61 Frames Per Second : peter smith

Criterion Collection + Videogames = Best GAF Thread Ever

Peter Smith — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Over the years, much has been made of Mega Man's hideous box art, and of the general pimplyness of game art's 8-bit pubescence. But ere we hurl stones at an older era's ugly glass houses, let us first look to our own, or something!

Like this, for example. Now that is some garish shit. Even the boxes for major games like Metroid Prime 3 aren't likely to win any design awards. Most of the time, they evoke summer-blockbuster viewing more than the subtler experiences their contents (hopefully) provide. They also tend to be stuffed full of colorful characters, when, more often, the unique experience of a game comes not from its characters but from the texture of its world.

Perhaps realizing this, some clever commenter over at NeoGAF started a thread soliciting game box art designed in the vein of Criterion Collection DVDs — playful, inventive, minimalistic, gorgeous. It is — ahem — the best thread ever. So much the best that even I, not much for Photoshop, spent a few hours mocking up some covers myself. Hit the jump for my efforts and my favorites from the thread.

Super Mario 64 - McBacon
Very much in the Criterion mold, which some contributors didn't quite catch.

Dr. Mario - somnific
Elegant, simple, instantly recognizable. Awesome work.

Bioshock - Bernbaum
This one's ingenious, and (given its simplicity) remarkably eerie in its evocation of the lost city.

Mirror's Edge - Jocchan
There are a bunch of Mirror's Edge pics in this thread, many of them very handsome, but this one makes a highbrow art reference in a non-arbitrary way.

Donkey Kong Country - Jocchan
Really captures the playfulness and tactile quality of many Criterion covers in a way that also perfectly suits the game.

Sonic the Hedgehog - zaidr
Just a great idea, and it also emphasizes how Sonic and co (in their earliest, best form) are less characters than multicolored, shiny projectiles in a giant pinball machine.

Okay — here are mine:

I've always loved that sunset/sunrise scene on Zelda's title screen; by hiding what's on the other side, it implies mystery and adventure in a way unskippable owl monologues never will.

Another wonderful thing about Zelda 1 is the mystery of the ancient. I wanted this picture to look like the dusty cover of some '60s anthropology book, but I'm not good enough at Photoshop for that, so instead it looks like the poster for an IFC documentary about Bali.

Then there's Zelda's sense of loneliness, which I thought was well-served by this Asher Durand painting. I picked that font cause it made me think of academic editions of 19th-century American classic novels (which often have Asher Durand paintings on the cover, as well). If I were really working for Criterion, I'd make sure to find a Durand painting with some hollow tree roots, to emphasize that sense in Zelda that there are secrets (to everyone!) tucked away everywhere.

The original Metroid is a scary game, largely because of the feeling of exploring a dead world. Those Chozo statues don't have a comic-book back story; they're just sitting there, creeping you the fuck out. Dead birds tell no tales, friends. (Until they get sequels, anyway.)

Using game assets seems like something of a cheat on these covers, since part of the goal is to suggest a tactile quality that the games themselves leave to the imagination. But when the game art is as immortal as Yoshitaka Amano's, it's hard to say no. (Sorry — that second one doesn't scan so well on a white background.)

So there you have it. (Sadly, the word "Actraiser" superimposed on El Greco's "Annunciation" wasn't as awesome as I'd hoped.) Go check out the thread, then start demanding better from your favorite game publishers!

Top Ten: The Very Best of 61FPS in 2008

John Constantine — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Now, just before everyone in the Western world hunkers down for some much needed holiday relaxing, it’s time for our most important list: the self-aggrandizing top ten! It’s hard for me to believe that it was only a scant seven months ago that 61 Frames Per Second went from being a glint in Nerve’s eye to the ever-flowing stream of commentary, madness, and love that it is today. When I first started planning the blog, my one goal was to ensure that anyone who stumbled into our colorful corner of the internet would find videogame discussion that was more thoughtful, playful, and free than what they could find elsewhere. These ten articles are the ones that I feel best realize that ambition. In 2009, Joe, Nadia, Derrick, Amber, Cole, Bob, Peter and I will continue doing every thing in our power to make you think about games. Thank you to everyone reading for helping make 2008 the best year of my life. – John Constantine

Crossing the Uncanny Valley, (Part 2), (Part 3), (Part 4), (Part 5) by Amber Ahlborn
"I have a rather strong bias against photo realism. As an artist, I've always been attracted to stylization and the current trend toward photo realism seems less about artistic possibilities and more about graphic processing power. Reality is limiting by nature but art is limited only by imagination. Also, in line with this post series theme, stylized characters are much more forgiving to design and animate. What I perhaps find most offensive about photo realistic graphics is how they more often than not fail to fool my eye and jar me out of the reality of the game than draw me in. But I have to ask, are people these days becoming numbed to the Uncanny Valley affect? More now than at any point in the past, in everything from movies to games to robotics, we are exposed to visual frauds asking that we suspend our disbelief and simply accept them."

Alternate Soundtrack: Donkey Kong vs. Les Savy Fav by Derrick Sanskrit
"Go Forth actually manages to take the innocently bizarre narrative scenario of Donkey Kong '94 and transform it into beautifully desperate drama. (…) Tim Harrington's lyrics paint the portrait of a man on the verge of desperation, battling for his livelihood against seemingly insurmountable odds. Sound familiar yet? This is most apparent in the mantra-like lyrics that Harrington uses to close his songs. "Reprobate's Resume" closes with the repeated pleading, "Please, go easy on me." "Pills" ends with a few aching refrains of, "You and I, we were meant to be together. You and I, we are gonna hang together. You and I, we are going down together." And "Bloom On Demand", the album's final proper song brings it all home with two minutes of Harrington worrying, “This giving in is wearing thin." It’s repeated as he, along with the rest of the band, are slowly washed away by the cold, unfeeling rain clouds of synth keyboards. At the close, despite the previous thirty-seven minutes of flexing their muscles and proving their might, the environment is just more powerful than the band had imagined. Les Savy Fav have become Mario, trying desperately to evade the obstacles in their path that only increase in breadth the further they travel."

Katamari in the Classroom, (Part 2) by Bob Mackey
"One of my goals is life is to turn the rest of the world into as big of a nerd as I am because--wait, why do I need to explain myself here? All I have to say is that my job as a teacher of college writing allows me to force video games on the afraid and unwilling, which is always a good thing. It's all part of making the world just as nerdy as me. Of course, there's a method to my madness. The backbone of my course is a nice little book called Everything Bad is Good For You, which states that video games actually give our brains a cognitive workout, because they require a constant use of the scientific method. And because video games are all about teaching you things within the context of their use, I force my students to write a paper based on a game they choose to play in order to see some of the concepts of our texts embodied in action. But first, I make them play We Love Katamari."

Counterpoint: Too Many Games? by Cole Stryker
We at 61FPS are always dusting off old games. As for our ignorance about the future of games, I won't even get into how much space mainstream gaming sites devote to previews. I'd argue that gamers have a firmer grasp on the medium than any other group of pop culture enthusiasts. We obsess over the trivia and argue about the value of games more than film or music nerds...heck we even rival comic book guys.What's so great about being a gamer today is that we have the luxury to forgo even the excellent games, skimming the sublime, timeless gaming experiences off the top of the pile. With all the new indie development competing with big studios, it's the best of times. Let's enjoy it.

For Love of the Game: Quest For Glory II by Peter Smith
"When it comes to expansion, AGDI's take on QfGII treads softly; added elements are completely optional, and many of them are simply subtle enrichments of the game universe. You can now ask many characters about the settings of the later games. You can challenge the magic-shop owner to a magical duel — an element cut from the original game for lack of time. And in a lovely touch, if you return to the inn around midnight, you can sit with the innkeepers, sip a cup of tea and talk about your friendship. Tasteful expansions like this only make an already rich world richer, deepening the mythic sense of place and the satisfaction of saving the land from evil. Every great classic game should be retouched so lovingly — but then, there aren't many games this classic to begin with. With Quest for Glory II, the Coles made one of the greatest adventures ever; AGDI has made one of the greatest fan games, and — the highest praise available — a fitting tribute."

Overworld: Yakuza by Joe Keiser
"The Yakuza games are about the Japanese criminal underworld, but they’re also about loneliness—we’re talking about a series where the protagonist is an orphan, who continues to watch the people he loves die, who starts the second game in the series by leaving his adopted daughter behind, alone, as he goes off to bust some skulls. The Japan that was built to highlight this loneliness is a masterwork of isolation—it’s a densely populated world where friendly conversation costs cold cash, where drunken stumbling is noticed only by opportunistic vagrants. The fact that many of the places are real world locations and chains, and that the meaningless material comforts like liquor are likewise licensed, make this sad city almost real. Which makes it even more unsettling when you, as Kazuma Kiryu, lash out against it."

Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming by John Constantine
"In order for a game to be successfully surrealist, its mode of expression will have to be tied directly to play and not traditional presentation. The game has to subvert expectation based on established mechanical tropes to garner the desired subconscious effect. The seeds for this are out there, in places you might not expect. Mario tends to be associated with childlike psychedelia, but the manipulation of perspective and gravity in Super Mario Galaxy are a larval form of potential surrealist play; for twenty years, Mario would die if he jumped into a void, and here the void propels him to new heights. A game can be most anything the designer wants it to be. In the coming years, the most difficult task for both designers and players will be looking backward, seeing what games are and have been, and figuring how they can break them to create something brand new for the future."

The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes and Five That Weren’t So Great, (Part 2), (Part 3), Rebuttal: Say What About Metroid Zero Mission?, and Rebuttal Rebuttal: I Stand With Metroid by John Constantine, Peter Smith and Amber Ahlborn
This trio of posts started out as an attempt to make a regular old fashioned top ten list. Within a week of the list going live, it had turned into the most widely hated thing we’d published. It had also triggered one of our most spirited debates, one between both our staff and our readership. Read on through part 1, part 2, and part 3 of the list, then hit up Amber and Peter’s mutual rebuttals to relive the whole sordid affair.

Mario Will Not Retire. He Will Outlive Us All. by Nadia Oxford
"Growing up, we all kind of hated the rich kid. Even if he was the sweetest child in the world who only wanted to share his toys and candy and have us come over and play in his hedge maze (remember that episode of Care Bears? If not, silly me, I just made up another euphemism for sex), we'd lapse into an uncomfortable, cringing silence around him, like dogs in the presence of an alpha. When he wasn't around, we'd seethe and hiss in his direction. There are gamers in this world who are similarly intimidated by the existence of our hairy king, Mario. He benevolently brought many of us into this glorious, mind-gelling hobby. He has walked, run and jumped with us since we were children. Thanks to Mushroom Kingdom logic, we have baffled our teachers with adamant declarations about raccoons flying and fireballs bouncing underwater. Just last year, we soared through space with our magic plumber and visited more fantastic planes than the Little Prince. Mario is grand. And that's why the latest Internet fad, in which bloggers call for his retirement, is impotent and sad."

Nobody Puts Bionic Commando in a Corner
"Bionic Commando ran from the room, sobbing. My tea had grown cold. How dare he. Bionic Commando is a vision, a treasured paragon of tight rules and lusciously precise gameplay that has endured for two decades. Nostalgia may reign for trollops like Battletoads, but my Bionic Commando is as pure a game as Pac-man, an ageless bit of programming as entertaining today as it was in years passed thanks to fundamental quality, not its association with some fool’s salad days. I write this from aboard a sturdy ship, The Radd Spenceria, sailing west across the pacific. I carry only this journal, a pistol, and my love on this journey. I do not know what I will do when I encounter this Croshaw, but I fear that I will no longer be able to be called a gentleman in polite society."

For Love of the Game: Sonic 2 HD

Peter Smith — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:30:00 GMT

As I've said a number of annoying times, I've never cared much for ol' Sonic the Hedgehog, even in his beloved classic form. It's a design thing — I can tell you about any number of specific places in Mario, Zelda, Metroid and Mega Man levels, but Sonic levels seem to blur into a procession of the same compositional elements over and over. If you've seen one loop-the-loop, you've seen 'em all, especially when all it takes to get through them is holding right on the d-pad.

One column in which Sonic cannot be faulted, however, is presentation. Graphics and music have always been the little blue shinbiter's strong suit. That's why this fan project — an HD remake of Sonic 2 — is cool. Probably the most "classic" game in the series, 2 here gets a loving makeover, and you can check out the results in this second tech demo of the project.

One cool feature of the engine, though, almost makes me interested in actually playing Sonic again, and that's the zoomed-out view present in this build. Have you ever noticed how in Sonic games, you're constantly, y'know, running into things that you couldn't possibly have seen coming? That's partly because the sprites are so big — the view so zoomed in. Compared to Mario and co, you're pretty much trying to play a close-up; combine that with the speed and general looseness of Sonic gameplay and you've got a recipe for frustration. But if this remake allows you to play with a zoomed-out view, you'll, A), be able to actually appreciate the architecture of the levels, instead of merely watching it rush by you; and B) you know, play a fun game. Instead of a fun-looking game. Sorry, everyone!

Related posts:
Sonic Bound: After Three Botched Reboots, Sonic the Hedgehog May Finally Get His 3D Due
Do You Hold Any Hope For Sonic Unleashed?
Trailer Review: Sonic Unleashed
Sonic Unleashed Wii: Should Dimps be trying harder?
Sonic the Hedgehog: I'm Just Not that Into You
A Long-Scorned Sonic Fanfic Writer Seeks Redemption

Previous For Love of the Games:
Quest for Glory II
Rockman 7 FC
Outcast 2
Street Fighter One
Metroid II

Let the Mega Man 9 Speedruns Continue

Peter Smith — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Some weeks back, our very own Bob Mackey reported on the first speedruns of Mega Man 9. But the best clip out at that point was multi-segmented and started out with 999 screws, which is kind of cheating in my book. Now, watch as champion speedrunner Nicholas "SirVG" Hoppe (who holds world speed records on such classics as Actraiser, Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood) delivers the goods with a single-segment, new-game run. (And provides entertaining captions to boot.)

Some Youtube/gaming forum posters have complained about the way that MM9 times gameplay — freezing the timer when the game is paused. This does mean that an MM9 speedrun like this one, which actually lasts forty-nine minutes, gets an official time of 27:37, which is a little odd. But the cool thing is that by not penalizing for use of the select screen, this rule encourages inventive speedrunners to use all of Mega Man’s special weapons in clever, time-saving ways. (Mega Man 9’s weapons, incidentally, are far more versatile and useful than the throwaways of most Mega Mans past.) This makes the run way more entertaining to watch, which, after all, is the point, and it’s enough to make me wish that the older games were set up this way. In fact... Capcom, old friend? Any thoughts? Enhanced downloadable versions with MM9-style challenges and timer features? You know, we love you very much...

Related posts:
Infinite Mega Man 9: Composer Ippo Yamada Talks Living Up to a Serious Musical Pedigree
Mega Man 9: IT'S OUT NOW
Let the Mega Man 9 Speed Runs Begin

Face-Off: Bayonetta and the Merits of Exploitation, Part 2

John Constantine — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:34:00 GMT

John: Explain to me how Barbarella is more innocent than Bayonetta.

Pete: The innocence of that movie comes from it being forty years old, so, whatever the authorial intent, it will always be perceptibly innocent. But beyond that, I think the innocence mostly comes from Jane Fonda's performance. There's just a sort of goofy sweetness to the sex, it’s more playful than smirkingly gynecological. Barbarella makes me feel like Jane Fonda is the subject, a "relateable" character, for whatever that's worth. Bayonetta feels like I'm molesting a Barbie Doll.

(We then consulted this original trailer for Barbarella)

John: I see a pretty strong corollary here, just in the first forty seconds. "Did I tell you what I would like?" *flash to the vixen* "I think I know." I think you're splitting some serious hairs.

Pete: I disagree. I think the corollary is facile. I'm smiling just watching this. I think there's an earnest quality to Barbarella—which is an artifact from a pre-knee-jerk-irony world—that is absent in Bayonetta. Subtleties are important.

John: Yes, but i don't think there are subtleties at work here outside of your fondness for one work and your associating a different medium with slothful behavior. You might see Bayonetta as spiritually bankrupt not because it is, but because you sometimes associate videogames with emotional emptiness.

Pete: Sometimes videogames are emotionally empty. Most of the time they are. Most media are emotionally empty a large part of the time. I’ve come to a point where I kind of recoil from this sort of media—which i might once have embraced—because i know that it'll leave me feeling a little empty.

John: I actually think I'd disagree on your first point there. I don't think most media is emotionally empty. I think most media is poorly made. That’s a shame. Saying you can’t enjoy something a little trashy is like saying you can't enjoy a nice shot of whiskey every now and again, something sweet, impermanent, and a little bad for you.

Pete: I think that metaphor is flawed. Surely you recognize that in the bar inventory of gaming, this game is surely not the whiskey. Bayonetta is the kiwi-fruit sexmopolitan, the big, fruity tropical blended cocktail. Whiskey is smoky, bitter, subtle and adult. I don't even think it's the humble Schlitz, a distinction that surely belongs to the likes of, say, Wonder Boy in Monster Land. A good, solid drink that gets the job done, simple and unpretentious.

John: There's the word I've been missing: pretension. Bayonetta has no pretensions.

Pete: See that's the thing—i think this kind of winking "unpretension" is absolutely a kind of pretension.

John: It's brazen, it isn't winking at you.

Pete: Tell me that camera pan through her legs isn't a wink.

John: A tiger growl plays when the camera pans through her legs. Subtlety isn't exactly at play here.

Pete: Exactly. That's a wink. It's, "Ha ha, look how trashy we are!" Bottom line, I would no more play this game than would I rent, say, Van Helsing. A point on which i suspect we differ.

John: That’s a funny corollary, I was actually very excited about Van Helsing when i first saw a preview for it. It just so happened to be terrible.

Pete: Uh huh.

John: You are a shady ball-licker. Not to derail, but it appears we have accidentally just written our first face-off piece.

Pete: Be sure to keep "shady ball-licker" as your totally non-desperate parting shot.

John: Oh, eat me.

Pete: Maybe throw that in too.

Part 1

Related links:

Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum
Rebuttal - Say What About Metroid: Zero Mission?
Rebuttal Rebuttal – I Stand With Metroid

Face-Off: Bayonetta and the Merits of Exploitation, Part 1

John Constantine — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:28:00 GMT

61 Frames Per Second was born long before it went live in May of 2008, though it existed in a far more nebulous form than the blog you’re reading now. It actually began in the fall of 2005, when Peter Smith and I began working together here at Nerve and we engaged in daily spirited debates over the intricacies of design and the virtues of numerous games. It’s sometimes horrifying to go through instant messenger histories and find page upon page of arguments over whether or not Ocarina of Time or Symphony of the Night are enduring works of quality. Pete is both a staunch pragmatist and a stern aesthete, demanding to the point that he plays only select games at this point. While I fancy myself an aesthete as well, I am also an unabashed enthusiast, often times to a fault; I adore trash nearly as much as I enjoy art. Much like the rest of the internet today, we found ourselves coming to blows over Hideki Kamiya’s new exercise in action and sexploitation, Bayonetta.

John: You need to watch this trailer.

Pete: Is this the chick who has a gun foot?

John: It so is. It is going to be hilarious and rad and absurd. It is the videogame equivalent of those Paul Kenyon’s Baroness pulps from the ‘70s.

Pete: Whoops, my eyes fell out and rolled around. Jesus, dude. Just watching this makes me feel like I'm wasting my life every time i even think about videogames. You don't find this even slightly depressing?

John: I find it hilarious.

Pete: Such a thin line.

John: I think it looks ridiculously fun. I also don’t think it’s being earnest.

Pete: It would be less depressing if it were earnest. Sometimes i just find it wearying when people phone in some lousy bullshit under the auspices of camp. Where's the heart, John? Can't we do better?

John: But i don't think this is lousy. I think this is awesome. Michael Bay and I are going to be playing Bayonetta and high fiving each other while you're off sulking in your Cheerios reading Dave Eggers. She stands on her hands shooting monsters with guns in her boots, then stands up and her clothing, made of her own hair, turns into a giant wolf that eats other monsters. I love the way Hideki Kamiya makes games, especially Devil May Cry. The shameless raunchiness of this appeals to me.

Pete: Fair enough. It’s just, after a while this stuff leaves me feeling a little empty.

John: Well, you don't regularly consume any media like this.

Pete: You know, I might under other circumstances, but it's escaping me right now. The closest thing to Bayonetta that I love is Barbarella, but there's something about Barbarella that seems a little more innocent and a little less callow. If I’m going to get a sex and violence fix, I want it to be good, and there’s nothing here that really appeals to me. Bayonetta is so calculated, don't you think?

John: I think it's far less calculated than, say, television shows in the vein of Las Vegas. High-octane action! Hawt chicks! There's some chiseled berk standing there and then the chick in a black dress shoots the bad guy standing in the shadows before saying something like, "He checked out early." The difference between Bayonetta and Las Vegas, aside from medium, is that Bayonetta isn't trying to sell me anything beyond itself. It isn't winking at me, trying to get me to watch commercials for Old Spice. It looks me straight in the face and says, come on John, let us go and enjoy some puerile sex and violence together, shall we? And I'm like, fuck right, let me get my coat!

Part 2

Related links:

Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum
Rebuttal - Say What About Metroid: Zero Mission?
Rebuttal Rebuttal – I Stand With Metroid

For Love of the Game: Quest for Glory II

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Lori and Corey Cole's Quest for Glory was always one of my favorite franchises. It set unusually logical puzzle-solving (by adventure-game standards — no "THROW BRIDLE AT SNAKE" here) in culturally distinct worlds that went beyond the usual D&D boilerplate. Even in Quest for Glory I, which eased players into the series with a traditional medieval setting, the sense of place was richer than usual. (My favorite detail: a frost giant from north of the Germanic game-world speaks in the alliterative verse of Beowulf.)

But Quest for Glory II must've blindsided fans of the first game. Expanding the small-scale campaign of QfGI into a world-saving epic, it also transported the hero from a sleepy European valley to the full-sized Arabian city of Shapeir. In all the hype about GTAIV earlier this year, I couldn't help thinking that QfGII had done the same thing decades before — not at the same scale, but with as much attention to detail. In II, you met multiple characters in a large city, and you could ask each of them about each other. You could talk about current events; you could help or hinder their lives. More than any game of its time, Quest for Glory II presented a living world. The musician who played outside the inn during the day went inside to entertain the evening guests. The nearby merchants had opinions on that musician. If you did something brave on their behalf, they'd remember it. The gratitude of a beloved character was a far more satisfying reward for a voluntary action than the experience points and high-powered weaponry that console games doled out. And when, in a beautifully foreshadowed climax, you arrived at Shapeir's fallen sister city to face a growing evil, you really felt that something was at stake.

I could ramble on about how much I love Quest for Glory II, but nothing would convince a new player more than playing AGD Interactive's just-released remake. AGDI is a rare beast among fan groups. They actually finish what they start, even when, as with this remake, it takes seven years. (!) And where fan projects often play like fan fiction, AGDI has recreated Shapeir and its people with the most love and restraint imaginable.

The original game's largest flaw, a drab navigation system that makes much of the city feel more like a tomb than a bustling metropolis, has been fixed; the streets are now bright, easy to navigate and full of life. (Click here and compare with the street scene at right.) And when it comes to expansion, AGDI's take on QfGII treads softly; added elements are completely optional, and many of them are simply subtle enrichments of the game universe. You can now ask many characters about the settings of the later games. You can challenge the magic-shop owner to a magical duel — an element cut from the original game for lack of time. And in a lovely touch, if you return to the inn around midnight, you can sit with the innkeepers, sip a cup of tea and talk about your friendship. Tasteful expansions like this only make an already rich world richer, deepening the mythic sense of place and the satisfaction of saving the land from evil. Every great classic game should be retouched so lovingly — but then, there aren't many games this classic to begin with. With Quest for Glory II, the Coles made one of the greatest adventures ever; AGDI has made one of the greatest fan games, and — the highest praise available — a fitting tribute.

Previous For Love of the Games:
Rockman 7 FC
Outcast 2
Street Fighter One
Metroid II Remakes

The Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Soundtrack - An Inside Look

Peter Smith — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In this exclusive follow-up to our interview with Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix soundtrack producers David "djpretzel" Lloyd and Larry "Liontamer" Oji, djpretzel himself gives us a breakdown of four tracks from the game:

E. Honda 'Dosu-Koi'
djpretzel

"This was the track that I set my sights on early in the process. McVaffe has had an excellent mix of this track on OCR for a long while, modeled after Madonna's song 'Music,' but Capcom weren't feeling it for in-game usage, so I decided to take a shot. My initial version was way too aggressive, and got the hundred-hand slapdown itself, but I went back to the drawing board and did something mellower, with more of an emphasis on Asian instrumentation. There's shamisen, koto, shakuhachi, AND taiko in there, so it's got the 'big four' of Japanese instruments (more or less) and is more appropriate to the sumo bath house setting."

Guile 'Combat and Service'
Big Giant Circles, Justin R. Coleman

"Jimmy Hinson, alias Big Giant Circles, put together a really kicking take on Guile's theme, which is definitely one of the classics off the soundtrack. Capcom generally dug what he was doing, but were iffy on the lead synthesizer sound, and wanted something different. Jimmy got Justin to lay down an electric guitar lead that added some rock edge to the more electronic backdrop, achieving a good blend that Capcom gave the green light."

Ken / Online Menu 'Clamato Fever'
AE, Prozax

"While Sixto Sounds did the version of Ken's stage that's actually used in the game, Capcom wanted something special just for the online menus and the title screen, since users spend a good amount of time setting up matches, checking rankings, and tweaking options. Alex Esquivel (AE) and Dan Orosz (Prozax) put together an alternate take on the Ken theme that works perfectly for this context. The first time I fired up the beta and heard it, I just smiled — they nailed it! As an interesting side note, AE learned about the game through other channels and contacted Capcom directly, and was a little surprised to be redirected to Shael, Malcos and I to coordinate his involvement. Everything worked out, though, and I'm glad Alex and Dan were included in the long lineup of OC ReMix artists."

Zangief 'Red Cyclone'
The Grammar Club

"Shael Riley's been mixing humor, VGM, rock, and anything else he cares to throw in for a long time now, and his latest project is The Grammar Club, a band that's been making waves with their album Bremelanotide. The fellows put together a rock arrangement of Zangief's theme that's unique on the soundtrack for being a little less refined and more in-your-face, New York garage style. When I think Zangief, I certainly don't think 'refined,' so this ballsier type of production worked really well."

61FPS Q&A: David Lloyd and Larry Oji of OC ReMix on the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Soundtrack (Part 2)

Peter Smith — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

What are some of your favorite game soundtracks? Favorite composers?
djpretzel: Yuzo Koshiro, Dave Wise, Yasunori Mitsuda, Tokuhiko Uwabo, and Koji Kondo are all amazing... Super Castlevania IV, Revenge of Shinobi, Lunar (Sega CD version!!), Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Final Fantasy VI , Mega Man II, and Super Mario Galaxy are my favorite game scores at the moment.

Larry Oji: Favorite soundtracks and composers tend to go hand in hand. I'm a big fan of Koji Kondo's work on the Super Mario series, Masato Nakamura's on the Sonic the Hedgehog series (Sonic 3 & Knuckles, though not his, was excellent too), Alph Lyra for the Street Fighter II series, David Wise for Donkey Kong Country and Battletoads, Kazunaka Yamane for the Double Dragon series, and Yuzo Koshiro for the Streets of Rage series. That covers a lot of the games I played as a kid. Since learning more about the history of game music, I love so much stuff now, I can't even rattle it off. But my second-favorite composer, little known in the States, is Yasuhisa "Yack" Watanabe. His stuff is a lot more known in Japan, including as a member of Taito's Zuntata group, but almost no one tries to arrange his material; it's pretty far out there, so I can understand why. Sometimes his stuff doesn't resonate with me, but he's put out some incredible compositions. Then my personal favorite is British composer Tim Follin, whose nearly two-decade career composing for games was unparalleled, as far as what I've personally enjoyed. Check out his compositions for Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Solstice, Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge and Silver Surfer. He always strove for creative techniques and cool textures with his chiptunes. Plus, his modern soundtracks like Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future and Lemmings for the PSP were equally impressive. I've been slowly plugging away at a small OC ReMix album project paying tribute to his work, so before the end of this year, Dirge for the Follin should finally be out there, lamenting the fact that he retired from the industry.

Do you prefer the old-school chiptune style, or are you more into the CD-audio present?
djpretzel: I prefer the melodies and compositional approach of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras coupled with more modern production aesthetics; in other words, I like slick production, but only when it's paired up with a great melody. Which is not to say that game composers of today aren't writing great melodies, just that the limitations of earlier consoles meant that almost every piece needed to survive on compositional strength as opposed to production values.

Larry Oji: I've got no major preference. The only bias I have is that I grew up with chiptunes, so there's going to be some nostalgia pushing me to those. But modern stuff holds up a lot better to active listening. Either way. [pauses] Was that a cop out? ... All right, let's go with modern stuff. I actually prefer the melodies that were written in the chiptune days. But modern music has the potential for great writing as well, combined with higher quality sounds. Some fans feel there's an inherent compositional quality trade-off in newer videogame music compared to the older stuff, but I believe the best of the modern stuff is simply more elusive. Besides, people tend to gloss over the fact that not every chiptune was amazing back then either.

What do you think of the recent trend towards contextual music? In old Zelda, you'd just have a melody looping for the whole time you were in a dungeon. Now, you often just have ambient effects and then an "action" motif when you approach an enemy.
djpretzel: Well, I think most good game music, even very old stuff, is still contextual on some level — it still makes sense for the environment. But more recently the focus/buzz has been on making that contextuality of a more real-time, responsive nature, as opposed to the loops you mention. In essence, this makes the experience more cinematic, with the score reacting to players' actions just like a well-cued Hollywood soundtrack would. For FMV sequences in games, obviously, this is nothing new and has been the standard for years. The challenge is in maintaining that very polished interactivity once a user's actions become unpredictable. There are different ways of accomplishing this, including triggered motifs like you mention. I think it's all very interesting and exciting, but I also think we need to take a step back once in awhile and remember that games are a different medium from movies, and that emulating them is an option, but not the only option. Who's to say that looped melodies a la Zelda and older 8-bit titles don't make complete sense for certain games or genres? Game creators are creating interactive worlds... those worlds can resemble a film experience, and if that's the goal, then responsive, interactive scores are perfect. But the true art of game creation, to me, is remembering that there aren't any limits, that conventions of all other mediums can and should be bent or broken, and thus I think too much emphasis on targeting a cinematic experience could be dangerous. In essence, I think this trend is very positive, so long as it expands the arsenal of approaches to music in games, rather than narrows it.

How about the shift from short melodies to more expanded or moodier compositions? The difference between, y'know, Zelda II's Palace theme and Ocarina of Time's Forest Temple theme?
djpretzel: This is totally natural; audio and music have progressed alongside graphics and other technical aspects of console hardware and gaming, and more ornate and varied compositions flow from those progressions. With Ocarina, you've no longer got a limited palette of bright colors on screen, you've got a fully 3D world, and it'd be odd if the music didn't match. This sometimes means the number of "hummable" tracks on a game soundtrack is reduced in favor of more ambient, atmospheric fare, but it's usually right for the game, and composers like Koji Kondo in particular can almost always hit a balance between "song" or theme tracks and more environmental, BGM stuff.

How did you meet up with Capcom on Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix?
djpretzel: OCR is mostly about individual mixes, but every once in awhile we release album projects, where artists get together and focus on a specific game, composer, etc. We've released albums for Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong Country and most notably Final Fantasy VII with our Voices of the Lifestream album in 2007. Shael Riley and Stephen Malcom-Howell (a.k.a. Malcos), two veteran OC ReMixers, put together an album of Super Street Fighter II Turbo mixes called Blood on the Asphalt back in 2006. Capcom found the album online and contacted Shael, who in turn referred them to me. At first we were actually suspicious of being Punk'd or something, since it was such an amazing opportunity, but once we confirmed it was legit, we obviously jumped at the chance.

The HD Remix soundtrack is based on Blood on the Asphalt, but it's not exactly the same. What are some of the changes?
Larry Oji: Firstly, I definitely need to stress that the remixers didn't do any mere drag-and-drop jobs on these. A lot of the pre-existing arrangements selected for inclusion on HD Remix were full-on, four-to-five-minute arrangements with original sections, solos and so forth, which doesn't fly in Street Fighter II. So everything's been edited down to a more standard sixty-to-ninety seconds and looped, focusing on the core of each theme to work like the old-school themes did. Dave had to handle relaying all of the desired modifications handed down by Capcom to the artists and got a variety of requests. This is where he gets music-nerdy!

djpretzel: In addition to length and formatting requirements, Capcom had some very specific feedback, and some comments that were more general in nature. In certain instances they wanted individual instruments changed out, tempo increased by a few beats per minute, or other modifications to production that were very easy for artists to implement. Other times, they were looking more for a different feel, or more subjective changes to texture, which were more challenging. We were blessed with a pretty long development cycle, so we had a lot of time to present different versions/permutations of each track and go through an iterative process.

Where are you getting the themes that aren't originally from the album? Are these all new remixes?
Larry Oji: Along with eight edits of mixes from Blood on the Asphalt, three of the seventeen character themes are modified versions of other OC ReMixes. That left six themes with all-new takes, as well as nearly all new material for the fast versions of all the character themes, character endings and other assorted themes, with everything provided by our crew of remixers. Gotta give props to José E. Felix (a.k.a. José the Bronx Rican) for coming through in a big way with nearly every ending theme besides providing both the Dee Jay and Vega themes!

What've your production duties been like on the soundtrack?
Larry Oji: I'm a detail-oriented person, more behind the scenes. Dave functioned as the lead producer and director for the soundtrack, serving as the point of contact with game producer Rey Jimenez and Capcom to keep things streamlined on the communications side. He handled the legal stuff, as well as ensuring Capcom had all of the remixers' latest work as things progressed. I handled contacting remixers that were difficult to get a hold of in order to secure some pre-existing tracks, recruited and provided critique for some of the new music, and helped keep track of smaller details with all of our personnel. Even stuff like preparing our credits list for the game and getting new track titles for all of the remixed themes, I enjoy making sure the finer things are in place at the ground level, while Dave works with the big picture. If you had told me back when I played Street Fighter II in my friend's basement that I'd be in the credits of a game in the series nearly two decades later, I wouldn't believe it. It's an honor to help coordinate something that will always be a part of a historic franchise, especially Street Fighter, the one that truly pulled me into game music beyond being a casual fan.

djpretzel: Working with Capcom was truly awesome. We brought our fandom — the way we express ourselves through mixing/arrangement — full circle, right back to a commercial product that is itself a remix of an absolutely classic game... it's very meta, when you think about it. I think it's something that could only have happened in a post-internet environment, with a company that was groovy enough to realize their fans could play a meaningful role. Mods, user-generated content, etc. have been around awhile, but I think there's often an artificial wall — "this is the official content, this is the fan stuff" — that segregates things. This project tears down that wall, at least for game music, and integrates the two, without emphasizing the distinction. I think that's a fantastic precedent to be setting, and I'm proud OverClocked ReMix was involved!

Click here for Part 1! And check back tomorrow for a detailed look at the four all-new themes on the SSF2THD soundtrack!

61FPS Q&A: David Lloyd and Larry Oji of OC ReMix on the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Soundtrack (Part 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Here at 61FPS, we couldn't be more excited about the upcoming Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. So it's with great pleasure that we present our in-depth Q&A with David "djpretzel" Lloyd and Larry "Liontamer" Oji, of the definitive game-music remix site, OC ReMix. In a deliciously fan-friendly turn of events, OC ReMix was tapped to produce the music for SSF2THD — and we've got the inside scoop on this glorious reimagining of one of the greatest game soundtracks ever. We also took the opportunity to chat with these gurus on a wide range of game-music-related topics. Enjoy!

David, can you tell us about founding OC ReMix?
David W. Lloyd (djpretzel): Way back in 1999, I was making a 3D comic strip dedicated to the emulation scene called "OverClocked" — a few episodes were actually pretty funny, and it played a part in popularizing the whole "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" craze, but it was also a way for me to get better at Photoshop and 3D Studio MAX. I wanted something I could work on for music as well, to get better at composing, arranging and producing; I had this idea to do videogame arrangements of my own, but also to open it up to others. At the time, there were sites which were specific to Commodore 64 games, and which focused on techno mixes, but nothing that was more open-ended. I wanted a website that encouraged jazz, classical, rap, rock and anything else, in addition to electronica genres, and which allowed arrangements from computer games, console games, handheld games and arcade games alike. There was nothing like that in existence, so I figured I'd start something myself. "OverClocked ReMix" started as a side-project to "OverClocked" the comic strip, but eventually became a hundred times bigger. In the early days, I was like a door-to-door salesman, emailing people asking for their permission to post their mixes on the site, but once it grew large enough, people started sending us stuff. Eventually there were so many submissions that we needed to create a judges panel and more official guidelines/standards, which really helped clarify what we're all about — interpretive arrangements, not just the original with drum loops on top. The rest, as they say, is history!

Larry, how did you get involved with the OC ReMix community?
Larry Oji (Liontamer): I love hearing stories on how people have found the site, and I share mine when I can in order to encourage people to check out everything OCR has. I did college radio at Emory University 's WMRE in Atlanta, where I loved playing video game music on my shows alongside mainstream music, mostly Britpop stuff. A friend of mind as well as a casual gamer and fellow DJ, Matt Kertz, saw that I played videogame music and recommended that I check out what was then remix.overclocked.org in early 2002. That was my first exposure to the site. The site was only two years old at the time and had more than 500 mixes by that point; I downloaded about thirty, sticking only with the few games I grew up with, and was extremely happy. But I didn't follow the site closely or try anything from games I had no history with, which was a huge mistake.

Luckily for me, I told my best friend Joe Mauri about the site and he downloaded everything OC ReMix had. If he hadn't done that, I wouldn't be where I am today. That summer, I sat down at his computer, listened to all the free remixes one by one over three days, and was simply amazed at how creative everything was. Even the games I wasn't familiar with had some amazing themes that were being remixed, and I ended up doing the research and downloading chiptunes of the original tracks to better understand what inspired the remixes. So it was a great crash course in the history of videogame music, and from that point on I was hooked. I shifted my radio show's format to videogame music exclusively, and volunteered for the site by filling in the database with info on remixers, composers and songs. I also grew as a music critic to the point where I was invited to join the site's judges panel in July 2004, where I help evaluate submitted material. Listening to music and spreading the word on OCR is one of the most enjoyable jobs I can think of.

Let's talk about game music in general. What got you into game music?
djpretzel: My earliest VGM memory would be the happy little tunes in Smurfs for the Colecovision and Dream House for the C64. The use of the Peter Gunn theme in Spy Hunter, also for the C64, was pretty classic as well. But it was really the Sega Master System that got me hooked — I loved the music from Alex Kidd, Shinobi and Space Harrier so much that I recorded the output of the console to tape and, sadly, did my own lame seven-year-old's version of DJing between tracks. To the best of my knowledge, those tapes are long gone, which I'm more than okay with from a human-dignity perspective, but they nevertheless represented my first steps into actually interacting with VGM.

Larry Oji: My earliest days of gaming were with the NES with a tiny bit of Master System. The SNES and Sega Genesis came a little later, so all of those systems planted the seeds. I didn't own too many titles, but I loved a lot of the soundtracks I heard. Super Mario Bros. 3 was the epitome of an excellent game and Koji Kondo's music from it was no exception. The first Donkey Kong Country on the SNES was amazing to me as well, and I loved the Streets of Rage and Sonic the Hedgehog series on the Genesis side. I can't forget Street Fighter II either. That was first in a long line of Street Fighter games that stuck with me, even when I didn't realize how immersed in game music I'd be down the line. It goes without saying, but the best games truly have a synergy going on between the gameplay and soundtrack that provides the total package.

What do you love about game music?
Larry Oji: The music from the games I grew up with had some of the best melodies and hooks imaginable. And the tunes had such range in terms of genres. As a kid, I obviously didn't think about it on a scholarly level, but I subconsciously latched onto the depth that videogame music possessed. Think about the range when you compare the soundtracks of Super Mario Bros. to Double Dragon to Road Rash. The 16-bit era, especially the SNES, was a big step up in realizing game music's potential, thanks to the wider array of sounds and more complex textures. The best composers really didn't put those extra resources to waste. The thing I love most is that game music is a medium and not a genre; game music can, and often does, involve any and all genres, so you get a flavor for all sorts of styles if you keep your ears and mind open. The fact that many game themes are malleable and can be reinterpreted makes me love game music that much more. Every time I hear an OC ReMixer take a theme and transform it into something fresh that I wouldn't expect, it validates being a fan of the medium.

djpretzel: ...what he said. It's worth mentioning that I'm a big fan of soundtracks in general — film, television, anime, etc. — and that contextual music that's part of a larger work always has a certain appeal for me. With almost all other mediums, though, it's a linear, non-interactive experience, so you only hear certain themes once or twice. With game music, because it's interactive, and because you can end up hearing the same piece ad infinitum, I think there's a much stronger mental association between the music and what it represents. A classic example for me would be the first town theme from Lunar for the Sega CD — every time I hear it, I can envision the town layout in great detail and feel like I'm there. You can get that type of strong association with film scores and even non-soundtrack material, sure, but I find it happens more often with VGM. This of course requires that you've actually played the game the music is from, though, which isn't necessary at all just to enjoy the music at face value!

Click here for Part 2!

OST: DuckTales

Peter Smith — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Licensed games have never really worked for me. Somehow having an explicit tie to another medium damages the game's claim to its own reality; the sense of place that makes a game unique is diminished if you know it's just a digital recreation of a film set. Games even seem to lose something when I find out they're based on some obscure manga, even if I'll never read it. This may make me crazy — it's been said before. But in any case, adaptations from the NES era could occasionally circumvent this effect. Maybe it's because the technology of the time had a naturally abstracting effect. You could at least count on a game, whatever the source, to have more architecture than plot — which was good, because if you'd wanted plot, you would've just watched or read whatever the game was based on in the first place.

Moreover, since pulling music from the source usually wasn't an option, you sometimes (if you were lucky) got a delicious batch of tunes, which always helped give the game a feel of its own. Here I'm thinking of Yoshihiro Sakaguchi's score for DuckTales, probably the best of Capcom's late-'80s Disney adaptations. With the exception of the DuckTales theme — which plays only over the title screen and the ending — the DuckTales score is completely original. And with all due respect to the beloved cartoon, the game soundtrack does a better job suggesting globetrotting adventure and exploration. (Not surprising, since Sakaguchi also worked on the soundtrack for Mega Man II, probably the most revered NES soundtrack of all.) Start with the stage-select music. Clocking in at three seconds, it's about as simple as you can get, but it immediately sets a mysterious tone with its pizzicato melody and arpeggiating bassline. From there, head to Transylvania, where a spooky minor-key tune builds to a quick descending series of syncopated chords. I may be imagining things here, but somehow even the basic square waves that comprise this track (and every track on the NES) seem to be tweaked for a ghostly shimmering effect. Listen closely to the chorus section, from 0:30 to 0:41 or so, to hear what I mean. (Interestingly, the beta version of DuckTales had a completely different track for Transylvania; it's got a less-melodic hook, but it's pretty cool on its own right, and features the same spoooooky square waves.)

But of course, the highlight of the DuckTales soundtrack and one of the greatest tracks on the NES is the theme from the Moon level. Evoking the bittersweet melodicism of Yasunori Mitsuda (think "To Far Away Times," the wistful track that concludes Chrono Trigger), this theme loops a celestial sixteenth-note pattern under a melody that stays just on the sweet side of cloying via a perfectly considered key change at 0:36. In its mixture of triumph and yearning, this classic song captures the spirit of wanderlust in a way its source material never could.

Previous OSTs:
Chrono Cross
Soul Blazer
Everyday Shooter
Rule of Rose
Treasure of the Rudras

For Love of the Game: Rockman 7 FC

Peter Smith — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Most people agree that the Mega Man series went downhill around Mega Man IV. I'm with 'em. But Mega Man IV, V, and VI are pretty great all the same, which is more than you can say for Mega Man 7. Boy, do I hate Mega Man 7. Some people say Mega Man 7 is good, but they are charlatans with no taste. Everything got cutesy all of a sudden, the music sucks, and the feel is completely off, probably because the character sprites are so big that there's no room to maneuver.

Luckily, some enterprising soul in Japan put his programming (and art and music) skills to the test, and came up with Rockman 7 FC, the greatest thing I've seen all week.

My God. It is beautiful. It takes the raw material of Mega Man 7 and makes it, you know, good. This is pretty much the definition of "for the love of the game" — you can just feel the love here. I can just imagine this guy, overcome by love for classic Mega Man, properly disgusted by Mega Man 7, desperate to see things right. Just like me, except a dedicated craftsman instead of a bitter old crank. Look at the dedication and care that went into these perfectly-styled 8-bit graphics. (My sole complaint: this is actually a Windows-based game, not an actual NES rom hack... but that would be a lot to ask.) And if you want more evidence of the love on display, note that the Shade Man easter egg, which played the music from Ghouls N' Ghosts, is intact — 'cept this time it plays the music from the NES port of Ghosts N' Goblins. I'm almost crying over here. The best part of it? Apparently this same guy is working on an equivalent reverse-port of the equally loathsome Mega Man 8. If you're excited about the retro-styled Mega Man 9, you owe it to yourself to check this out. It's like a classic Mega Man game just dropping out of the blue.

Previous For Love of the Games:
Outcast 2
Street Fighter One
Metroid II Remakes

Related:
The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels, Part 1
The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels, Part 2
The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels, Part 3
Mega Man 9 Goes Back To Your Roots. Way Back.
New Mega Man 9 Trailer: I'm Drowning in My Childhood
Don’t Call It Retro: Mega Man 9 and Design Resurrection

Rebuttal Rebuttal – I Stand With Metroid

Peter Smith — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, I recently incited the wrath of seemingly thousands of NeoGAF readers by defaming the good standing of Metroid: Zero Mission. One of them even said he hated me as much as he hated Amy Winehouse, which was so left-field I almost took it personally. Let me further establish that I am totally batshit, tastewise, by giving you my list of favorite games in the Metroid series:

1) Metroid
2) Metroid Prime
3) Metroid II: Return of Samus
4) Metroid Fusion
5) Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
6) Super Metroid
7) Metroid: Zero Mission
8) Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

See? I'm fuckin' nuts. I'm a madman. I'd slit my momma's throat for a nickel. Granted, I still think all of those games are pretty swell, but please feel free to completely disregard my opinions on Metroid, videogames in general, fluffy bunnies, etc. That said, since my fellow blogger Amber mounted a thoughtful and cogent defense of Zero Mission yesterday, I feel obliged to clarify my thoughts.

First of all, despite Amber's objections, I can't really attribute my preference for the original Metroid over Zero Mission to nostalgia, because I'd never played the original Metroid until the late '90s, when I was already a cantankerous teenager. I'd played Super Metroid well before that, and it never stuck with me as much.

As far as the popular notion that the original Metroid is unplayable — I think contemporary gamers have in some ways been spoiled by easier games and smoother controls. No doubt Zero Mission controls better than its source game, and no doubt Metroid is hard, but it's far from the hardest thing on the NES. I wouldn't call it unplayable, but one thing I would call it is "hostile." Which actually fits its themes pretty well.

One thing that games did by default back in the day was leave a lot to the imagination. There weren't a lot of system resources for story, comic-art interludes, etc. You could argue that the designers would've put that stuff in if they could have — ie, "It's only that way because it's on the NES." But that gets into the good ol' intentional fallacy. Once Metroid is out in the world, it doesn't matter what Gumpei Yokoi would've done if he'd had the resources. What matters is what's on the cart and how it affects us when we play. By leaving a lot to the imagination, Metroid invites you more openly into its world. This is one of the virtues of simplicity. It's the same reason I prefer The Legend of Zelda to A Link to the Past (a game for which I have far more nostalgic feelings), or Mega Man II to Mega Man VI, even though the later games are clearly more polished and planned. For me, Metroid lost something once it started explaining about Space Pirates and Chozo and so forth. Once those strange, ancient bird statues had a name, they went from the realm of the uncanny and dreamlike to just elements of a standard-issue space opera — one that happens to be very well done, but familiar material none-the-less.

I should also address my allegation that Zero Mission is full of hand-holding. As many people quite rightly pointed out, Zero Mission actually allows you to sequence break pretty substantially. This is definitely cool, I agree. (Actually, here's a remarkable chart of possible sequence breaks, which makes clear how malleable Zero Mission really can be.) So "hand-holding" may not be the right charge. Let me be more precise. For me, the distinction between Metroid and its sequels, and also between Zelda and its sequels, comes down to (bear with me) the difference between a godless world and a created world. The world of Metroid is truly alien. It's full of repetitions, corridors that go nowhere, areas with no apparent human purpose. (Memory limitations, I know — see "intentional fallacy" above.) In "modern gaming" terms, this means that it's, in some ways, less fun to run around in. That also means that it feels disorienting, atmospheric, organic, "real." (And on a side note, I'm not sure "fun" should be the ultimate determinant of a great videogame — if we want games to be art, great art is not always "fun" per se. . . a tangent you'll probably thank me for not following further.) Again, think of the space jockey in Alien. There's no explanation for it. It's just there.

In contrast — yes, there is no verbal explanation for a lot of stuff in Zero Mission. But let's look at the subtextual implications of the gameplay. Let's say you go into a room where you acquire the Ice Beam. Once you get it, you have to use the Ice Beam in a puzzle to get back out of the room. By establishing a logical construction like that, Zero Mission (like most other Metroid games) implies intelligent creation. There is a cause/effect structure, thereby tipping the hand of the creator. In Zero Mission, Zebes isn't an incomprehensible alien world. It's an intricately constructed puzzle box — a very well-made one, but a human artifact all the same, in the same way that the half-decayed ancient ruins Link wanders in Zelda become clever videogame constructions in Zelda III. I realize this is a subtle distinction, but to me, it makes a huge difference in the experience of playing the games. I'm an atheist, and that cold, atheistic Metroid just hits me where it hurts. No disrespect to Zero Mission, really. It's a great game. Metroid is a place.

Related:
Rebuttal: Say What About Metroid: Zero Mission
The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes, and Five That Weren't So Great, Part 3
For Love of the Game: Metroid II Remakes

The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great, Part 3

Peter Smith — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:02:00 GMT

And now, the bad...

Metroid: Zero Mission (Game Boy Advance)

Is Metroid: Zero Mission a terrible game? By no means. On its own terms, it's rather good. But as a reconception of one of the greatest, most influential games ever made, it's a disaster, taking everything that made Metroid spooky and replacing it with a thick layer of corn. Metroid was heavily influenced by Alien. Remember the petrified extraterrestrial skeleton in Alien? What if that bastard had gotten up and started bombarding Sigourney Weaver with some hack's idea of ancient wisdom? Wouldn't that have pretty much thrown the movie's chilly austerity out the window? Like so many latter-day games, Zero Mission thinks comic-book jibber-jabber is cooler than eerie silence. This lack of subtlety is echoed in the gameplay itself, which, while it controls a lot better than Metroid, is chock-full of egregious hand-holding and advice-giving — pretty much the exact opposite of the original's sprawling openendedness. Metroid is practically Lovecraftian in the way it makes you feel tiny and alone in a vast and hostile universe. Don't look for that feeling in Zero Mission. Oh, and it also mangles the most immortal climax in videogame history — the truly unsettling slaughter of a shrieking brain in a jar, followed by a hair-raising escape sequence — by tacking on a (sigh) stealth section. — PS

Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros 3 (Game Boy Advance)

I can hear you, fanboy. The exasperated sigh, the cry of indignation. Super Mario Bros. 3 is the same great game it's always been on this GBA cart, sporting the snazzy 1993 Super Mario All-Stars graphics. But, first of all, I don't need to hear Mario yelping at me all the time. I know it's a-him. I'm perfectly fine entering a level without being told to a-go. The talking isn't the biggest problem, though. It's that Nintendo actually created a wealth of brand new levels for Super Mario Bros. 3, levels that brought over mechanics from both Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario World, and left them off the cart. You had to buy the game, then buy an e-Reader, then buy packs of random cards from Wal-Mart and EBGames to play them. Oh yeah, and they changed the ending. What could've improved on a classic instead leaves me reaching for my NES. — JC

Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (SNES)

A scandalous missed opportunity, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy collects two of the greatest NES action games (and their mediocre third sibling) and gives them a graphical non-makeover, at points even downgrading. The gorgeous parallax in NG3's desert level is inexplicably MIA — dude, this is the SNES! Every level should have parallax that handsome, and you can't even keep it where it already was? The music is butchered too, despite the SNES's powerful sound chip — some of it is even missing. And some of the excised effects dumb down the gameplay, like the omission of the lightning in stage 3-1 of NG2. The whole point of that stage was that you had to operate in the dark; now, it's just like any other. Only one thing is really improved, and that's that the port of NG3 has the difficulty settings of the Japanese original, not its maddening U.S. counterpart. But the first rule of remaking is (or should be) "do no harm," which means Ninja Gaiden Trilogy flunks out of med school. — PS

Sega Ages Vol. 5 and Vol. 13: Golden Axe and Outrun (PlayStation 2)

The Sega Ages line, compilations and polygonal remakes of the publisher's classics, is certainly a noble effort. Letting players revisit games like Panzer Dragoon, Space Harrier, and Gunstar Heroes is just plain good, benevolent even. Making Outrun, one of early gaming's brightest visual achievements, into a washed-out, muddy looking budget title is the opposite of benevolent. You just don't make Outrun uglier than Cruis'n USA. It's wrong. Golden Axe, well, that was never much of a looker in the first place. But why would you make it more drab? Why would you add cutscenes? Why would you take out the opportunity to beat up gnomes for magic potions? It just doesn't make any sense! — JC

Mario Kart Wii (Wii)

A stretch, I know. But the inclusion of classic tracks from the original Super Mario Kart highlights how much gameplay depth has disappeared from Mario Kart's gameplay over the years. As an "enhanced remake," Kart Wii's version of Ghost Valley 2 is a bust. Don't try to make that awesome shortcut jump, cause the feather — an item that took actual skill to use — is long gone. In its place are a boatload of zany items that'll blast you from last place to first and back over the course of one lap. Yeah, it'd probably entertain your Amish cousins (or whatever other gaming-illiterate demographic Nintendo's targeting these days) for half an hour, but would my friends Mike Brownell and Mike Schlauch make it the centerpiece of a decade-long continuing struggle over who's the uncontested master of gaming/the universe? No — they'd both recognize it as far too spastic and random to function as a scale of justice. — PS

Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 2.

What'd we miss? What'd we unfairly vilify, and what'd we overpraise? Tell us in the comments section.

Previous Top Tens:
The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels
The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels

The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:01:00 GMT

Final Fantasy (WonderSwan Color)

The first in a vast battalion of Final Fantasy rereleases, the Wonderswan remake actually gets it righter than any that were to come. Sure, the Playstation version has FMV intros (whoo-hoo?), the GBA version has some mostly extraneous new dungeons, and the PSP version has sharper graphics. But the Wonderswan version gave the NES original a beautiful visual makeover that later ports would simply poach, and more importantly, it corrected some of the original game's antiquated design quirks in a totally optional fashion. In the NES game, if two characters attack one enemy and the first one kills it, the second character's attack will be ineffective. This is annoying, but it also forces you to plan; it adds some strategy to the essentially one-dimensional battle system. You could really argue for or against the feature, and the Wonderswan port gives you a choice. The same goes for a number of other idiosyncracies we cranky old-timers like to keep in our enhanced remakes; subsequent rereleases dumbed the game down until you could grind through it with a rubber band around the A button. — PS

Mega Man: Powered Up (PlayStation Portable)

People are excited about Mega Man 9's back-to-basics approach for good reason. The Mega Man name has become synonymous with chatty drama-fests in the past decade and a half, less about hard-as-nails action than lame anime tropes. The 2006 remake of the first Mega Man, Powered Up, isn't short on talking heads. It's also not an especially good recreation of the original's gameplay and, as for its new bosses, the less said about the Jim-Crow-faced Oil Man, the better. But Powered Up is a great game, and if it changes the original's exact scale, feel, and pace, it perfectly maintains the original's principles, albeit in its own super-cute fashion. The wealth of options in Powered Up is staggering, letting you play through the game as almost every character you run into in addition to an intimidatingly deep level-creation feature. If you want to remember how Mega Man was back in the day, well, that's included. — JC

Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles (PlayStation Portable)

Koji Igarashi remade Rondo of Blood last year out of necessity more than a need to improve upon the first. The final proper Castlevania sidescroller has aged exceptionally well in the past fifteen years, but it's impossibly rare, was never released outside of Japan, and is difficult to properly emulate. But Igarashi's Castlevania team did far more than just put some spit-and-polish on Richter Belmont's adventure, creating Castlevania's first truly attractive polygonal outing. More importantly, none of the game's perilous jumps have been hurt by the shift in presentation, unlike in so many 2.5D games. The remixed soundtrack isn't quite as spectacular as the original's, but you can unlock that in the game. It's win-win! — JC

Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 3.

The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Well, having burned through our annual pants-replacement fund on the announcement of Chrono Trigger DS, we here at 61FPS now find ourselves surprisingly ambivalent about this remake (or is it just a rerelease?) of the greatest game Square ever made. Sure, it could be handsome and polished. But it could be sloppy and buggy, too. It could add new gameplay elements, or it could dumb down those that were already there. Chrono Trigger's a delicate thing! Be careful with that priceless art item, you sausage-fingered renovators! And here to guide you on a righteous path are five enhanced remakes that got it right — and five that didn't. — Peter Smith

First up, the good...

Tomb Raider Anniversary (PlayStation 2)

Most games simply do not need to be remade. As beautiful and ambitious as Square's impending Final Fantasy IV DS is, its voiced dialogue, new script, and three-dimensional overhaul are icing on a cake that was already delicious despite its simplicity. The original Tomb Raider, however, is a once-revolutionary title ravaged by the passage of time and the growth of technology. Forget how Lara's 1996 debut looks. Just think about trying to play a fully-3D game that requires precision platforming using only a d-pad. Crystal Dynamics' full remake of Tomb Raider put the engine from Lara's rebirth, the decent Tomb Raider: Legend, to great use, re-introducing the world to the game and, most importantly, preserving it in a way so people can actually play it in the years to come. Plus, grappling hooks are awesome. — John Constantine

Resident Evil (Gamecube)

If ever there was a lasting argument for using pre-rendered backgrounds in a game, it's the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil. The abstract, dollhouse creepiness of the Playstation/Saturn original was made nightmarishly real here, each room identically re-imagined as a dimly lit place of shadows, dust and blood. The visual overhaul would have been enough to earn RE a place on this list, but the gameplay additions were just as exciting. Zombies can't simply be dispatched with a hail of bullets any longer. You have to stab them in the head with disposable knives or set them on fire after you stop them from munching on your goodies. If you don't, they turn into fiery-red speed demons who will chase you through rooms. The only thing scarier is RE's new boss fight, which you should just go play instead of having me spoil it for you. — JC

Click here for Part 2.
Click here for Part 3.

The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels, Part 3

Peter Smith — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:32:00 GMT

Shadow Man

As Pete said, Mega Man III started to strain the series' robot-masters-as-industrial-tool conceit. Silly as Top Man is, I have even more trouble getting my head around Shadow Man and his lair sitting at the bottom of a waterfall of lava. What was the civic-planning meeting like for this one? "Finally, we have used the remaining funds in 200X's robot-master budget to build a crazy-sweet ninja robot who lives in a rad fortress at the bottom of a lava flow. He will be protected by robot frogs and parachuting heads." "Madness! Why would you do such a thing?" "Because, sir. It is awesome." Know what? He's right. — JC

Bubble Man

A big part of the classicness of any given Mega Man stage is the music. Bubble Man's got one of the greatest tunes in the series, an unforgettable bit of melodic pop that builds quickly to a dazzling chorus of harmonized square waves and Van-Halen-esque arpeggios, all over an appropriately watery triangle-wave bassline. But let's not forget the stage itself, which follows our hero from a huge waterfall, down into a cramped subaquatic tunnel (some kind of refinery?) stuffed with giant robot lantern fish, then back out into the open air for a showdown with the local kingpin. As in so many classic Mega Man levels, there's a beautiful sense of the elemental here — the breeze, the cold metal, the spray of the sea. — PS

Crystal Man

You'd think Capcom's increasing ability to push the NES hardware would've made stages in the later Mega Man games even more memorable than their simpler precursors. Unfortunately, this usually wasn't the case. Many levels in Mega Man II and III gave you just enough detail to fire your imagination, and not enough to stifle it; the increased detail of IV through VI actually made the stages seem less like real places and more like digital constructions. Sometimes the most evocative background of all is just a sinister and inviting black. Still, the fancier graphics of later games did allow the occasional surrealist delight, like Crystal Man's stage, a jagged landscape of shimmering gems and glass-tube-enclosed machinery. For a brief and gorgeous section, the blue background switches to glowing hot pink like an animated bar sign. — PS

Dr. Wily's Castle, Part 1

This is the finest stage in the entire Mega Man franchise, spin-offs included. Mega Man II has four scenes of explicit narrative, and outside of the introduction's brief narration, they are wordless, used only to provide spatial context. What is remarkable about the first stage of Wily's castle is how it conveys scale and design independent of the cutscene that precedes it, how its propulsive music perfectly illustrates exhaustion, finality, and resolve. It is an assault, the scaling of a mountain using literally every tool at your disposal. The level concludes with actually breaching the fortress' walls and finding a chasm, the crossing of which requires precisely timed jumps across miniscule platforms. The castle's guardian, a screen-filling robotic dragon, destroys your footing in its pursuit. The stage, the music, the opponents reveal everything about this world and its stakes: you are fighting a madman on his terms and survival is not guaranteed. Remarkable. — JC

Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 2.

What'd we miss? Tell us in the comments. For the record, we like Flame Man's arabesque oil well and Tomahawk Man's cod-western badlands too, but nothing from MMVI makes the top ten in fairness. MMVII and MMVIII are beneath discussion.

Previous Top Tens:
The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels

The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:31:00 GMT

Metal Man

More than your average Mega Man stage, Metal Man's feels collosal. Who knows why — maybe it's the giant screws and gears in the foreground, or the dense, heavily animated background (technically quite impressive) of pistons and cogs. Or maybe it's that Metal Man's stage actually has somewhat less variety than most of Mega Man II's stages, thereby suggesting a larger size. Whatever the reason, the scope seems massive. The stage itself is relatively short, but it feels like just a small part of a vast, rusted-out fortress of industry. — PS

Toad Man

For all of Mega Man IV 's missteps (downgraded music, overemphasized story, increasingly nonsensical characters), it's not without its highlights. Toad Man's stage bombards you with intimidating elements from the start, buffeting seemingly easy jumps with heavy wind and pouring rain. As you descend deeper into the sewers of 200X, waterfalls crush, overflows lead to bottomless pits, and robotic vermin (rats, slugs, snails) take full advantage of your decreased mobility. The stage is emblematic of the series' descent into comic absurdity, but it's flawlessly laid out and challenging. — JC

Spark Man Revisited

Mega Man II is an undisputed classic, but for a NES game, it's pretty damn easy, a fault that Mega Man III hastens to correct. By the time you get around to the "dark" versions of conquered stages, III is offering you no quarter. When you walk into Spark Man's second stage, you're at the bottom of a room with no ladder to the top; as you go to summon Rush Coil, just imagine Keiji Inafune giving you the finger. Spark Man 2 is also a long haul, with some truly nasty spike placement and two bosses to tackle; for an added touch of creepiness, it's also got a damaged background texture that suggests the whole place has been bombed out. Ominous stuff. — PS

Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 3.

The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels, Part 1

Peter Smith — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Capcom, I don't really know how to say this. It's a little awkward, but damn it, it's the truth. We've known each other a long time, and you've always been a good friend to me, but this year, things have gotten more serious. With Street Fighter IV, HD Remix, Commando 3, 1942: Joint Strike and two versions of Bionic Commando, it's like you've gone out of your way lately to show me what I mean to you, and now that you've announced Mega Man 9, it's time for me to return the favor. Capcom, I. . . I love you.

Jesus, I don't know what came over me there. But with Mega Man 9 just unveiled in all its eight-bit glory, my old-school-gaming glands are all swollen and red, and I think it's squeezing out the blood flow to my brain. The early Mega Man games are masterpieces of their era, and they feature some of the most unforgettable stages on the NES — a series of giant constructions that, high-tech though they may be, maintain a playground-like innocence. World-building obsessives that we are, we couldn't let this glorious day go by without commemorating the ten greatest classic Mega Man levels of all time. — Peter Smith

Elec Man

Keiji Inafune's first attempt at Mega Man was promising but ultimately half-baked. The play was there but the world itself was still confused, its six core stages shuffling back and forth between "gamey" abstraction and eerie pastoral. Elec Man's tower was one of the series' first real successes, an ascent that felt like a true structure and not a background for a sprite to jump about, a dangerous place pulsing with energy that could obliterate our diminutive hero using the very power that fueled his mechanical innards. — John Constantine

Top Man

The whole premise of Mega Man was that each of the Robot Masters you were fighting had been conceived for an industrial purpose and therefore ruled over an area appropriate to his capabilities. (Guts Man is a construction robot, right, so he's in this construction zone... or something.) This whole idea kind of fell apart as the robots got weirder. By all rights, Top Man should probably have been in a giant robot toy store or something, and God knows that's how the series' increasingly corny later installments would've played it. Luckily, Inafune and co. were still capable of a curveball or two when Mega Man III came out, which must be why Top Man's stage isn't a toy store at all, but some kind of bizarre jungle/greenhouse/space station. With giant robot cats. Most fans would agree it's better that way. — PS

Gemini Man

As important as the future metropolises of classic Mega Man are the natural landscapes. Gemini Man's stage shows a world where even the harshest environments have been hollowed out, bent to the will of humanity, and overrun with intelligent machines that can work and survive where our fragile bodies can't last. Enemy placement is logical, functional in this arctic wasteland; drones spill fire digging into the frozen surface, giant penguins produce an adapted work force, robotic-tadpole pods shifting to maintain delicate structural integrity deep in the ice. The whole place is cold and sharp, beautiful and forbidden. I'd never survive there, but Mega Man can. — JC

Click here for Part 2.
Click here for Part 3.

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 3

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:13:00 GMT

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

We cite Punch-Out!! here not for starring Mike Tyson (a controversial figure, even before his rape conviction), but for the degree to which it epitomizes a trend that would dominate gaming in the late-'80s and early-'90s: the "beat up stereotypes from around the world" gameplay model. Granted, most of Punch-Out!!'s characters are too ludicrous to really offend; it's hard to imagine Pacific Islanders getting all up in arms about King Hippo being kind of a jackass. That said, the sight of cross-eyed Piston Honda babbling "Sushi, Kamikaze, Fujiyama, Nipponichi!" as a mid-match battle cry is a little unsettling. — PS

Persona 3

I’ve written about Persona 3’s disturbing imagery before: “It’s always strange when games filled with truly troubling imagery go unnoticed by the most vocal anti-game pundits. Persona 3, Atlus’ exceptional RPG in the long running Shin Megami Tensei series, has been released not once but twice in the past twelve months without eliciting even a peep out of Joe Lieberman or Focus on the Family. For those unfamiliar with the game, the reason Persona 3 might ruffle some feathers is its protagonists, a team of troubled high school students who control guardian spirits to battle demons. And oh yeah, they release these spirits by shooting themselves in the head.” Seriously! Teens! Shooting themselves repeatedly in the FACE! No one even said anything about all the teens shooting themselves in the face. — JC

Metroid II: Return of Samus

Metroid II is about xenocide; your goal is to slaughter an entire alien species. Yes, there are many games about destroying evil alien species. Usually, though, said species are attacking the Earth or something. Or they're at least competent to make moral decisions. Metroids are space jellyfish. They're not evil, they're just hungry. And the series storyline establishes pretty clearly that the Space Pirates are breeding the things for their own evil ends. Exterminating the Space Pirates would be one thing, but the Metroids are mere low-functioning animals. As you proceed through the game, you watch a steadily declining count of how many of the poor little bastards you have left to vaporize. Imagine if this thing was set in a nature preserve. — PS

Fable

Peter Molyneux may not have delivered on his promise of creating the greatest role-playing game of all time with Fable but it was still a remarkably forward thinking game. Consider this: Fable was released in the United States on September 14th, 2004, a mere four months after Massachusetts started issuing same-sex marriage licenses and two months before senatorial, congressional, and presidential elections where constitutionally banning same-sex marriage was a tent pole issue. I applaud Molyneux for creating a game where a man can fall in love and marry another man. But I am shocked that Fable didn’t cause videogame content to be another talking point that election season. — JC

Click here for Part 1
Click here for Part 2

Previous Top Tens:
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 2

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:12:00 GMT

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4 is a game obsessed with realism, its depiction of combat situations and the tools of war meticulous to an almost terrifying degree. Early in the game, you are placed in the gunner’s seat of an AC-130 Spectre over a Ukrainian field, the night vision view of an aerial assault looking no different than an Iraq war newscast, the radio confirmation of kills unsettlingly casual; a game so realistic that it mimics a soldier’s detachment from killing. It’s strange then that the game, for all its incessant specificity, sends the player to kill Arab soldiers in “the Middle East”, and not an actual nation. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has sold over seven million copies in a war-weary United States in under a year. Am I the only one who finds this sort of depersonalization unsettling? — JC

Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators

Fast-food promotional games are pretty fucked up, as a whole. Selling this nasty grub to kids via smiling cartoon characters and hop-and-bop platforming — well, it may not cross over into "immoral", but it's certainly sleazy. The 1992 McDonald's promo-piece Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators, however, crosses that line by hopping onto the kid-friendly environmentalism in vogue at the time. (See also Captain Planet, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc.) The problem here is that McDonald's' own environmental record was far from clean; as a massive distributor of factory-farmed beef, the company was (and is) directly responsible for a huge amount of pollution, deforestation and energy wastage. Bastards were cutting down the same sparkling-green rainforests through which their grinning shills were merrily traipsing. — PS

Heavenly Sword

It might seem strange that we’ve chosen to single-out Heavenly Sword as our example of an absurdly over-sexualized female protagonist. Dead or Alive, a series that’s persisted for just over a decade now without causing a kerfuffle despite its bizarre, hyper sexuality, might seem like a more logical target. You might even say that Heavenly Sword’s a poor example considering its emphasis on Nariko’s empowerment in a male dominated fantasy world. But let me ask you, if Nariko is such a great warrior, savior of her people even though they hate her for being a woman, why does she go to war in her underpants? She is fighting people with swords in her underpants. No one thought mention to developer Ninja Theory that underpants are not effective armor? Nariko stands in for the legions of silly, objectified, hyper-sexualized female game protagonists. We’re giving Lara the day off on this one. — JC

Click here for Part 1
Click here for Part 3

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 1

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:11:00 GMT

Games have been raising hackles since their inception. Howell Ivy kick-started gaming and controversy’s relationship when he designed Death Race in 1976, a simple black and white game that was, well, about running people over for points. That was enough to get America riled up, prompting 60 Minutes to run the first of many, many televised news stories about the psychological effects of gaming. But public outrage is unpredictable. Politicians and parent groups have been shocked by d-list titles like Manhunt and Night Trap while more popular, widely played games with far more inflammatory content have passed by unnoted. Today, 61 Frames Per Second presents The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial. A number of these are games that we are surprised did not cause uproar in a number of communities. The rest are games that we ourselves find seriously questionable in content. How do you feel about these videogames? Indifferent? Appalled? Leave a comment and let us know. — John Constantine

NARC

I don't know about you, but I have at least a couple of friends who have occasionally sold drugs. They're pretty lucky they grew up in the relatively permissive '90s, and not in the merciless, Reaganite '80s presented in NARC. Sure, NARC gives you bonus points for arresting dealers instead of killing them, but that's because it's almost impossible to do. Far easier is just perforating them on the spot. As my fellow blogger Cole notes, "I guess dismembering hundreds is okay if they're pushin'." In fact, there was some parental outrage over NARC's unprecedented level of gore, but its moral assumptions went pretty much unchallenged. — Peter Smith

Pokémon

Have you ever noticed that there are no regular, powerless domesticated animals in any of the Pokémon games, cartoons, comics et cetera? Let's say your pre-teen brother/sister/cousin goes out for a walk one day and comes across a pigeon in the street. They then capture this pigeon in a small cage and train it to fight the dogs, lizards and ponies that the other neighborhood kids have captured and trained to fight, as well as stray cats and sewer rats that can then be captured and trained for similar purposes. Yeah, that scenario is a little awesome, but it's also pretty horrifying, right? When Michael Vick is involved in a dogfighting circuit, the media explodes with rage, but when your kids do it in a Nintendo game it gets rated E for Everyone by the ESRB. — Derrick Sanskrit

Final Fantasy Tactics

As much as Final Fantasy Tactics’ tale of political intrigue in the feudal fantasy-scape of Ivalice is concerned with a power struggle between church and state, it’s hard to get past the game’s barely veiled indictment of Christian lore. Tactics' villains are essentially the Catholic Church. Their central figure is Saint Ajora, a 'child of God' with twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed him and sent him to his death. 'Cept it turns out Ajora wasn't really the son of God, but a power-hungry war-mongering mortal who was sneakily made divine through church skulduggery and historical revisionism. Good thing RPGs require so much reading, otherwise there might have been some good ol’ fashioned game burnings back in 1998. — JC

Click here for Part 2
Click here for Part 3

For Love of the Game: Street Fighter One

Peter Smith — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the hallowed halls of the Street Fighter series, there's really only one stinker — one game that's just not fun to play — and that's the original Street Fighter. It's a damn shame, cause the character designs are pretty cool (outside of a couple of generic muscle-men like Joe), and the graphics are really quite attractive for the time (Lee and Eagle's backgrounds are pretty spectacular actually.) But the actual gameplay... well, it's disastrous. You can only choose Ryu or Ken, they both control like your commands are mere suggestions, special moves are near-impossible to pull off, and enemy attacks seem to do vast amounts of damage randomly determined on a per-occasion basis. It's a pretty startling swing and miss for the normally infallible late-'80s Capcom, and though it was a decent-sized hit at the time (big enough, anyway, to warrant a markedly improved sequel) it's pretty much a historical curiosity at this point. But because the graphics are cool and the characters are classic (and because it's the first game in a truly legendary series), I've always wanted someone to make a revamped version that was actually playable.

Well, someone has.

Using the MUGEN engine, the SF diehards over at Capcommunications have rebuilt Street Fighter from the ground up, and it's fun to play now. In their Street Fighter One, you can choose any of the characters, everyone has their own ending, and most importantly, you can actually move the bastards around finally.

As a Street Fighter nerd, I have a couple of quibbles with this remake. Some of the background graphics are blurred out; it might've been an attempt to modernize, but the backgrounds lose their beautiful late-'80s sharpness. The AI is unremittingly punishing, often comboing for a dozen hits. And this may be picky, but I think it's too bad Capcommunications added super moves to the game — as a much-later addition to the series, they don't really seem at home in any version of the original Street Fighter. That said, this is on the whole a really nice piece of work, making a silk purse from a notorious sow's ear. And it even has a perfectly chosen secret character. If you like Street Fighter, make sure to check out Street Fighter One post-haste.

Previous For Love of the Games:
Metroid II Remakes

Related:
Street Fighter HD Makes Me Freak Out
We're Playing The New Bionic Commando, And We Can Only Assume That You're Not
Screen Test - Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Introduces Akuma
Street Fighter II HD Update - Hitbox-O-Rama

The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History, Part 3

John Constantine — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:45:00 GMT

Sonic the Hedgehog - Green Hill Zone

By the time the original Sonic the Hedgehog came out, Super Mario World had been out for six months in Japan. In almost every way, Mario had the edge on Sonic — more levels, more power-ups, more variety, more gaming. But there was one thing you couldn't take away from Sonic, and that was the sheer dazzle of starting up the game and entering Green Hill Zone. To this day, Green Hill Zone looks spectacular, with its sparkling ocean, lush vegetation and abstract geometry — not to mention Masato Nakamura's unforgettable music. Mario had a lot to offer, but in terms of pure physicality, most of Dinosaur Land seems awfully drab next to Green Hill Zone. (Plus, it was 1991 — "zones" were just cooler than "lands", for Chrissakes.) — PS

Shadow of the Colossus - Valus

Shadow of the Colossus’s opening moments are less mysterious, and therefore less grand, than the opening moments of Ico. As players, we are given exposition and context through narration (however vague it may be) and the game’s protagonist Wander states a clear goal while an evil god tells him how to achieve it. This is a far cry from the confounding and almost entirely silent internment of a horned boy in a decaying castle. But Shadow of the Colossus’ first level, toppling the colossus Valus, is a singular moment in gaming history. Valus stands at one end of an enclosed valley opposite you and, at first, it doesn’t seem that big. Then you run towards it, feeling the ground shake through your controller, the music swells, and you jump on its enormous leg, searching for a handhold. It is, in the truest sense of the word, epic. Even God of War 1 and 2’s opening battles against the hydra and the Colossus of Rhodes seem miniscule in comparison. — JC

Metroid Prime - Space Pirate Frigate

To fully appreciate the beginning of Metroid Prime, play through the beginning of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Both openings teach you how to play the game, but Twilight Princess teaches you like you're in the remedial class, instead of someone who (knowing Nintendo's fan base) probably has a doctorate in Zelda. It takes hours of cat-placating, monkey-placating and goat-herding to even get a sword. Prime takes it easy on you, but you never feel condescended to. Its tutorials are thoroughly skippable; expert players can finish the Space Pirate Frigate in five minutes flat. But beyond that, it's a beautiful, self-contained introduction to the game's spooky atmosphere. Every console Zelda after A Link to the Past has started you out in a village full of whiners you have to coddle before you get to adventure. Prime throws you into a dark, eerie spacecraft where something horrible has happened. Get in and get out before its orbit decays and you die. Chills. — PS

Half-Life 2 – City 17

“Wake up, Mr. Freeman. Wake up, and smell the ashes.” As Gordon Freeman, your journey through the bleak streets of City 17 begins a mere sixty seconds after the game’s title has faded to black. The mundane environment tells you everything you need to know about how life works in a world where civilization has crumbled; tired and scared citizens mutter in the corners of a train terminal, Combine soldiers threaten and abuse, and rare familiar faces urge you to escape immediately. Half-Life’s greatest success has always been keeping the player in constant control of the action while still herding them along a set path. Half-Life 2’s opening level, Freeman’s arrival in City 17 and his flight from the Combine across the city’s rooftops, engages and informs in equal measure while providing an immediate thrill through play. It’s remarkable that a first-person shooter’s most memorable level is its first, a level where not a single shot is fired. — JC

Click here for Part 1
Click here for Part 2

Previous Top Tens:
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels

The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History, Part 2

John Constantine — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:30:00 GMT

Metal Gear Solid 2 – The U.S.S. Discovery

The opening level of Metal Gear Solid 2 is the finest Metal Gear game ever made in-and-of itself. Forget Hideo Kojima’s cinematic pretensions for just a moment and think about the raw play available in this self-contained prologue scenario. The tools of MGS’ trade may not be available to Snake in their totality here, but every inch of the tanker acts as a playground for the series' most fundamental mechanics. You can sneak through without ever being seen or you can kill every Russian soldier you come across. There is an expertly paced boss fight. There is skin-mag related humor. It’s all here. Now layer Kojima’s cinematic pretensions back on top of all that considering they are at their best (read: most restrained) here and you have a beginning that is, arguably, superior to anything the follows or precedes it in the entire series. — JC

Mega Man X - Awakening Road

This is not your father's Mega Man, says the opening stage of Mega Man X. Or it would, if it had a voice — but instead, it's got a brutal snare roll leading into a heavy rock instrumental. It's got a crumbling highway, complete with fleeing commuters (the latter of which ground the action in a more inhabited world than the NES Mega Man games ever featured.) And it ends with X almost getting scrapped by a mech-riding Boba Fett ripoff. Whatever our love for the classic Mega Man series, it never had this kind of drama. — PS

Einhander – Imperial Capital

Shoot ‘em ups, both vertical and horizontal, are usually gradual experiences. Gradius set the standard: an opening level that acclimates you to both the game’s challenge and its setting, you are the aggressor, going into a place to reach its center where defenses will be strongest. Also, excluding rare exceptions like 1942, shmups are fairly fanciful in scenario. More often than not, you’re fighting aliens, robots, monsters, etc. Einhander doesn’t start slow. Your ship flies into the middle of a bustling metropolis, literally crashing through neon billboards before racing through its ruined foundation. It is a human place and you are fleeing it, your first enemies police in pursuit. There’s a lot about Einhander that’s memorable, from Kenichiro Fukui’s techno soundtrack to its genius weapons system. But nothing sticks with you like the Imperial Capital. — JC

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The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History, Part 1

John Constantine — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:15:00 GMT

First impressions are important, in videogames as they are in life. The first moments you spend with any art can define your experience of it. They compel you to dig deeper, to more carefully consider the work or the hand that crafted it. Other times, they can be so startling that everything that follows is diminished. This week, 61 Frames Per Second looks at the ten greatest opening levels in gaming history. Stick with us past the first one though. They’re all great. — John Constantine

Prince of Persia 2 - Rooftop Chase

The original Prince of Persia was a unique and wonderful game, but it wasn't much for setting. Half the game takes place in a monochromatic dungeon, and the other in a monochromatic palace. 2 quickly makes up for it; about to be executed by the Vizier's goons, the Prince leaps through a window, and from there it's up to you to guide him across the palace rooftops, into the marketplace below, down a long pier, finally leaping into the hold of a departing merchant ship — all with those guards on your tail. The stage is a real nail-biter, and all the more memorable because the rest of the game is comparatively subdued. — Peter Smith

Strider – Saint Petersburg

I won’t lie. There was a time that I watched that glider fly low over terrible Slavic church spires to a brief fanfare of synthetic horns and I believed, for a moment, that I would never leave Eurasia alive. Then I realized that Strider Hiryu’s sword was practically the length of the screen and it could literally make people explode. Strider, as a game, has not aged well in the past twenty years; the control is wonky, you can’t really tell when you’re even hitting something, and there are times when stuff in its stages blows up for seemingly no reason. But that first level remains an incredible spectacle, coated in color and character, a place where robot tigers will scale towers and entire Russian parliaments will turn into hammer-and-sickle wielding robot dragons. Fighting robot apes and hordes of half-naked amazons a few levels later just seems pedestrian after that. — John Constantine

Final Fantasy VII - Assault on Mako Reactor #1

Presumably your retinas have just detached as a result of your vigorous eye-rolling. Re-attach those suckers and hear me out here: no matter how bloated, overrated and over-fanboyed Final Fantasy VII might be in retrospect, its opening is masterful. Up until that game, RPGs never started fast. You loaded up your neophyte warriors with whatever cloth armor and rusty dinner knives you could afford on your starting wage of ten gold pieces, and then you sent them out to the local forest to get their asses handed to them by killer squirrels until they could upgrade to some new silverware. Final Fantasy VI was a step in the right direction, with its haunting approach to a frozen, gloomy northern town. But VII's opening is still a dramatic highlight of the series, segueing from a lyrical vision of a flower girl in the streets, to a full view of a vast futuristic city, to a tense assault on a huge power reactor, all to the strains of the Blade Runner-esque suite that is Nobuo Uematsu's immortal "Opening/Bombing Mission." Put that jackass with the Sephiroth tattoo out of your mind, and take a minute to appreciate the scope and excitement of this sequence. — PS

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Street Fighter HD Makes Me Freak Out

Peter Smith — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

As promised, yesterday brought me my first in-person look at Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and if such a thing is possible, I am now even more psyched than I was. The only thing I can say against the game is that crying in front of Capcom's cute publicist Melody made me look foolish. (Tears of joy, folks. Tears of joy.) Internet complaining about the redrawn art, I can now say with assurance, is thoroughly misplaced; the notion that higher-resolution graphics would make the animation appear jerky couldn't be further from the truth. Though only Dee Jay, Ryu, Ken and Akuma were selectable in this build, they looked beautiful, meshing perfectly with the newly luscious backgrounds. And the new widescreen mode is zoomed closer to the action, so the characters approach Art of Fighting stature on-screen. Even at this pre-release stage, it looks gloriously polished, and I truly relished handing my colleague his ass multiple times in a row, even more than I usually would. The future's looking bright, friends. (Mel — call me.)

[Above: me facing off with Dark Void producer Morgan Gray. Below: a sight for sore eyes. (Click for larger size.)]

We're Playing The New Bionic Commando, And We Can Only Assume That You're Not

Peter Smith — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Eeeeee! Despite my having jumped out of a plane at 10,000 feet this weekend, the most exciting event of my week is still ahead. By the time you read this, John and I will be at a Capcom press event, basking in the sweetness that is new Bionic Commando and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix. I hate to be a slavering fanboy, but my God, look ye at that screenshot above. Then when you're done looking at that, hit the jump for the best video yet of HD Remix in action.

I think I just juiced my loons. (Sidenote: If you click this video and go to YouTube, you can select a high-quality version that, for some reason, won't embed. Definitely worth checking out.) Check back later for as much of a report as they'll let us give you.

Related:
Going Vertical: How Capcom’s Developers Are Changing the Landscape of 3D Games
Screen Test - Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Introduces Akuma
Street Fighter II HD Update - Hitbox-O-Rama

The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History, Part 3

Peter Smith — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:32:00 GMT

Jak II

As Amber recently mentioned, Jak's personality changed between Jak & Daxter and Jak II. This wasn't an, "Oh look, he's got a new hat!" sort of change either. Jak went from being an unassuming, Pixar-styled young-and-plucky hero to a gun-toting, tortured prisoner of war in the span of two credits sequences. But Naughty Dog's decision to frame the sequel around a loss of innocence isn't what's adventurous about Jak II. In Jak & Daxter, Jak is mute, but following his fall from grace at the beginning of II, he chats up a storm. As significant as the shift from a silent vessel for the player to inhabit to a defined personality driving story are the changes made to Naughty Dog's original play design. Jak & Daxter was a hub-based platformer in the vein of Super Mario 64 (albeit more linear) that featured basic melee combat. Jak II has more in common with Grand Theft Auto than Spyro the Dragon, eschewing platforming arenas and challenges for a mission based structure and vehicle play with more gun combat than melee. Naughty Dog have established themselves as one of gaming's most reliable developers, but few of their titles have the sheer balls of Jak II. — JC

Star Fox 2

"Star Fox... 2?" you ask incredulously. (Or maybe you don't, because you are a gamer with an internet connection, and you probably know more about Star Fox 2 than we do.) In any case — yeah, there was a Star Fox 2, and weirdly enough, at the time it was cancelled it was just about finished. Star Fox 64 became Star Fox's first released sequel, and it's a lot closer to the original Star Fox than its miscarried older brother. Star Fox 2 was an innovative oddball, with multiple distinct characters and (most notably) a lot of gameplay on a non-linear map where the player's team can intercept enemy forces before they reach Fox's home planet. It's sort of like a Command & Conquer-style strategy game where traditional Star Fox action kicks in once opposing characters engage. Some of these concepts were reused in the 2006 Nintendo DS title Star Fox Command. But if your heart belongs to the 16-bit era, Star Fox 2 is a real lost gem, and a truly ambitious sequel. — PS

Resident Evil 4

In all fairness, Resident Evil 4 plays almost identically to Resident Evil: Leon Kennedy moves like a tank, turning with none of the grace or precision a trained US Secret Service agent should have (though he becomes downright acrobatic when prompted to jump off a building.) Items are collected and, technically speaking, zombies are shot. But, oh, the difference a shift in perspective can make. Bringing the player’s viewpoint behind Leon’s shoulder as opposed to the dramatic but fixed camera angles of early Resident Evils not only made for more dynamic gunplay but changed the entire tone of the series, making for a more claustrophobic and less generally ominous atmosphere. Resident Evil 4 also made survival horror more about fight than flight, providing copious amounts of ammunition but even more dire odds in its hordes of glaring enemies. More than any other game on this list, Resident Evil 4 could not be more different than its predecessors at the same time as being undeniably rooted in the series. It is the essential adventurous sequel: everything’s different but feels like home. — JC

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island

There's a probably-apocryphal internet story about the development of the 1995 masterpiece Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Asked by Nintendo management to develop a Mario title with pre-rendered graphics (in vogue at the time due to the success of the otherwise generic Donkey Kong Country), the ever-contrary Shigeru Miyamoto instead moved the visuals in a radically different direction, ordering up the lush crayon world that eventually became Yoshi's Island. Whatever the truth of the story, I remember being thrilled at the time because a) I thought Donkey Kong Country was overhyped bullshit, and b) I thought designers were getting obsessed with graphic "realism" when it really wasn't appropriate to their games. (The latter complaint was borne out by the subsequent half-decade of gaming.) Besides being visually stylized to a degree that games have only recently re-approached, Yoshi's Island also brought in Miyamoto's usual boatload of gameplay innovations, from the protect -a-shrieking-baby mechanic to the unique projectile system. Super Mario World was essentially a tarted-up Super Mario Bros. 3, but Yoshi's Island was a strange and wonderful beast. — PS

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Previous Top Tens:
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels in Gaming History

The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:31:00 GMT

Super Mario 64

If you'd asked a young me to imagine a three-dimensional Mario Bros. game, I'd have pictured a screenshot from Super Paper Mario — essentially, the point-A-to-point-B linearity of classic side-scrolling Mario, shot from a different camera angle. Instead, Shigeru Miyamoto's first 3D adventure completely rewrote the rules of platforming, replacing the "get to the end" format with a variety of challenges set in one, open physical space. To a generation weaned on linearity, this was pretty overwhelming at first — I remember being plunked down in Bob-Omb Battlefield and wandering around like a chump for an embarrassingly long time. 64 was so different from its precursors that you arguably wouldn't call it a sequel, but bear in mind that no one knew at the time what the next generation of games would look like. Early 32-bit games like Bug and Clockwork Knight dressed 2D gaming in 3D clothes. As usual, that nut Miyamoto had something different in mind. — PS

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest

This game is full of fucking liars. That's the least of its eccentricities but it's worth pointing out up front. Up until the late '80s, Konami's bread and butter was short arcade games, heavy on action and reflex based play as exemplified by well-known staples like Contra and Gradius. The original Castlevania was no different, just six linear stages of unforgiving reaction play that demanded careful attention to the game's weighted attack/jump timing. As home consoles strengthened their grip on players, Konami followed the growing trend of creating longer, deeper play experiences. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest has only superficial similarities to Castlevania. You jump over platforms, whip monsters, and move from left to right. But the world is persistent, requiring you to revisit most locales, and it's littered with towns. Towns are full of non-enemy characters selling items and offering "advice" on how to proceed through the game's barely defined obstacles. Simon's Quest also introduced one of gaming's first night-and-day systems. During the day, towns are safe. At night, everything kills you in two seconds and towns are full of zombie chicks. Konami retreated from Castlevania II's experiments for almost a decade, but the series has never since done anything quite so daring as having its lead die after beating the game. — JC

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

We are aware that this list is populated almost exclusively by games designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. What can we say? He's an adventurous guy. [Shouldn't that be "adventuresome guy?" — PS] The first Legend of Zelda is, arguably, Miyamoto's true masterpiece, the culmination of his first design era. His benchmarks: Donkey Kong created context and narrative, Super Mario Bros. brought speed and an expanding world beyond a single screen, and the Legend of Zelda created an actual world to explore, an organic place peppered with secrets. After its release in 1986, the next decade of Miyamoto's career was one marked more by refinement than creation. But, in 1987, Miyamoto got experimental. Alongside the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. 2 is Zelda's sequel, The Adventure of Link, a sequel so bizarre in its design choices that it's still seen as a blemish on a series considered unimpeachable by gamers and designers alike. While Zelda II doesn't eschew the original's birds-eye-view perspective entirely — travel and world exploration is presented this way, albeit with a much more expansive view — all the action takes place in multi-tiered scrolling stages (not dissimilar to SMB2's.) Items were replaced by spells learned from chatty townspeople, heart containers and swords replaced by role-playing style attribute growth, and link himself grew from a diminutive elf into a teenager with a peculiar, post-lobotomy stare. Unlike some of the other games on this list, very little of Zelda II's design has been used in subsequent adventures. I've found it only gets better with age, a diamond in the rough of a series that's become bloated and stagnant after twenty years of little revision. — JC

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