Selective Depth

by Zen

Fans of 2D games put up with a lot of abuse. Often we find ourselves playing a game simply on the basis of its visual and gameplay sensibilities, while the quality of the game could be worse than quick time events. It's sort of like being a Sonic fan, or driving an American-made car. It's sort of like being a battered spouse.

Still, sometimes being 2D doesn't have to be enough; sometimes Vanillaware makes a game. Now I've only played two of their games, but both have offered a distinctive perspective on action RPGs while delivering the most astonishing visuals I've possibly ever seen in a video game. Odin Sphere was a meticulous and harsh brawler, one where each chapter of its intricate story not only provided new perspective on seemingly clear events but also presented the player with completely new play styles. There was variety to the combat, and each playable character focused on a different aspect in a way that really explored the potential of this variety.

In short, it was a masterpiece, although in some ways having a score by Hitoshi Sakimoto could be considered cheating in this regard. When a Wii successor was announced I got pretty excited, since I seem to be the only person who still wants the Wii to work as a platform for more than Gamecube ports, opportunistic shovelware, and kusoge. After playing several hours of Muramasa: the Demon Blade, the 2D gamer in me feels sated without feeling cheapened or insulted.

Like Odin Sphere, Muramasa proves that sprites are still way, way more detailed and beautiful than 3D models. 3D effects are used for complex animations, especially for some of the more enormous sprites, but always as emphasis for actual frame animation. It's a distinctive visual style, somewhat reminiscent of Flash animation, this time given the same kind of Japanese art flavor as Okami. The colors are phenomenal, the backgrounds lively and deep, and the gameplay excellent.

Vanillaware action RPGs have a flow of gameplay that simplifies or removes some of the more traditional obstacles, like platforming challenges or fetch quests, and instead offers the same variety and depth of experience in just combat and map navigation. In Odin Sphere this was accomplished with parallel systems of food and weapon experience which fed into each other, along with a ridiculously complex item crafting system that was tied into every single aspect of combat and character progression. In Muramasa the item crafting is simpler, but there are still parallel systems affecting what weapons you use. This relative simplicity is made up for by a much more flexible combat system. Instead of cautiously performing hit and run tactics on swarms of durable enemies, combat happens in quick skirmishes that coerce you into using all your abilities without ever explicitly requiring it.

Basically, the theme for these games is that nothing is wasted. Every action you perform is working double-duty, and every action you perform provides toward a goal elsewhere. This is how a game that essentially boils down to running around a simple map fighting random battles can stay fresh and interesting for so long.

To explain more about why I love the game's combat so much, especially in the face of accusations that it's too button-mashy, I'm kind of a sucker for any combat engine that emphasizes mobility. There are simple ground and air combos if you just mash the attack button, but it's usually a better idea to take advantage of the dash attacks. You hold down the attack button and just aim the control stick in the direction you want to go. Combat feels more like a flow from one enemy to another, punctuated by stationary combos, than a simple round-up followed by an attack combo. Dodging and attacking become the same, and just like everything else in a Vanillaware game no single action serves a single purpose, but everything works double duty.

Another feature of the combat, and probably the primary reason people think it's too easy, is the blocking. For the most part (things change in the game's hard mode) you block by attacking while being attacked, which makes sense as far as parries are concerned. The reason this all works is that blocking uses up sword integrity, which is necessary for performing special moves. After a sword breaks it will slowly regenerate, and you can carry up to three at a time, but for the most part you will be more worried about keeping your swords intact than actually taking any damage. Once they all break you're basically dead meat. Think of it like the recharging shields in any post-Halo shooter, only because it's Vanillaware they pull double duty and power special moves, too.

The game is brilliant and the game is beautiful, but that's not even why I love it, exactly. It's the same sort of feeling I got when I played No More Heroes and felt like I really got to know Suda 51. We're all used to loading up a game and seeing corporate logos for thirty seconds, but you don't even see Vanillaware's logo until after you press Start. It's a unique touch, and it reminds me every time that the people who made the game are a part of the game experience itself. When the cover falls off of House of Leaves you're left with a book written by characters, and it's the author's hope that you forget about him entirely. If the cover fell off of Muramasa you'd still be spending time with George Kamitani, because he puts so much of himself into what he does. Please join me in loving him for it.

The Phantom of Akihabara

by alzabo

A Man Once Dreamt that He Was a Rock

by Zen

I'll confess I've never been as up on the Mega Man phenomenon as I should have been. Growing up I got to play the original, but not enough to get good at it. At home the only gaming device I was allowed was my Game Boy, so I made do with a couple of the Game Boy titles until I could use an emulator.

Technically I've played through and beaten the first seven games in the series, but since I did it with an emulator I cheated like mad and never got very good at them. The first Mega Man on Game Boy, however, remains my bitch to this day; I can maul through it with my eyes closed from start to finish.

Despite my metered exposure, having played almost the entire franchise I can say with some certainly that Mega Man 9 is the best entry by far. I would not have said anything of the sort during my first few hours of gameplay, what with the constant falling and exploding and losing, but after skating through the game once on energy tanks and picking it up again something crazy happened: I declared my lordship over it.

Every obstacle in the entire game is an obstacle only until you make sense of it. There's a rhythm to every area in Mega Man 9, and once you get into it you'll find yourself stopping very rarely. Areas that seemed arduous at first become second-nature, and weapons that seemed useless become favorite tools.

That's something about Mega Man 9 that we haven't seen in a long time: useful weapons. This is the single biggest factor in Mega Man 2's greatness, where the Metal Blade achieved legendary status for its versatility, power, and forgiving use of ammunition. The unfortunate side effect in Mega Man 2 was that it was practically compulsory for you to take on Metal Man first in a game that should be all about leaving it up to the player. Mega Man 9 sidesteps this by having every weapon possess genuine utility. Even the tired rotating shield weapon doubles as Enker's Mirror Shield, and the fire weapon is more useful for its angle of attack than for any extra damage it does or the fact that you can charge it.

A fundamental fact of a good Mega Man game is that the weapons you receive don't affect how much damage you do so much as they affect how you play the game. Another one is that playing the levels in a different order should be a very different experience. Mega Man games are even more nonlinear than the old Metroid games, it's just that that nonlinearity is completely on the table from the beginning. You acquire the tools in the order you want, and rather than deciding whether you can pass through an area, acquring a new tool merely decides how you can pass through that area.

The result, in Mega Man 9, is a playground. You are given obstacles, and you are given a bunch of tools. Anything will work, so it's just up to you to figure out what you want to use. It gets written up in my book along with Final Fantasy Tactics, Super Metroid, and Mario Sunshine as a shining example of nonlinear game and level design. If I could, I would make out with it every day.

2400 N81

by Zen

For some time now I've been puzzling over just what the hell is so fun about the channels on the Wii. Everybody Votes is kind of neat, but only gives me anything to do every other day, and Check Mii Out is a great concept spoiled by the fact that everyone just votes for Harry Potter all the time. So why am I having so much fun with this stuff?

Sometimes, when a board got really fancy and someone was willing to shell out a few bucks or knew someone who had, it would have "door games". These were programs the board would drop you into that were usually pretty simple, but sometimes grew spectacularly complicated. All of this, with one notable exception, was done without much in the way of graphics or sound. Almost every one of these games rendered what visuals they had with the ANSI extended character set, making use of colors and symbols to draw pictures. These usually fell somewhere between ASCII art and MS Paint, but it wasn't uncommon to see fully animated scenes rendered this way. It's really amazing, looking back on it, how much people were able to squeeze out of the medium.

What got me thinking about all this again was the previews for Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King on WiiWare. So far the game sounds exactly like the empire-management sims I used to play on local BBSes. Solar Realms Elite, Barren Realms Elite, and Falcon's Eye were an awesome way to log in and spend ten minutes, making treaties with other players and waging war with your turns. There were trade agreements, different systems of government, and different ways to allocate your resources. My Life as a King similarly has you in the role of a monarch organizing his country to better encourage his subjects to spread his domain. It's all a bit like a cross between Falcon's Eye and Majesty, and it's too bad I can't see Squenix making the decision to give you ten in-game days each real day and letting you duke it out with people on your friends list, just like the BBS door games of the 90s.

As I get around to it, I'll maybe showcase a few of the standout games I used to play back in the day. It's a kind of video game that I simply never see anymore, and it's a shame since it's not one without merit. Some tried surviving the transition to real-time multiplayer, but it rarely worked. My great hope is that these kinds of games will find a place again on the Wii, alongside a program that lets you vote on something stupid every two days and decide whose Darth Vader is the best spaceship captain.

I get disappointed a lot.

Rise from your grave

by alzabo

A good place to look for examples of the genre's death this is LucasArts. After Grim Fandango performed poorly in 1998, the lackluster sales of Escape from Monkey Island caused LucasArts to abandon every project that didn’t have “Star Wars” in the title. Other companies were having the similar problems, Westwood Studio’s Blade Runner did poorly the previous year and Sierra Entertainment had stopped producing adventure games. In a round of layoffs Sierra fired a quarter of their workforce; including Al Lowe and Scott Murphy, who created Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest respectively. It was a sad time to be a PC adventure game enthusiast, some say 3D games in general and the proliferation of First Person Shooters specifically killed the adventure game genre. There are other theories about what killed the genre, but I’m not writing this to mark the 10^th anniversary of Adventure Gaming’s death, I’m celebrating its return.

The Nintendo DS has become the new home for this timeless Genre. The first time I realized this was when I picked up Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in the Fall of 2005, the game is a classic point & click adventure that gained popularity via word of mouth and has had multiple repressing by Capcom. Phoenix Wright’s two sequels in 2006 and 2007 did equally well and I can say that the ending of the 3^rd game ties all three together into a fun and memorable trilogy that I enjoyed more than most adventure games I played on PC. Even though Phoenix Wright is an adventure game with some mature themes (almost all the cases revolve around murders that are somewhat grisly), the game has an “animu” flavor that is impossible to ignore. Luckly, there are alternatives made by the developer Cing.

After Cing’s first forgettable DS adventure game Trace Memory they developed the mesmerizing Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Hotel Dusk has the gameplay of a adventure game, a classic point & click interface with a FPS navigation twist, visuals that are mature and seem fitting (I love the whole “Take On Me” look) and a story that is right up there with the best PC games of yester-year. When I started playing, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing Icom’s Déjà Vu. The atmosphere of Hotel Dusk is so spectacular that I want to go back and play it for the first time all over again. I cannot stress the following enough: If you love adventure games you need to play Hotel Dusk.

Most people probably never expected Adventure games to make a comeback, the best part of all of this is that most of the people picking up these new games have never played a Adventure game before. It’s unlikely that they’ll go dig up old PC games to play on their PC, but the classics are available to them via another channel. One of the programs available to people who choose to hack their Nintendo DS handheld is ScummVM, a emulator designed to play adventure games by LucasArts, Sierra and other developers.

The reason I’m writing this today is because I finished Phoenix Wright 3 last night to clear up some of my game back-log to make room for both Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (a.k.a. Phoenix Wright 4) and Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village. While I know exactly what PW4 is going to be, I approach Prof. Layton with high expectations, the game is very popular in Japan and spawned two sequels. The visuals of Prof. Layton reminds me of the excellent 2003 French animated film The Triplets of Belleville. I’m quite excited about these new Adventure games, their arrival is another sign of the Adventure genre’s return to popularity.

PS3 Progress Report

by alzabo

NEW EF PEE ESSS.

by alzabo

• "I would set up a portal to Taco Bell inside my living room so when I get drunk I can just stumble in, get a chalupa, and leave"
  
• "one portal at hone one at gamestop so i could play the motorstorm demo all night when they closed"
  
• "ohm y fucking god i just came everyuwhere"
  
• "i would put one end in front of my fist and the other in front of nintendo so I COULD PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE FOR DELAYING MY SMASH BROSEH"

"Drilling is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

by K1