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!

A Game of Two Terries

Rock of Ages, a downloadable game on Xbox Live (and PSN I'm pretty sure), looks and plays like it was spawned by Monty Python's Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.

Mash Jones' absurdist method of teaching history, like his Crusades TV series, together with the cutout animation and funny voices of Gilliam's Python days... you get this awesome video game. Neither person had anything to do with Rock of Ages as far as I can tell (the developer is Chilean collective ACE), but I hope they've been alerted to it!

Essentially you play the game as the legendary Greek character Sisyphus. You break free of your endless toil rolling a rock for Chronos' amusement and then move down through the ages of history using that same rock to conquer various kingdoms. The opponent kingdoms are laid out as a pair of paths (with terrain, obstacles, and gaps) that lead to castles. Players must roll Sisyphus' boulder (think Monkey Ball or Marble Madness on a bigger scale) through the gauntlet of their assigned path, ultimately smashing into the enemy castle gates with as much speed as possible. Your opponent will be trying to do the same thing to you, over his mirror image course. At its simplest it'd just be a race between two players (your opponent can be human or CPU), but the game is complicated by a tower defense aspect. You can build additional obstacles and hazards for your opponet to navigate, in an attempt to either slow him down (so you get to their gates first) or damage their boulder enough to reduce its mass at impact... maybe even destroy it altogether effectively costing them a turn.

I think maybe I like this game a lot more than the general run of gamers would. It has awesome, sometimes crude humor, a lot of historical references, and constant continual nods to a Pythonesque aesthetic. Everytime you roll on down toward the enemy gates the path is littered with soldiers and citizenry all represented as moving, dancing paper cutouts that shout 'oohg' or 'blah' when you roll over them. I never get tired of it! All backgrounds and landscapes resemble the bright, airbrush-enhanced backgrounds Gilliam used to do in his animation bits. The bosses are incredible absurd CG creations. The intro to each stage is a humorous history lesson, with some of your opponents a complete surprise.

I dunno, the whole thing is probably designed to appeal to me and very few others... at least few game players that'd be on Xbox Live! It hits a lot of my buttons and basically came out of nowhere. My kids think it is awesome, even though their exposure to Python and the other works of the two Terries is pretty limited. But they don't play it as doggedly as I do. I'm trying to get golds in all the time trials, find all the hidden item, everything. Whatever I can do to stretch out the longevity of this goshdamn game because it is too fun!

I read somewhere a reviewer complaining about how the defenses you build aren't enough to really 'defend' your castle. I think the dude was missing the point. The game is REALLY about rolling the boulder and getting to the enemy gates as fast as possible. It is primarily an action game with controller-facility and an understanding of physics and the boulder's momentum as your top tools. The defenses are there to slow the boulder's course. It is rare that a boulder actually gets destroyed and even going off the course only resets you in place with a small loss of time. Even if you lose some layers on your rock, from getting hit by catapults or running into dynamite, and it is smaller when it hits the enemy HQ, it is still basically going to take three hits to win no matter what. So when it comes to building defenses, you are not going to prevent the enemy from hitting you. That isn't the point. And the computer player WILL be better than you are at making the defenses until you put in a lot of time and learn what everything can do and the best places to set them up on the tracks. But you can still win. This CPU's advantages are balanced out by the fact that a human player is going to be better at controlling the boulder. Finding shortcuts and attempting insane jumps is part of YOUR advantage as a non-CPU.

If you want something really funny (and violent in a decidedly different way), try out the Rock of Ages demo. You'll know in two minutes whether it is the game for you. An utterly different, refreshing break from all the murder and grimdark games crowding the field.

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.

Getting Gold For Releasing Your Load

A lot of people are pretty passionate about so-called 'social games' on computers and smartphones currently. Okay, passionate is not the right word. ADDICTED is probably the right word. Like there’s a thin membrane laced with crack cocaine right under the touch screens and its been seeping into their skins. None of that namby-pamby baking, shopping, or tending for me though.

My crack-game of late has been Akai Katana Shin on the Xbox 360. I’ve spent more recent hours on Mortal Kombat attempting to get a last few achievements, in what should’ve been an afterthought, but turned out to be way too much work. Freeing myself from that bloodbath, I’ve been playing Cave’s latest shooter in earnest now, and I find it really hard to put down.

I enjoy Cave shooting games in general, but this title has even more of ‘the one more try’ factor than the rest of their catalog. The disc has three versions of Akai Katana on it, Shin, Arcade, and Zetsu. I’ve been playing Shin mode predominantly, and it has weapons and scoring so awesome and cathartic that replaying the early stages on restart hasn’t gotten the least bit tiresome to me. This post is going to deal mostly with Shin mode, then. The disc is region-locked to Japan. If you don't have a JPN console you can't play this, though I'd dare to say this game would be a big incentive to get one.

Like any Cave shooter, you can either play ‘for survival’ or ‘for score’… these terms used by gamers as nutshell phrases trying to encompass the balance between risk and reward. If you want to generate more or bigger scoring items you are going to have to put your ship (or avatar) at risk by getting closer to enemies before you shoot them, letting the screen fill with extra bullets, or milk boss characters for extended lengths of time… some version of ‘extra jeopardy’ rather than simply trying to kill every enemy as fast as possible to increase each ship’s survival time by minimising enemy fire. It is these sorts of risk/reward mechanics that make shooters compelling, and it’s where Cave’s particular style of STG excels. Also in Akai Katana Shin, as in most Cave games, learning to play well for score eventually ends up benefiting your survival as the extends come sooner or more frequently, and the timing and strategy you needed to get that score translate into survival skills. Once a player learns the ins and outs of a Cave game, playing for score IS playing for survival.

The thing about Akai Katana Shin for me is that the visual and audio depiction of the scoring system is so frickin’ cool… it just has ‘something’. But the risk, most of the time, is not nearly as brutal as other Cave games. And it is recoverable. If you fail to take advantage of a high scoring section, it won’t take long for you to reach another opportunity. It doesn’t feel (though I could be wrong) that getting the highest scores is nearly as ‘scripted’ as it is in say Ketsui or Dodonpachi Daioujou.

I also found that the blending of score and survival play styles came MUCH sooner. I love Ketsui, and I’ve dumped a lot of hours into it, but I’m still playing the entire second half of that game in pure survival mode. With Akai Katana Shin, I’m deliberately risking ruining great runs to the end by trying to keep huge chains alive and lining up as many bullets as possible in the sights of my super-weapon… and loving every minute of it. Yeah, yeah, I still curse when I die, but I think Cave hit on the perfect combination for me. In an earlier post about Bangai-O HD, I remarked on the cathartic thrill of that game’s over-the-top screen-filling uber-weapon. Akai Katana Shin pushes the same buttons with its ‘Ninja mode’ katana blitz.

For those who can’t be bothered with trying to dig up the info online: In Akai Katana Shin you pick one of three pilots/planes. Each corresponds to the typical Cave rules; one with narrow, straight but strong shots. One with a fair amount of spread to the pattern, but a little weaker. One with wide, fanned out shots that catch most of the screen but are quite weak and will not make short work of many of the enemies. Each pilot also has a ‘Ninja’ companion, who normally exists as a sort of ‘option’ orbiting the player’s plane. After building meter, you push a button and your plane switches out for a large, flying human (and no option), who has enhanced abilites and is the secret to triggering the aforementioned uber-weapon awesomeness. Again typical of Cave (and danmaku in general) if you hold down the fire button in any mode it focuses your shots at the expense of speed. The bombs in Akai Katana do clear enemy bullets as well as destroying the enemy themselves. A form of auto-bomb is the default. If you get hit by an enemy, while on your last life, the game will trigger your entire remaining bomb stock to keep you alive.

--If you use normal shot (rhythmic tapping), dead or injured enemies release light blue orbs (magatama actually, the comma-shape that figures heavily in Japanese history and myth) that power a couple of your Ninja abilities and keep a chain counter going.
--If you use focused shot (button held) the enemies release green energy orbs that increase the amount of time you can spend in Ninja mode.

When you are all ready to go, switching to Ninja form gives you two options;

--A defensive ‘blue Ninja’ (rhythmic tapping) who slows incoming bullets down and can continue to collect blue orbs.
--Or the offensive ‘red Ninja’ whose fire collects ‘katana’ swords from dead enemies. .

So basically, you fly through the stages, mostly using regular shot to collect blue orbs, with the occasional dip into focused shot to get some green E’s, it doesn’t take a lot of energy to fill up and sporadic use of focused shot won’t break your hit chain.

Progress collecting is indicated by a glowing ring of characters around your ship and a green bar at the top of the screen. At any time you can switch to Ninja mode and it will consume whatever you have in green bar. The blue orbs you collected will be reflected in the number of magatama surrounding your ninja. You can stay ‘defensive’and treat the Ninja like your regular old ship albeit he/she can slow down incoming fire somewhat, but there’s a time limit based on how much green you had in the meter before you changed. Or you can go ‘offensive’, by holding down the fire button, switching to red. This shoots out the circle of magatama and they cause damage to enemies and cancel bullets. As they do this, they fling katana back to your ninja. So really, the more blue orbs you collect before you switch, the more magatama, and katana, you will have to work with. If you hold fire down as the red Ninja portions of your fire output will gather additional katana from dead enemy, but your green bar timer is still counting down, so it’s better to collect what you can before triggering Ninja mode.

With a cloud of katana surrounding you, here’s the REALLY fun bit. Apart from the blue orbs and green E items, there are gold scoring items marked with a red G. You get these in various sizes when you kill enemies in different ways in Ninja mode. As I said earlier, when you switch BACK to ship mode, any katana hovering around your ninja will shoot forward (or wherever you aimed them). Anything they strike, will be destroyed and emit clouds of the biggest form of gold item. They blossom all over the screen and then get immediately sucked into your ship. Opportunities to do this come frequently in the game. And if you amass enough swords before unloading, any enemy apart from end bosses will go down with one glorious, slowdown-inducing barrage.

If I had any criticism about the game itself, it would be that all this orb-gathering and gold-fountaining frequently obscures the awesome artwork on display in the game’s graphics. Akai Katana’s art style is reminiscent of the stodgy ironworks machines found in titles like Metal Slug or In The Hunt. But you’d have to play through seriously reducing your scoring attempts in order to see a lot of it! The way it all works is so awesome however, that the complaint is kind of pathetic and hollow really.

The above explanation does not encompass many of the subtleties in the game and its scoring but it gives the gist. Essentially what you have here is a game with such cool and layered weaponry, that the time-honored, screen-clearing bomb is almost unnecessary. Through some strategic timing, you almost always have overwhelming force on tap. It is seriously boner-inducing when you get a full complement of swords lined up on a huge midboss, let some popcorn enemies gather around him, and then wait for scads of enemy fire to blanket the screen and almost reach you… then trigger twelve katana right into the heart of the shitstorm, flying your plane behind that steel wall of consuming death so that you can vacuum up all the gold that much quicker.

Practically a video game orgasm. Ooh! That’s what the appeal actually is! Cave has distilled human sexual response into a shooting game! YES!

Seriously, I could go on and on about the other things the game does so right. I think Cave soundtracks are generally ‘okay’. Usually I think they are appropriate for whatever game and usually there’s one or two standout tunes (ie, the TLB theme from Ketsui), but not the sort of thing I’d spend a ton of time listening to on my iPod. The music from Akai Katana Shin isn’t going to make my favorites list, but it is a damn sight better and more memorable than most of their previous music. I’ve already mentioned the visuals, but additionally, this is the first Cave game in a while where ‘lolis’ in some form were NOT front and center. Instead the game has a sort of old-fashioned industrial feel with clunky little tanks and turrets, and prop planes. All the player characters, teen girls included, are dressed in a military manner, and pretty lacking in fan service opportunities. That isn’t to say the character art is particularly manly. It is still pretty swishy, as seems to be the style these days. But the armies and weapons are glorious. Rendered in HD-friendly resolution, and with plenty of screen adjustment options. Also, it’s horizontally-oriented, so no tate required.

I don’t think this game will necessarily make a gamer a fan of the bullet hell style. And it may actually vary from the Cave formula, with its multiple uber-weapon system, too much for a lot of Cave diehards. Also, since it’s a hori like Progear and Deathsmiles. So vert-only players might shun this too. But to me this game just does everything so right. It is absolutely spectacular, and brings enough new things to the table that it doesn’t play like any other Cave game… or any other shooter that I can think of.

There was one massive oversight, though, and I’m kind of baffled that Cave, at the time of this writing, has not issued a patch to fix: you cannot enter your initials on the high score tables. If you post your score to an Xbox Live leaderboard it DOES use your gamertag, so proper credit is attributed. But in ‘local’ terms you can’t ID the scores played on YOUR console. Pretty glaring considering high score tables, and their three initial entries, are pretty much rock-standard in shooters since Space Invaders.

That error aside, I can’t recommend Akai Katana Shin highly enough. I haven’t even really scratched the surface on Arcade and Zetsu modes. Arcade is essentially a recreation of the original game, complete with the faults that got it kind of a lukewarm reception in Japanese arcades. But it is the mode that allows two players at once. Zetsu is a sort of ‘fixed’ version of Arcade and would be the de facto standard now for basic Akai Katana (without the Shin part of the title). Unless some super surprise entry blindsides me between now and Christmas, Akai Katana Shin will probably end of Game Of The Year for me in 2011.
(screenshot ripped from Andriasang)

Composed In The Baroque Mode

I’ve been sinking quite a few hours into Sting’s role-playing game, Baroque for the Nintendo Wii. One variant of the several, historically mutable, definitions of the word ‘baroque’ is: ‘adorned or decorated so heavily the original intent is unclear’.


That would definitely fit this video game and the choice for that title has to be intentional despite Japanese developers penchant for devising titles in English that are nonsensical or ill fitting. Baroque’s mechanics are so convoluted (though the controls are simple) and its narrative so obscure that, personally, I’m incredulous that somehow this thing actually got made at all, let alone was successful enough to warrant conversions to multiple platforms.

In the heyday of the Sega Saturn, the lion’s share of my purchases were Japanese import titles. Baroque first released in 1998 looked really interesting from the screenshots and descriptions. Very murky and mysterious and cool. But the Japanese-only language issue was a problem. I’d just gone through Samurai Spirits Bushidoretsuden, the Samurai Shodown RPG, with the help of a guide and that was pretty damn labor-intensive. Good game and fun, but a lot of work. I also had the Saturn’s Japanese-language Grandia in my to-play stack. I really didn’t want yet another guide-aided slog. So I didn’t buy it.

Flash forward nearly ten years, and I see copies of a game called Baroque at my local GameStop in both the PS2 and Wii sections. WTF? Cover art and screenshots looked sort of like the game I thought of as Baroque, but not as dark and evil. Yep, plot description seems to jibe with my memory. I looked up online to be sure. Sure enough Atlus USA published remakes of the RPG Baroque in the United States. Not only was the game now totally accessible to my English-speaking self, but a lot of additional information was also in the form of an online mini-community. And while trying to avoid outright spoilers, I was reading that Baroque’s graphics were brightened up, the mechanics for controlling and fighting modernized, but that it was still considered a grueling hardcore dungeon crawl (original Wizardry came to my mind reading that stuff).

I’m already on the fence about RPGs as it is. Given that I used to play pen & paper role-playing games, and used to work for Games Workshop (not an RPG company, but fantasy toy soldiers and a lot of its customers and staff are also role-players), you’d think the genre would form a regular part of my balanced breakfast, but not so.

My indulgence in RPGs has never been more than occasional. I’ve racked up far more minutes in action games with RPG elements; basic item management and leveling up as games such as Odin Sphere or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. But actual role-playing games I have played I can probably count without having to include my toes or other appendages. Two real reasons: one, I’m impatient with the learning curve and strategy aspects. While I like ‘exploring’ well-conceived game worlds, I want to just get to it. And I am (or believe I am) suck-ass at the more think-y aspects of many games including puzzles and tactics. Two, RPGs typically require A LOT of time put in. I play a lot of video games for a working parent, but sometimes it can be sporadic. I mostly go for short-burst pick up and play games that suit my lifestyle. So that’s why my ‘currently playing’ list is so dominated by arcade games like fighters and shooters. When I do have some kind of long-play title I’m working on, it’ll be an ‘action-RPG’ (SOTN mentioned above), or some first or third-person shooter, games that are not nearly as intricate and attention-demanding as RPGs are. I’m also pretty easily immersed. I don’t require dense, novel-trilogy levels of detail. I grew up as an arcade gamer and so it isn’t so easy for me to find the patience for games that really drag out at all, let alone to the levels many RPGs pad themselves out for maximum perceived value.

So weirdly, I am in some aesthetic ways someone who should like RPGs, but based on practical concerns I tend to shun them. Every now and then I'll get enough of a hankering. Most recently I played through Skies of Arcadia on the Dreamcast. I also bought the Virtual Console version of Chrono Trigger, like two weeks ago, but my kids have beaten me to that one for now. Baroque’s bizarre science and religion mash up story… revealed as your character continually cycles through death and rebirth…looked pretty intriguing. That the play style involved some ‘roguelike’ features; randomized dungeons, complete reset of characteristics and items upon death, just made it appealing to the so-called hardcore (okay, masochistic) side of my gamer self.

In any case, I chose to go with the Wii version. And the wiimote/nunchuk combination works fine with the game. The combat in Baroque is rather action game-y and the part of the game that resembles ‘standard RPG’ mechanics the least. You have to actually run around and fight in real-time. You can avoid enemies or circle around them to strike when they are vulnerable. My understanding is that this was tricky in the Saturn original. The dark graphics and the limitations of a first-person view made fighting difficult. Switching to third-person and clearing away the murk makes Wii Baroque much less frustrating, although it is still tough until you learn what you are doing. These fixes came at the expense of much of the game’s evil atmosphere. It may have made things difficult, but Saturn Baroque had a grim, grimy ambience that is lost to a shinier (but still fairly plain) new version. The soundtrack has been re-done too. The new one is fine to me, and quite fitting for the game, but players of the original frequently say it isn’t a patch on the Saturn’s moody industrial tunes. The story itself is largely unchanged.

Now having spent a considerable time with the game, I do find even the new version to be problematic. Most players used to other games would probably find the combat inflexible, the dungeons repetitive, and the dying/resetting aspect quite off-putting. None of that bothered me. The graphics, sound, music, and controls; none of these are cutting-edge, but they all came together for me personally.

Nope, my difficulty comes from the very heart of the game designers’ philosophy, and one of the things that made me want the game a decade ago. The way the mysterious plot and the in-game objectives are doled out.

As I said in the beginning, Baroque hides the particulars of its narrative points under layers and details. At first, you play and are trying to just figure out how to survive. Then you are trying to figure out how the items work or interact with each other. Then you are trying to figure out how to find or keep the best items. THEN you want to figure out what to do next. Apart from just going through the dungeons—what is the point? Well, NONE of this stuff is spelled out for the player. The manual has a lot of words in it but doesn’t really put the system together. The manner in which items are used for various effects (there’s no magic system) is discovered through trial, error, and numerous deaths. The non-player character dialogues are cryptic in the extreme, but critical to the game. All of this reflects the Japanese original quite accurately and effectively simulates your avatar who, in the story, has no memory and no idea what to do. Story and objectives are progressed by hearing dialogues, but it can frequently take many conversations with multiple characters just to dial in a single goal. And the whole time you are running around trying to find these conversations, you are highly vulnerable and still trying to work out other basic aspects of the game, like trying live long enough and not just die and repeat the upper few levels of the dungeon…again.

Most dialogues are triggered by items given to the speaker. There are hundreds of items in the game, with the player having a limited inventory. So again, a lot of running around and experimenting. This may be the first collect-a-thon type of game where collecting every goshdamn thing is integral to the story and not just a bonus for completists. You can complete a Mario game without finding all the stars, but in Baroque, you really have to pay attention to what you’ve acquired so you know what moves the game itself along. Add to THAT enemies and objects that can take your shit away from you… and yeah, a TON of work. And you MUST die multiple times. On paper that seems like a cool, hardcore concept, but in practice it isn’t so simple when the game severely limits what you will be able to keep with you the next time you resurrect. There IS a system for moving items around or hanging on them for your next incarnation, but the way its done is all part of the game’s strategic underpinnings… and while I wouldn’t say it is tedious exactly… it is a lot of work.

The game lets you save after each completed dungeon level. So I kind of found myself keeping a couple of save points running at all times, so that I could revert to a previous happier moment if something untoward happened, frequently the loss of a needed item rather than a death. I generally didn’t allow myself to ‘die’, as it were, until I’d gotten to the end of each dungeon run, where you have to either die or be absorbed by the game’s deity. Which usually furthers the narrative.

At this point, near the completion of the game, I’ve had numerous restarts from save points but my character himself is on his eleventh incarnation. From my understanding this is pretty fuckin’ speedy. A lot of players have logged many many more hours than I have. Here’s the thing, though. This is a game for completionists. For players who like to winkle out every detail and every nuance. It is for gamers who don’t mind plugging through the same hallways and rooms, because there’ll be some other weird item to find or slice of dialogue to hear. The game has extensive screens for tracking everything you find. I get the appeal of this, and I even find it compelling myself to a certain point… but it isn’t for me. I made time for an RPG, but I didn’t make time for the most demanding collect-a-thon I’ve ever heard of. So I did something I’m not proud of:

I used a guide.

Not just for one hint. Not just to find some devilishly well-hidden item. I mean I used it EXTENSIVELY.

It happens every now and then that I’ll hit up an online guide or walkthrough when I’ve reached my limit on trying to figure out an objective. That’s probably my most common reason. I can’t get my head around the various clues given in the game, if in fact there are any clues—some games as we know, don’t always work logically—so I hit up some online help to connect me to the next step. Less frequently I might look up tips or strategies to beating a troublesome level or boss. But in the main, I consider it pretty easy to get too much help and spoil the experience. So I try to be judicious. This is really the way most mature gamers use helps or walkthroughs, but it has been a bitch to explain to my son, who doesn’t understand how figuring shit out is ‘more fun’ than having your hand held through the whole thing. I’ve resorted to hazing and sarcasm to keep him away from guides.

If I’m going to use help in any significant way, I’ll buy the actual printed official book and use it AFTER I’ve completed whatever basic story mode or campaign is the backbone of the game. As I said, I’m not a collector-maniac in video games, but sometimes it is cool to continue to poke around for stuff. So for some games like Bayonetta, Vanquish, or Brutal Legend, I liked the game worlds so much that it was fun to buy a guide, and explore to get to previously unseen areas or find items or learn to play the game better or in unconventional ways. I don’t think looking under every rock and tree is loads of fun, but having the guides gives me a bit more incentive to spend some extra time in a game world without the tedium of endless clueless searching. I also frequently buy guides for fighting games. For some reason I just prefer my move lists in front of me in print, rather than pausing the game to look it up onscreen.

I avoided buying Saturn Baroque because I didn’t want to eke through it inch by inch using a guide to get around the Japanese…but that feels like what I did with the English version anyway! As I was playing, early on it became apparent I would not have the patience to work the details of this game out on my own. So I went to a walkthrough intending to just learn how the items, item combination, and inventory system worked.

But as I played and discovered that every single tidbit of information (necessary and otherwise) was going to be delivered in the same obtuse, miserly manner, I caved and started fishing out what my actual goals and objectives were. Who to talk to, where they were located, and what item to give them. I managed to avoid actual plot spoilers, so the central desire to find out what ‘the story’ was about remained for me, but that was about the only discovery aspect I got to experience. As much as I hate using a guide it is hard for me to say this actually ruined the game for me. I would like to stumble upon meaningful events on my own, but the amount of play time required for this was just more than I could possibly afford. So I sort of reduced the actual play mechanics to the same level of directness that almost every other RPG employs. ‘Take this magic book to the wizard who lives in the tower’ might be something an NPC would say to you in your traditional role-playing game, so I kinda forced that onto my game of Baroque. I’m not thrilled to admit it, but as compelling as the story is, I would NOT have stuck with the game if left entirely to my own devices. Life’s too fucking short.

In hindsight, I can now see a sort of ‘play formula’ that I could’ve used to get through the game without a guide to the objectives. It’d still require that the player know more about the basic mechanics than the manual or the game really tells you, but I could write up a breakdown that would leave all the surprises and discovery intact while giving the player a better shove out the gate. And in fact, some people have done this; they just aren’t quite ‘explanatory’ enough, I don’t think. Maybe I should start up a page on this blog for this purpose. ‘KOG’s Truly Useful Guide To Baroque’.

Here’s an odd final note: Like some RPGs (and a few other types of games), Baroque has a post-campaign scenario, an endgame. If a player completes these epilogues it’ll usually net you the complete, true, or additional ending. Chrono Trigger is pretty well known for this, allowing you to take your fabulously leveled-up protagonist back through the story, now able to take on the final boss at his earlier appearances in the game and so get a different ending, depending on where in the chronology you destroy him.

After Baroques’ credits roll, you strangely find yourself resurrected yet again. Ostensibly, this would help the collecto-freaks this game caters to continue to work at filling in all the item slots in the database, but supposedly if you accomplish such-and-such-and-such (yes, I used the guide to see if there were, in fact, any goals in this endgame) you actually bring some dead NPCs back to life and redirect the course of events again. The such-and-such-and such are actually pretty complicated, involving hunting down dozens of items and bringing them out of the dungeon over the course of multiple runs. So I figured that was pretty much all she wrote for my continued involvement. As I said, this game makes fanatic collecting a literal part of the game, and there’s this huge stretch ahead that I didn’t really want to indulge. But on a whim, I thought I’d just check out the dungeon one last time, seeing what was different now that I’d ‘saved the world’.

Not much was. BUT. At the bottom of the dungeon, I got the dialogue saying I’d triggered the final set of events. I didn’t DO the such-and-such-and-such that the guide says you need to do. I just played as well as I could and then went back in one more time for old times’ sake. So just to test if I really was in the final stretch, I entered the dungeon and headed right for the floor the guide indicated would house the first set of ‘final’ enemies. And there they were. I was loaded up on invincibility items (just in case) and it wound up that I needed them. Then I actually killed the creatures. So now I find myself somewhat jazzed at the idea of actually completing the full story arc, which seemed like a lark only a day ago. I don’t know how it happened, but I am only three or four dungeon runs from finishing the narrative aspects of the game. One run for each set of the final enemies. It seemed like I was going to have to resort to reading the dialogue online or watching Youtube clips of the final section, but I’m glad I held off on doing that.

In a day or two, the game should be done, and I’ll feel really fortunate that somehow, using a guide, I manage to play this intriguing, difficult game while divesting myself of all the bullshit in it that would’ve made me throw in the towel ages ago. Despite my guide-guilt I feel like it’s a really good game, but there’s so much about it that makes it difficult to just outright recommend.

(image kyped from Daily Record UK)

You Remember that Carl Douglas Song? Yeah...

I'll maintain that the new Mortal Kombat has the best single player experience of any fighting game since Soul Calibur 2... maybe the best ever.

But 300 (yes, THREE HUNDRED) levels to the Challenge Tower mode is a bit much. The game already has a several hour long story mode. It has lots of fighters to toy with and play through the basic one-player fight 'ladder' and even non-fighting game activities, the Test Your Might and Test Your Sight sections.

I'm up to challenge 83 or so. Some of the challenges are easy and quick, some take a bit of time to get the hang of. But even if I spend an hour a day (and at this point they aren't so engrossing as to spend more than that) which would get about ten challenges done, that's over twenty days to completion.

THREE WEEKS. Holy crap. I want value for money, and Mortal Kombat has more than already delivered... but jeezo pete that's just too much. Seems like a dumb thing to complain about but this one of the few games where I could genuinely have enjoyed having 'done everything'. Lots of neat unlockables and generous gamerpoints.

I'll still pick away at this, but I've already found myself sliding back to spending more time with Super Street Fighter IV. That game doesn't have nearly the one-player content, but the actual fighting engine is something I like a lot better. Street Fighter IV (not Super) basically triggered the new modern happy-time for 2D fighting games. New titles (as opposed to re-releases or HD remakes) we've seen on home consoles:

King of Fighters XII
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift
Tatsunoko vs Capcom
Street Fighter IV
Super Street Fighter IV
Marvel vs Capcom 3
Arcana Heart 3
Mortal Kombat (2011)

Upcoming still:

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition
King of Fighters XIII
Street Fighter X Tekken

I'm sure I missed something in the lists above too!

Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Mortal Kombat have definitely taken attention and traffic away from SSFIV, but the fact that Street Fighter has another update coming and is absolutely the best balanced technical fighting game means I probably have great timing to be learning and re-learning my Street Fighter chops.

Online competition is brutal for reasons mentioned in a previous post, and it is only going to get worse. But at least I find myself getting better, even if it only by inches.

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.

Star-Struck



Sega really only ever marketed one video game console successfully; the Sega Genesis here in the states or The Mega Drive as it is known most everywhere else. Every other console they’ve launched has either lived in the shadow of a more successful machine or it has just flat tanked without really giving the competition much of a fight.

Sega's machines have been good, with really good games available. I don’t have much experience with the Master System or the Game Gear, but the Saturn and the Dreamcast have seen many MANY hours of play time in my house. Many games on Sega consoles were exclusives or were the best versions to own. But Sega made serious errors in marketing, timing, or the direction for their products.
I was definitely a Sega adherent at one point. Probably not up to the level of fanboy by today’s definition of the term, because while I definitely kept track of who had what advantage when Sega participated in the so-called console wars, I didn’t actually diss any other machines. I didn’t own a Super Nes or a TurboGrafx-16 during the Genesis era, and I didn’t own a PS1 during the Saturn era because I simply couldn’t afford multiple consoles and still buy as many games as I wanted to. But I thought the console-bashing was pointless since it was the games that mattered. My only negative feelings about any other system or fanbase was the little spurt of envy whenever a game I really wanted came out exclusively for a machine I didn’t own.

Since then I’ve picked up a PS1 and downloaded SNES and TG16 games on the Wii Virtual Console. Sega got out of the hardware business when they pulled the plug on the Dreamcast, but they are still a software powerhouse, releasing games for every system currently sold, which would, of course, include former rivals.

Amongst the parade of failures from Sega, sits one machine that seems particularly derided. The SegaCD (or Mega-CD as it is known in Europe and Japan). This console… console add-on really since you have to have a Genesis/Mega Drive to make it work… embodied everything that could be wrong with a video game console all in one shot. It was expensive. Its major marketing push was a new-ish gimmicky game tech (like Kinect, but in this case full-motion video or FMV). It promised hitherto unseen graphic and aural heights that weren’t actually new or were not frequently accessed by developers. Etc etc. You can read all about the system’s tragic history online, no need for me to reiterate that shit in detail. Ironically, with the SegaCD and the 32X (a plug-in for the Genesis) Sega essentially demonstrated that add-ons designed to boost your system specs really don’t work. Since this time, hardware companies don’t usually try to extend the life of dying consoles with upgrades, they simply come out with an all-new machine.

Looking past all the hype of the time, what the SegaCD offered was really an opportunity for bigger, more expansive Genesis games. The TurboGrafx-16 already had a CD-based edition, but not much was done with that beyond upgraded audio… real instrument based soundtracks instead of the bleepy-bloop music of rival consoles. So at the very least you’d get ‘bigger’ sound. The SuperNES had more colors on display than the Genesis (though it was slower to move the graphics) and hardware-based scaling, so Sega fans were expecting ‘bigger’ visuals to rival that console while maintaining the Genesis characteristic play speed. The storage capacity of a CD meant that you could have massive numbers of levels or huge casts of characters.

But in reality, this was rarely ever accomplished. The SegaCD WAS capable of many of the claims, but exploiting it was beyond the capabilities, desires, or budgets of many game companies. The idea of having an orchestral score in your game sounds all well and good but who is going to pay for that? Where’s the money coming from when formerly you were paying a small-time musician for some chiptunes? That's not to say there were no good games. There were quite a few. Some, like Sonic CD, delivered the goods in graphics, sounds, and size/variety. Others, like Android Assault, are great games, but could’ve just as easily been Genesis cartridge games apart from the soundtrack.

I actually own a number of the better SegaCD games, and really the whole point of this post is to draw some attention to a particularly good one that I’ve gotten back into. Recently I bought a Genesis with a hardware modification to allow it to output S-video and stereo sound. Hooking my old Genesis up to my current hi-definition TV setup was an exercise in disappointment and eyestrain. Every other old console had had cables upgraded to look good. Even Genesis Virtual Console games running from the Wii looked fine. Never mind trying to get my kids to understand why the Genesis was so great, when they couldn’t get past the fuzzy ghosting visuals. So the mod made a huge change and since the SegaCD outputs through the Genesis, its graphics carried right along in the same improvement.

This sudden leap up in fidelity caused something of a Genesis renaissance between my kids and myself. Suddenly Mickey Castle of Illusion and all the old Sonic games were wondrous displays of hand drawn animation goodness. And on the SegaCD, Earthworm Jim, Robo Aleste, and that kid and dog from Panic! live again. Totally badass. And the game I wanted most to get back to was Core Design’s Soul Star.

Core Design, famous for inventing Tomb Raider, seemed to be one of the few companies willing and able to realize the potential in the Sega CD. Battlecorps, Thunderstrike, and Soul Star are all fast-scrolling 3D showcases for the console. I like all of them, but Soul Star is a particular favorite, and in all the years I’ve owned it, I never completed the damn thing.

Consider THAT particular goal accomplished. Now that I have played it several times, and finished it on all difficulty settings I’m appreciating this game all over again. Soul Star is a third person 3D shooter. You move your ship up, down, left and right in the foreground while firing at targets coming at you or moving across the background. How your ship moves and controls varies with the stages, but you generally have the same powerups; several different types of weapons including a screen-clearing 'bomb' and replenishments for your shield.

Core Design was an English developer, and with most of their games a British aesthetic is very apparent. Soul Star is different. It is a speedy sprite scaling game that looks, at times like Sega’s old coin-op Space Harrier or the lesser-known Taito game Night Striker. But look closer and you’ll see that far from the ground stages having simple checkerboard or roadway patterns for terrain, many locations have sophisticated ‘skins’… like a texture map laid down on the flat surface. From that terrain artwork various sprite obstacles, rocks, buildings, or turrets, stand up appropriately from the surface. It is really quite impressive to see it in action. Check a Youtube video. Also many of the enemies have a decidedly 80s anime, that is to say Japanese, look to them… particularly referencing artists like Masamune Shiro of Appleseed fame. Almost every level has some glistening humanoid mech as a mid-sized enemy to comes skating along the ground towards your ship firing the whole time. The use of color also goes quite a bit beyond the ‘gritty’ colors schemes that try to be grounded in reality in western games. Much of the game has an almost painterly approach to the skies and starfield backgrounds.

In fact, there are tons of little aesthetic touches that seem commonplace now, but were just awesome to me back in the day. The huge tractor beam animated in the sky of the water planet. Debris falling from the ceiling of a hovercraft level as a self-destruct timer counts down. Flying over the surface of the sand planet, after you’ve passed through the initial wave of popcorn enemies and ground installations, a giant carrier appears in the sky and starts dropping shit. First these mechanical ground worms that try to collide with you, then mines, then shooty robots. Periodically the carrier itself has a big lens iris open on its hull to shoot little needle bursts of light at you from a mile away. Then it takes off and you enter another field of turrets and rocks. All the levels have distinct ‘sections’ like this that flow from one to the other. In the space levels you might have to pass through an asteroid field, and then a large orbital construct, before eventually descending to a planet… and it all comes at you in one contiguous action with small almost unnoticeable blips of load time from the disc.

And then there’s the soundtrack. Almost any mention of this game is going to include the awesome soundtrack. The sound effects are okay… but the music is outstanding, really setting the mood. In any other game, music this fine might push an okay game up to the realm of good, but this game doesn’t even need the help, it is just the icing on an already delicious cake.

If there’s anything to actually complain about (for me) in the game it is probably that the system gets overwhelmed by all the shit going on, very common complaint about 3D games that can be heard even today about recent releases. It doesn’t make the game unplayable but the stuttering frame rate can cause a bit of confusion when it comes to dodging enemy bullets. Also your ‘hit box’ is big. Really big. In fact you can be hit by stuff that just comes really close, not always seeming to need to hit your sprite. Your ship is fairly speedy so it isn’t too hard to put extra margin for error when you move out of the way… but in some levels where you are slower—as a hovercraft or walker—this can get pretty annoying. When piloting the slow free-roaming levels I frequently adopted a strategy of clearing out most or all of the enemies from long distance before moving in to accomplish the level’s goal. Some reveiwers have complained about the controls, particularly for the hovercraft form, but I didn't have a problem. Once I got use to them I found myself making pretty intricate maneuvers in the thing.

It may just be me that thinks this game is the cat’s ass. It seems to get pretty good reviews, frequently classed as equal or better than Starfox. But it also seems, most of the time, if I get hyped up on a game, it’s gonna be really expensive to acquire… owing to lots of other people thinking it’s the cat’s ass too. But from what I can tell Soul Star can be had pretty cheaply.

It’d probably take more than one good game to make tracking down and buying a SegaCD really worth it, but Soul Star is really good first choice. Maybe so good it is almost misleading. As I said, most games didn’t come close to pushing the hardware or taking advantage of its capabilities. This game is so spectacular it might make most everything else you’d buy something of a let-down.

(pic stolen from Sega-16)

A Wonderland Of Violence

Holy shit. Golf N’Stuff in Ventura, California still exists! I’d dearly love to drop in and see what that place is like now.


Playing Super Street Fighter IV on my Xbox 360 has really gotten me nostalgic for the arcade ‘olden days’. I’ve actually been a bit choked up at times. I’m getting the same feeling watching the new Captain America trailer that just hit, but that’s a different, though similarly nostalgic story. The source here is SSFIV’s fight request option when you are playing Arcade Mode. You play through the one player game as normal, but people seeking online matches can drop in on your game, just like an opponent could walk up, drop in quarters or tokens, and push the 2P button on an arcade cabinet. The other night I had so many fight requests coming through I barely made any headway on the 1-player game. Which was fine. I was just playing Arcade Mode to practice and kill time waiting for matches.

I mention Golf N’Stuff in the opening paragraph because when I think back on the good old days of arcade gaming that place is the one with the clearest memories for me. There are specific games at other locations that also mean a lot to my history, but their respective arcades sort of blur and aren’t so identifiable.

Back in 1990, I lived in California. I’d been there a couple of years, and had been hired by Games Workshop to help man their store in Santa Monica… effectively the first one ever on the west coast. I worked in Santa Monica but lived in Ventura, a commute of about 55 minutes through Malibu. I owned a NES at home and had bought a Genesis pretty much on its release day in 1989, but I was a player from the arcades first and foremost. So having home consoles didn’t stop me from hitting the game places, of which Golf N’Stuff was probably the best that I knew.

Golf N’Stuff was/is based around a huge miniature golf course with very elaborate setpieces for most of the holes. And a pretty big go-kart track. It also had an arcade with the usual hoop shot or skeeball games, an air hockey table and A LOT of quarter munchers. I don’t know what all is in that part of the complex now, but their website says 100 arcade games, and they list many of the riding, driving, and shooting games that have big hardware with them… the kind of arcade games that dominate Dave & Busters or Jillian’s. Back in my memories of the place, the machinery on video games rarely got more elaborate than a periscope, mounted guns, or a steering wheel. Hopefully, Golf N’Stuff also has the good ol’ arcade cabs with nothing more than sticks and buttons too. Or maybe a trackball. Of course I ran through the miniature golf course, more than once. It was way too big and fun not to. I drove the go-karts. But it was the arcade I went back to repeatedly… frequently just going to the park for that.

They had tons of games. My first time there was overwhelming. Had to try most everything once. They had three-screen Darius AND Ninja Warriors machines. They had standbys like Rush ‘n’ Attack, Shinobi, and Galaga ’88.. There was the super-tech game at the time, Hard Drivin’. After the newness wore off, I settled down to just a fraction of the games, putting a lot of hours in on Space Harrier, Outrun, and Spy Hunter.

I think the game I played the most was Strider. I was determined to 1CC this game. The closest I got to that was clearing it on the second life of my second credit. I just couldn’t get through that last upside down section, with the moving spikes and robots before the last boss rush, without losing two lives or more. I’m still going to insist there’s some luck involved in getting through that part unscathed.

But there, in my memory, near the middle of the main room was this cabinet with an attract mode depicting one on one combat. It looked a bit like Karate Champ, except mounted on this shelf to the front of the cabinet were these big rubbery looking buttons the size of dessert plates. You used a joystick to move per standard, but then you smacked these big-ass buttons and the force detected determined the power of the punch or kick from your onscreen avatar. This was Street Fighter, people. The original. Later versions of this game switched out the giganto-buttons for a six-button layout in standard-sized components, but THIS is the one I remember:

http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=street-fighter&page=detail&id=2647

I was NOT very good at the game. I don’t think I ever played it against another person actually. It was not a busy game, and I think part of that owed to the fact that the act of looking like a fool whaling away on a game hadn’t yet come into vogue the way it has with Samba de Amigo or the various Bemani games. Karaoke Syndrome. I tried it a few times, got a few victories, but never stuck with it enough to get decent. You couldn’t just credit feed to the end if you weren’t good enough to beat the AI opponents. I remember what Sagat, the boss, looks like from the game, so I guess I probably got that far.

Eventually, Games Workshop asked me to move across country to the HQ in Baltimore, Maryland. So my visits to Golf N’Stuff came to an end. But not before a thunderbolt struck. Street Fighter II. I only got a few games in over what was probably my last time there. There were crowds around this machine. All the serious players seemed to want to get in on this. All the combos, the specials, the tiers and matchups hadn’t been worked out yet. The internet wasn’t pervasive enough for players to have read up on all the strats before seeing the game. I tried Ryu and Guile. But I pretty much fell in love with Chun-Li.

Over in Baltimore, I never really found an arcade that could compete with Golf N’Stuff. The closest thing was a Sega Center that was in Towson north of the city. Arcade machines usually were found in the closet-sized arcades in shopping malls or in the lobbies of movie theaters. But there was always a version of Street Fighter II (CE, Turbo, Hyper Fighting, whatever) available to play. And usually already stocked with players, observers, and on-deck opponents. I remember vividly now how it was to switch out back and forth with other people waiting to play. Not a lot of words spoken. I rarely saw the same players from one day to the next. There were no organized meetings that I could detect. But that didn’t matter. It was intense. Stories from old players about that time are everywhere on the internet. Many of the tournament champs that arose then are still active experts today.

We seem to have no arcades left these days. Home consoles changed the way we game. I didn’t just give up fighting games altogether as arcades got scarce. I went along with the times, got into other genres more popular on home platforms, and just kept plugging away at the one-player-versus-CPU mode of 2D fighters like Samurai Shodown IV or 3D fighters like Soul Calibur. I just sort of kept at it off-and-on as the mood struck me. I’m sure many other arcade enthusiasts drifted out of fighting games altogether without a ready supply of human opponents. With the passing of the arcades and their respective scenes, game genres with fat ties to arcades (fighting, shmups, light guns, etc.) have been largely relegated to niche corners of the video game universe.

But fighting games kept being produced even if the customer base was a small cult. Online play has to fill the competitive void for most players, but it is dominated by massive multiplayer online games and first person shooter arenas. Every now and then SNK would release some special volume of collected King of Fighter games, or a young studio would re-tool a Capcom classic for the HD-generation to download over XBLA or PSN.

For fighting games that niche-yness changed with Capcom’s recent decision to update and revisit their Street Fighter series for real. Street Fighter IV, released in 2008, was a big budget return to the most popular 2D fighting series of them all. Gathering in many of the old favorites and pitting them against new faces, Capcom decided to go with polygonal fighters (like Soul Calibur or Tekken) instead of the venerable hand-drawn sprite approach in portraying all the characters. However they also made two critical decisions that ensured the blockbuster sales that followed. First, the characters are polygonal but have rendered in a very detailed, almost painterly way. Features like hands and feet are more exaggerated compared to their old portrayals… it looked odd to me at first… but there’s no denying the attention to details, and the artistry involved in the shading and modeling. More importantly, Capcom kept the mechanics within a 2D plane. The characters are 3D models, but the camera only moves around them during certain special moves… for drama’s sake really. The game is played along only two axes just like it always has. So you have all the detail and flashiness of a modern game with the tried and true delivery of traditional Street Fighter.

Super Street Fighter IV

Capcom released an update with some tweaks to the mechanics and moves, and several new characters in 2009, with Super Street Fighter IV. Although I bought SFIV, it wasn’t until Super that I really found myself trying to get back into Street Fighter mode. And that only just recently. I’m kind of a latecomer. I practiced quite a bit with good old Chun-Li and some with Fei Long… the Bruce Lee lookalike that I never used in the arcades, but that had grown on me in the various home versions of Street Fighter II and Street Fighter Alpha. I really like the new mechanics and this feels like the most rigorously balanced of any modern fighting game.

When I decided to go online and give versus play a go, I got several rude awakenings. I already knew I wasn’t that good. It had been long enough since I’d played any Street Fighter game, and there were enough differences, that I didn’t expect to be kicking ass. I also knew there’d be ruthless people out there, spamming difficult-to-defend moves, and doing anything to win. That’s fine. That’s part of the game. It is an old fighting game tradition that when someone shows up with some move or combination of moves that supposedly breaks the game, a veteran will come along and take them down a peg. In the absence of real-life experts to demonstrate this, the internet is full of advice and videos and discussions covering this very issue. If you become skilled enough you will be able to handle even seemingly ‘unfair’ characters or moves.

But one thing I didn’t expect was experienced players masquerading as n00bs. I just didn’t consider it prior to playing online. Why would someone who is obviously ‘good’ want to start a whole new account just so they’d get matched up with new suck-ass players and crush them? What would be the point of that? Yet it happened numerous times in my first out. I was bewildered. Here is a guy with zero ranking, but I can’t lay a glove on him and he’s obviously using sophisticated tactics with ease. Surely someone that good would have more pride, wouldn’t they? I have since come to understand that some decent players go to the trouble of starting new gamertags specifically so they try out new characters or new strategies and they want non-expert players to do it with. Someone who’ll have less predictability than the CPU, but will still leave them plenty of openings to try stuff out. I can’t say I respect this very much, but it is what it is. The matching service ‘thinks’ they are novices and so it puts them up against people like me, where they proceed to rip me one before I can blink.

The other shock was losing ranking points when beaten by a much higher ranked player. Before doing this I figured if you played against a MUCH better player (as determined by their points, there’s nothing telling the system about a masquerading expert) you wouldn’t go DOWN in rank. Hell, if you did well you might even gain some rank despite the loss. Nope. If you lose, you drop points. Yeah, if you lose to someone mighty, your points loss is less. But there seems to be very little ‘incentive’ to how the losses and gains work. I’d have created the system to be much more dynamic and encouraging. Even allowing some gains if you manage to do well or even win a round against a vastly superior player… which I did do but it mattered fuck-all to the ranking points. I’m sure a lot of hardcore players think this is fine, and don’t really care if the n00bs (forgetting they were new at one time) ever claw their way up from the ranks of pathetic-dom.

I have since adopted the philosophy (similar to real martial arts actually) that you can learn from someone who beats the shit out of you and to not take the ranking points very seriously. They show progress and all, but getting hung up on the points takes the fun out of it. It’s supposed to be a game. The game has a facility for matching you up with opponents close to your skill level but I wasn’t having much luck with that. That’s what I get for starting so late. It wouldn’t hook me up with other newbies. The lobbies are full of people that are all way better than I am. So if I set the matching to just take whatever I could get… BZANG!… ass handed to me.

After a few days of this discouragement, but before I’d learned to wax philosophical about it, I read someone’s suggestion of using the ‘fight request’ feature in Arcade Mode. So the next night I did that. I started the game with Fei Long on single player, to practice with him against the CPU, with my request parameters set to ‘same skill level’.

This worked out pretty well. As I said at the beginning of this post, it has been, to me, a really fun, nostalgic reawakening of that old arcade excitement. You’re sitting there trying to beat the AI opponent when suddenly ‘Here Comes A New Challenger’ splits out across the screen. You get a chance to re-select your character and his or her ultra, but then you’re off and fighting. I kind of wish when they showed you the gamertag prior to the match you could also see their ranking, but in the main, the ‘same skill level’ setting in this context worked pretty well… much better than it did when I was manually requesting same-skill fights outside of Arcade Mode.

And I’m winning more matches. I still suck, but I’m winning a bit more. I have the hardest time with the relatively new characters… or the ones originating from Street Fighter III which I have less experience with than SFII or SF Alpha. And even when I lose, it is a pretty priceless feeling to wake a better player up by beating them in a round and making them work harder for their victory.

Getting out there and fighting online is an exercise in ego-check for sure. It was pretty frustrating at first, but there have been a few people I had to send a kudo to for being good sports. More than one guy let me have a decent round (without just handing it to me) before wiping up the floor with balls. I think you can do what you have to in these games, and I’m not going to cry over tricky moves and tactics, but a little sportsmanship when you obviously dominate is a pretty decent thing to hand out.

Now that Marvel Vs Capcom 3 just came out and the new generation Mortal Kombat is on the horizon, I may find my pool of potential opponents shrinking considerably. I don’t think it will stay that way. SSFIV is the only one I really feel like being competitive with. Something to do with my old history with it, something about how they’ve worked so hard to make it balanced. MvC and Mortal Kombat have their appeal… I will buy and play both. SSFIV seems to have rather opened a floodgate and now lots of 2D fighters are starting to come out. These new hot fighting games are super-flashy or gory, but they’re usually relegated to novelty status by the most hardcore fighting players, who play them to see everything and unlock everyone… maybe prove their online dominance… and then gravitate back to the more technical shit like King of Fighters and Street Fighter.

I’m not a hardcore fighting game player by any stretch, but I’ll probably do the same thing. Enjoy the other fighters, but always come back to Golf N’Stuff in my living room with Street Fighter.