Two games came out on the NES with the same design goals, but with different inspirations.  Both games were open-world action games that emphasized the hero's gradual mastery over an environment, but while The Legend of Zelda attempted to capture the spirit of adventure of a young child playing in the woods Metroid was inspired by the solitude and anxiety of the film Alien.  Understandably, this led to two very different protagonists.  Zelda's Link as the chosen hero, guided by destiny to rescue his princess, is a trope that even as a child I couldn't stomach.  His rise to victory is pre-ordained, a series of formalities the game, like its world, is obligated to bestow.  Metroid's Samus shows up similarly under-equipped, and similarly unlocks the secrets of her environment to gain the power to achieve her goal, but the game inherited Alien's emphasis on its heroine's personal struggle.  Even after awkward world-building was forced into the series Samus retained her potency, her desperate strength.

Metroid 2's only indication that Samus is a woman

It is mercifully mundane nowadays to note that Samus, like Ripley who inspired her, is a woman.  At the time it was something we talked about at recess.  "But the manual calls Samus 'he'!" Those of us who knew the code for her second quest (of course we couldn't beat the game ourselves), where the armor came off and her hair came down, knew the translators had just made the same assumption we had.  Seeing this made me think, probably for the first time, about where these assumptions came from.  But in the end Samus acted as a glorified peep show, rewarding the player with a flash of skin for completing the game quickly.  The positive impact of this representation was overwhelmed by objectification.

A few years ago I read a story about a man whose daughter loved playing Zelda games but wasn't interested in playing as another boy saving a girl.  He hacked the game script for Wind Waker so that it was a story about a young girl saving her brother, and it ended up working perfectly.  This is a really sweet story, one that highlights many of the imperfections to which "typical gamers" have the luxury of blindness.  There was a time I'd have sworn that gamers would cling to this anecdote as being indicative of video games' universal applicability, that the girl's desire to play Zelda at all meant vindication that games were more than mere focus-grouped novelty and had genuine cultural value, for everyone.  I now know better.

The backlash, in a smirking equivocation that has become all too familiar, came in the form of a version of Metroid hacked so that Samus is a man.  Neither hack was a high-profile event, but the audacity of this absurd rebuttal presages GamerGate's core tenet: that even one heroine is too many.  That young girls should stay out of the treehouse.

How powerups are acquired in Other M

This juvenile tantrum presaged something else: Nintendo itself rescinded Samus's heroic status, releasing a new Metroid game whose only purpose was to retroactively excise all agency, power, and courage from its once ground-breaking protagonist.  This game, Metroid: Other M, is the most aggressively sexist game I have ever played, made all the moreso by its determination to undo the barely-progressive "mistakes" of its forebears.  Its purpose was to reassure us that Samus, while she may have done cool stuff once, is ultimately nothing but a pretty vessel for male will, delirious with her desire to procreate.  Her newfound weakness illuminated a path of unconscionable derogation.

At the center of the most important moment in gamer culture right now is a series of videos made by Anita Sarkeesian on the representation of women in games.  A lot of nerds have responded with threatening vitriol, and while no video she could possibly have ever posted to YouTube justifies death and rape threats, I was somehow still surprised by how calm and careful her videos are. All she does is follow a trope from its origins in other media through the history of video games and then point out that, while these are mostly very good games that she can enjoy despite their problematic elements, those elements are still troubling enough to warrant attention and discussion.  It's the product of someone who clearly has a great love of the art form and wants to see it rise above its shortcomings.

For any element of the gaming community to react badly to this is confusing on many levels.  First are the obvious ones: I don't like to think about how people in our society could ever be this morally bankrupt, and that anyone could watch this video series and not only find fault with it but feel the need to make a "rebuttal" that attempts to invalidate rather than engage her points takes an uncomfortable degree of dishonesty and intellectual laziness.  What keeps me wondering, though, is how wrong I was about gamers' priorities: I have always known gamers to be so obsessed with the art form that they see as "theirs" that they want it to be all things to all people.  It isn't just that they like games, it's that games are the best.  It's that a higher class of people like games, smarter people who see the value in something the rest of the world doesn't understand.  There's a smug pretense about it all, and I always found this overcompensating myopia to be constitutive for gamer culture at large.

The controversy over Anita Sarkeesian, as well as GamerGate, highlight the shameful truth: that these gamers are more interested in abusing women than they are in video games.  Rather than wanting to see games eliminate those qualities that lead to justified derision, rather than shepherding a fledgling art form into true cultural relevance, they lash out at anyone who suggests they overcome their deep and protected bigotry.

Of anyone who still thinks this is an example of "boys will be boys", or of a vocal minority, I ask simply to consider the example of Samus Aran.  An already-problematic character, she nevertheless blazed a trail of representation that, if supported, could effect real change in how young boys are taught to think about women.  I have already written about the power this art form can have over the way that we care; to not only shout down any attempt to listen to women about how our art affects them but to find whatever meager sprig can grow in the wasteland of mainstream representation and pull it up by the roots represents a degree of hatred and willful oppression that nobody can afford to ignore.

As an avid reader of German philosophy, I so often find myself at the mercy of translators to properly understand the material. Even if I, like Heidegger, refuse to concern myself with fidelity to the philosopher's intent, a poor translation can obfuscate or even completely cover over useful nuances and enlightening tricks of meaning. This problem is as much present for novels and music as it is for philosophical works, and I've found it applies to video games as well. Masterpieces like 7th Saga, Final Fantasy V, Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu II), Chrono Trigger, and even parts of Final Fantasy VII suffered from having poor to nonexistent translations that hid their greatness from view.

Fortunately, Japanese publishers started to catch on that not everyone in the US is a drooling moron around the time the original PlayStation came out. Instead of dumbing down hard games and not even releasing games that were too complicated, Japan discovered that gamers in the US were thirsty for true works of art. For me, the turning point was a game called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and after the opening scene I knew things would never be the same again.

What follows is an annotation, a sort of recreation of my own thoughts as I relive these precious moments today. You are encouraged to click this YouTube link first, so that you can appreciate these lines as I first did all those years ago.

We see here a desperate and crucial line being drawn, a dualistic boundary with foundations in Plato that has, much like Dracula himself, endured (some might say thrived upon) the millennia of strife human beings call history. The irony foreshadowed here is that not only does Dracula belong, but this world is contingent on another dualism that he represents. He cannot be banished from this world, because without him there can be no world. Koji Igarashi is arguing here that one cannot banish value, cannot operate outside of it, and cannot simply eschew the uncomfortable and macabre. This becomes important later, but for now one can simply appreciate the claim that worldliness comes after value.

This famous exchange at first seems to contradict Dracula's opposition to the value of Goodness, but he is not trying to equivocate. He is in fact highlighting his nature as the opposite, that he behaves the same but in the other direction. There is a note of sadness to be discovered here by the perceptive: there is no hate in this exchange, as though Dracula mourns the fact that his foe, whom he respects more than he can ever let on, could just as easily have been his most trusted ally and friend. The futility and contingency of it all throws the attentive player into an authentic experience, fully appreciative of the arbitrariness of the very distinction the series represents. This irony is one of the most compelling moments in video game history, and is possibly the main reason for the fondness so many gamers have for this title.

Who knows what secrets lie hidden, deep within a man's heart? Does Dracula? Is it his lack of a soul which clouds the deepest truths of humanity from his vision? Or is it perhaps the very thing which allows him the keenest vision of all, a pure and objective view of humanity which is the source of his contempt? In this beautiful passage we see the heart of Castlevania's meaning, the foundation and culmination of all of its themes. Dracula--dangerous, powerful, timeless--displays a kind of insecurity. Unable to relate to anyone but his greatest foe, he is quick to dismiss the subject. Could he abandon his position, see if the world could survive without his chaotic influences? Best not to think about it. The last time he let himself see humans as anything more the results were too painful to bear. Best to end the discussion and do his duty. Best to go on forgetting, go on hating. It's the best for everybody.

What childhood could a man like this possibly provide? Is it even so different from the plight of any father quaking in the face of the insurmountable responsibility of parenthood? The roles of faith, love, fatherhood, and family legacy all collide here. In this brief encounter with Richter we seem to learn so little of Dracula, and yet one can see his entire person (dare one even suggest a soul?) laid bare in these few lines. It is only fitting that Richter sit the game out, having done his duty: the stage is set for Alucard (Is he his father's opposite? He goes in the other direction, but is made of the same stuff...) to discover his father, and himself. By the end of the game we see not only the purest of good, not only the most dastardly of evil, but the gentle, terrified man who sits precisely between them. And we see the horizon by which to judge him: the balance of all things.

It's that time again! Sonic Team has made another Sonic the Hedgehog game, and when they're not working out the appropriate anglo-saxon-derived hedgehog equivalent for "werewolf" or arguing over the continuity of the Sonic storyline, Sonic apologists are going to start coming up with arduous and ornate explanations for why this new game deserves an 8 out of 10.

Leaving aside the already-too-late aspect of lying to convince yourself the game you're playing is merely "not terrible", there's a legitimate and compelling sadness to the history of this franchise. Everyone will talk about the glory days of Sonic and you know they're talking about the Genesis games. Sonic Adventure was compelling, especially for its time, but it can hardly be recommended now. The sequels have each spread another layer of sadness on Sonic fans' hearts, culminating in the absolutely abominable 2006 game that was simply, blasphemously tarted around as some kind of replacement flagship under the title of Sonic the Hedgehog.

That Sonic Unleashed is an improvement is effectively tautological. Don't let fans' relief of this mundane fact fool you into spending dollars on this new entry. Over the years much effort has been spent getting to the bottom of A: what made the old games so great and B: what makes the new ones so execrable, and while answers vary one thing remains constant: Sonic Team is not interested in answering either question.

At first people thought they wanted a game where you go as fast as possible, since Sonic games' claim to fame was always that they were really fast-paced, but over time this has been proven completely wrong. Going as fast as possible means either barely interacting with the game as it holds your hand through automatic sections or constantly losing because you can't react to what's happening on the screen. The former is pleasant but quickly unrewarding, and the latter is absolute hell. Both issues have plagued the series in 3D for so long they can now be considered hallmarks.

Some people seem to enjoy Sonic and company as characters, and show an interest in what happens in the plotlines. I'm pretty sure this is just a byproduct of their apologism, since this world was founded on the simple lie that Sonic somehow has "attitude". It rarely occurs to people that Knuckles was added to be an edgier character, and that when that didn't work Sonic's Shadow counterpart was added to the mix. When he wasn't enough, Shadow was given a dark version as well. Now Sonic has a dark side at night. The entire setting, plot, and characters of Sonic the Hedgehog are a series of attempts to out-dark the last one. Even nostalgia for childhood cartoons can't justify staying on this sinking ship.

The truth is that, speed aside, there was never anything fundamentally different about Sonic as a game. He runs, he jumps, and sometimes he gets special abilities (most of which, you'll note, have little or nothing to do with going fast). What made the games stand out so much on the Genesis was that the levels were absolutely spectacularly designed. Sections of the game seemed to play themselves, but at any point the player could break away and use the game's physics to launch off to another path through the level. This was more than just branching or separate paths, it was a level full of ways to move forward and a player empowered to find a way among them at any time. It was fast because you were always playing, not because Sonic was moving quickly.

I'm going to go ahead say that I don't think we need Sonic the Hedgehog, even in good games. What lessons about level design we can learn from the old games should be learned and we should move on to new franchises. I don't mean Sonic Team, since they obviously don't care about anything but their own bad ideas. I mean us. Stop hoping the next Sonic game won't suck. Stop even knowing when it's going to come out! Let yourself look back on it with a smile as that awesome series on Genesis with the simple, goofy setting and great levels.

Hey, is it cool if I shit all over this thing you love? Okay, thanks.

Ever since I played them back in college, I've wondered how anybody could possibly hold Suikoden I and/or II in such high regard. Like Final Fantasy V before them, the games are clearly beloved only because they feel so secret and valuable to US gamers. Saying Suikoden is your favorite game will make everyone stroke their beards and grunt appreciatively in your Philosophy East/West class. Suikoden II is an especially safe bet, since anybody who played the first game is unlikely to have stuck around for the sequel, so if they're not quite sure what you're on about they'll probably keep it to themselves.

It's pretty hard to objectively demonstrate that a game is garbage, but it's easy enough to argue against what people love about it. I think Suikoden is a lot like Xenogears in how much its ambition is completely wasted by sloppy, hamfisted execution, and the fans of both series are always so impressed by the former that they completely ignore the latter. Sooner or later, though, the fans start to wake up a little bit. For Xenogears fans it was Xenosaga that started them thinking, and Suikoden fans have Suikoden III and IV.

Suikoden III and IV are exactly like Suikoden I and II. I haven't played them, so I'm basing this purely on what I've read about them on the Internet: that their characters' interactions are contrived and nonsensical, that the story is shallow and undeveloped, that the villains are set up as pure world-destroying evil in a series that's supposed to be all about moral grey areas, that the gameplay and pacing are clunky and time-consuming, that the 108-character feature doesn't mesh with the combat system, and that the strategy game-like tactical battles are a completely worthless afterthought.