Multiplayer Madness.

I've never really been one to get in on the whole online multiplayer thing. PC users have been hep to this for ages, but I have a personal abhorrence for using computers as game machines (long story), so over the years I've just sort of chalked this up as 'not my deal' and moved on. No Doom or Quake or Unreal multiplayer. No World of Warcraft or Everquest. I dabbled in Alien Front Online wth my Dreamcast (complete with voice mic) and that was fun... but after the Dreamcast dropped off the planet I just couldn't muster the resolve to keep at online play. I enjoy single-player campaigns just fine, and my own preference for competitive play was definitely informed by my arcade days of live, face-to-face opponents.

But I've finally taken the plunge with Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine on the Xbox 360. As I understand it the multiplayer is kind of no-frills, and pretty difficult for its type since the weapons are so deadly. But it is pretty fun and is definitely teaching me why online frag-fests are so popular.... though I don't see myself putting making a huge time sink out of it. Exterminatus just got released last week as free DLC. It probably should've been included with the main game release, but I'm not complaining.

Exterminatus is multiplayer co-op. Basically the survival or 'horde mode' of other titles. You and up to three other players make a stand against waves of Orks, Gretchin and other baddies thrown at you with an unique selection of maps. So far I've mostly played this against my own kid. Being local our connection is good and our headset chatter fun. He's really enjoying it, though Sonic Generations recent release made it kind of a difficult job getting him back to this 'old' game!

Be A F@#%&ing Space Marine

The new game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Reasons why it is a good game:
Robust graphics engine better than it has any right to be from RTS developer Relic Entertainment.
Seems like a cover shooter, but changes things up a lot to emphasise close combat.
Emphasises close combat, including health ups from finishing moves.
REALLY smooth system for moving from shooting to close combat.
You get to learn why 40K Space Marines are THE Space Marines.
Decent voice acting and music. Cutscenes good and also pretty short.
No weapons really suck if you no how to use them.
Customisation in multiplayer quite deep.
Multiplayer maps tight, interesting, and well-designed.
Perks in multiplayer varied and useful.
Ability to copy an agressor's loadout a great balancing tool.

Reasons why it might not be such a good game:
Close combat strikes and facing frustrating when finesse is required.
No block or shield button. And you could really stand to have one.
Levels very linear, encounters mostly staged the same way through the game.
Limited enemy variety.
Little play variety beyond run 'n' gun action (no vehicles, only one 'shooter' section, etc).
Extremely limited starting weapons and abilities in multiplayer.
System for unlocking weapons and perks in multiplayer arduous.
Only two multiplayer scenarios.
Some significant lag issues at times.

Reasons why it is a great 40K fan game:
You get to be a fucking Space Marine.
Narrative mostly accurate to 40K universe.
Setting and trappings accurate to 40K universe. Effectively disguises simplicity of the levels.
Hearing Orks speak. Seeing Guard hold the Marines in awe.
Definitely feels like part of a bigger war, with lots of incidental NPC actions.
Good choices made on visualisations of potentially difficult ideas like Bloodletter daemons and various plasma and power weapons.
Deep multiplayer customisation includes tons of Marine and Chaos chapters, and many armor types.
Again, you get to be a fucking Space Marine.

Reasons why it is a not-so-great 40K fan game:
Three man Marine squad around a Captain. No explanation for rest of squad.
Titus cool, but pretty underwhelming compared to canonical Marine Captains.
Health restore mechanic really out-of-place for Marines (it's clever, but almost vampiric).
Plot will seem 'same-old same-old' to those familiar with 40K universe.
Effect of Chaos on people and places treated too casually.



So basically, good fun for run 'n' gun players, especially those who like the GW game worlds. Sticklers have to be willing to overlook some oddball things put in for 'video game reasons'... seriously Relic, you couldn't include a Marine medic in Titus' squad instead of the life-sucking Execution finishers? Probably the first multiplayer shooter that has trappings cool enough to get me onboard with that particular type of timesink.

Bloody Irony

My son is about to turn 13… become a teenager as it were.

His mother and I have been pretty careful about what he gets to watch on TV, see in the cinema, listen to on ipods, and play for video games. I think it is important, regardless of circumstances, for parents to stay on the same page and present a united front in family policies, and that includes what the kids take in for entertainment.

Up to now it has been pretty simple to clearly divide what is inappropriate content-wise from what is okay. Sex and violence, dubious morality, drug use, torture, and all that… pretty easy to say ‘no’ when your kid is grade-school age. But like the Harry Potter films’ and their gradual creep up in dark tone and violence, so one’s children gradually expand their sphere for what is appropriate for them to see. It is every parent’s judgment call just how much to let in the sphere.

The film rating PG-13 is pretty terrible. I mean the usefulness of it. I find myself paying a lot more attention to those little black and white words underneath the rating to get a better idea of content. PG-13 is so far-ranging that I find myself expending a shitload of effort trying to find out just where on the scale this or that particular film is falling. A film with this rating can be a family film with the word ‘damn’ in it or a few too many scat jokes. Or it could have the levels of violence, including the occasional decapitation, of an R-rated movie but without mature levels of cussing. More than once I’ve had to go to the movies a day or two ahead of my kids just to be able to make this call.

I’m no prude and I’m not easily shocked—certainly not by entertainment content. In fact my commitment to pushing my own boundaries in film viewing may make me the best filter on content that I know of. I’ve been determined to observe my children, their behavior and their reactions, and introduce various levels of onscreen mayhem if and when I think they can handle it. If I’ve gotten a bad reaction, then I dial it back. Unless I’m feeling mean on Halloween or something. Because my daughter is almost two years younger than my son, she has sort of set the bar for what I can allow, since keeping two separate standards going for the two is not really manageable. So she probably sees things a little too early (but she’s mature), and he sees things a little late (he isn’t mature) so it has been made to work out.

TV is simple. I can use the cable box to simply lock all programs above a certain rating, and look at individual programs on a case-by-case basis as they come up. With music, we’ve sort of gone with a looser policy altogether. Given the lack of visual component, the content seems less impacting. So I’m not going all ‘parental advisory’ on the kids about what they listen to. I just keep an eye on it, and if I see playlists that start to lean towards gangster rap or graphic deathgrind, I’ll bring the hammer of censorship down. Lady Gaga and Rhianna have me wincing a bit at times, but I’m letting it go for now.

Games are more complicated. In terms of keeping a different game standard for my younger kid… there’s no issue because she isn’t interested in the games that push that envelope. The worst I have to worry about here is a bit of cussing or some of the sexual content in her DDR games, the same as her music basically. But with my son there’s a whole different need for monitoring in place.

It has only been about two years since I loosened up the reins on violence in first person shooters and let him play Halo. The lack of violence to humans (little conventional ‘gore’) and the emphasis on the game world’s aesthetics and the music, made it more palatable. And this turned out to be a positive decision. He became enamored with the whos and the whats of the Halo universe, including getting toys and books… and not just focused on painting the walls in neon-bright Covenant blood.

BUT. Like his friends, the baseline favorite game genres are first and third-person shooters. So as he’s gotten older, and shown he has been levelheaded, I’ve moved him on up to more mature material. Not too long ago he was playing Serious Sam. This game is pretty violent, with tons of enemies to mow down in a sort of abstractedly gory manner. But the type of enemies, the stylized graphics and the whole over-the-top attitude of the game tempered it for me. When I was his age I was drawing big pictures of war scenes or underwater views of boatloads of people getting attacked by sharks. It had the adults around me rolling their eyes, but not calling for a straightjacket.

Later still, I let him play Wolfenstein. Now this game ups the ante, being by far the most realistic representation of violence he’d yet played. Along with seriously creepy or scary enemies and a sound effects aspect that will make you duck your head from incoming fire even days after you’ve started playing it. But Wolfenstein also has clear-cut, no-ambiguity enemies—Nazis. And their historically supported penchant for occult artifacts. So y’know? No drug dealers, no prostitutes, not much in the way of dubious moral choices, unless you count slaughtering Hitler’s minions a dubious choice. It’s still pretty clearly not in Grand Theft Auto territory. So at this point, the violence is becoming almost secondary, helped in large part by the fact that he isn’t showing an increasing tendency to punch his sister or talk about headshots at the dinner table.

So this brings us to the present. At the moment he is pressing his way through the various episodes of Half Life 2. Half Life is kind of on the order of Wolfenstein. Realistic human enemies mixed with otherworldly fiends. There are also no morally questionable paths through the game. Gordon Freeman is a standup guy whether the player wants to be or not, but the game does a good job of not making it feel too restrained. Half Life is also a cut above almost anything else in terms of drama, story, and overall quality and has seriously given Halo a run for its money in my son’s list of favorites. The world built by Valve has him thinking about a lot more than just the killing, and he really cares about the people populating the resistance against The Combine. By association he also likes the Portal games which emphasize puzzle-solving over blowing things away, though death for your avatar(s) is never far away.

Far and away the most extreme thing he’s played is the new Mortal Kombat. And I really had to think that one over. It is extremely violent, never mind the somewhat scantily clad sexed-up looking women. And it encourages matches to be finished in as violent a manner as possible. I kind of looked at it like some old monster drawings I might’ve done as a kid. Gory, yeah. But MK is also populated by otherworldly creatures and almost every human has superpowers and is dressed accordingly. It is pretty far removed from reality. I actually found The Krypt, where players buy the various unlockables, to be the most objectionable part of the game. You basically have to push a button to kill some hapless prisoner in order to ‘unlock’ his soul, which then flies off to provide you with your ‘reward’. These deaths are by torture device and creature infestation. They don’t provide the meat of the game, and actually get tiresome after a while owing to the amount of shit that’s in The Krypt. But it is still ‘push a button kill an innocent dude’. A didn’t stop my kid from playing MK because it IS just a sidebar to the game, but it was a moment of realization in how casual ‘murder’ has gotten to be even apart from the obvious ‘murder simulators’ that are the typical first person shooters.

But his friends are all about this graphic killing. And apparently have parents knowingly or unknowingly abetting the carnage. When his friends talk about their coolest games they are almost invariably talking about a Call of Duty game or something like it. The only real-world war FPS I’ve really let him play are the Battlefield Bad Company series for Dice. The first one actually didn’t even get up to a Mature rating and what I saw of it, emphasized tactical thinking with its destructible scenery and the comradery between you and your comrade NPCs more than it did running up to the enemy and capping them. So the Battlefield games got a pass. He’ll probably get to play the new one just coming out soon. His friends know these games and think they’re ‘okay’… I’m sure they don’t rate super-high for the very reasons I green lighted ‘em. They’re not in-your-face enough about the killing.

I have since put the nix on some other games, almost always coming up because some friend of his has recommended it. It makes you wonder if these parents really have no fucking idea what their kids are doing, or have just written them off because their ‘only games’. Remember in the old days of Dungeons and Dragons when some kids showed marked behavior changes from taking their characters too seriously? Yeah. Those were only games too.

This brings us to Fallout. Specifically Fallout 3. Fallout is the cat’s ass as far as my son’s buddies are concerned. I knew these games probably had objectionable material in them, because I knew enough about the Fallout game world. I hadn’t played any Fallout games since previously they’ve been PC titles. The Fallout titles I knew about were also role-playing games. So when my kid asked to get Fallout: New Vegas after seeing it briefly at a friend’s house, it was not too difficult to dissuade him since I knew FNV was also an RPG, albeit one with some real-time action aspects. I just knew he wasn’t into games to manage inventories and get into long conversations. He’s done a bit of RPG stuff on his handhelds and is currently stalled in Chrono Trigger on the VC, but it is amongst the least appealing genres to him.

Then some friend let him borrow Fallout 3.

I don’t know if it is because of the way Bethesda actioned-up specifics of the game that were strictly RPG staples before, but the game appears to have changed enough things to where my son wants to get into the Fallout world. Or maybe he has matured enough to where the RPG aspects don’t hinder him. Either way, he took the game home along with Portal 2. I looked at it thinking ‘hm, I don’t know…’ but put it off because I figured burying himself in Portal would buy me some time to research just how bad Fallout 3 is. Nope. He apparently went straight to Fallout. I know this because I his Mom heard screams of agony coming from some NPC he was working over. So she pulled the game for his Xbox 360 until such time as I could render a verdict. I had some explaining to do on how he had a game where the rating box out shows ‘sexual situations and drug use’ right under the M rating.

Needless to say after doing a bit of poking around about what-all is in the game, he’s not going to get to play Fallout 3 for the foreseeable future. Drug use, prostitution, and the ability to murder innocents, are dodgy enough when seen in some RPG-typical isometric view, but Bethesda’s work to make the experience immersive and ‘cinematic’ pretty much shreds any rationalizing I might do. Oh, and hearing ‘fuck’ about five times in as many minutes kinda does that too. Fallout has a karma system where doing the civil thing clicks you towards a certain ending, and doing evil another. But that’s not enough for a kid still in formative years. If he CAN do the horrible thing, he’s going to do the horrible thing. Just to see how the game handles it. If he gets a shitty ending for it, he won’t be happy, but it’ll have been worth it just to see all the forbidden crap we’d never let him watch in a movie.

And I don’t blame him for doing it. I tried to see inappropriate sex and violence when I was kid. But my Mom went apoplectic catching me at it sometimes. Back in the day, the film Jaws (understandably) had a serious public rep for excessive violence. Based on everything she’d seen and read there was no way I was going to see it. So I snuck. And she caught me. Now there were worse things I’d seen and read. But THAT movie was the one she specifically had inside her blinders. I think parents today are doing the same thing. They all have their shields up for Grand Theft Auto, the scapegoat of today, but are missing the Fallouts getting by them. So my kid? Not happy. Not at all. He got caught watching Jaws. There won’t be any disciplinary action to speak of—I mean I looked right at the damn box and handed it back to him. But that’s another game his Dad cut off.

He’s found compensation though, and the irony is almost suffocating.

Yesterday we downloaded the demo for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. The full game releases next week on September 6th. If you’ve read my previous post about Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team, you know we played that little lead-in download to death and are eagerly awaiting this game, its big brother.

So the kid has started in on the demo, and it is one of the most violent games I’ve ever seen. And I've seen A LOT of video game violence.

Games Workshop’s 40K universe isn’t replete with sex or drugs or the exploitation of fuzzy kittens. Controversy around it mostly has to do with the fascist nature of the Imperium of Man (though all the ‘armies’ take a sort of kill-everyone-else stance since the species’ survival is frequently at stake), or the demonic imagery associated with the forces of Chaos. The Space Marines, though the most elite and haughty of human forces, are also frequently far enough above politics that they are shown taking something resembling moral high ground. That is, a Space Marine commander can follow what he believes is right and there’s precious little the more pragmatic human forces like the Imperial Guard or Inquisition can do about it. So playing a Marine captain as you do in this game, you will probably be taking as noble a road as possible given the context, that of protecting humanity and its resources against the invading Ork hordes. So, in terms of narrative choices, I’m not too worried that my kid will be complicit in holding some human victim’s testicles over an open flame. A Marine isn't going to do that.

But cripes. I love GW and 40K, but this is like Mortal Kombat with about a dozen combatants on the screen at the same time. Amongst the 'goodness' is performing ‘executions’ (of Orks mind you) that GAIN YOU BACK SOME HEALTH. I realize they need a healthup mechanic but turning the paragons of humanity into vampires? Actually, there is a precedent for that amongst the Blood Angels Chapter of the Space Marines.

But that’s a long, complicated story. The protagonist in WH40K: Space Marine is by default an Ultramarine—a chapter based in Greek imagery and who run their own empire of Ultramar about as close to 21st century standards of fairness and equality as you’re going to get. So the boy is using his Marine to hack about with a chainsword (chainsaw sword) throwing up clouds of blood and popping off the occasional Ork head with a bolt pistol. Of course he stops every now and then to EXECUTE an enemy which is usually shown as hoisting them in the air on the chainsword while the blade chews through their abdomen and bursts them apart in a shower of blood that then stains the Marine’s armor for the remainder of the combat. Yay!

When I get involved in 40K games or painting or drawing or whatever, yeah BLOOD is implicit or explicit in all of it. The novels are probably the place where the violence actually gets the strongest, particularly where anything has to do with Chaos (the really uber bad guys). But the video game is VISUAL. I’ve rarely seen a GW spinoff that so revels in carnage. And this is the ‘good guy’.

Now for me, this would be fine. I still look askance at the vampire health thing (what the fuck?)… it just seems like there’d be a canonical 'Ultramarine way' to make this happen instead of such a weird, macabre manner. But graphic gore doesn’t rattle me. The problem is that I set this up to my kid as, ‘yeah, you’re gonna love it!’ And boy does he ever! Right down to the smoking, headless, eviscerated Orks lying all over the landscape. He plays the 40K tabletop game, but the brutality is still totally abstract even if the body count was the same… which it isn’t. If the ten minutes I saw is any guide, before the game is completed this Marine is going to kill twenty times more enemies than a similar character would manage in a dozen tabletop matches.

I’m just dismayed looking at this as a parent. It IS over-the-top like Serious Sam. It IS about facing non-human alien enemies out to destroy humanity like Halo. And he isn’t being exposed to any attitudes or philosophy he doesn’t already see in the 40K wargame literature.

So I won’t put the brakes on for this. It might be difficult to explain to another parent the nuance here that makes Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine different from Fallout 3. But there’s a difference. I'll admit to bristling less at violence than the other objectionable sorts of content that Fallout has on display, along with its giving the player the ability to indulge in some of it. He's already been exposed to everything in Space Marine except the execution mechanic. So, though it is off-putting, I'm not lumping it in the same league as Fallout 3.
At least with this new Space Marine game, he’ll be on the hip side with his other blood ‘n’ guts buddies for a little while. He's just going to have to wait awhile longer to be allowed to be totally amoral.

Not Without Its Faults pt 2

The other game defying my expectations was Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. I got this for ten bucks on my Xbox 360.

Unlike the giant-budget Epic Mickey, Kill Team is one of those little downloadable titles that publishers more and more frequently release as an apetite-whetting cash grab. Part of building hype for an upcoming triple-A game. Sometimes these are little flash games on websites, sometimes they are more elaborate... like the 2D 'retro-styled' game released in conjunction with Capcom's Dark Void. Usually these little side stories aren't anything to write home about, but Kill Team is now out about a month before the much-anticipated much-hyped Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, and is definitely an exception.

It is actually REALLY good.

The upcoming Space Marine game looks to feature the player in the role of a Marine Captain. In the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine Captains are legendary hero-level characters, typically commanding good size armies, and capable of laying waste to whole squads of trooper models on their own. They get their Chapter's pick of the best custom-made armor and weapons, and are typically very old, very experienced war leaders who have seen battle on countless worlds against all manner of enemy. They're also every inch the super-sized no-nonsense shoot-first type of warriors that western sensibilites seem to require. So a Space Marine Captain makes a great player character in the third person blast and chop-fest that this new game is bound to be. One of 40K's iconic enemy races, the Orks ('futuristic' versions of fantasy orcs), appear in most of the screenshots and videos I've seen for the game. Video games based on GW franchises don't always work out so well, but Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine *looks* like it hits all the right marks.

Which leads to Kill Team. This little downloadable game starts of showing an Ork Kroozer (warship) heading into Imperial Space to attack a Forge World (industrial complex planet). Space Marine boarding craft intercept it, and your game begins. I think the game represents a different specific conflict, but is attached to the larger that also encompasses the upcoming WH40K: Space Marine.

You can choose between four 'types' of Space Marine, and the differences in them basically reflect how much balance you want between ranged and close combat. You can also choose between five different Chapter color schemes, for a bit of personalisation. Each Marine type has three different weapons available but the high power ones need to be unlocked through play. The game also provides various levels of buffs (again most have to be unlocked) and you have opportunities to swap weapons and buffs in the course of blasting through each stage. You're never stuck with an unworkable combination. The controls are simplicity itself, the game is a twin-stick shooter. Moving in one direction while firing in another is a piece of cake, and use of special abilities, running and all that are mapped in logical places. There isn't that much to keep track of anyway.

Now for 40K purists there's going to have to be a little give here. The player is expected to run and gun through the corridors and chambers of a large ship killing hundreds of Orks and Gretchin (SF goblins). None of the Marines on offer would canonically be capable of accomplishing this. In the upcoming Space Marine game it might be a bit less of a stretch considering Captains are top-level hero characters, but in Kill Team you are using (for variety's sake) squad leader and lower level heroes. It is a bit like the stretch you have to make when Guile is fighting the Hulk in Marvel vs Capcom games. For the sake of even having a playble game, some bending of canon is required. So if a 40K goober can just have an open mind and set aside the limitations imposed on these Marines by the tabletop game, they'd find most of the rest of the game is a really neat little exploration of the 40K universe.

I read a review (after I'd played it) that said Kill Team's environments were drab and same-y. Well, there are only five levels and they will take the player about forty minutes each the first time through. And all the levels take place on a big Ork spaceship. So a certain amount of consistency could be expected. The devs structured this, actually working to NOT break canon in a sense, similar to the tabletop system's penchant for campaigns, scenarios strung along in narrative form to reach an ultimate goal. Most typically official individual scenarios do NOT range all over the galaxy and pit an army against a variety of enemie armies. 40K game narratives don't have an everything-but-the-kitchen sink approach, though in their own home games players frequently battle with little regard to a functioning narrative. So I found focusing on just the Orks and THEIR environment to be a good idea. Especially considering the short length of the game and the focused nature of the narrative.

As a long-time 40K fan, I found the portrayal of the cluttered, ramshackle Ork ship to be really cool. It had lots of great details, like every time there was an explosion big enough to rock the ship, all kinds of carp lying around would slide across the floor-- the Orks don't tie anything down! There are great vats of radioactive material just open to the air with no safety railings, and catwalks made up of metal planks barely riveted together. And everything is lit with harsh white lights or hellish red and green glows. The game totally nails the anarchic and heedless nature of Orks and their technology. It's a miracle they could build anything space-worthy. For a little variety's sake there is one level in the game where the Orks have sealed off the ship because of yet another alien presence that they haven't quite been able to eradicate. This was a good bit of fun, with a few visual cues here and there (heavy use of maroon and purple) to indicate the 'changed' nature of the region. The player must make their way through this area, of course, and battles a totally different, well-known 40K force, before confronting the Ork Warboss in the finale.

The in-game player and enemy models are also worth mentioning. I read somewhere that these were basically the assets from the Dawn of War strategy game series, but jazzed up with a few extra details. I haven't played Dawn of War (aversion to PC games, aversion to strategy games!) but the characters and enemies are all perfect for this type of game. The game is played in an on-high isometric view, very much like you were looking down on a tabletop wargame. You get a pretty wide field that you can see to allow time to see what's coming at you-- though the game has a lot of ambushing going on-- and to give room for many enemy to be on screen at once. Consequently, the actual size of the models for most of the game is quite small-- again, like a tabletop view, but every now and then the camera zooms down in for a slo-mo enemy death scene and then the level of detail in the scenery and characters becomes apparent. It isn't Halo Reach levels of sophistication, but there's a lot more texture and bling than was really necessary for such a cheapie twin-stick arcade game. Interestingly, with all the details the dudes in this game all look like well-painted 28mm figures, with the figure proportions and chunky details... as opposed to the upcoming Space Marine game's properly proportioned realistically rendered game characters.

There might be a lot of video gamers who will look at this game and think it is some kind of science-fiction ripoff of stuff from World of Warcraft, but GW's designs, both fantasy and futuristic, were full-fledged and established well before even the first early generations of Warcraft came along.

This game doesn't really do anything new, mechanics-wise. If you can play Robotron 2084, Expendable, Loaded, or Geometry Wars you're good to go. It just has everything tuned really well. It makes it seem ludicrous that no one has applied the twin-stick formula to 40K before. The graphics, the sound, the voice over (sounding rather like Patrick Stewart or Sean Connery at times), it is all just badass.

And the game is just as fun, if not moreso, in two-player couch-cooperative. The powerups, and their judicious use is pretty critical to getting through the game and Kill Team lets both players share the advantages of a powerup that either grabs as long as they stay in proximity to each other. Players can then stack the powerups in a way you can't do in single-player. Player one can grab the power field creating a dome around the Marines impervious to enemy fire. Player two can then grab triple fire, granting awesome sprays of bullets. So for as long as these pickups last, both players are protected, both players have spread guns. It really encourages the players to strategise together and not just be every-man-for-himself and dick the other guy by grabbing the good shit. Since my kid is a 40K fan, this game is tailor-made for he and I to just pick up and play. And it was actually fun trying to find all the hidden medals and acquire all the weapons and buffs. The usual confusion ensuing from two players wreaking havoc is a major part of the fun because with all the cooperative aspects, including reviving a downed partner, it almost never causes a game over. I never found the camera a problem either, and in fact its dynamic tracking actually added a lot to the game.

I've also read some complaints about game length, but to me it was perfect. I'm so damned tired of games that require such a huge commitment in time and effort... even fun games can bog down. This game is only four hours for one play through, as I've already said. But it was really fun on repeat plays and it rewards the primary player with unlocks, achievements, etc even when played co-op. So I've put much more than four hours into it, and none of it has felt like a chore or grinding.

Other writers seem to largely agree with everything I'm posting here. Even non-40K fans give the game a lot of props. BUT. I have to go along with the one huge glaring fault:

NO online co-op. Let me repeat that. A pick-up-and-play game with an expansive user-friendly field of view and multiple aspects to encourage teaming up, but has NO WAY for you to play co-op other than with a friend in the same room. Local two-player ONLY. Wow.

Now for me this isn't really a problem. I have a fanatical kid gamer and 40K goob right in my own home, and I'm not that big for online play anyway. This does, however, seem like an absolutely massive oversight. I can only think the money ran out. Since the game is so well-done in just about every other way, maybe the room wasn't in the budget to implement this. I don't know what all it takes to enable smooth netcode but looking at this game it isn't much of a resource hog. I can't believe it would require anything like a Halo or Street Fighter game to banish lag and get really efficient bandwidth usage out of it. It has a mostly fixed view, tiny characters, and minimal, straightforward controls (son not a lot of inputs to have to read).

Anyway. Huge oversight, yes. But for me personally, this is the best cheap game I've bought all year, and one of the better games overall regardless of price. I don't feel too keen to diss Mickey, and I'll admit to 40K frothing probably enhancing my enjoyment of Kill Team... but I'm probably not going back to the Disney game. I will, however, spend a lot more time in the Ork Kroozer icing greenskins.

King er, Prin-- uh, DUKE for a day...

Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury is a fun, but grueling game from bizarro hardcore developer Treasure. I loved the Dreamcast Bangai-O, lo those many years ago, and this is a fine, though brutal sequel. It lacks much of the wackiness and character of that original game with its dearth of dialogue or cartoon cast, but it has its own advantages with the Xbox 360's graphical power allowing hitherto unseen levels of enemy and projectile mayhem. This game may have the highest levels of onscreen virtual death ever. And that's saying something considering what a Cave game looks like.

Some levels were giving me real trouble. If Bangai-O HD has one weakness (apart from no goofy characters) it is the wildly uneven difficulty level between stages. Unlike the Dreamcast version (or the concurrent N64 one) this Bangai-O is more strategy-oriented and less on-the-fly skill oriented. Each stage is like a puzzle, and usually has very few... maybe even only one... solution to get through. That solution frequently has to do with finding the quickest way to kill the most enemies and beat a timer. That has been my biggest foe throughout the game... the damn clock. Frequently I had the skills to get through a stage only to run up against a shortage in time. And that would almost be fine if it weren't for the fact that there is no real sense of difficulty progression. Some of the hardest, most frustrating levels actually occurred early in the game... again almost always based around the clock. The game doesn't 'teach' you a new technique or a new way to use an old technique with an stage. Nope, the game introduces each new concept with a level that expects you to do it with masterful timing.

You need very specific techniques or a very specific sequence in many of the stages, and it can be hair-pulling to find out what that is particulary considering how broad the number of abilities your mecha has. The Bangai-O robot is supremely powerful and you need it considering how much shit your flying through in the game, but so many of the stages are completely based around one single aspect of the robot so the flexibility doesn't come into play.

Stage 40, which has both a very specific difficult technique needed, AND a severe time limit, was giving me the most trouble. NO videos online at Youtube, and though Bangai-O lets top-ten leaderboard players post replays, other players like me can't look at 'em 'til we finish the level (to force you to figure it out yourself). And Gamefaqs-based player advice was not helpful. So I had to play it over and over and over and over again. My kids were absolutely sick of seeing that screen by the time I got through it. I had the correct strategy I just couldn't pull it off under the time limit. For an occasional break I'd complete a stage PAST stage 40 and then come back to try again. I left the final stage alone mostly.

So when I finally finish 40 and get onto 47, the final stage of the games main 'Fury Mode' I find the boss to be pretty tough. You have to go through a long series of rooms full of enemies before you get to him only to get your ass handed to you in two seconds. Then you have to do the level all over again... and again. It's a lot of work to go through to get to try something against him... and then have it fail. But the game has a room editor. So my kid (the tinkerer) built a stage roughly the size of the final battle room and plunked the boss, Crazy King, into it so I could practice fighting him.

When I'd played the practice room a dozen or more times and worked out how to kill him, I went back to stage 47 and defeated him on the second go. Afterwards I thought I'd look at the top leaderboard replays and see how the really skilled players did it.

Only there really aren't any players above me. Okay, there are TWO.

I'm NUMBER THREE on the leaderboards? Holy crap. I don't think THAT'S going to last long. Interestingly for me, the number one player uses almost the EXACT same technique for defeating Crazy King. He did the rooms before the boss 'better' than I did to get his higher score, but he didn't finish the level much sooner.

Basking in my short-lived moment of nerd glory. Man, I'm so hardcore! Now ALL the chicks'll dig me!

Motherfrickin' Missile Fury

My son, twelve years old, is much more open-minded to the older 2D gaming styles than any of his friends seem to be, but the new Xbox Live Arcade title Bangai-O: Missile Fury is probably way too hard for him. He's given it a few tries, completed a few early levels here and there, but he doesn't have the patience to work out the games intricacies. And I don't blame him, it's pretty rough.

However. There is one thing he agrees on, and you'd have to be blind or an utter fool to disagree. Nothing, repeat NOTHING in video gaming compares to the sweet ultimate power of unleashing a full-power 1000-count counter-attack. It has been that way on every system that the Bangaio series has appeared on... and is doubly so now that you can pump up the size and power of your counter-attacks up to four-fold.

The above screen shot pretty much says it. The screen of your Xbox 360 will pause and then erupt in slow white molten fury as you utterly annihilate everything around you. And as often as you get to do this in the game, IT NEVER GETS OLD! Especially with the bounce laser-- a blue-white sun of destruction that leaves an afterimage on the gamer's retina.

Rest of the game's good too.
(image cribbed from Eurogamer)

Nin2 Jump Pisses Me Off

Cave put a tiny new game up on Xbox Live Arcade, the score attack platformer Nin2 Jump. A big departure from their usual forte, bullet hell shooters, this download title I'd describe as the art-style of Okami mashing up with the quick and deadly get-thru-the-room play of Super Meat Boy. In addition it has mechanics that look superficially like the grapple arm from Bionic Commando. You use this 'manriki' chain tool to lift yourself over spike beds and past buzzsaws or target enemies for you to then power through.

I love the shadow play art style. I don't find the 'kids in the audience' flourish to be distracting. I'm used to bullet hell shooters so I don't find the occasions where the screen fills with stuff to be confusing. I like the quick restart and one-more-go addictiveness of the game. The bosses, like Fujiyama illustrated above, are really neat and different. There's only one thing that really gets to me, and it is kind of important.

The controls.

Wow, do they suck. I cannot, absolutely CANNOT get the chain weapon to go where I want it to. As stated, you must use this thing to get around the hazards. Sometimes you even need to do something fairly dextrous like use it to anchor and haul yourself horizontally in mid-air while falling down towards some spikes. In most games, with a little practice I find this sort of thing pretty easy. I've played A LOT of platforming games in my time with similar mechanics. In Nin2 Jump it makes me want to eat a gun. The chain does not shoot out in the same direction as I'm indicating on the controller with any consistency. The game does not register a button release (so that you haul up on the chain to safety) with any regularity. Most of the time pulling off even simple moves is sheer luck. What does it say when World 2 took ages to complete because of all the chain bullshit, but World 3 took one-quarter the time, because it has no traps, just enemies to defeat, and that requires timing and gauge management... not precise manipulations of the chain.

I'm reading online how the game is just so easy. Oooh, you'll have no trouble at all with the story mode. Motherfucker. Did I get some kind of bum controller? It isn't having problems in any other game! I'm all for challenge, but not when the challenge is inherent in control difficulties. That's like some hold over from old frustrating 8-bit games. I HAVE read one or two people say this game's controls give them fits... so I'm not totally insane.

I want to love this game. Most games from Cave make me all tingly down there. But this is just nuts!

Days of Yore, I Mean Gore

The game that almost singlehandedly started video games down the road of intense-scrutiny-for-content and provoked the creation of an industry rating system, is back and bloodier than ever.


Released in the heyday of arcades, MK was the major American contribution to the fighting game scene. Not as technical as Street Fighter (Japanese) and not as cutting edge as Killer Instinct (UK), Mortal Kombat relied on players wanting to return to it time and again to see all the wild stages, catch up on the cheesy story line, and indulge in all the characters’ ‘fatality’ possibilities.

If any fan is completely honest the fatalities (and their offshoot ‘babality’ and ‘friendship’ finishing moves) are the main draw. For everyone. Don’t pretend the story or depth of mechanics was the reason you were there. The graphics, digitized photos of actors mostly, were something of an eyesore even back then. Nope. You came for the gore. And since MK was an equal opportunity offender it was one of the few places where you’d see buxom female characters eviscerated or decapitated with the same aplomb accorded the macho males. Boobs and blood. An American exploitation tradition!

For those that bothered to pay attention, Mortal Kombat did have a back story that was more than ‘buncha people fighting to be the best’. See original MK movie. It was a corny tale of interdimensional overlords and ancient deities. Martial Arts temples, assassins and prophecies. As the series went on, the designers tried to flesh out the story line further to give nerds a high road to hang on to when they attempted to justify playing in all the boobs and blood. But up to now with eight episodes under its belt (and some non-fighting game offshoots) the plot has gotten so convoluted and repetitious that only the most diehard adherents have still kept track of who is who and who does what.

I gave up after Mortal Kombat 3. I was never a REAL Mortal Kombat player. I already had Street Fighter and Samurai Shodown. I checked in with Mortal Kombat to see what the controversy was about and dork around with the fatalities. I kinda knew the story from watching serious players play. Then when the next two sequels came out, I dallied enough to see new characters and note where the ideas were going. I might’ve bought MK2 and/or MK3 for my Genesis. All this stuff was ‘okay’ to me. I think I exclaimed ‘oh shit’ just like everyone else the first time I saw a head get popped off in a welter of gore. But after that, the ugly characters and unorthodox input methods (kudos for not copying Street Fighter but still weird) just turned me off. Along with the story line getting too dense for its own good, I guess the edginess kinda bled out of the games too. The DC versus MK game from not too long ago is supposedly pretty flaccid.

I haven’t bothered with it in years other than to note ‘oh, they’re still doing Mortal Kombat’ whenever the series was milked again on another console. But in 2010, folks seemed to be getting pretty excited about the new installment titled simply Mortal Kombat, but tagged MK9 in gaming circles to distinguish it from the 1992 original. The promo materials and statements made by the developers showed a return to what made the first three games, uh, ‘great’. Blood, boobs, and the original storyline—revisited through a timeline alteration plot hook analogous to the one in JJ Abrams recent Star Trek reboot.

Oddly, I found all this news to be kind of boner-inducing to me too. The things that made me NOT stick with MK back in dinosaur days were still in place. Same characters, same control scheme. But the speed and power of today’s consoles has given the character (and by that I mean the atmosphere and bloodshed) a new lease on life. Additional ways of dealing gory mayhem have been added along with a lot of nods to the first three games. I was really surprised by how much I recognized considering my limited time with Mortal Kombat in the first place. And wisely (just as Street Fighter IV has done) they kept the 3D characters fighting in a 2D plane.

So now having bought the game (released yesterday), it is pretty much everything I’d hoped for. The new polygonal character models, while still kind of stiff and unattractive, are way easier to look at than the old sprites… and that’s saying something considering how much I love the sprite art in old games. With the new Street Fighter releases, the characters look fine, but they aren’t literally better than a lot of the earlier generations. SF3 and SFAlpha’s fighters are well-drawn cel-animation-style 2D sprites. Their 3D polygon versions on current machines are also high-quality and recognizable… but kind of like comparing apples and oranges if you try to decide which is better. With Mortal Kombat there’s no real debate… at least not if you look back at the old games that this new iteration is referencing. The original sprites were photos of actors in not-good costumes, incredibly crude and not having aged well at all. The new characters, stages, menu screens, everything is very detailed and just drips with menace and hellish atmosphere. It’s like what the designers of the originals were trying to convey, but the tools were so crude players had to dig down pretty deep in the imagination to fill it out. The stages are awesome looking, with a lot of disturbing background imagery and updates to old stage themes. The in-game character art (like on the matchup screens) is decidedly amateurish though… looking quite a bit worse than many of the fighters’ polygonal models. Okay, the Raiden polygon model IS uglier than the matchup screen drawing. Sorry, Raiden actor!

The input method is still really hard to get used to. For someone to whom the Street Fighter method of blocking and inputting specials is second nature, this game is a pretty drastic change. But the fatalities, new x-ray attacks, and general weirdness compel me to stick with it. At least to get through story mode, see all the bloodshed, and tackle most of the challenges. With all the bizarre moves (lots of projectiles, teleports, distant grapples) and overpowered x-ray attacks I’ll probably never really jam on this online the way I’m currently doing with Street Fighter. It just doesn’t seem serious enough… an odd thing to say considering the mature nature of the game, but it definitely revels in its over-the-top B-movie props with considerable macabre humor. But I mean ‘serious’ in mechanics and balance. I guess time will tell whether the tournament players get a functioning, competitive fighting game out of it.

Perversely, this may be the game that sells the fighting genre to my son. I’ve had some serious reservations about allowing him access to this game—this iteration doing absolutely nothing to dispel MK’s rep for excess. But, I’ve been gradually allowing him to watch more mature movies (with relevant content discussions) like the Terminator, Matrix and Aliens series. Stuff with more cultural ‘weight’ than just any old film with a lot of head shots and sex scenes. So while this game is rife with even more violence than any ten movies put together, it is also decidedly more unrealistic or immersive.

That’s probably the key. Mortal Kombat is kinda cool now… but not very immersive. My kid has never really gotten into fighting games because for one, as far as his friends are concerned, it is a dead genre. And two, he had a lot of trouble with the command inputs. Fighters are traditionally joystick-friendly with their quarter-circle and dragon punch inputs. They are not so easy on a standard controller. And my kid is a controller (or wiimote) kid. With MK’s tap-tap input method, he has found a scheme that will work for him.

And he’s loving it. He loves the fact that he CAN do the moves, apart from the most complicated—the fatalities, but he’ll get ‘em. He’s just intimidated. And of course there’s the not-so-secret glee of all the bones cracking and ogling all the scantily-clad polygonal breasts.

He MAY just go to a joystick for this game eventually, and then I’ll have him! Brainwashed! Maybe he’ll migrate to my fighting games before too long and then I can kick my kid around the room in a way the law won’t frown upon!

By the way, hope you get to play this before too long, Australia!

This Bastard

The stage four boss for the XBLA shooter game, Strania: The Stella Machina. I want to kick this guy in the ding-ding.

I died more times trying to work out how to get past him. Holy crap. The levels and boss fights past him are easier... including his giganto form in stage six, fifty times the size of your robot.

I have sort of learned the knack for beating him now. That pic showing the lasers filling the screen isn't even the hardest attack of his to avoid.

THEN. I get past him, eventually finishing the game and get... nothing. You have to play on 'hard' or 'expert' in order to activate stage seven, the REAL last boss fight, AND THEN if you beat that you get the ending and credits. But if you die during stage seven, its game over, no continues, no second chances, nothing.

Needless to say I haven't managed it quite yet. The game lets you train on any level you've reached so I have managed to figure out how to get through stage seven, but I've haven't done it in an actual game turn.

But I will. Despite some of the nightmarish choices made in the name of challenge (evil stage seven, restart checkpoints for bosses, must play on hard/expert to win) by those sadistic jerks at G.Rev, the game is really fun. Spectacular visuals (despite being kinda budget), cool soundtrack, good (if somewhat coarse) controls, and really fast pace. It is NOT a danmaku in the tradition of Cave games, but it still manages to have a lot going onscreen. About the only criticism I have about the game is it being a little too easy to wind up with a weapon you don't want, but they have a way around that too (swing your sword as you pass through).

The game is short, but that's in the nature of the STG genre. Well worth the MS points it costs to download.

Porkin' That Sweet Pink

Yeah, I know, right?

Using words from a game title like that is truly sophomoric, but I’m sure half the game’s purchasers have already made a similar joke themselves. Muchi Muchi Pork & Pink Sweets, is the name of the recent double-pack of manic shooters from Cave for the Xbox 360. Hell, Cave had to know what fodder for dirty phrasing they had when they decided to put the games together!

Okay, I’m only making it worse by putting the artwork for the protagonists in Pink Sweets, the Rose Sisters, up at the top there. I’ll put an in-game shot in here somewhere too… to prove it ain’t THAT kind of game.

Originally MMP and PS were NOT together. The disc is based on arcade games put out back in 2007 and 2006 respectively. Home versions of the arcade originals are 1.00 in the package, and they are accompanied by tweaked versions 1.01 that reduce the brutality somewhat, along with Cave’s usual assortment of so-called arrange modes. Also there’s a really neat ‘matsuri version’ (as DLC) that drops the Pink Sweets bosses into a version of the MMP game.

No HD-friendly upgrading has been done to the visuals. There are a variety of options for resizing the play area to fit your screen, and there is the typical smoothing filter that can be toggled. Players can also change between arcade and arrange soundtracks for each stage of both games. Some of the alternate tracks didn’t sound like different musical arrangements at all, but wholly different compositions. In general I prefer the originals, they seem to fit the themes of the games better.

And the games have VERY distinct themes. I used the word brutality earlier in the post, but looking at these games artwork, ‘brutal’ might not be a word that’d come to mind. Both games are cute and comedic, with Pink Sweets going heavy on the cuteness-- bright rainbow colors and toy-like enemies, and Muchi Muchi Pork leaning toward comedy with everything being pig-themed and slapstick. Despite the pixellated nature of the graphics, the art styles really shine through. Muchi Muchi Pork in particular has a ton of variety to the backgrounds and enemies and really cool drawn inserts to further the story, with awesome little frames of animated robots every time you launch a bomb.

Pink Sweets

But yuks and sweetness aside, the games are monsters on the difficulty… bordering on abusive. Danmaku (curtain fire, manic, or bullet hell, take your pick) shooters, as all of Cave’s shooter output is, these games bear the stamp of lead programmer Shinobu Yagawa. If you’ve played Battle Garegga or Battle Bakraid, then you’ll have some idea, mechanically, about what you can expect from these games. Tons of enemies coming at you from all directions, gobs of stuff you have to collect (including bomb fragments in MMP), and rank, rank, rank… the difficulty increase leveraged in-game if a player is doing well. It is typical for expert players of Yagawa-made games to have all sorts of strategies for avoiding powerups, and reducing stocks of extra ships and bombs, all towards inducing the game to keep the rank low. Conversely, experts playing for score might do everything they can do jack the rank up high, at least at certain points, to force out as many enemies or bullets (if there’s a bullet canceling aspect) as possible. As I understand it, by reputation MMP’s rank is manageable and not much of a concern to good players until near the end of the game. But Pink Sweets has a rep for being perhaps the most punishing Cave game of all. With all the attention and notoriety that rank has in these games, this home version set comes with visible ‘rank meters’ (called ‘difficulty gage’) that you can display to show you how your play strategies and skills are affecting the abuse level.

Having played both of them now, I have to say they are both good games, but far beyond my ability to play well at this point. Pink Sweets is understandable. It is hard, ranks up quickly, and has bomb and powerup mechanics that are really different than any other Cave game. Certain enemy bullet types can be destroyed by your own shot and I’m sure learning these is a necessary part of progressing and will come with time. Interestingly, I’ve found the bosses to be much easier than the actual levels, which I’ve only felt with Ketsui before this. Muchi Muchi Pork is a different story entirely.

Muchi Muchi Pork

I’m not sure what is giving me trouble with the Pig Girls. Rank never even gets a chance to enter into it because I can’t last long enough for it to get very high. There are not an unbelievable amount of enemies in the early going. The enemy bullets are highly visible. The amount of firepower the game gives the player is extremely high and most enemies do not last long under it. There would seem to be no reason why I can’t progress just as well with this game as most any other shooter.

But I am just stumbling along at it. I know the sheer number of item drops is causing me to approach this a little differently… and maybe cause some screen confusion. I can’t tell. I just see myself having simple, avoidable deaths over and over again. And my REAL sticking point is the boss of the second stage. Holy shit. Rarely do I get past it without using a continue, and if I do continue and play on, the rest of the game, though difficult, doesn’t cause me nearly as much trouble relatively speaking. I mean the 4th and 5th levels are really tough, but they are about what you’d expect. I don’t expect to get totally hung up on the gosh damn second level boss… but there’s something about the guy, and the game in general, that just makes me panic and act like I’m playing with my feet. I can breeze through the first level boss NOW but it took forever to learn it. I’m just intimidated or something. Pink Sweets is a harder game, but I can get further in it. The 2nd level boss in MMP fires his bullets REALLY close to the player, and he has a lot of different fire types. I just don’t have the order and locations memorized yet… though I damn well should, I’ve played it enough times.

Kind of a drag because I really like the game. It is REALLY different from every other Cave game, just as Pink Sweets is. I’m not going to stop playing it, I just have to sigh and resign myself to fighting and struggling for every scrap of progress I’m going to make (or not make) in it.

My experience shouldn't discourage anyone else from checking this release out. Most bullet hell shooter fans will not have my bizarre hangup! The package is awesome. It was a good idea for Cave to pair up their two oddball cute but funny games (with weird mechanics), and offer them for a package price. AND they’re region-free. So you don’t have to own a JPN Xbox 360 to play ‘em. Don’t be put off by the visuals not being modified for HDTVs (some Cave releases were, ie Daifukkatsu). The graphics are still outstanding.

They’re not going to set most American gamers’ hearts afire, because hey, the whole anime cutesy-humor thing doesn’t play to the masses here, but these are explosive rock-hard shooters under all the boobs and batted eyelashes. And pork. There’s a lot of pork.
(pics stolen from Adriasang)



A Renaissance: Bullet Heaven

Strania

What is with all the shooter (STG or shmup) releases now? This was (and by many still is) considered a dying video game genre. But man, is it ever coming back into vogue!

I'm one of the original video game dinosaurs. I dabble in all sorts of genres but my gamer's heart belongs to those styles I dumped so many quarters into back in the day. That means driving games, platformers, fighting games, and forced-scrolling shooters. All of these genres have evolved from the old days... not just graphically, but also the goals have gotten multi-layered, the simulated physics more important, the scoring more complex, and the narrative behind the action more detailed. But the core game mechanics are still the same as ever. In driving games you race your car to beat opponent racers. In platformers you still run and jump and grab items while killing (or knocking out) enemies. In fighting games, you still just work to defeat an opponent or the opposing team, no matter how complex the movesets or over-the-top the supers. And in shooters you still just pilot your ship killing almost every enemy that comes onscreen while managing the state of your powerups.

I love STGs. Ancient like Galaga, old school like R-type, golden age like Battle Garegga, or modern bullet hell like Mushihimesama Futari... it doesn't matter. Not all shooters are good, mind you... there are shitty or boring ones... but I willing to give anything in the genre a try at least. Enh, maybe not the ones on handheld game machines. I can't really hang with little d-pad/cross-pad.

In any case, since the golden age of the shooter in the mid-90s when the great old houses Psikyo, Raizing, and Toaplan folded (or just quit making them), there has been a significant drought. Occasionally a franchise sequel (Raiden IV) or a remake (Raystorm HD) would appear. Only Cave, rising from the ashes of Toaplan and Raizing, and a few other stalwarts, like Milestone and G.Rev, have kept the STG flag flying, year by year being relegated to more specialised, cult corner of the video game universe but still cranking out new games.

In recent months though, something has clicked with Xbox 360. From fairly early in the lifespan of the console, there've been shooters old and new. Not a ton, but every so often one dropped for eager players, sometimes even from one of the big companies, like Konami releasing Otomedius G. Cave decided at some point to see if conversions of their arcade games would bring in additional income considering even in Japan arcade sales were in decline. They licensed brutal old shooter Dondonpachi Daioujou to another company, and brought Deathsmiles out themselves. I don't know the specific profitability figures or margins belonging to any Cave release, but they indicated to Cave that ports of their arcade games was the way to go. Inspiring a slew of non-Japanese customers to buy JPN consoles, Cave have also prompted some of the most active online discussions, fired up collectors, and almost single-handedly revived the STG genre for home audiences. I'm not going to say there have been no other impactful shooter releases since the 90s. Of particular note are all the Triangle Service and G.Rev releases on the Dreamcast after that system was pulled from the market. But the huge upswing we are experiencing at present has to be laid firmly at their door.

On the heels of the success across multiple titles that Cave has had... they typically release or license for release about two or three games a year... we now have loads pouring in from other companies. Konami, G.Rev, Qute, and German nutters NG:Dev Team all have released or are imminently releasing new games. And Treasure, developer-gods almost as crazy as Cave, have their own shooter titles in progress, something they haven't done in ages.

Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu 1.5- Cave
Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu Black Label- Cave
Muchi Muchi Pork & Pink Sweets- Cave
Akai Katana Shin- Cave
Otomedius Perfect- Konami
Bullet Soul- 5pb
Eschatos- Qute
Strania- G.Rev
Radiant Silvergun HD- Treasure
Fast Striker- NG: Dev Team
Sturmwind- RedSpotGames
Bangaioh HD: Missile Fury (yeah, this one isn't literally an STG, but it has a ton of similar elements and appeals to the STG audience)

I know I'm missing some still and didn't even try to list the various indie shooters that have come up like Revolver360 or Lethal Judgement 2.

One point to be made is that an Xbox 360 is pretty much mandatory to exploit this list. The NG: Dev Team titles are for the Dreamcast, and some of the XBLA titles like Strania or Radiant Silvergun could show up on the PlayStation Network, but if you want modern shooter titles getting the Microsoft console keeps it simple. It is the platform developers of niche gaming genres have decided to go with even though sales of the machine in Japan are decidedly low.

You'll have even better luck if you just plunk down a bit more cash and get a JPN-based Xbox 360. I can't tell you how many online posts or blog entries I've read from some gamer who is lamenting the region protection on some goshdamn shooter he wants. Get a friggin' Japanese box and be done with it. It is more expensive, yes. Most, not all USA games are playable on the thing. So in some cases you would have to buy a Japanese or Asian version of a game and these may also cost more. Here's a list of games that I want, bought, or for some reason checked, that the USA version does not work on my Japanese console:

Kengo Zero
Gundam Musou (any chapter)
Fist of the North Star
Quantum Theory
Nier
Import Tuner Challenge

These titles all come from Genki, Square Enix, and Koei Tecmo. So it is reasonable to assume one would have problems with ANY title from these companies. Shit from Capcom, Sega, or any Western-based outfit like EA, Bioware, or Codemasters all work fine, assuming you are talking about an NTSC title and not PAL. None of the original Xbox (not 360) titles I've tried; Halo, Return to Wolfenstein, or Panzer Dragoon Orta worked. I had to buy Japanese versions of all of those.

But if shooters are your thing and you don't want to sit around waiting and hoping the lastest shooter is going to appear in the USA, the positives outweigh the occasional inconvenience. All other shit, like XBLA, Netflix, all of that, work exactly the same regardless of the platform's country of origin. I have two XBLA accounts on one machine, one for the Japanese marketplace and one for the American. I've read many people who are dreading having to do this to get some of the DLC for shooters, but jiminy christmas it isn't that hard and you only have to do it once.

Recent days are looking so good for shmup fans that I don't know where the time and money will be found to take advantage of it all! Wait, that's not a complaint!

(pic kyped from jeuxvideo)

Nerd-Stick Part Deux

I got the proper part in (thank you Gremlin Solutions in the UK) and finished off the modification of my Xbox 360 joystick, the HRAP EX. My daughter helped me on this part of the project, as she did with the buttons two weeks ago, proclaiming that snipping the wires to the old Sanwa stick was ‘cutting the nerves to the brain’.

The Hori Real Arcade Pro EX does NOT have a simple little molex connector that harnesses the wires for easy hookup. It has a ribbon cable with tiny fine wires all splayed apart and soldered individually to each lead and ground on the four individual switches of the Sanwa stick. So eight connections to have to account for. The kiddo helped me make up masking tape labels to stick on each wire, so we’d hook up the correct directions when the new part went in.


I really didn’t want to have to solder, especially since their was ten-year-old child I wanted to keep involved. The switches on the new Seimitsu stick have flat pegs (blade connectors if you will) that internet searching told me could take a certain type of flat connector. So I hunted all over town for some female quick-disconnect ends that I could crimp on to each wire and as luck would have it, after every other outlets items were all too big, Radio Shack came through.


The disconnect ends themselves fit the Seimitsu stick perfectly. The end you push the wire into for crimping was a bit problematic. The wires off the ribbon cable were just so small. You had to really crunch down on the connector ends to get them to hold onto them. It looked a bit odd to see the smallest quick-disconnects in town sticking off the end of each tiny gray filament, but it worked. I almost got everything screwed back together when I realized the stick seemed short sticking up from the top of the faceplate of the unit when I was testing it on a game to make sure it all worked and the directions were correct.

I then remembered something I’d read when researching this project in the first place. The flush-style mounting plate that comes on a Seimitsu LS-32 stick isn’t quite correct to go into a HRAP. The SS-style mounting plate that I needed (named for the curvy cross-section of each end) actually comes on the LS-32-01 stick that I originally bought… y’know the one with the useless connector (and PCB). So I was okay on having the right part, but if I didn’t know better I’d swear there was some sort of evil afoot with the makers of the HRAP. If you want to swap in a Seimitsu stick you need the body of one model with the mounting plate of another?

Anyway, the SS plate nestles the top of the Seimitsu stick right up where it is supposed to be, so all worked out. A green ball top added on, and my daughters small hands to help me close up the case. I’m glad I went back in and fixed the plate because the difference in height switching between the two HRAPs would’ve driven me nuts.

The green of the joystick top and the A button don’t exactly match Microsoft’s more leafy green that is the Xbox 360 hallmark, but that’s okay. Controls on Japanese candy cabs in arcades tend to have bright party colors, so that’s what this green is, but it is close enough.

As I said in the first part post, the big push for me to do this was because I was having assloads of trouble pulling off double-hadouken motions in Super Street Fighter IV. I was hoping the characteristics of this Seimitsu joystick would help me. While I was waiting for this new stick to arrive I happened to re-read one of the online tutorials at shoryuken.com and happened upon a paragraph that I completely overlooked before. The author was swapping out his Sanwa for a Seimitsu (on a PS2 HRAP) for the exact same reason. I was inspired to try it by shooting game fans’ describing shorter, more precise movement capability. He got good results so that only made my waiting that much more difficult.

Now that it was all together, I didn’t waste any time testing it out. For STG/shmup games you can definitely notice a difference during quick direction changes. There is a lot less of a dead zone (virtually none really) when the stick is centered. For SSIV, I’m still not awesome at complicated command motions in the game, but I can get them out with at least twice the frequency after one short session. The flip side to this is that I have to be less sloppy or I’ll inadvertently move a way I don’t want to. A quarter circle for a hadouken is MUCH easier to accidentally turn into a forward jump if you push a little up past the 3 o’clock mark on the stick.

The new buttons are nice too. The original Hori buttons weren’t a problem, but these definitely feel less mushy.

All told, the whole thing, both joysticks, went well… and I’m pretty happy with the results. No glaring difference in appearances from the originals, but the play is the thing and that seems quite improved. It took a month from start to finish, but only two evenings and one afternoon were actual work. The rest was waiting on the mail. As I said in part one, I’m not actually enamored of this sort of work, so if I had to get another HRAP I’d probably get the EX-SE model that has all Seimitsu parts to begin with.

A Couple of Conquerings

Race Driver: Grid

Last week I finished Race Driver: Grid (alternately known as just GRID). After the drying-up of new racing games from Japanese developer Genki, I decided I needed to try a new route (heh) to get my racing fix. I did some investigating, reading reviews and playing demos before finally settling on GRID, Codemasters mixed-discipline racer.

Codemasters has a lot of racing games under their belt, including the extensive TOCA Race Driver series of which GRID is supposed to be the most recent chapter. I've looked in on TOCA at different times actually buying one for the PS2 at one point, but it just didn't catch my fancy. It emphasized sports and touring cars which are my favorite forms of formal real-life racing, but the narrative in the game just didn't click with me. I really like racing games making things personal. It is one of the reasons I think Genki's driving games have it all over stuff like Gran Turismo or Forza. But TOCA puts you in the shoes of a specific character with specific motivations and that, perversely compared to other types of games, actually served to de-immerse me. But my understanding before buying GRID (and demonstrated in a demo) was that it personalised your experience (gave a loose narrative or leveling up experience) without slapping it into a drama.

Obviously the particulars of this game must've clicked for me because I've just played it through. It was actually one of the most immersive video games I've ever played racing or otherwise. Codemasters absolutely hit on the formula for making it about YOU with a fun ladder to climb through the ranks, but without forcing in some melodramatic story points. The drama is on the track where it really counts, but pretty exciting during down time too, when you are managing your sponsors, or seeing that you've been challenged by the everpresent villains of the piece, Ravenwest Motorsports. A big part of this is the mechanism whereby the in-game speech addresses you by your real name... a feature officially labeled 'creepy' by my kids, but that really made everything in the game much more personal and affecting.

And then there is the driving itself. There aren't tons of cars. There aren't a lot of tracks. But each car is so lovingly detailed. Each track is so realistically presented. The sounds and bumps when you are jostling in the pack, particularly if you have an over the hood or in-car camera view (look at that shit, the pic I posted at the top of this entry). And the radio communication from your crew chief and your on-track teammate, though repetitive and sometimes inaccurate, is pretty well done. It is unbelievable how intense the driving got at times. Codemasters also made a couple of decisions about the opponent AI that I have to applaud. It had some drawbacks which I'll detail below, but this is one of the few times outside of Genki racers where I felt almost like there were people in those other cars, complete with mistakes made and tempers lost. Most racing games the opponent drivers just hew to the racing line as if there was no one else on the track. They will robotically race the same way every time. In GRID, opposing drivers sometimes push hard to get ahead of you and then neglect to check up enough in the next corner and skid wide, sometimes crashing outright. If you're in the back of a twelve car pack it might seem you'll never get past everyone, but the opponent drivers fuck each other over so frequently, that you'll almost always have a shot. Compare to typical driving games where cars form packs and because they don't spin out, AND because damage isn't taken into account really, the way you usually have to get through the pack is by unrealistically crashing and grinding your way through them.

Not only do you not need to do that so much in GRID, but given that this game DOES model damage, you really can't. Or at least you really have to be judicious about it. I also give props to Codemasters for not (seeming) to rely on rubberband AI. This is the annoying tendency built into racing games for computer opponents to suddenly exhibit supernatural abilities when they fall behind. You can see it in some other types of games too, most notably fighters where a computer-controlled opponent plays twice as fast and pulls out inhuman combos when you've beaten them in the first round of the possible three. In GRID when you get ahead you can stay ahead by the same interval if you keep driving consistently.

All that being said, the game has some annoyances, and they are tied to some of the same things that make the game great. GRID has the appearance of a simulation-style racer as opposed to a so-called arcade racer, but it IS actually skewed to the quicker arcade-style model. There is no tuning. So when you pick a car, if you don't like how it handles, tough shit. You can't change it. All you can do is get by until further in the game and more cars are unlocked.

This rarely presented a problem for me, but there were a few categories of races that made me wish for tuning. On the one hand, it's nice that the cars do all handle with noticeable differences. On the other, a driver wants to emphasise one thing or another in a car, making changes for certain tracks or variables like weather conditions. With GRID if the car you are driving is too slippery to be really effective on a twisty track... you gotta suck it up. In most sim-style games you could use the suspension settings to dial this out of the car. The compensation in GRID is that each individual race can have its difficulty turned up or down. So while I felt a bit guilty about it, after struggling with open wheel cars and club car races (Tuscan TVRs drive like little lead ingots on skis), later in the game I notched the difficulty down one pip. I just don't have the time or wherewithal to learn the nuances on the classes of cars that handle so radcially different to all the others. Turning down the difficulty turns down the speed and aggressiveness of the opponent drivers so that if you don't drive quite so accurately you don't suffer as much for it.

The flip-side of the driver AI: GRID models and reflects damage. It isn't comprehensive enough to drive the game into full-on realistic simulation territory, but it is significant. Through all the years I've played driving games damage modeling has just not been a real factor. Most games just haven't done it. It requires intense processing power, particularly if you want multiple makes and models of automobiles in one race, AND you need the car manufacturers to agree to it if the game is based on street cars. Most car makers are not all that keen for a game to show their car flipping around with the doors and tires flying off. TOCA games did show some damage but it didn't affect performance much. In this generation of video game consoles we now have the power to model damage extensively and realistically... even to the point of wreck debris littering the track laps after the original accident. I've always thought prior to this that I wanted damage modeling. It would just add that much more realism and drama. Playing this game shows me it isn't an all-good addition.

Codemasters knew bashing around trying to race without getting your vehicle disabled was going to be tough, particularly on scads of gamers weaned on Gran Turismo, where you can literally ride on an opponents doors all the way around a tough corner. So even though AI drivers can screw up in GRID, the developer still included a now-famous time-rewind function that lets you to roll back up to ten seconds of driving to allow yourself to re-drive to avoid a bad slip or game-ending accident. The lower you set the aforementioned difficulty setting the more of these rewinds a player gets. As I've said in previous posts there's no way a racing game can simulate a lot of the tactile aspects that really help a driver in real life and this game also shows the limitations on duplicating the visual aspects. Because gamers don't have four screens set 360 degrees around their seat, you've got a button for looking back, and the right stick lets you turn your virtual head to look out the side windows. But compared to the glancing, quick-snap method one uses in real-life to acquire and process all the information; mirrors, rear window, side windows, guages, road feel, etc... the different views in-game are highly disorienting and I found myself basically NOT using them. Since the AI players presumably DO have all of the computer's awareness of what is going on around them, essentially they get the benefits of 'using' all the views correctly, the rewind function is a really cool way to offset this advantage.

So with a rewind function, AI drivers that screw up, adjustable difficulty per race, and pretty good fixed tuning on all cars I gotta say GRID ironed out pretty much every potential frustration while still presenting a fun, challenging game. The only real unaddressed gripe I have with the game (and one a GRID sequel could easily fix) is that the computer opponents seemed 'dim' in how they treated some car types, particularly the prototype cars. In muscle car or touring car categories there is, in real life, a certain amount of jostling and bashing for position, particularly in the first turn of any given race. The cars are built similar to street cars, have sheet metal skins, and don't go uproariously fast. But prototype cars are purpose built race cars usually with a lot of carbon fiber and aluminum. They are fast and tremendously expensive. Yet in GRID, the AI drivers were bashing me around the same as in touring car races. Needless to say the results of a mild shunt at 190 miles per hour in a lightweight prototype are hugely different to one at 60 miles per hour in a fat Dodge Challenger. In the open wheel races the opponents seemed aware that you can't just smash the huge fenderless tires into each other, but in prototypes this sort of care was sorely lacking. And minor though it is, it grated because I really REALLY like real-life prototype racing a la the various Le Mans series LMP categories.

I would highly HIGHLY recommend this game to racing enthusiasts. It does so many things right, I find racing even after completing the campaign to be almost as fun as when I started. My son feels the damage makes the game too difficult... yet he is compelled to try because it just FEELS like the closest thing to being in a race yet. Great stuff. A word of warning though: I'm not really much of an online competitive player so I can't comment on how the online versus racing is... but I've read that it is pretty rough. All versus gaming online suffers from so-called 'griefers' the people who deliberately try to wreck other players' experience. GRID with its damage and its ability to easily wreck out of a race seems a prime target for this sort of abuse. There is a code that allows one to turn damage off, but I don't know how prevalent the use of it is. I didn't get access to the code until I finished career mode, so GRID doesn't give you THAT easy out during the single player campaign.

Illbleed

In a completely opposite direction we have Illbleed for the Sega Dreamcast which I finished nearly the same time as GRID.

Illbleed is one of those titles that on paper doesn't read like it would be a very good game, particularly to modern gamer sensibilities, but the weirdness was so compelling that it just forced me on and on to get through it. 'Kusoge', literally 'shit game' in Japanese is a term used to describe a game that is low-quality or has serious deficiencies and yet is considered fondly or seriously by some segment of the gaming community. That might be for character/licensing reasons, uber-difficulty, nostalgia, or a bizarre sense of humor. Illbleed isn't literally a kusoge in MY book, but it is just the sort of game that could be to some gamers and mostly for its strange, borderline disturbing, plot and visuals coupled with weird mechanics. It is certainly NOT unplayable or beyond-belief difficult.

In simplest terms it is a third-person survival horror action game. Unlike early Resident Evil episodes, the camera is only fixed during combat. Most of the time it follows around behind your avatar. This means that the game can't really use a forced viewpoint or unseen areas to provide shock scares. You can move your view to wherever you wish, so nothing is going to jump out at you like RE's famous window-breaking dogs. But Illbleed does manage creeping menace pretty well, at least at first. After a while, when you've got a good handle on healing item stock and how mortal your character actually is, much of the suspense and anxiety goes away, but the narrative gets wacky and unpredictable to make up for it.

The story is that you are navigating your way through the various areas in a deadly horror-themed amusement park. There is a cash reward (in game terms, duh) for doing so, but the money is secondary to rescuing your friends who went in ahead of you. Originally, your character Eriko had zero interest in going to the park because your Dad used to run a haunted house attraction himself and you've been there and done that. This of course, makes you the ideal person to go rescue your friends when this amusement park appears to have gone all lethal. Eriko is basically skeptical and has nerves of steel.

The game that follows on is, by turns, funny, creepy, and puzzling. Like a dream or a bad drug trip filtered through Rob Zombie's garish take on B-movies. The tale in each area is a take on a horror or fantasy movie plot cliche, but each level plays out in a unique and hallucinatory way. By the time I was done with the game I'd seen faces pushing out of blood puddles, pieces of pork and chicken chasing me around on a giant grill, a tree that eats people, and a parody of Woody from Toy Story battling a huge demonic version of Sonic the Hedgehog. The pic above is a spider boss with a head for its abdomen. All of this is interspersed with overly-copious amounts of bloodletting and an awesome soundtrack.

If you're like me all that stuff would only drive you on to seek out and play the game. Hell, that's exactly what it did in my case. But there are complications. I bought this game during the actual shelf life of the Dreamcast. I started playing it soon after, but the play mechanics were off-putting. Illbleed isn't actually about running, jumping, and shooting the ghoulies. It requires a methodical, exploratory approach. Eriko has all kinds of vital signs that need to be monitored. The game tracks her heartbeat, blood loss, health, etc. And keeping all of this stuff within safe levels is quite an exercise. The game also gives you a pair of night-vision goggles called a 'horror monitor'. You use this device to set off traps and scares ahead of time so that Eriko won't be shocked or injured when she actually gets to the triggering point.

When I originally started playing the game, this all seemed a huge load on the player and not really what I was after in a horror-themed game. But recently when I felt like playing something 'different' I gave it another go. The Dreamcast is capable of some pretty astounding visuals (think Ikaruga), but a lot of the console's titles have sort of glossy early PS2 graphics... which is appropriate considering the DC just precedes the PS2 chronologically. Illbleed is hardly cutting edge visually. In fact, it's pretty ghetto. But most of the time, that only adds to the games charm. Same thing with the mostly crap voice acting. Climax/Crazy Games is obviously not a big budget game maker, but in Illbleed's case a lot of the cheesiness seems very much deliberate. Only Eriko really looks and sounds 'normal' with a polished character model and mostly okay vocals, an anchor amongst all the confusion and strangeness. I think the choices made in the game just reflect a very Japanese take on the appeal of low-grade horror films... and LSD trips.

Once the player wraps their head around the not-at-all-obvious way exploring is done with the horror monitor, and the way one has to monitor Eriko's life signs like a crack trauma team, there are still some really odd choices the designers made in other ways. Sometimes these choices just fit right in, like playing jump rope with a murderous doll. Other times the mechanics seem needlessly old-fashioned and can be pretty frustrating. Mostly this comes from combat. The controls are a variant on the old Resident Evil scheme and they come with similar movement and collision detection problems. They are functional and the game usually gives you a way to get out of combat encounters (a rescue helicopter!!!!), but this game isn't so old that a more workable fighting system couldn't have been implemented. There are a number of places where it seems Eriko just can't connect with an attacking enemy, but of course they have no problem ripping the shit out of her.

The save points are also really infrequent. This doesn't normally bother me because I kinda feel today's gamers with insta-save all over the place are being enabled right past a video game's challenges. But in Illbleed, even accustomed to Eriko's precarious life functions in the first few levels (you get the hang of managing them), the deliberate pace of the game meant huge stretches of time between save points when I really needed to quit out and get onto the business of the rest of my life. A few times I had to leave the DC on to do something else, which sucks because the game penalises you monetarily, the longer you take getting through a level... and the clock ticks even if the game is paused.

Anyway. Through all the quirkiness, this time I persevered and was rewarded with a game experience I won't soon forget. There are multiple secrets I missed, and I didn't get the best ending, but I felt pretty triumphant just getting through such a bizarre, often confusing video game. I had to consult an online walkthrough twice to figure out what the game actually wanted from me. Now that I understand so much more about how the vital signs and horror monitor work... not to mention being much more practised at fighting... I could see myself having at this again to do better. I wouldn't say the learning curve is super steep, it is just that the game, and what it expects from the player, are so different to everything else out there. And the manual is pretty much no help at all.

Illbleed is like a lot of the movies I watch when it comes to defining its target owner. Not something I can just recommend to anyone, but with the right audience the positives would outweigh the frustrations. If you have fair patience and really liked Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses, then this is probably the game for you.