61 Frames Per Second : joe keiser

Indie Dev Moment: The Manipulator

Joe Keiser — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

The Manipulator is a smart, lo-fi platform puzzler. It also happens to be an honest-to-goodness murder simulator, like the ones you read about in the newspapers. Except it’s real.

It feels like it was smuggled under cover of night from behind the Iron Curtain, a bit of digital contraband out of a twenty-year time warp. It’s bleak--you are a Manipulator, a government agent of dubious morality tasked with infiltrating a rebel group (also of dubious morality). The graphics are strictly late 70s in design, but they’ve also been filtered so they look they’re being pumped through a decaying monochrome security monitor. It makes the whole game feel like something naughty, something you’re not supposed to be doing.

The gameplay feeds that “guilty secret” atmosphere by being entirely about the worst kind of crimes against humanity. As a Manipulator, you can only jump, climb ladders, and fire a harmless bullet. That bullet allows you to take over the mind of whoever gets in its way, which leads to all sorts of horrors. Take over a guard and you can pry into his mind for an access code, but you’ll also learn about his drug addiction and unhappy family life. You can use him to tranq his co-workers, or you can have him kill a friend as he takes a bullet for you. And when you’re done with him, you can make him a threat again by leaving his mind in peace. Or, you can kill him from the inside.

Every man you kill in this way is helpless to stop your slow, inhuman process. As you begin, a single exclamation of pain hovers on the screen. As your murder progresses, these screams fill the display, overlapping and flashing as your victim’s agony climaxes. When you’re done and the words disappear, the emptiness of your monitor lays bare your monstrous act.

The combination of abstraction and voyeurism at play here puts this atrocity right at the edge of your willingness to commit it. Although all you’re really doing is making some pixels disappear, the game has told you that these pixels have lives, that they can’t fight back, and that you could have saved them instead. You’ll probably kill them anyway, but that you were able to do so will eat at you. After the game ends, you’ll still wonder if you made the right choice, or you’ll know that you hadn’t and wonder why you did it anyway.

Related Links:

Indie Dev Moment: Blush
Indie Dev Moment: Dyson
Indie Dev Moment: Gravity Bone

10 Years Ago This Week: Super Smash Bros

Joe Keiser — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

A vital addition to the Nintendo 64 catalog, Super Smash Bros (released April 27, 1999) was a phenomenal critical and commercial success. It helped cement the console’s legacy of innovative four-player game design, while at the same time creating a new flagship franchise for Nintendo and starting the game’s creators, Masahiro Sakurai and particularly Satoru Iwata, on a trajectory that would eventually see them leading the industry. As such, it’s one of 1999’s most historically important titles.

Unlike many of Nintendo’s major properties, Super Smash Bros was not tapped to be a major player prior to its release. Instead, it started life as a tiny side project at second-party developer HAL Labs. The prototype for the game, entitled Kakumo-Geemu Ryuoh or “Dragon King: The Fighting Game,” had almost no time or financial budget to speak of—HAL Labs was a very prolific developer during this time, and was more focused on sure bets including Pokemon Stadium. But what the four-player battle royal project did have were two brilliant men who were passionate about the concept: current Nintendo head Satoru Iwata did all of the programming, while series creator Sakurai is usually credited with everything else.

These two managed a successful rally to get Nintendo’s biggest characters into the game, but even then it wasn’t a sure thing. Both internally and externally, there was concern that a game where Mario could punch Pikachu in the face wouldn’t resonate with fans, even though it sounds really, really awesome on paper.

Kakumo-Geemu Ryuoh

That skepticism, as we all know, proved to be unfounded. Super Smash Bros was exactly the right title at exactly the right time. It took incredible liberties with the versus fighting genre during a period when the Street Fighter model was falling out of favor, and it did so with a careful eye for both accessibility and depth. HAL Labs also treated Nintendo’s characters respectfully, turning the game into a nostalgia-fest perfectly crafted to gently stroke the pleasure receptors of longtime Nintendo fans.

This success made Super Smash Bros HAL Lab’s most iconic and best-selling title, and turned the developer into a much more important part of Nintendo’s development strategy; this was surely a factor in Iwata’s rise to the top of the company. It also ensured that Sakurai would continue to make Smash Bros games (even though this fact would occasionally be thrown into doubt), and his work culminated in 2008’s Super Smash Bros Brawl becoming the fastest-selling videogame in American history. Smaller influences of the franchise are scattered across Nintendo’s timeline: as a single example, the series is often credited with introducing the Fire Emblem franchise to America via the popularity of Melee’s Marth and Roy.

So it’s important, but that doesn’t make it all that worthwhile to go back to. Super Smash Bros has been thoroughly eclipsed by its sequels. 2001’s Super Smash Bros Melee in particular is still considered the series’ highlight, and was a favorite of professional tournaments for many years. Of course, that’s not going to keep Nintendo from selling the original: it recently appeared on the Japanese Wii Virtual Console, and it seems like an American release (perhaps on April 27th, 2009?) is inevitable.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

Requiem: Avenging Angel
X-Wing Alliance
Everquest
Army Men 3D
Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

One Real Man Runs Along the Mirror’s Edge

Joe Keiser — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Here’s the first example of what I hope will become an extremely dangerous fad: videos of parkour filmed in the style of Mirror’s Edge. You’ll want to stay for at least the first minute, when filmer AZO is most dedicated to the tribute—he even finds a properly color coordinated factory and makes a beeline for the red pipes.

Some of the rest of it is pretty out of place, like the bike tricks and the, um, magic cup thing, and some of his other moves wouldn’t look impressive filmed any other way. They do look impressive this way, which reiterates two things:

DICE really found something powerful with the combination of camera angle, camera motion, and animation in Mirror’s Edge, if someone else can use that same combination to make standing on a two-foot fence feel dramatic.
Doing athletic things while holding a camera is unfathomably awesome to the internet.

The video, after the jump.

Related Links:

What Faith of Mirror’s Edge Really Looks Likes
Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge

What Michael Jackson’s Game Collection Says About Michael Jackson

Joe Keiser — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Remember that ridiculous auction of all of Michael Jackson’s stuff? The one that got pulled a few weeks later when Jackson suddenly remembered he liked all his stuff? I do, because it had me scouring my couch for enough change to purchase his 87 arcade cabinets.

Now, a game collection says a lot about a person—for example, my game collection says that I am credit risk, and that my love for engrish alone probably qualifies me as functionally illiterate. But even with all those pre-approved Diner’s Club cards I could still never afford anything remotely approaching Michael Jackson’s ludicrous collection. So what do his games say about him?

The New York Times Gadgetwise blog attempted to answer that, with the help of some video game experts (anyone else probably would have stopped the evaluation at “he is some kind of perverted man-child”). And the conclusion?

…Well, he’s a man-child. But there are a few more interesting things to note:

His extensive Sega collection doesn’t mean he’s a huge Sega fan. More likely Sega is a huge fan of him—remember Space Michael?—and gave him all those boxes gratis.
The lack of wear and tear on the cabs says he probably doesn’t play very often. That’s cool, I have copy of Rule of Rose still in shrink wrap and I don’t get sued by children and Bahraini Princes nearly as often as he does.
They also say he’s an indiscriminate collector, but nobody buys a Jaleco Pony Mark IV candy cab accidentally. That’s just a classic candy.

There’s plenty more of this sort of fun at the article in question. Note that none of them bother looking into Jackson’s ownership of a life-sized Lara Croft statue. Some things are better left to the imagination.

Related Links

I Almost Bought a Genesis For Moonwalker
The Post-Apocalyptic Arcade Image Gallery
Spring Cleaning: Dusting Off Your Old Games

Whatcha Reading: Racing the Beam

Joe Keiser — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

There are a lot ways to think about games—as cultural artifacts, works of art, works of programming craft. Racing the Beam asks you to think about games in a way that is rarely considered: as a negotiation between game developer and hardware platform, between an artist with vision and the constrained tool that must be used to bring that vision to life. It’s a particularly apt metaphor for the platform in question, the Atari 2600, as almost all of that console’s games were made by one-man programmer/artist/designers. The result is a video game history unlike any I’ve ever read.

Racing the Beam is full to the brim with interesting tidbits about the nature of the Atari’s hardware. Cost-cutting measures on the system meant it was designed in a very specific way, to play games like Pong and Combat but little else. That meant that nearly everything that was actually done with the console was an elaborate hack. Getting more than two characters on screen, a la Space Invaders? That was a hack. Getting cars to drive onto screen from the left and off the screen from the right? The Atari was never designed to do anything like that, so that’s a hack too. That beam of brightly colored safety in Yar’s Revenge? That’s an absolutely ingenious hack.

Told in this way the story of the Atari 2600 becomes a story of brilliant renaissance men, twisting to their whims a piece of hardware that turned out to be far more versatile than its creators could heave dreamed. It’s also supposed to be a story about how this weak system with almost no memory tempered the ideas of developers, but this comes off much less well. The way the book is written, even the system’s abominable port of Pac-Man looks like a miraculous work of laudable engineering. By the end, it almost makes you think that the Atari 2600 could run, well, anything, if only you put the right genius in front of it.

Still, maybe this is the best way to look at that time period. The people involved in the programming of the 2600 were wizards. All too often they were tasked with impossible projects, like converting a graphically rich arcade game to a console that couldn’t even hold an entire screen’s worth of data at once. The stories of how they succeeded and failed paint an important historical picture about the relationship between the system and the people who made art come alive on it.

Racing the Beam paints that picture well, but it’s still in many ways a book about a computer and some programmers. It will occasionally become dense with technical speak and it even sometimes boxes out esoteric machine code, so if you don’t have any technical knowledge you can expect to re-read some pages many times before your understanding becomes complete. It’s still worth it to try, though. Watching Atari's wheezing beast get tamed by the intellect of this industry’s forefathers is a great and necessary journey for anyone who cares about games.

Pick it up here: Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies)

Related Links:

Whatcha Reading: 20 Years of Nintendo Power
The Videogame Ages, part 1
Death of the Gamer, Redefinition of the Audience

Whatcha Playing: GTI Club+

Joe Keiser — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Did everyone miss this little racing gem when it came out a earlier this year? I know I did, and that’s a shame—but not as shameful as the fact that I missed the original game when it game out 12 years ago. I’m pretty sure I’ve never even seen the cabinet, and I spent a lot of time in arcades in 1996. Maybe GTI Club was a Euro-specific thing?

Whatever. It’s mine now.

The original GTI Club came from the era that was undeniably the heyday of arcade racers, when titles like Daytona and Sega Rally were filling arcade goer’s fields of vision with hairpin turns and sunlit vistas. It’s a time period that’s not very well cataloged—major titles in the genre, like Daytona 2 and, until now, GTI Club, have never gotten home conversions of any sort. It’s sad because these games are not like today’s racing games, with all their twitch or slavish devotion to realism. Mid-90s arcade racers offer a specific mix of mechanical precision and simplified physics, and are uniquely satisfying in their sense of control.

The heart of this era beats in GTI Club+, and I could feel its pulse even though I had never played the original before. It turns out that GTI Club is actually a very nice example of the genre, and the remake retains the classic-feeling mechanics while augmenting the aesthetics to create a reasonable facsimile of what it must have felt like to play GTI Club in 1996. It’s a gorgeous, simple, three-minute romp through a beautiful beachside town in a tiny European car.

Most reviewers have said it’s only worthwhile if you remember the game, but that’s not quite true. This game is emblematic of a sort of game that isn’t really done anymore, and if you like that sort of game this is pretty much your only modern option. It feels as if it’s as loving a remake as Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and it’s a shame that more people haven’t picked up on its charms.

Related Links:

Building a Better Racer
Excitebots Should Be Super Smash Bros. Kart
Alternate Soundtrack: Need For Speed: Underground

Qutting Time at Edge-Online

Joe Keiser — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:22:00 GMT

Today it was announced that the staff of Edge-Online, every single one of them, quit that place to move on to other endeavors. In a blog entry that is about as spiky as a blog entry can be when the topic is business matters going cross-eyed, the former editor in chief Colin Campbell explained that the publisher offered him and the site a “a gumbo of old media thinking, rampant cost-cutting and ego-driven control mechanisms” going forward. This was the reason for his resignation. One can’t help but assume that the rest of the gang there felt the same way, because they left shortly thereafter.

I used to work at Edge-Online as well. So what do I think about this whole thing?

I have a huge amount of respect for Colin and Kris Graft. As a longtime contributor to Edge-Online and its predecessor Next-Gen, I’m acutely aware of the amount of sweat and blood they poured into that site daily since Colin founded the thing four years ago. I also know they’ve seen the thing through its share of hardship, and I remember when the site gave Kris his first fulltime industry job. That they’re leaving after all of that says a lot of about how different the site is going to be from its original form, probably in the near future. I personally can’t imagine an Edge-Online without them, and as someone who worked closely with them for years, it was borderline traumatic to watch them leave.

But I’m sure they have bright futures; they’ve already landed on their feet, as is exactly what I expected for some of the brightest and hardest-working people I’ve ever collaborated with. As for the future of the site itself, I don’t know—as I said earlier, it is beyond my ability to reasonably imagine. But as I also feel a significant amount of closeness to Edge-Online, I have to hold out hope for it. It’s too difficult to think about the alternative.

Related Links:

Best Game Writing of 2008
Death of the Gamer, Redefinition of the Audience
Earthbound's Secret Evil

The 61FPS Review: Suikoden Tierkreis

Joe Keiser — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Let’s get something out of the way first, to avoid misunderstanding: I love Suikoden. I know that Suikoden II is the best game on the PlayStation, and that it is easily one of the two best games I’ve ever played. I left Suikoden III spinning in my PS2 for hours, and I’m not talking about playing it—I’m talking about letting the attract video repeat over and over just to listen to its score. I played Suikoden Tactics from beginning till end, and so help me, I didn’t hate it.

I’m telling you this because I want you to understand the depth of my meaning when I tell you Suikoden Tierkreis isn’t for me. Sure, it cribs from parts of older Suikodens, and those parts of Tierkreis endeared themselves to me. But I can’t believe that’s anything but a Pavlovian reaction to JRPGs loved and lost (or rather, JRPGs loved and left to gather dust in the closet).

Here’s what is there from older Suikodens: 108 Stars of Destiny to gather, a castle with an elevator, a streamlined and elegant battle system. The series’ legacy of excellent music is upheld impressively as well. It’s what’s not there is a lot more important, and takes a little bit more explanation.

One of the most important elements of the Suikoden franchise is its constant focus on local histories—“local” in that it depicts conflicts between nations, and “history” in that it depicts them in a believable way with little sense of which side is good and which is evil. Those of us who play JRPGs may think it is compelling to wrest dreams of world destruction from the grip of a mad god, but that is nothing compared to maneuvering political webs and enlisting the local citizenry to take a conflict that may or may not be just to its better end. At its best Suikoden provided the latter but it also added personal battles intensified and complicated by the war at hand. An engaging mix that easily trounced the fairy tales of JRPGs it competed against, you never saved the world in Suikoden. Suikoden, for all of its successes and failures, was above saving the world.

So in Suikoden Tierkreis, you save the world from a mad god and the nation of zealots who worship him. Your team of “starbearers” are clearly in the right the whole time, and most of your enemies, with dreams based in selfishness or fanaticism, are clearly in the wrong. The nameless hero, a village boy whose origins are mysterious, is far too simpleminded to engage in political intrigue so the game pays shallow lip service to the concept. His simple nature and devil-may-care attitude also means personal troubles elude him completely. There are glimmers of past brilliance in the story—a handful of villains have complex motivations, for example—but this is largely JRPG 101, complete with horrible voice acting.

The rest is not horrible, provided JRPG 101 is your thing. Suikoden’s battle system is still a thing of elegant beauty, and it’s sleeker than ever in Tierkreis. The technical presentation is wonderful, though many of the face textures are pretty questionable. The main characters are likable—Tierkreis deserves credit for presenting its dumb, good-natured hick of a protagonist as an actual dumb, good-natured hick, and the rest of the cast falls into place well around him. There’s a lot of things to see and fun to be had, two elements that have not been present in every Suikoden. It’s not the worst Suikoden by a good margin, assuming it’s a Suikoden at all.

And it’s not, not really. It’s Suikoden with the heart ripped out—all of that good storytelling and risky characterization replaced with comfortable genre tropes and easy mythmaking. It’s Suikoden as directed by a publisher that is seeing diminishing returns on Suikoden, and its intention to make the franchise more “mainstream” feels obvious and cynical. It’s Suikoden for JRPG fans, but not for Suikoden fans. It’s amazing to me that there’s a difference, but Suikoden Tierkreis proves there is. It’s a good RPG, and yet I can’t help but be disappointed by it.

Grade: C+

Previous Reviews:

The 61FPS Review: Eat Lead - The Return of Matt Hazard
The 61FPS Review: Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
The 61FPS Review: Resident Evil 5

10 Years Ago This Week: Requiem: Avenging Angel

Joe Keiser — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:15:00 GMT

A rare effort from 3DO to create a first-person shooter franchise, Requiem: Avenging Angel (released April 4, 1999) had a fascinating premise but nevertheless was a critical and commercial dud. It was also the last game to come out of Cyclone Studios, a short-lived development house that never managed to find its footing despite having a string of interesting game concepts.

Requiem’s mythos combined a near-future dystopian scenario with a story of heavenly intervention. Fallen angels have come to a late 21st-century Earth and suppressed the populace under totalitarian order, with the goal of using that disciplined force to build a starship that would touch the face of Paradise. As this is an act God cannot allow, he sends his angel Malachi to Earth to deal with the situation.

This combination of tropes is unique, engaging, and provides the game with its greatest strength: its arsenal. It’s huge, combining your typical FPS weapons loadout with a variety of neat and sometimes hilarious angelic powers. In 1999, it was almost worth it to play through the game just to get the Pillar of Salt ability, and really get biblical on those grunt soldiers.

But for all its attempts to do something interesting with the genre, Requiem suffers from a great many negatives. Like many FPS titles that began development before Half-Life but shipped afterwards, it felt obsolete out the gate. But in addition to this lack of vision Requiem had enough post-Half-Life development time to attempt to shoehorn its story in via in-game scripting. Unfortunately, the technology simply wasn’t there to support this type of game structure, and the result was lots of stationary NPCs talking: a wooden, hollow telling of what could have been an interesting yarn.

And yet Requiem had even bigger problems in that its gameplay itself failed to engage. Interestingly, this was not because the mechanics of the shooting game itself were bad (although they were loose). Rather, Requiem suffered from a lack of adequate positive feedback: the player didn’t feel powerful no matter how powerful they actually were. The reason for this was primarily a failure on the part of the game’s audio direction. Most weapons and powers simply didn’t sound like they had any oomph, enemies rarely responded to damage with reasonable exclamations of pain, and these lousy samples were put into the game at a low audio quality, which made them sound even more tinny and weak. If you’ve ever wondered how important good audio direction is to a game experience, Requiem: Avenging Angel should be your textbook case of why skimping in that department is a bad plan.

Requiem was the last game to be developed by Cyclone Studios, and it actually released several months after 3DO closed the studio and absorbed its assets. This may have been the best option for the studio: reports from the time state that Cyclone had a habit of hiring green developers with no experience but incredible passion for the medium, which is no doubt why it’s major franchises, Requiem and the early first-person RTS Uprising, were so interesting in concept and so messily executed. It’s unfortunate that we’ll never get to see these concepts handled with the weight of experience behind them, but with 3DO gone and its assets thrown to the wind its unclear who even owns the rights to Requiem: Avenging Angel anymore.

Requiem still has fans, as is evidenced by a Quake 4 engine total conversion effort that actually got pretty far along before apparently being scuttled just a few days ago. But that doesn’t mean it has too many fans: you can find copies for less than a dollar on the aftermarket. Fully patched Requiem: Avenging Angel gives the illusion of working in Vista, but it’s really too buggy to get very far without an incredible amount of frustration.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

Everquest
Army Men 3D
Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

Whatcha Playing: Dead or Alive Xtreme 2

Joe Keiser — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

When I tell you that I am playing Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 I know that the first thing you think of is “there’s only one reason to play that game in 2009.” But it’s not what you think, honest. Yes, it’s an archaic collect-a-thon that was excoriated by the press for a variety of reasons both just and unjust. But the Xtreme series actually does manipulate the player in fascinating ways. Xtreme 2’s failure to appeal also speaks to the failure of some modern gaming conventions, and specifically suggests that maybe Achievements shouldn’t be mandatory on every title under the sun. If we can all disregard the nauseating breast physics for a second (and I understand this is very, very difficult) I’ll try to explain.

I’ve always held that the Xtreme games are actually doing something insidious behind all of the cheesecake and ridiculously proportioned girls. Yes, they try to appeal to the part of the male brain stem that will always be twelve years old. But when this testosterone-filled player actually starts playing the game it actually goes the other way. This is not a game where you just ogle women, it’s a game that makes young men carefully consider the fashion implications of a new floral hat. It’s a game that forces the player to think about at nearly all times their relationships with everyone else on the island, and how to nurture those relationships by understanding the wishes of others. This is effectively boys playing with Barbie, a project that uses the prospect of bikini-clad women as a carrot while it does the work of feminizing the player. It is a great trick, and I bow to Itagaki for perpetrating it so successfully.

Unfortunately, I think the smoke and mirrors Team Ninja employed to such great success in the first Xtreme were a reason for Xtreme 2’s failure. Most people did not see Xtreme 2 as an elaborate mind game. They saw it as a guilty pleasure. A really guilty pleasure. A pleasure so guilty that maybe they didn’t want it to be broadcast to their friends/co-workers/family that they were playing it for hours a day. This desire runs pretty contrary to the basic feature set of Xbox Live, and is exactly the reason it took me two years to chip away at my shame and finally put it in my console.

But it gets worse. The achievements in DOAX2 do not have that nice pro/con dichotomy most achievements share, that feeling of pride mixed with just a twist of shame. It’s all shame in DOAX2. Every achievement is related to buying swimsuits, with even the easiest ones requiring a pathological devotion to voyeurism. By the time you’re getting to the mid difficulty achievements, Itagaki’s joke has not only been lost on you but has revealed a latent mental illness. And then Xbox Live broadcasts it to the world.

As a result, I’ve been playing the game in fear of getting an achievement accidentally, and what that might say about me to my Live friend’s list. Now I do like achievements, and I think their ubiquity in 360 games has value. But it also creates a layer of structure that isn’t appropriate for all games. What if something like Shadow of the Colossus gave your achievement points for every colossus you felled? Wouldn’t that kind of positive stimulus weaken that game’s intent?

Related Links:

Team Ninja’s Post-Itagaki Future
Where Will You Go, Tecmo? What Will Happen to Our Love?
The 61FPS Review: Ninja Gaiden 2 Part 2

Everything You Need to Know About the Wii Storage Solution

Joe Keiser — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:50:00 GMT

As we’ve said, one of Nintendo’s big reveals at GDC today is the long, long awaited solution to the Wii’s storage woes. It's so obvious it's not even worthy of a condescending drum roll: it’s just the ability to load Virtual Console and WiiWare games off an SD card. Could someone please explain to me why this took two years to roll out?

From today’s Nintendo GDC keynote, we know that this solution adds 32GB SDHC card support and is implemented via an SD card menu that looks a lot like the Wii menu. But I’ve been playing with it, and so have all the extra little details after the jump. This might be rather fine data for something as pedestrian as a storage solution, but don’t blame me: Nintendo has given me way too long to think about what I want from this.

Here’s the breakdown:

There’s load time. The Wii still can’t actually load games in-place off the SD card; instead it has to copy them to system memory temporarily, and then load it. This means you will be twiddling your thumbs while the copy takes place, and on a big game like Sin & Punishment this load can be nearly twenty seconds long.
It recognizes all previously backed-up VC and WiiWare games. Imagine my surprise and buyer’s remorse when I opened up the SD card menu for the first time and found Solomon’s Key, a launch VC title I hadn’t played since 2006. If your SD card is where your ill-conceived late-night VC purchases have been buried, get ready to be slapped by a bunch of history.
The Wii Shop can only sort of use the SD card. While you can download from the Shop onto the SD card just fine, once the game gets there the shop can’t see it right away (ie: it flags the game as “downloadable” instead of “downloaded”). Only if you try to download the game to the SD card again will it figure out you already have it and give you an error. If you’re like me, you have WiiWare junk all over the place, and this update isn’t going to help you get more organized.
Don’t move your save games. If they didn’t work off SD card before, they still won’t now. This is a VC/WiiWare solution only.
It doesn’t break The Homebrew Channel. If you already have it installed you can still use it after the update, so don’t worry about that half-finished game of Beneath a Steel Sky you were playing in ScummVM.

Will OnLive Change Everything?

Joe Keiser — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:30:00 GMT

The first major reveal of this year’s GDC is OnLive, a service that seems in a lot of ways to be too good to be true. Put simply, OnLive wants to take the hardware out of the gaming equation: simply log in via a web browser-based plugin, start up any game on offer, and the game starts to play on some godly rig at OnLive’s server farm—with the glorious HD results beamed right into your trashy netbook.

The announcement materials for OnLive make the thing sound truly game-changing. OnLive will let you play modern games on anything, starting with PC, Mac, and a little “MicroConsole” that probably won’t cost more than $100. It will start with PC games (including computer crushers possibly including Crysis), but console games are possible. There’ll be unique community options like unlimited live spectators as well, and you can have it all for a low, Xbox Live-like annual fee (and the price of game purchase/rental, of course).

Now from a technical perspective, this sounds like a unicorn—getting 720p games to react at 60 frames per second to controller input coming from across today's internet is, without devolving into technobabble, a task so close to impossible it’s difficult to discern the space between them. But OnLive has been in development for seven years, so it’s possible that seven years of optimization and cunning tricks could compile into a solution. It’s apparently been working well enough at the press showings, but there’s reason to be skeptical—I am, and so is a lot of the internet.

There are also of course the usual issues that crop up with digital distribution, only more so. Here you don’t even get a download to backup and crack in case of emergency corporate implosion, and if the service ever decides to go on holiday you’ll be back in the Dark Ages till it comes back. It also further marginalizes PC gaming's hardware culture, a landscape of neon and copper cooling pipes that I adore in all its geekiness. And you’ll need a decent internet connection for it too, obviously—5Mbps for 720p and 1.5Mbps minimum, for Wii-like 480p. That sounds like a lot (and you can test your speeds here), but in terms of what OnLive is asking those Mbps to do it’s nothing. It’s miraculous. It’s pushing a Mack truck through an inner tube.

Let’s hope it’s real.

Related Links:

Steam Weekend Sales Will Save Us All (Money)
GOG is Great

Sony’s Xi: It’s Something to Do in PlayStation Home

Joe Keiser — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Because I am a relatively sane human being, I hadn’t noticed the strange new alternate reality game that has apparently been teased in PlayStation Home for the past few weeks. That would have required me to play Home, a nightmarish exercise that no good person should have to experience more than once.

But these aren’t normal circumstances. This is Xi, Home’s first alternate reality game, which officially launched yesterday. Never mind that the point of ARGs is to take place in the real world, while Xi looks like it will take place primarily in Home: I didn’t re-enter Sony’s hellscape of marketing to argue semantics. I went in to figure out if you should chance it too.

Everyone knows the strategy of the average Home player goes thusly:

1. Find a female
2. Turn on bubble machine
3. Dance like an idiot until female leaves/turns into fat man.

Xi ups the ante on these players: now Home’s sexiest alpha tester has disappeared! So if you’re ever going to find her, to gloriously Charleston with her, you’ll need to figure out whatever crazy, cryptic thing she was doing, as well as the mysteries that lie in Home’s super-secret Alpha Zones.

On day one of Xi these mysteries took players to The Hub, a new tiny map that turns Home into a rudimentary adventure game engine. New to the Home experience are cutscenes, context-sensitive voice-over, and hotspots triggered by specific emotes. There’s also items to gather and puzzles to solve, but this stuff is particularly simple—there’s no inventory to manage, and challenges have so far been of the “figure out the password and type it into the keypad” variety. So it’s still not very interactive, but it’s just day one. Less forgivable was that by the start of day two, The Hub had replaced some of its flavor content with tips on what to do if you experience game-crippling bugs. A video of sexy alpha tester was provided (perhaps as penance) but this is not a good sign.

But Xi is still something to do in Home, which is a thing Home has lacked since it launched. It also expands the scope of Home enough to imply that there might be more to do in the service in the future. But Xi still has to play out over the course of weeks. Whether or not it’s worth following along as a player will probably not be answered until the very end of the game, when Miss Attractive Alpha Tester turns into (or doesn’t, in which case this will all have been for naught) Sweaty Alpha Fatso. I’ll keep on it, and let you know when it’s worth diving in.

Related Links:

Revisiting the Curious Case of Playstation Home
Playstation Home: All Your Worst Fears Realized
Home: Your Virtual World Sucks

My Name is Joe, and I have a Metagaming Problem.

Joe Keiser — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

I’ve been bouncing around my backlog lately, and it’s become problematic. This is not because of the backlog itself, though I will not lie: my backlog is dark and deep, a German forest in the middle of the night. By the time you get to 2004 you can no longer see sunlight. By the time you get to 1995 there is no way out, your breadcrumb trail having been eaten by PlayStation launch titles. You will be scared and alone, having no choice but to turn to torturing analogies for comfort.

My point, and I think I have one, is that pulling games out of my archive requires some kind of path, some kind of genre or theme like “games with robots in” or “games by that one developer I like to pretend is my friend”. So I’ve chosen a path.

It is Achievement Points. And it is ruining everything.

I think Achievement Points are fascinating. I like how they measure my progress in 360 games, sure. But I really enjoy how they have represent both a positive and negative worth, how great it feels to see that score so high until you remember how many of those points were gained by pretending to ride a bicycle in a circle for hours. The higher your score, the better and worse you feel! It’s brilliant. And I wanted more of them.

But the journey they’re taking me on, I’m not sure I like. I just finished a playthrough of Devil May Cry 4, on Human mode because I am a wuss. It took like ten hours, and at the end the game gave me like five achievement points, a bottle cap, and the most condescending achievement titles I have ever seen. This upset me, and I was even more upset when I looked up the good achievements and found that to get them, I had to turn myself into an unblinking Devil May Cry genius, attaining mastery in its rainbow of impossible difficulty settings. Before reading this, I was planning on playing through it again. After reading it, I threw the game aside in disgust.

And then I remembered that DMC4 is actually pretty fun—it’s no great shakes one way or the other, but it’s pretty and flamboyant and racking up a huge style combo is really very satisfying. I realized as I carefully removed Overlord from the Jenga pile that Achievement Points were destroying me. I didn’t really want to play Overlord, I really wanted to play more Devil May Cry 4. And actually I really wanted to play Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition, except I didn’t because it didn’t have Achievement Points.

Clearly, what started as a way to find something weird and new to play has become a big problem. I understand that and am working on a solution. Right after I finish up Overlord.

Related Links:

My Life as a Red Ring Statistic
GameTrailers' Top 10 Most Difficult Games
Bayonetta: Not As Gratuitous As You Think

10 Years Ago This Week: X-Wing Alliance

Joe Keiser — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:00:00 GMT

X-Wing Alliance (released March 24, 1999) was the last entry in Totally Games’ X-Wing series of space sims, and one of the last games in the genre to experience significant retail success. It thus represents a significant marker in the collapse of the space simulator as a market force, even if it’s not a particularly notable game on its own.

XWA was the follow-up to 1997’s X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter, a game that sold very well but disappointed a lot of players ostensibly because it focused on multiplayer at the expense of single-player (it’s far more likely that the game was disappointing because it followed TIE Fighter, a genre classic that many consider the best Star Wars game ever made). X-Wing Alliance sought to return to the strong storytelling roots of the franchise, while at the same time providing a compelling multiplayer element.

But beyond that and the standard technical upgrades, XWA didn’t provide any major additions over the mechanics of previous entries in the series. This lack of ambition was acceptable given the major strides of Totally Games’ earlier efforts, but it meant that X-Wing Alliance would never be destined for classic status. The reviewers of the time were aware of this. While they appreciated the more nuanced than usual story—Ace Azzameen, a member of a merchant family with Rebel sympathies, finds himself unable to avoid becoming embroiled in the galactic war—and the well-trodden gameplay, what was written about the game was unexcited and dispassionate.

Playing it in modern times, it’s easy to see why. Like most late-era 3D space simulators, it holds up a little bit better that contemporary games in other genres. But even with its clean graphical look and a lack of genre innovation to keep if fresh, it still feels somewhat hollow, and doesn’t compare favorably in any way to 1998’s Descent: FreeSpace.

Star Wars fans and franchise veterans ate it up anyway, but with less gusto: despite being a significant improvement over X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter, X-Wing Alliance was the worst-selling entry in the series by a significant margin. While still by no means a failure, this could perhaps be seen as a portent for the collapse in sales experienced by space simulators in 1999 America—FreeSpace 2 and Tachyon: The Fringe both came out to general apathy at this time, and the early 2000 release of X: Beyond the Frontier was completely ignored.

XWA still has a small but dedicated following, and the number of mods that add content or enhance the graphics continues to grow. Miraculously, the game will run in Vista with only its official patches (though if you have an nVidia graphics card you might run into visual corruption in the text, and will need a fan-made patch). XWA has not been reprinted in some time, and that coupled with the collectible nature of Star Wars artifacts means it commands prices in the $15-$25 range on the aftermarket.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

EverQuest
Army Men 3D
Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

Roundtable Discussion: Pushing the Envelope on Sex and Nudity

Amber Ahlborn — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Relatively recently Grand Theft Auto news made waves by showing a full frontal male nudity scene. Now, this is hardly the first time a human being, male or female, has been shown nekkid in a game. You can at least go back as far as the reprehensible Custer's Revenge for the Atari to find a digital representation of male genitals. The question is, do we really need this sort of thing in a video game?

Amber's Take: Now, anyone who knows me also knows I'm a bit of a prude. I really am not interested in having certain pieces of anatomy on public display. That said, I don't have a problem with sex or the related bits in video games. What I take issue with is how it's used. I think the full exposure in the GTA scene serves no purpose other than to shout out "Hey, we did this because we could!"

For most of the scene, the camera teases around the main character and very strongly gets the message across that this guy has no shame. As a way of portraying a character trait, it's incredibly effective. There is no question the character is a slime ball. The final bit that shows his bits adds nothing other than a superfluous ick factor (all the more repulsive due to the character already sliding down the side of the Uncanny Valley).

Another thing I take issue with is when sex is used to trivialize people, usually women, in games. I think the force of my sneer actually radiated heat when I learned about the sex mini games that have been popping up in certain titles already drowning in their own testosterone.

Like violence, sex and basic human anatomy can be used to shock people. This in and of itself isn't necessarily a negative. Unfortunately, it's far too easy to use these elements in a cheap and base way, rather than as effective story telling tools or ways to drive messages home. If you want to shock my sensibilities, fine, more power to you. I only have a problem with games that insult my intelligence and use the medium to degrade and dehumanize.

Cole's Take: I cannot think of a single instance in which sexual content has improved a game. I talked about this recently when I discussed God of War. I think that sex is used so often in media because creative types and business people operate under the false assumption that sex sells. I won't get into it here, but I took a class back in college that put the theory to rest. Yes, in some cases, steamy content will increase awareness about a particular movie, game, or whatever, but all things being equal, sexual content rarely has a measurable effect on sales. Which is why I find it so bizarre that developers, like the GoW guys, think that they absolutely have to have sex minigames, lest they disappoint fans.

I feel about sexual content the same way I feel about excessive, gory violence. It's cheap. I'd just as soon go back and play Starsiege: Tribes, which had no blood or gore, than a Controversial M-Rated Shooter. Game mechanics are what excites my senses, not titillating imagery. If one really wanted to be turned on, there are many, many superior alternatives outside of gaming that can be used to exercise that unsavory impulse, if you know what I mean and I think that you do.

Joe's Take: I'm going to play a bit of devil's advocate here and say that for now, pushing the envelope just for the sake of pushing the envelope is a-okay. Videogaming is still a medium in adolescence, particularly in terms of how it is perceived by the public on a whole. In order to get on even footing with other mediums it has to do everything those mediums do, and has to do it in a way that gets attention. This actually makes "Hey, we did this because we could!" a valid reason to put in shocking content.

Of course the fact that this course of action is necessary for the overall health of medium doesn't defend certain crass, base implementations of shocking content, which of course can be horrendous and cause short-term damage to the perception of games on a whole. This is a sort of collateral damage, though. If you want to be able to expand the visual language of games to include the same taboo bits as cinema or HBO you have to let everyone (or rather, everyone willing to get an M or AO-rating) use the taboo bits, and not everyone will use them in a way that is within reasonable societal norms. The overall impact will still be positive, as it will create a genuinely mature way for games to discuss genuinely mature themes.

Note that I'm not defending any of Amber's examples. I've not seen the Lost and Damned content, and God of War's minigame, though maybe justifiable as a characterization device in the first game, did not need to be in the later games. Custer's Revenge was the most deplorable part of a thankfully failed experiment to create an adult games industry similar to the adult film industry--that sort of effort will always be consigned to the gutters, and isn't really relevant to games as a medium.

Related Links:

Roundtable Discussion: Genre Design Evolution

Roundtable Discussion: The Fandom Phenomenon Part 1

Roundtable Discussion: Where is the Handheld Version of Console Wars?

Playing Treasure's Lost PS2 Game

Joe Keiser — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

I don’t know how this got past me, but I’m on it now: a few weeks ago, the unreleased game saviors at Lost Levels gave up on their seven year wait for Tiny Toons: Defenders of the Universe and finally pushed the beta they had been sitting on into public channels. The reason you should care about such inexplicable, unfinished, licensed pap? Two reasons. It’s from Treasure, the Japanese game developer everyone so loves (probably too much). And it’s been billed in the past as the spiritual successor to Rakugaki Showtime, the cult crayon arena fighter nobody’s ever played.

Thinking it was at worst a curious historical footnote to the legacy of a storied developer, I went through the trouble of giving it a shakedown. And this was certainly troublesome code—it allegedly runs very badly on PS2 emulators, and although my dusty old PS2 could read the game just fine it couldn’t display it on my screen without the assistance of the exceptionally obscure Blaze HDTV Player. For these reasons it seems like very few people have actually played the game in a workable state.

But I have, though I probably shouldn’t have bothered. It isn’t that this beta code is technically unplayable. It’s not a finished game, by any means—the game has both audio quality and audio cue problems, and critical instruction text runs off the screen where it can’t be read. These are just small, quashable problems, though. The game still feels largely content complete and doesn’t look awful for a 2001 PS2 game, though it doesn’t look good by any metric. But the technical side is competent, so that’s not the issue.

Instead, the game’s major problem seems to be that it has too many masters. If it is indeed trying to be a spiritual successor to Rakugaki Showtime, it’s also trying to meet the arbitrary kiddie game requirements of either publisher Conspiracy (who judging by its track record may or may not have cared at all) or license holder Warner Brothers. So from its game design DNA it pulls the elements of a chaotic arena fighter, like Power Stone 2 but occasionally even more frenetic and hard to control. This is fine for a multiplayer game.

But demographics demand that DotU be a linear single-player game as well, and here this beta is a disaster. See, it’s still an arena fighter, so its single-player implementation is fighting AI opponents in a small, boxy arena before running down a…long hallway that still plays like an arena. Here, game design that emphasizes fighting is in direct conflict with level design that emphasizes platforming, so the whole game collapses into a mangled mess.

I’d like to believe that Treasure realized it was trying to push a square peg into a round hole with this game, and shut it down internally. More likely the reason for it never seeing release was “Conspiracy sold the license to stay afloat” or “somebody realized that nobody would buy a Tiny Toons game in 2001.” In any case its problems ran too deep to be salvaged, and we’re lucky it was doomed to be played only by bored bloggers on lazy afternoons.

Related Links:

Underrated: Mischief Makers
Jumper and How Not to Make a Game
Up All Night: Ex-Mutants

Whatcha Playing: Dungeon Maker II

Joe Keiser — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

These days my launch PSP is held together by masking tape, spit, and prayer. But it does work (for now), and I’m trying to get to know it a little bit better before it inevitably decomposes into its constituent parts. The game of the hour is Dungeon Maker II: The Hidden War, a title from last Christmas that was roundly ignored by all humans.

To be fair, it’s a bit of a minor effort. It’s low budget, free of any and all flashiness, and doesn’t have a lick of polish. But it’s also curiously addictive, so it provides a nice contrast to the modern AAA titles that hide their mechanics deep under pixel shaders and mocap animation. Dungeon Maker II is a throwback: like the low-tech games of yore, its mechanics sit exposed and naked under the nose of the player, and so have to be compelling on their own.

A dungeon crawler at heart, you can probably glean the twist that makes the game worth playing from its title. Dungeon Maker II’s conceit is that you are a warrior-architect. Your goal is to build a luxurious dungeon that will attract monsters to its depths, because when monsters are in dungeons they’re not annoying people in the streets. It’s more or less Diablo, except instead of a randomly generated dungeon you’re traversing a constantly repopulating lair of your own design. It’s a trade-off of a sense of exploration for a sense of ownership (though there are still some computer-generated spaces for when your own space makes you stir-crazy), and gives the game a charm all its own.

It’s also a simply implemented twist—dungeons are graph paper dungeons, two-dimensional and all right angles, but that makes them intuitive to set up. The graphics are plain as is technically possible, but are iconic so it’s easy to get on with the building/slaying/loot gathering aspects that will keep you playing. Combat is…clunky and mechanical, but it gets the job done. There’s no excuse for the music, though, so you should mute that.

So the game has lots of edges, and none of them were smoothed off. It gives a lot in return, though. In just a few hours, you’ll have a cavernous self-built play space that you feel a strong connection to. The game drops loot frequently and with significant variety, which you can bring to town (again, a work of minimalism—it’s a single, hand-painted screen) to trade for a constantly growing array of spells, cooking ingredients, and exotic dungeon rooms.

Dungeon Maker II is not shy about its grind cycle. This is a game where every gear is exposed, a game so plain and unpretentious that its closest technical relative might be NetHack. And yet after a game like Star Ocean: The Last Hope, little, obsolete Dungeon Maker II feels refreshingly straightforward.

Related Links:

How Sony Can Save the PSP in 2009
Persona Comes to PSP
Where Is the PSP?

10 Years Ago This Week: EverQuest

Joe Keiser — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

While not the first successful MMORPG (Ultima Online is frequently cited for this accolade), EverQuest (released March 16, 1999) was undoubtedly the first truly culturally relevant MMORPG, and the first one to achieve critical mass in its player base. The things EverQuest did in its five years at the top of the genre defined not only the way MMORPGs are designed. It also codified how the MMO business is structured, cemented a great many aspects of massive game player culture, and began the controversies that continue to haunt the genre to this day. It’s hard to overstate how much EverQuest has contributed to the medium, and you could certainly make an argument for it being the most important game of the last ten years (though you only have the rest of the day to do so).

In retrospect, it’s easy to see EverQuest as the culmination of the interesting online game experimentation that went on in the mid 90s, in games like Meridian 59 and The Realm and at companies like Stormfront and Mythic. In addition, Ultima Online proved that there was a significant market for subscription-based online gamine as far back as 1997.

EverQuest has gone through many UI and graphical overhauls in the last decade. This video represents a long defunct version of the game.

EverQuest made all of those projects look like relics. At a time when just being an MMO alone was considered a marked technological achievement, EQ managed to render its large-scale world in an incredibly modern 3D engine. With its graphics alone bringing in newer, more casual players, EverQuest also sought to take some of the harder edges off the genre, taking (for the time) major steps to limit player killing and encourage more cooperative play. It still wasn’t completely intuitive—the original interface (which has since been iterated out of existence), for example, was a rather kludgy attempt to keep massive amounts of game data available to the player at all times—but it was an improvement over the intimidating MMORPGs that it was competing with.

This more casual slant, combined with gameplay that pulled the most addictive parts from MUDs, D&D, and its predecessors, made EverQuest a sensation. Reviewers loved it, simultaneously praising and warning against its incredibly addictive nature. At the end of 1999, it was simultaneously winning game of the year awards while surpassing the incumbent UO’s subscriber base. Bolstered by frequent updates and sizable expansion packs, “EverCrack” quickly became a gaming institution.

The industry immediately took notice. EQ proved that a single living game could not only do strong retail sales for years, but could also draw high monthly fees from a satisfied player base of up to nearly half a million players. It was a temptation that few publishers could resist, and the ensuing years were filled with “EverQuest killers” that looked and played similarly to EQ in the hopes of drawing a positive comparison.

And which that much, um, sincere flattery, tropes were created. It’s almost impossible to count the number of MMO memes and standards that began in EQ, but here’s a fairly prominent one: raiding did not really exist before EverQuest. Today these large-scale uber-challenges are standard issue content in most MMO end games. Interlocking guild-based character classes like tanks and buffers also came to prominence in this game, as did jargon that is now used across the entirety of the genre—phrases like, you guessed it, “tank,” “buffer,” and “raid”.

Like any work at the vanguard of a new cultural movement, EverQuest drew controversy. Most of these issues were non-specific to EQ itself, but rather endemic to the genre the game led. The idea of game addiction became more prominent than ever in discussions about the game, and anecdotes of people who flunked out of college or were left by their wives because of their EverQuest habit rapidly made the rounds. An even more fascinating cultural problem cropped up in the form of gold farming, as third world-based sweatshops began playing the game nonstop and offering spoils to the highest bidder. When World of Warcraft did prove to be the EverQuest killer of legend, it inherited these and similar issues of psychology and economy.

EverQuest’s PC version is still actively maintained and updated by Sony Online Entertainment; its most recent expansion came out last October. Of course, a free trial is available. There is also a Mac version, but it exists mostly as a curio—it hasn’t been updated in years, meaning it lacks the game’s rolling graphical upgrades as well as the content of the last eleven expansion packs. The effect of this lazy maintenance schedule means the Mac version acts as a time capsule of EverQuest at the height of its influence. So it’s an interesting historical artifact, and one that’s freely accessible until Apple inevitably breaks the game in an operating system update (and that assumes you can even get it to work at the moment, because it sure did look funny on my machine).

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

Army Men 3D
Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

The Perfect Recession Game: Tetoris

Joe Keiser — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Here’s a real find for anyone that’s found themselves without a job in this difficult time. It’s free, it’s long, it’s as addictive as Tetris, and the only system requirement is perfect 20/20 vision. It’s Tetoris, the Tetris variant where every line takes 20 minutes to break.

Okay, so playing Tetoris as if it was Tetris is almost certainly impossible, as you’ll go cross-eyed and mad after only a few hours of the attempt; we are talking about a game where a conscious attempt to die can take upwards of ten minutes. Still, this is actually quite a fascinating little take on the puzzle as endurance test, and there’s actually more to do than just play it. Race to your first line, or to (heaven help you) your first double, or to death: see how long it takes you to get there. Or just let Tetoris run in the background while you work. After a few hours, you’re likely to have a lovely bit of organic tetromino art.

You can play it here. You can also experience it there, if playing becomes overwhelming.

Related Links:

It's My Tetris Party And I Can Waggle If I Want To
Bastard Tetris will Make You RAGE
I Wish I Had Bought Tetrisphere.

The 61FPS Review: Star Ocean The Last Hope

Joe Keiser — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Star Ocean 4 is a tragic creature. It’s not a great game, nor can it even see greatness from where it is now. Instead, it feels like it was dragged, kicking and clawing, away from greatness by wicked beasts that feed only on the worst excesses of Japanese pop storytelling.

So its story is almost unfathomably bad. Here is one Edge Maverick, who goes against what his parents wanted for him by being neither edgy or a maverick. Born on a post-apocalyptic earth, he is but a cog in the government division tasked with finding a new home world for the remainder of humanity. A coincidental calamity sees him promoted to captain of his own ship, with his mission clear: mankind is choking on fallout, so go find a new planet for them. Preferably one without giant man-murdering insects.

He immediately loses the plot. Long before he finds himself embroiled in a conflict for the fate of the universe, Edge is compiling his ragtag team of horrifying cosplay clichés: there’s a winged girl in there, and an embarrassingly clad catgirl, and at least two different varieties of space elf. He takes this merry band of awfully voice-acted annoyances across a series of nearly non-sequitur adventures, none of which have anything to do with colonizing the galaxy. Perhaps because he has confused being the universe’s most incompetent space captain with being a maverick, he messes up nearly all of these missions, which apparently excuses him to spend hours and hours as a mopey drama queen.

Eventually we do get to the battle for all life, and things get even worse. It’s a turn of events that gets all of the actors talking incessantly about “evolution,” except none of them know what “evolution” is, giving it at least three different definitions but using them interchangeably, to the point where it’s no longer clear what the main villain is doing or what anyone should learn from any of it. So it’s no surprise when all the characters take the wrong lesson away at the end, though it is hilarious.

This complete mess is relayed in a never-ending barrage of excruciating cutscenes, but the real tragedy of Star Ocean: The Last Hope isn’t that it’s a terrible game with a terrible, terribly acted plot. It’s actually quite a good game with a terrible, terribly acted plot. From a technical perspective this is about as good as the JRPG has ever gotten—Tri-Ace’s lovely engine pumps out some lush and colorful vistas while keeping framerates high and load times nearly nonexistent. The super-fast realtime battle system balances chaos and twitch with an incredible amount of tactical depth. The difficulty curve forces you to learn all of its many nuances, so by the end of the game you’ll be juggling quick attack chains with methodical menu-based magic, mixing fully aggressive attacks with slower but more damaging blindside attacks, and switching characters in and out of the party while switching which character is under manual control. There’s even a customizable bonus board, which rewards certain battle actions like critical hits with percentage increases to things like experience and gold acquisition. And the increase persists from battle to battle until you take a critical hit yourself, adding a level of tension to the affair.

This battle system is well integrated into the game’s other subsystems, which include character growth, item creation and data collection. These systems are for the most part well implemented. Character development is primarily handled through the enhancements of skills via scarce skill points, forcing the player to often make difficult decisions about who needs to be better at what right now. Item creation is based on a tangled web of dozens of collectible doodads, with item recipe discovery based primarily on character skills. The data collecting element rewards battling enemies with increased enemy info—battle a specific type of creature enough and you’ll be able to capture their essence into an accessory, providing stat gains based on the nature of that creature. There’re a huge number of interlocking gears for the maximal player to keep in mind, which is good. It’s interesting. And the reward for playing long and well isn’t just better characters and loot, there’s also a wealth of contextual information to read through.

This is all well and good, but Star Ocean: The Last Hope is designed in a way that minimizes its strengths. Combat is fun, but dungeons are long and strenuous affairs with architecture often repeating and save points spread far apart. The sheer number of battles will begin to grate, and then you’re rewarded with…another shrill, nonsensical cutscene.

The reason I spent the beginning of this review on the game’s story is because Star Ocean: The Last Hope is an incredible case. It’s fun, on several levels. But here fun is not enough, because the game’s universe is simply a place that you do not want to visit. If you watch the cinemas and leave on the voice-acting it’s like going to Disneyland except you have to ride the teacups for hours at a time and it’s “Douchebags Get In Free Day”. Turn all of that off (and there are a wealth of options to do that, including turning off character voice individually) and it becomes an empty, more joyless sort of fun.

I requested the review for this game having not played a Star Ocean before because it was made clear to me that Star Ocean: The Last Hope, being a prequel, would be a good way for a JRPG fan to jump into the series. Unless you can watch all of the embedded cutscenes in this review without wincing, I would recommend you do not follow my lead.

Rating: C-

Past Reviews:

Killzone 2
Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

30 Years Ago This Week: The CD

Joe Keiser — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

We’re taking a break from our regular 10 Years Ago column this week, but only because nothing happened ten years ago this week—unless you are some kind of terrible extreme sports game aficionado, in which case you can talk about EA’s Rush Down by yourself. Fortunately for the rest of us, something great did happen this week. It’s just something we have to go back a little bit further to discuss.

The Compact Disc (released, sort of, on March 8th, 1979) was first publicly demoed thirty years ago this previous Sunday. It went on to become one of the major driving technologies of the digital media revolution. It also broadened the horizons of videogames as a medium, and to an extent democratized the industry as well.

The Compact Disc format originally began as an audio-only format: the standard for recording sound to CD was codified in 1980, five years prior to the buttoning up of the CD-ROM standard. Even then, it would take several more years before economies of scale would finally become such that the games industry would be able to take advantage of the disc. And it would be even longer before the technology would be able to take root—the earliest adopters of CD media (besides the PC, which is always first) were fringe players, with NEC’s TurboGrafx CD the noted trailblazer for CD on console. It would be quickly followed by other quirky systems including the Amiga CDTV and the CD-i. The end of 1991 would see the market leader of the time acknowledge the format in the form of the Sega Mega CD, but even that was at best a limited success.

Although CD represented some tangible benefits over the cartridge formats of the period, it was by no means obvious that the disc would become the format of choice for games manufacturers. It had problems cartridges didn’t have, like a lack of durability (an SNES cart is more or less indestructible, whereas one scratch can permanently incapacitate a CD) and slow seek speeds that necessitated load times, the great bane of game pacing. Even its major advantage, the 650MB of space, started off as a disadvantage as developers used to 2MB cartridges or 1.44MB floppies struggled with how to fill this incredible new expanse.

This struggle produced early results both banal (the practice of piling dozens of floppy-based games on to CD, which gave us the term “shovelware”) and interesting (full orchestral scores on console titles, the “talkie” versions of adventure games), but nothing particularly ambitious. The format’s software breakthrough wouldn’t come until 1993, when the twin PC releases of The 7th Guest and Myst spurred drive adoption and set the industry down a treacherous path. Both games were potent cocktails of simple puzzle mechanics, high-res still graphics and low-res video, a multimedia blend that would have been impossible had it not been for the copious storage space of CD. A lot of developers misread the tea leaves here and turned the CD into the medium of choice for FMV games. This was fortunately short-lived.

The hardware breakthrough came for CD games in the form of the PlayStation. Although the use of CD was just one of many canny decisions Sony made in development of the console, it was an important one, as the biggest advantage CD has over cartridge is that it is cheap and a lot of them can be made quickly. This had obvious advantages for gamers, as CD allowed Sony to adopt the $50 pricing standard that represented a significant drop from the wild west of Nintendo cart prices. But it also had advantages for publishers, who no longer had to worry about sitting on expensive cartridge inventory should a game fail to sell and so could afford to gamble on riskier projects. This was a major contributing factor to the decade-long wane of Nintendo, which suffered enormously for its decision o stick to cartridge. It’s also partially responsible for the burst of creativity that happened in mid-90s game development. Works like Parappa the Rapper, Resident Evil, and Final Fantasy VII made lasting contributions to the medium at this time, contributions that may not have been possible without the advantages of CD.

The CD disappeared from consoles at the turn of the century, replaced with newer optical media technologies like DVD and GD-ROM (PC stuck with the format for quite a while longer, to ridiculous multi-CD effect). These newer formats are just evolutionary advances on the Compact Disc, however—this 70s-era technology continues to shape the medium to this day, and will for the foreseeable future.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

Army Men 3D
Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

Roundtable Discussion: Genre Design Evolution

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Roundtable Discussion takes the intrepid 61FPS blogging team and pits it against itself in the search for deeper truth. The moderator for today is Derrick Sanskrit.

Hey kids, I think it's time for another roundtable chat. I've actually been wanting to ask this of you guys for a few weeks now, because I've noticed that lately I've been playing a lot of games I never would have even considered playing as a kid. Am I alone in this or are we all doing it?

What sorts of games are you playing now that you didn't play during what I assume was the glorious childhood heyday of gaming we all experienced? What sorts of games did you play then that you don't now? Have our tastes changed or have we merely opened/closed ourselves to certain experiences? What is fundamentally different about how these games are made now and how has overall design changed over time, affecting us as game consumers?

I know that's a bit of a loaded series of questions, so I'll kick things off.

I pretty much never played racing games as a kid. As a lifelong urban New Yorker, I never romanticized the concept of driving a car and have veered away from it for as long as I've been able. My college roommates pressured me into playing Gran Turismo, but it was Need For Speed Underground that made me a convert.

Joe: Haha, yeah. Need for Speed Underground is the secret best racing game of the PS2 era, and given the state of the franchise these days might be the only Need for Speed I'll ever...need. I thought I was the only one.

Derrick: Right? It felt like such a guilty pleasure. I began to appreciate racing games the same way I appreciate traditional science fiction: they're based in reality, but you do things that you should never ever EVER do in reality. EVER. And now I'm all about Burnout Paradise, a racing game where they break so many rules of what you should and shouldn't do with cars that they can't even legally use the likenesses of real-world vehicles. I love smashing rival cars off the side of the road. I love doing barrel rolls over open bridges. I hate being in actual cars, now, because I keep thinking the other cars will do all of that... but I still secretly smile.

Another genre I find myself seriously enjoying these days is the shmup/arcade shooter, which is wild because I HATED the shmup when I was a kid. Never got along with the memorization of R-Type, nor was I ever quite ADD enough for Geometry Wars. This is where design comes in, though. Genuinely thoughtful and creative game designers who love the shmup have gone about putting their own unique spins on the genre lately. From the simplified only-boss-battles-no-power-ups rRootage to the minimal-shooting-equals-sensory-overload Every Extend (Extra) to the additive-soundtrack-suggestively-philosophical Everyday Shooter to the bright-colors-we'll-make-up-out-own-damn-rules Big Bang Mini, I find that I LOVE avoiding one-hit destruction and blowing shit up. I'm even enjoying Retro Game Challenge's "Star Prince" a great deal, and that's just a rehash of the classic Star Soldier. It's not just these ones either. There's a plethora of artistically experimental shmups on the internet that, while still over my head as far as gameplay goes, fascinate me.

Cole: I don't think there's a specific genre that I play now that I didn't before, though I am much more likely to play online multiplayer games now than then, simply because I have the technology to do so at my fingertips.

Another thing that's changed for me over the years is that I've developed a much more discerning palate. As a kid, I got my hands on maybe two games a year (one for Christmas, one for my birthday). You best believe I finished each one to completion, no matter how frustrating, no matter how poorly designed. No cheats, no Game Genies. No Warp Zones.

Today, I only continue to play a game if it thrills me. I don't feel obligated to play through a game (unless of course I'm doing a review) just because. My time is much more precious than money, now that I'm a young urban professional. This has a huge impact on the way I approach leisure time in general. I'm much more interested in games that offer high-impact fun, even if they don't offer epic quests and cutting-edge visuals, as well.

Derrick: I remember being like that, Cole, getting a check from my grandmother every birthday and trying to decide which game was worth playing until the next special occasion that I had money for another game. Kirby's Dream Land 2 and Donkey Kong '94 were both acquired that way and they had metric tons of replay value, so I was happy for years. I think I've traded back more games for my DS than I ever owned for my Game Boy.

Joe: In terms of pure genres, I would say that I play less of them now than I did as a kid. The reason for this: I am a casualty of genre design bloat.

Although it's worse in some genres, generally speaking most of them have through the years experienced an increase in design complexity, which in turn makes the communities that play those genres smaller and more insular. For the types that I've invested myself heavily in, I'm able to keep up-the vagaries of modern JRPGs and 3D action/adventure platformers are something I can handle, and to an extent first-person shooters also don't provide a problem (modern shooting games actually straddle a line between feature bloat and blockbuster accessibility that makes many of them interesting beasts).

But at the same time, I've been pushed out of genres I used to enjoy: RTS (the last one I played a lot was Warcraft III), 2D Fighting (Marvel vs Capcom 2), shoot 'em ups (okay, I always sucked at these. You get my point). If something comes out in these genres that offers increased accessibility or something really new and fascinating, I will likely check them out because well, I love games. But I do feel like for the most part, these things aren't for me like they used to be.

Derrick: Just out of curiosity, Joe, why do you feel you lost interest in those genres? I know I used to play every Capcom fighter fiendishly, but now I practically had SSF2THDR forced upon me and I still can't muster up the enthusiasm to buy Street Fighter 4.

Joe: I didn't lose interest in them so much as they became too esoteric for me. A great example is the Guilty Gear series. I love guitar witches as much as the next red-blooded young man, but with all of its dead angles and false roman cancels the actual mechanics of the game are completely opaque to me. I cannot for the life of me translate such complicated glyphs into meaningful gameplay, let alone fun.

Derrick: That is a great example. Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus was playable at New York Comic-Con and I remember seeing a crowd of kids playing it with the general air of "so what? Its the same game we've played a million times" floating on all of their eyes. The sheer number of instant-kill moves I saw performed was staggering. There should be no such thing as an instant kill move. That defeats the "game" of it! And these kids were just used to it because they somehow wrapped their heads around it years ago!

Joe: The biggest exception to this rule is western RPGs, led by the console-based development of BioWare. For example, Baldur's Gate is an intricate and terrifying beast to me, but Mass Effect is one of my favorite games of all time. I also love Bethesda's new work, but the procedural wilds of early Elder Scrolls games scare the hell out of me. It's the best example of a genre that's actually trying to slim itself down, which in my opinion is making the games in it a lot easier to get into, yet no less engrossing once you're in.

Derrick: Alright, that's all the time we have for this discussion right now. I want to thank Cole and Joe for sharing with me here today. The conversation doesn't have to end here, 61fpsers. Keep it going in the comments!

Previously Roundtable Discussions:
The Relevance of Japanese RPGs
Where is the Handheld Version of Console Wars?
The Fandom Phenomenon part 1 - part 2 - part 3

The One Thing Games Should Take From Star Ocean: The Last Hope

Joe Keiser — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Perhaps you recall that one cutscene that was posted here a week ago from Star Ocean: The Last Hope. It was a beastly thing from the darkest depths of the uncanny valley, writhing grotesquely in vibrant 720p. Well, it’s even worse in English—I have embedded that version after the jump, and if you think that I did that because I hate you that is completely fair.

I’m playing the game for a forthcoming 61FPS Review, and thirty hours in the good news is that so far this wins the battle for the “Worst Cutscene in Star Ocean: The Last Hope Award”. The bad news is that the battle for that award is titanic in scale—this game is packed densely with cutscenes, many of them twenty minutes long., and eventually they all combine into a single Lovecraftian horror of wild gesticulation and ear-wrenching voice acting. The producer of the game recently talked about games surpassing film as a storytelling medium. I hope he was speaking in general terms, because his team sure can’t do it alone.

I’m off topic. “Make sure your cutscenes are consistent in their ability to cause pain” is not the lesson the industry should take from Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Instead, it’s the elegant way the game lets you skip them.

It’s just a little thing, really, but I’m completely amazed I’ve never seen its like before. See, you can skip the cutscenes in The Last Hope. But instead of just leaving you adrift without a story compass like way too many games do, this one replaces the scene with a paragraph of summarization as to what you just chose to miss. As the parts of the game that you don’t watch can actually be rather pleasant, this is the kind of boon I wish I had known about, oh, thirty hours ago (though I’ll still be watching them, actually: due diligence and all that).

I don’t know if Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the first game to do this. It’s a simple idea, so I can’t imagine it is. That’s not what I’m really talking about here. What I am saying is that, for games where story doesn’t want to be there but for some reason has to be (and Star Ocean: The Last Hope is very much one of those games), there’s no reason to not do this. So why isn’t everyone doing it?

Related Links:

Star Ocean: The Last Hope Is Creepy as Hell
Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
JRPG Stories: Awful

Pools of Sorrow, Waves of Joy--The Beatles: Rock Band Priced and Dated

Joe Keiser — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

MTV Games and Harmonix have dropped a handful of details on The Beatles: Rock Band, which is the official name of that Beatles game that was announced last October. Key among those details was the fact that it would be called The Beatles: Rock Band. That certainly doesn’t sound like the “new, full-grown, custom game built from the ground up” that was mentioned back then, but I’ve spent the months since that announcement dreaming of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club RTS so it’s possible that my disappointment is not exactly, um, sane.

I’ll get my other crazy compliant out of the way now, too: the release is scheduled for 09/09/09, which is cute and all but totally conflicts with the Decade of Dreamcast blowout party I have been planning in my mind since, oh, January 1st 2009. But maybe that is just the ship date and everything will be fine!

Yeah, I’m actually pretty happy about this. All I really wanted was a Beatles Rock Band track pack (I was actually disappointed when there was a chance this wouldn’t be just that) so the fact that this is at least that is great news. If they throw in some Yellow Submarine-style animation in the background, well, who could complain, but it strikes me that there’s still going to be more to The Beatles: Rock Band than was announced today.

For the record, here’s the rest of what was announced today:

It will be compatible with all Rock Band instruments certainly, and more than likely all Rock Band-compatible instruments as well
It will be $60 on PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii—that’s pricey, for Wii
If you really need new instrument controllers, you’ll be able to get them, and they’ll be modeled after real instruments used by The Fab Four. But be prepared to pay out the nose for them: standalone guitars will cost $100. That's really pricey, for everyone, but at least they're not necessary.
There’s a premium bundle too, which will go for $250. It hasn’t been specified what that will get you.

Click here for the horse’s mouth.

Related Links:

Now That Harmonix Has The Beatles, What Should a Fab Four Game Even Be?
The Magical Mystery Tour is Coming to Take You Away
Rock Band Takes a Step in the Right Direction

Indie Dev Moment: Blush

Joe Keiser — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:30:00 GMT

The lovable lunatics at Flashbang Studios have been catering to you dinosaur-loving kiddies for ages, what with their off-road velociraptor safaris and jetpack brontosauri. I didn’t care about those so much, possibly because I don’t have a soul. But I can’t ignore those guys any longer, because this week a game came out of the studio just for me.

It’s called Blush. It’s a psychedelic physics-based jellyfish simulator. It is primarily about tentacles, and the flinging about of said tentacles. That’s all I need, but I own every single underwater game that has ever been released*. Normal humans might need more explanation, but that’s fine because Blush really is rather lovely.

(You might also need a video. I’ve got that too.)

It’s also quite simple, on the surface of it. You’re a jellyfish, so you have these tentacles. They’re stingy, and by swinging them about you can kill yourself some sea life. They’re also sticky, so once you kill said sea life you can swing your tentacles about some more and collect all their delicious bits. Bring the bits back to your glowing caves and you better yourself as a jellyfish—longer tentacles, faster swim speeds, all of that.

Two things immediately complicate the collect-a-thon, however. The first is that you can lose tentacles in your fight for food, along with any stuck-on morsels that leg might have been carrying—you’ll have to go back to your cave to heal up. That wouldn’t be a problem, except for the second thing – you only have four minutes. This turns every second of wild flinging of the stingers into an extremely important tactical choice, should you desire to get all the achievements and become the uber-jelly.

You certainly don’t have to do that, though. It also works well as a relaxing, Fl0w-like experience, except the soundtrack is better and the controls are way more interesting. You can also play it ten times in a lunch break, and it’s free. So it’s a wonderful diversion, even more so if you can appreciate the fact that it only took eight weeks to build from start to finish. I do. There’s a lot I appreciate about Blush.

*: This doesn’t include the SpongeBob SquarePants games. There are limits.

10 Years Ago This Week: Army Men 3D

Joe Keiser — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

10 Years Ago is a recurring feature that looks at whatever the new hotness was around this time 3,652 days ago. Ostensibly it will look at the game’s impact both in past and present terms, but mostly it will just make you feel really old.

It’s hard to imagine a time when the world wasn’t glutted with terrible Army Men games. And yet, that’s exactly the world that Army Men 3D (released March 2, 1999) was born into. Army Men 3D was the game that made the series’ descent into crushing awfulness visible to all.

Army Men has been the poster boy of franchise overexertion and laziness since its 1998 debut, but that wasn’t always immediately apparent. While only the most generous of reviewers considered the first Army Men title to be even mediocre, there was no denying that the concept of little plastic green men fighting little plastic tan men was an interesting game space to explore.

But Army Men 3D didn’t explore it. Instead, it was a 3D remake of the 2D original—an incredibly brazen move, since that first game was less than a year old and generally disliked. This was the first real sign that 3DO didn’t actually have a plan for the Army Men series beyond driving revenue—and the product matched the intention.

Compared to it competition of the time, like the now classic Silent Hill or even the antiquated popcorn action title Syphon Filter, Army Men 3D is atrocious. Sarge stumbles clumsily towards his objectives, all the while fighting tan enemies against a light brown backdrop in the beige-colored fog. Death comes quickly and without remorse from opponents that will see you long before you see them. It’s a frustrating experience that somehow also managed to be accused of being too short, though it’s probably fair to say that the weekend it would take to beat Army Men 3D would be a weekend wasted.

Another curious negative about the Army Men series that is exemplified in Army Men 3D is how seriously the early games in the franchise took themselves. All of the actors in Army Men 3D are toys, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it beyond netting a more family-friendly image on store shelves: the environments are all realistic and the violence is at the level of any contemporary war game, and the silliness of the premise is never even alluded to. Just about everyone was disappointed by this at the time, to the point where the ending of Army Men 3D (which is embedded below to save everyone the trouble) attempted to solve the issue. Of course, it attempted to solve it with the bizarre band-aid explanation that there are portals between our world and the World War II-esque world of the Army Men. An even more bizarre devotion to canon ensured these portals remained a major part of the franchise throughout its many, many iterations.

Despite all of this, Army Men 3D marked the height of market success for the franchise and was almost certainly in the top 100 best-selling games of the PlayStation overall. The game’s sales made the franchise the flagship of 3DO, and the deluge of Army Men games began. And though it’s been a decade and 3DO is long dead, Army Men continues: almost nobody noticed, but the most recent title in the franchise released as recently as last October.

Army Men 3D proved that a strong concept can drive a company’s fortunes even if implementation is shoddy. It would not be much longer, however, before the next iterations in the series proved that taking too much advantage of a strong concept will drive a company into the ground.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

Finally, Some Info On Dreamfall Chapters

Joe Keiser — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Ragnar Tornquist’s ethereal adventure games are one of the medium’s greatest joys: The Longest Journey is an established genre classic, and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was a genuinely affecting piece of work with an unforgettable (in either a good or bad way, depending on who you ask) ending.

They were brilliant, and those among us who are priveleged and wise cannot stop thinking about them, demand more of them. But the Dreamfall team has spend the intervening years on NCSoft’s next big MMO project. Now The Secret World is fascinating in its own right, but it’s not more Longest Journey. Tornquist knows what we crave, so today he pushed aside the typically opaque curtain of publisher secrecy to explain as much as he could about the upcoming Dreamfall Chapters. It’s all unofficial, but to see more of Dreamfall at all is a delight.

Most importantly, he let us know that these things are still distant. In fact, they are not even in production, at least not officially—this might be code for “Dreamfall Chapters is the only thing The Secret World team thinks about in the shower,” but even that might be making more of it than it is. Tornquist also explained that Chapters would primarily be sold through digital distribution, with Windows a certainly and consoles a nice thought. The implication is that DRM will be rigorous, though that will probably depend on the state of the industry whenever these games come out.

There’s good news, too. Tornquist says he wants to make a lot of these little episodic games, to tell all kinds of different stories. He also has a full The Longest Journey 2 in mind to wrap up the series completely, though I expect by the time that comes out senility will have made my whole life a Dreamfall-like fever dream anyway.

Perhaps it’s better coming from Tornquist himself. At his blog there’s more info on some of the new play mechanics he wants to implement to “modernize” the adventure game, which is a meaningless notion these days (I’ve lost count of the number of times adventure games have been modernized—hell, Tornquist himself already did it twice) but some of the ideas are interesting.

Related Links:

The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say
Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
The Writers Guild Isn’t the Only One Who Loves Dangerous High School Girls

Spring Cleaning: Dusting Off Your Old Games

Joe Keiser — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

I, like Cole, have been feeling the pinch of the economy lately. I’m not quite at the stage he’s at though: for example, I still live in New York, which means that naturally I meet our editor John regularly in that secret room on Wall Street where all New Yorkers adjust their monocles and laugh at the world. I also continue to own my most intricately designed brandy snifters, and I still swirl them daily.

But this lifestyle necessitates other cut backs, and one of them—the biggest one, actually—is my games spending. This is bad, because I am a consummate hoarder and cutting back in this way is hard. But it’s also good; because I’m a consummate hoarder and have tons of games I have not given nearly enough love to.

So I’ve tried to change my habits. Instead of fishing for buried treasure out of the hundreds of various bargain bins around the city (including some top secret hot finds that I’m hoping will still be there in better times), I’ve taken to searching for buried treasure in the deep strata of my own closet. I have found a couple of enjoyable baubles this way: in the last couple months I discovered a copy of WarioWorld purchased two years ago, as well as a copy of Zone of the Enders, a game I have owned since it launched seven years ago but never finished.

In the former I found a perfectly acceptable platformer, a game which probably felt like a throwback when it was released but now has a bit of a timeless quality—certainly good for a couple hours of greedy mayhem, though its devotion to stuff collecting means I’ll probably never finish it the correct way.

In the latter I found a mixed bag. ZotE is a slimmed-down action-oriented mecha game, with a very good control scheme and just wonderful robot graphics (3D robot graphics age pretty gracefully—Even Virtual On still looks pretty damn cool). It also has the whiniest brat in the history of whiny brats for a main character, and a ludicrously oversimplified story on the horrors of war. So it’s not great, but still fairly unique and certainly worth playing given its brevity.

That’s just skimming the top of my backlog, too—there’s plenty of weirdness going back to the mid-90s somewhere in there. The longer I hold off on buying Street Fighter IV (give me strength), the better the chance that I’ll let myself find out if Rising Zan: Samurai Gunman is some sort of unsung classic. I'm pretty confident it isn't, but finding out for myself would be some kind of adventure.

Related Links:

Spring Cleaning: Selling Your Old Games
On Sega and the Proper Use of the Wii in 2009
Virtual Console New Year's Resolutions

The 61FPS Review: Noby Noby Boy—Part 2

Joe Keiser — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Over the weekend, I spent half an hour tying my body around a cloud.

I’m not really sure why I did it, and I’m not particularly convinced I enjoyed it. Something inside me told me to do it, and after a fashion I succeeded.

And then I played Noby Noby Boy for a few more hours. And when I put down the controller I came to a realization: this is not something that can actually be reviewed, at least certainly not with the ease of other games.

Let me be clear: I am not the sort of person that believes that reviews should not have scores or grades at the end. I believe that most games are built with specific goals in mind, and that the value of those goals and how successful the game was in achieving those goals can be measured in a relatively standard way. It’s not objective, and there are exceptional games that bring trouble to the grading system, which is why you see so much hand wringing about review scores (note: that hand wringing is also valuable—it keeps scoring models contemporary and reviewers on their toes). It’s the same thing that happens at almost any school.

Noby Noby Boy is one of those exceptional outliers. There's little like it and almost nothing to compare it to. There’s also no implied contract here: you’re not trading $60 for the promise of a solid genre entry that meets all the bullet points and marketing hype. Noby Noby is $5, with the marketing hype being that it is “inexplicable” and the bullet points being “relax” and “have fun”. Without any expectations, it can’t be said that Noby Noby Boy is a failure. But can it also be said that it is a success?

As I am passing judgment here, I have to say that I don’t think it can. As it turns out the flashes of wonder I described in Part One of this review didn’t snowball into gloriousness—instead, they twinkled like stars in a vast emptiness. Noby Noby Boy feels like a toddler’s busy box, where all you do is see how things fit together. It has a sort of witless charm about it, but each time I was done fiddling with it (“fiddling” being the appropriate way to describe anything a player does with Noby Noby Boy) I didn’t feel like I had gotten anything valuable or even experienced anything notable. It just felt like mucking about with an unassuming toy that had an aesthetic similar to but not as well realized as Katamari Damacy. And I thought Katamari Damacy was brilliant even with the timers and size goals disabled.

Noby Noby Boy’s issue isn’t that it’s aimless. It just doesn’t give you the proper tools to let making the aims you create seem worthwhile. I’m going to give it a C, because five dollars does get you a certain amount of endearing cuteness and it does come through with its promise of “relax”. “Have fun” is rather more dubious, however.

I now expect much hand wringing.

Rating: C

Past Reviews:

Noby Noby Boy - Part 1
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3