Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?.

Later on, the industry switched to CD keys, and consumers went from owning a game to owning a key to accessing a game, and this gave rise to keygens. And that basically sums up how software piracy is. Hackers always find a way around copy-protection schemes, and there is always be people that don't want to pay for things. The way I see, this is inevitable and if publishers focus on it, it only ends up to the detriment of people that actually want to pay for games, and that makes no damn sense.

To me, and probably to most gamers DRM, digital rights management, is is a reviled thing. The funny thing is that it doesn't need to be. Steam has DRM, but nobody cares because it uses it in way that generally makes things easier for the consumer. Sure, the user can't be logged in in more than one place and play the same game simultaneously on two computers, but it also does things that are convenient for the user. For example, it is possible to log into that account anywhere and download games as often as the user wants, streamlining the install process, and in the case of some games save games and settings will automatically be there as well. Even if it has steps that curtail piracy, it also makes managing a library of PC games across multiple computers really easy, and that is how it should be.

The best thing publishers can do to minimize game piracy is to make things convenient for the user. The music and movie industries are currently seeing this with services like Spotify and Netflix, which make things more convenient for users while not allowing ownership of content. Even though these sort of things are keeping those industries in a financially successful they are still lobbying for more strict control over content, because they are apparently very stupid, much like the video game industry. If it is easier to purchase something for a reasonable price than it is to pirate, then people will do that, and that is why things like iTunes has done really well.

Probably the biggest misconception that publishers have about piracy is that they see every pirated copy of a game is a lost sale. That just seems ridiculous to me, because it has always been my experience that people that pirate shit either are the sort that don't ever want to spend money and would sooner just not play the game or are the sort that simply can't spend the money. Then there are people like me that publishers don't believe exist. I'm the sort of person that sometimes pirates games to try them out, then if it is something that I like I'll go out and buy it, and if I don't I'll just delete it. I don't think I ever would have just purchased Super Princess Peach based on the box, but after I played it and liked it, I did. This happened for me with a lot of games, like Mega Man Zero and Chrono Trigger. I guess, for me, I wouldn't need to pirate if demos were universally available.

I should also point out that there are certain situations in which I don't feel guilty about piracy at all. If I it is an old game that is not freely available on services like Virtual Console or Good Old Games or whatever, then fuck it. The perfect example for this sort of thing is Earthbound, which isn't available on anything other than the SNES in the US, and used copies go for exorbitant prices. If I download the rom, the only people that aren't getting my money are resellers. I like to support things I like with my money, and if Nintendo isn't going to take my money in exchange for Earthbound, then screw them, I'll pirate it because to me that is a morally neutral thing to do at that point.

Final Fantasy Adventure and Sword of Mana

2011-11-11T00:49:00.001-05:00

I picked up Sword of Mana because I heard it was a remake of Final Fantasy Adventure, the first Game Boy game I ever bought and a game that I am quite fond of. See, Adventure for the Game Boy is actually the first game in the Mana series, which was followed up by the great Secret of Mana for SNES, but has more recently been known for some pretty mediocre games. A remake of an early Game Boy game updated for GBA that brings it more in line with the SNES graphics and systems of later games sounds great on paper, but something just feels wrong about the whole thing.

One thing that is retained is the basic framework of the story and its characters, which is both a positive and negative thing. The story of Adventure was relatively dark for its era, starting off with with the main character as a gladiatorial slave whose friend has just died. The writing isn't of very high quality, probably due to bad translation, but the ideas are there, and most importantly, it is mercifully brief. The story is there, it leads the player along (well, most of the time) and it is just fine.

For some reason Square Enix thought it was important to expand upon the simple story and make it more complex. The problem is that it isn't particularly interesting, and while it was fine in small doses, this version drones on and on with its rote story and typical RPG nonsense. In the beginning of Adventure, a guy named Dark Lord is forcing people to fight monsters to the death for his enjoyment. That's a simple way to setup that the guy is evil and a villain. In the beginning of Sword, the player is put in the same situation, but it goes into all this extra detail about the situation and how it sucks to be gladiatorial slave. That's just not necessary, because the villain is still called DARK FUCKING LORD. Clearly he's an evil dude, I don't need to see him give an evil speech or whatever. It's just not necessary. If a game has to explain how someone named Dark Lord gained political power, it's doing something wrong.

There are some nice things about the remake. Graphically it is a great-looking 2D game, and the day/night cycle adjusts the color to keep it continually interesting. The music is very nice, with new versions of the original game's music that is some of the best sounding stuff on the GBA. The ring-based menu system from Secret of Mana works well in place of the original's more traditional menu system, though it sometimes takes a few more button presses to accomplish an action. I like the addition of the choice between playing the male or female lead, and there are stories are actually different, as they are distinct characters that cross each others paths throughout the game.

One thing that does bug me is that Adventure allowed the player to save anywhere, but Sword uses save points, which seems like a stupid step backwards, especially for a portable game. There are other little things that I prefer about the original, like the way special attacks are charged over time instead of by getting successive hits on enemies. This makes combat and choosing when to attack more tactical. Not everything is better in the original though. I don't care for the need to stock up on disposable items like keys and mattocks, and there are some really absurdly obtuse requirements for progression, like walking around a couple of palm trees in certain way in order to open a dungeon.

Sword mostly benefits from changes of art and character design. The original world was pretty flat and is basically a cross between the look of Final Fantasy and the mechanics of The Legend of Zelda. It's a really fun game, but the remake incorporates stuff from later Mana games that makes it feel like a richer and more unique world. It's a shame that the game lost Boco the chocobo, and by extension the later mecha-enhanced Boco that can run on water, but overall I think the change was good. At the very least it is fun to travel by cannon, though it does seem a bit out of place in a darker themed game such as this.

Yeah, I had to cut all that grass to progress the plot. Seriously.

In the first thirty minutes of Sword of Mana, the player does pretty much nothing, especially on the female's side. In the first thirty seconds of Final Fantasy Adventure, the player kills a big goddamn monster, and at the thirty minute mark has made a decent way into the game, leveled up, and gained a good grasp of what makes the game entertaining. Maybe I just don't give a crap about RPG stories anymore. I still find Adventure to be a great and fun Zelda-like game, and I would recommend it to people looking for that type of game, but I don't think I would recommend Sword even though it is capable. It just doesn't draw me in. Maybe I'm blinded by nostalgia for long car rides with my Game Boy Color and Final Fantasy Adventure. I dunno.

Wario Land 3: Yay Torture!

2011-11-08T19:31:00.003-05:00

The first Game Boy I ever owned was a Game Boy Color, but I didn't have too many games for it and so I didn't play it very much. I didn't really get into portable games until the Game Boy Advance, so I missed out on quite a few good games. For example, I never played any Wario games with the exception of WarioWare titles, so I missed out on the critically acclaimed Wario Land series. When I saw a beat up copy of 2000's Wario Land 3 for the Game Boy Color in the bargain bin at my local used game store for three dollars, it seemed like as good a place to start as any.

Wario Land 3's major strength is the way it takes established platforming mechanics and alters them in bizarre ways. Right away it establishes that Wario is not Mario by having enemies simply be stunned instead of killed from being jumped upon, and the need to be hit with a shoulder charge in order to be dispatched. Also, Wario is immortal. He can be hit and stunned, but he can't die. If it were simply a regular platformer without death it would be boring, but Wario's immortality is the basis of the game, with levels and mechanics built around this concept.

When Wario is hit, he reacts in various ways that allow him to progress through levels. For example, when set on fire, he runs around, and the player is only able to control his jumps for limited amount of time. After he has been on fire for a while, he is completely engulfed in flames and is able to walk around for a while like that. Levels have certain blocks that can only be destroyed by Wario in this flaming state. After being on fire for a while, the flames go out, leaving him comically charred for a few seconds before shaking it off and returning to his normal state. Much of the game is based around similar states that Wario can be put in.

This is great because it encourages the player to think in a completely different way. Normally when I come across a new enemy in a platformer, I am wary of it and don't really want to see what it can do, but with this game I get excited when I see a new enemy because I want it to hit Wario and see what happens. This is complimented by the non-linear level structure, which has branching paths and places that can't be reached right away, requiring backtracking. All of the levels are meant to be played multiple times, which is shown to the player through these out-of-reach places and the game's day/night cycle. Whenever the player leaves a level the game switches between day and night, and the enemies and their behaviors, as well as other details about the level change based upon whether or not the sun is out.

Mostly, Wario Land 3 is an interesting game with a strange charm. Wario isn't a hero, he's a villain that gets into a wacky situation and only really cares about satiating his greed by collecting treasure. I don't know how Wario has went from being a goofy enemy of Mario into a huge franchise, but I'm glad it happened because I don't think Nintendo has another character that would work in a game like this. I mean, a game based entirely around torturing Kirby would just be sick and wrong.

Breath of Death VII: A Parody, Not a Sequel

2011-11-04T14:45:00.000-04:00

I don't usually play Xbox Live Indie Games, and I guess technically I still haven't, because it is difficult to determine what is actually worth the time or money. I picked up the Breath of Death VII/Cthulhu Saves the World pack on sale on Steam for two dollars, as opposed the usual three, because I was already buying a bunch of other stuff, so it was hard to find a reason not to purchase it. They were made by Zeboyd Games, a three person team that started making Xbox Live Indie Games in 2009, first with a couple of interactive novels and then with these two parody RPGs.

Considering that I am in the middle of Dragon Quest IX for DS and Final Fantasy for the WonderSwan Color, it doesn't seem like a good time for me to get involved with another RPG, but luckily Breath of Death VII is pretty short, and not particularly grindy. The game is largely in the mold of the NES era Dragon Quest games, but, since it is a parody game, it sidesteps some of the pitfalls of the genre and incorporates some fresh ideas. The writing is generally pretty funny, and while I wouldn't say it had me laughing out loud, it usually could get a smirk out of me. It relies a bit too much on referential humor, but overall I like it.

The retro 8-bit art style works well for the parody aspect. It's not great-looking, but the art is clean and it serves its purpose. Cthulhu Saves the World bumps things up to 16-bit, and it does look quite a bit nicer, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Though the game looks very retro, the mechanics are quite modern in a lot of ways. The random encounter rate is mercifully low, and in the case of dungeons there is a maximum number of random encounters that can happen. This takes out a lot of the frustration that comes along with getting through a dungeon and just wanting to get it over with.

Similarly, battles have been streamlined with a combo system that makes the player's attacks stronger the longer the battle goes on, unless special combo ending attacks, which do massive damage, are done. Also, when after each battle character's HP is completely restored, as well as a small portion of MP. All of this keeps the combat brisk and encourages the use of skills and spells that require MP, which is a pretty interesting take on standard JRPG combat. With each level up, the player is given a choice between two different upgrades, which could be skill or stat increases, which gives the game a simple skill tree that is easy to deal with. It might seem like all of this would make the game really easy, but the enemies are strong enough that each battle needs to be strategically planned, and choosing the right time to use skill or heal is important.

There are a lot of smaller features that are nice. Things like the ability to save anywhere, stays at inns being free, and the reasonable price of gear sidelines some of the annoyances of the genre. If the player wants to grind, it isn't necessary to run around in circles for hours, there is a Fight menu item that automatically initiates what would usually be a random battle. The setting is kind of funny, in that it takes place after a nuclear holocaust and every character is undead in some way or another. This leads to funny little things, like the reason the main character, Dem, is silent is because he is a skeleton, and therefore has no tongue. Breath of Death VII: The Beginning may not be revolutionary, but is a charming little game and a deft parody.

Top Gun: Impossible To Land

2011-11-03T22:53:00.000-04:00

When looking through a pile of old NES games, the last game I ever want to see Top Gun. It is indicative of an owner that had no taste in games, and would likely purchase any licensed schlock that was released for the popular console, and generally lowers any expectations I might have had for the collection. There are some excuses for owning the game, like receiving it for free or writing a blog about playing awful games, and sadly I fall into both of those categories. It is games like this that defy the entire idea of a Nintendo Seal of Quality.

Conversations about the game invariably go like this: “Hey, Top Gun, that game sucks.” “Yeah, it is impossible to land.” And really, that is all I can say about the game. There are two parts of the game, which are dogfights and landing. It is hard to shoot down the other fighter jets is difficult because the controls are sluggish and it is tough to see them, let alone drawing down on them. Even with the instrumentation that takes up half the screen, it is quite difficult to tell what is going on most of the time.

Of course, sub-par shooting could have been forgiven, and people may have been able to forget the game entirely if it weren't for the godawful landing portion of the game. Even if the player does really well during the missions, and is perfectly capable of shooting down every other thing in the sky, it doesn't mean shit if the jet doesn't get back to the aircraft carrier. It makes logical sense, but it is usually something that is relegated to something the player doesn't have to actually control, which seems to be the right call because it is extremely difficult.

There are just orders being flashed on the screen, a quickly approaching sprite of an aircraft carrier, and a very poor sense of where the plane is in relation to the carrier. Supposedly there are four missions to the game, but I don't think I've ever met anyone that has seen past the landing portion of the first one, so if there are any readers out there that have landed in Top Gun for NES, please leave me comment or email me or something. 1987 Konami, I am so disappointed in you.

Fuck Mountain King

2011-10-31T18:43:00.000-04:00

In celebration of Halloween, it only makes sense to make an entry for the first game that ever scared the shit out of me. As an Atari 2600 game, I can't imagine anybody can find the game particularly horrific these days, but, as a kid, Mountain King made me uneasy. I don't know if CBS Electronics, the subdivision of a toy company that just wanted in on some of that Atari money, intended to make the game scary to kids, but that was the way things turned out.

Probably the biggest factor in my fear of Mountain King is that, without having the manual or box or whatever, the game is incredibly mysterious. The player is dropped onto this, well I guess mountain, and I honestly had no idea of where to go and what to do until I read about it on Wikipedia years later. Pressing left or right moves in that direction, pressing down crouches, and pressing up shrugs for some reason, but pressing up while moving left or right executes a pretty impressive jump, depending on how long up is held.

The background is mostly black, and most of the game has no music, which gives the game something of an eerie atmosphere. When I was really young, if I had decided to play the game I would always regret it because I would just aimlessly jump and climb around the mountain collecting specs of white stuff. There are only a few things in the game world that can be interacted with. Near the bottom of the mountain is a throne that holds a crown, but the throne cannot be approached unless the player collects enough white stuff to get a thousand points. This is something I never figured out as a kid, and I never really got anything done.

Apparently the goal of the game is to get the crown and take it to the top of the mountain, but getting the one-thousand points isn't the only restriction to approaching the crown, as a musical theme needs to play, and I still don't know what causes that. I guess that once the crown is grabbed, bats will fly around and try to take it away. Pressing the button turns on a flashlight, which for some reason makes the white things disappear, but apparently makes greater treasures that are worth more points appear.

There are two main reasons I found this game terrifying as a kid. One is the timer that is constantly counting down at the bottom of the screen. Considering I had absolutely no idea of what needed to be done in the game, the fact that there was a strict time limit is really unnerving. Like, sure, running the time out probably just leads to death, but there is a psychological affect that is a lot stronger than in a Mario or Sonic game, probably because it is far more likely to actually run out.

I never wanted to go to the base of the mountain because there is an angry goddamn spider there. It will dash towards the player, and if it is not avoided, the character is wrapped up in web, and the spider goes away. Unlike any logical and straightforward video game enemy, this attack doesn't kill the player, but immobilizes him or her. After a period of time, the spider will return and finally kill the player. The mechanical reason for this is to allow the player to shake out of the web and escape before the spider returns, but the asshole reason for this is to scare the shit out of the player and instill a sense of helplessness. What I am saying is fuck Mountain King.

Ariel: The LIttle Mermaid

2011-10-28T21:25:00.000-04:00

I imagine there are at least a few people out there that are fond of The Little Mermaid for the NES. It is a Capcom game for NES, after all. But that is not what this post is about, it is about 1992's Ariel: The Little Mermaid for the Genesis, which was most definitely not made by Capcom. Actually, it was made by a company known as Bluesky Software, whom aren't responsible for many games, but did make Jurassic Park:Rampage Edition. While I kind of like Rampage Edition because it was pretty much an insane expansion pack to the first Genesis Jurassic Park, they apparently aren't that great at making their own good game from the ground up.

In spite of being named Ariel, the game actually allows the player to play as either her or Triton, which seems a bit odd. I guess the goal of the game is to swim around to all of these little things that were apparently once mermaids/mermen and sing at them to return them to their original form. I put it as “I guess” because I collected them all in the first stage and while I got a special animation I still could not progress the game and I just decided I'd rather not play it any more.

Pressing start will show them all marked on a map, the game displays the remaining amount on screen, and a FAQ I checked stated that collecting them all would trigger a boss fight, but for me nothing happened. At this point the grating music had long overstayed its welcome, so I just turned the damn thing off. I saw all I need to see. Movement was a awkward, so this is the game for anybody who wants to see Ariel clumsily bang her head against rocks, coral, and sharks.

Ariel has two attacks. The normal attack has her simply throwing music notes a short distance, while the special attack seems to be the exact same thing but has a limited number of uses. The other button is the best because it will “call fishfriend,” which should be cool due to the funny name, but is actually pretty boring and just brings a fish to do something boring like push a rock. It's not nearly as comical as the ability to have a shark or dolphin randomly tackle an enemy like in that awful Aquaman game.

There is really no reason to play Ariel: The Little Mermaid. It's not fun to play, and the Genesis got the much superior aquatic game, Ecco the Dolphin, in the same year. As a weird aside, when looking up this game I went to the Wikipedia page for the film, and I found something odd. Not only does the article mention the whole penis-shaped castle thing in the “Controversy” section, but it has a picture of the damned thing. I can just imagine some little girl searching for The Little Mermaid, finding that page as one of the top results, scrolling to the bottom, and then some poor parent will have to explain what's up with the sparkly, golden dong. Also in the controversy section is a link to the site's entry on erections, which has pictures of real, live dicks, so that's cool and not in any way irresponsible.

Dragon Quest IX At Goodwill?!

2011-10-27T21:44:00.002-04:00

There is a certain sort of game that one expects to find when trolling Goodwill. That's not to say that I never expect to find good games there, but it usually more offbeat or older stuff. A good example of the sort of stuff I've bought from Good Will is the PC version of NBA Hangtime, which is a fun game, but it is pretty old and I wasn't even aware there was a PC version. I never expect to see newer games, with the exception of abject failures like Tony Hawk Shred, so I was quite surprised to see two basically new copies of last year's Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies. It may not have been the highest selling game, but it did pretty well for a Dragon Quest game in the US.

I have a strange history with the Dragon Quest series, in that I mostly don't have one. I like JRPGs, but I don't play a whole lot of them, so I guess it is sort of understandable how I never really made time for it. Theoretically I should have loved the series at some point, but I guess the timing was never right. During the JRPG's heyday of the Playstation era the series was in a pretty big rut, so it makes sense that it never pulled me in when I was most susceptible to that sort of thing.

This was also the time when emulation was picking up steam, and I remember specifically firing up Nesticle to see what the deal was with this whole Dragon Warrior thing. Sadly, playing the first game in the series in the late nineties is an awful way to be introduced to series because it is very unrefined. Call me ignorant, but I just can't play a game that requires a menu to do everything. I don't really want to incite war, but the original Final Fantasy's innovation of a single button that contextually opens chests or talks to people makes games that don't do this unplayable.

So, I didn't get into it then, and when the apparently amazing Dragon Quest VIII came out on the PS2 years later, I was thoroughly burned out on the genre. It's kind of funny that I never got into the series during my Dragon Ball Z period when I was younger. I mean, if I actually liked Akira Toriyama's art back then I probably would have ate this shit up like I did Chrono Trigger. I guess the stars never aligned right for Dragon Quest and I, so now that I am enjoying Dragon Quest IX as an adult I guess I have to begrudgingly accept his ctrl+C ctrl+V humanoid designs.

Dragon Quest IX begins interestingly, with some nice title screen music and then a character creation screen. Actually, the music throughout the game is all really good, which probably isn't a surprise to fans of the series, but I wasn't really prepared to like it as much as I do. Anyway, the character creation isn't particularly deep, but with the ten or so options in each category it is possible to create pretty much any Akira Toriyama character. In fact, if Dragon Quest X uses a similar system but in higher resolution I think Akira Toriyama could finally retire and publishers could just pose the character models and pretend he is still alive for years to come. I like character creation, so this really endeared me to the game right away.

The story hasn't really gripped me, but the idea of being a lost angel or whatever is kind of neat, and the stories in the different cities haven't been amazing, but pleasant enough. Speaking of pleasant, the localization and script are really nice. Characters speak in different ways and there is a lot of quirky personality to be found, and it is nice to play a game that isn't super serious and angsty all the damn time. It can be extremely punny and sometimes weird, but I can't hate a game exclaims that “The quest has been transgressed with finesse!” It's cute.

At first the mechanics of the game are solid but not particularly complicated. It is the usual JRPG stuff of walking around, talking to townspeople and killing monsters in a turn-based combat. Leveling up grants stat increases and the occasional spell or ability. Eventually the player is also awarded skill points which can be allocated to various skills, such as sword skill or shield skill, based on character's class. As more points are put into a skill the player unlocks things like special attacks or permanent attack increases with that weapon type. This is nice because it encourages specialization within a party.

Changing classes initially seems like a bad idea becomes a character's level is tied to a class, but there are advantages, such as skills and skill points carrying over, as well as the ability to use weapons that a class may not have access to. Though the game initially only allows players to use the main character, and there are no story characters that permanently joins the party, the player can recruit premade generic characters or create their own, which also encourages making a party of specialized characters. This is another feature that I really like because I like making generic characters, because it gives me a greater feeling of control over the party. Speaking of control, the other characters can be controlled directly in combat, or set to various AI routines, which is nice.

The reason for the use of generics is the most surprising part about the game. This mostly traditional JRPG is not meant to be played alone. Players can join the games of others and fight in their party, or up to three others can join the player's game. There are also special quests maps that can only be can only be obtained through an anonymous data exchange similar to the 3DS's Street Pass function. Since all of this is done over Wi-Fi and not over the internet, really favors large population centers where large amount of people are more likely to find each other. This is one of the reasons the game was a lot more successful in Japan, where there is a lot more opportunity for this type of anonymous play. The other reason it did so well in Japan is simply that it is a Dragon Quest game, and they love that shit over there.

There are a lot of little things about Dragon Quest IX that I like. Stuff like the fact that all equipment is reflected on the character model instead of having just one character model and maybe showing a different weapon. Battles could just be completely played out in first-person, like most of the other games in the series, but the third-person action during battles make things more interesting to watch. The world maps are vast and there are a lot of directions that aren't initially necessary to explore. I like that random encounters are mostly gone, with visible enemies on screen, allowing the player to approach combat and grind on his or her own terms. At just over ten hours in, I've enjoyed it a lot more than most JRPGs that I've played in the past few years, and I am shocked that I found it at a Goodwill a little over a year after its release.

Ghostbusters: The Old Good One

2011-10-23T23:57:00.001-04:00

Ghostbusters is a franchise that has always had a pretty shaky history when it comes to video game adaptations. This probably stems from the fact that the series started in the early eighties, and there wasn't much developers could do to make a good game based on the series for primitive systems like the Atari 2600. Even though the NES or Master System could theoretically host a good Ghostbusters game, they didn't because the games were based upon earlier versions. Thankfully, when Compile developed Ghostbusters for the Sega Genesis they started from scratch and ended up making a fun game.

Compile is mostly known for the puzzle series Puyo Puyo and bunch of scrolling shooters. While Ghostbusters is neither of these things, there are some elements drawn from shooters. Basically, it is an action-platformer somewhat like a Mega Man game. The player can choose to complete the first four levels in any order, though they do have distinct difficulty levels, and when all are completed the final levels are unlocked.

The levels themselves aren't as linear as most platformers. Sure, there is a single start point and the levels end with a boss fight, but the levels have a few different paths, some of which are dead ends, and finding all of the sub-bosses and the end boss requires a bit of exploration. It's not quite Metroid, but I enjoy finding rewards for poking around, though finding a way that accidentally backtracks kinda sucks.

One of the most interesting features of the game is the monetary and shop system, which adds some useful weapons and items. Each level gives the player a certain amount of cash, which can be used in the item and weapon shops between stages. Extra money can be earned from opening safes throughout the levels and as bonuses for catching the sub-bosses.

The default gun only shoots a short distance and isn't particularly powerful, so the player can purchase stronger and more effective weapons, like the three-way shot. These extra weapons are really useful for defeating enemies, but they require weapon energy to be used, so the player has to be conservative with their use. For those that aren't that great at the game, the item shop offers healing items and the weapon shop offers weapon energy refills.

Even with this help, I found the game to be incredibly difficult when I played it as a child, though going back to it, it doesn't seem quite so bad. It is by no means easy, but I think this is just the sort of game that I've gotten better at since I was like eight years old, which I suppose isn't something to be proud of, but just sort of how that whole “gaining fine motor skills” and “not being a stupid kid anymore” thing goes.

An aspect of Ghostbusters that is a weird mixture between charming and off-putting is the art style. The sprites of the characters from the movie look like caricatures of the actors they are based on, which is kind of neat, but sort of bizarre and creepy. The whole “super-deformed” thing was done a lot with anime games of the era, but with real people there is just something off about it. Still, by comparison the designs for the bosses and sub-bosses are far creepier. Whether it is a palatable style or not, I like the game, and at the very least it has the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and a decent rendition of the theme song.