Not Without Its Faults pt 1

I’ve ploughed through two more games recently, seeing through to completion both Disney’s Epic Mickey for the Wii, and Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team for the Xbox 360. Each of these games presents a case study in defied expectations.

Epic Mickey is a big budget, high-profile release from Warren Spector’s Junction Point Studios with some collaboration from Disney animation and Pixar Studios. The idea originally was to reboot interest in Mickey Mouse as a character, trying to shed some of his goody-goody image and go back to his roots where he tended to have more curiosity and mischief in his makeup. Mickey’s bad judgement in Fantasia might seem out of place to modern folks used to his squeaky clean image as Disney’s figurehead, but a look at his cartoon shorts from early in his career shows a much more troublesome mouse.

At any rate, all this high-concept thinking, pushed around with high-power talent and technical ability should’ve resulted in a game for the ages. That’s what the hype machine was saying prior to the game’s release (of course) and nostalgic as I was to see THAT old Mickey (not to mention some of the other characters being touted) I bought into it. Once reviews got actual hands-on time, they were less than fulsome in their praise. But I thought they were just strung out on dope, not really ‘getting’ how the awesome concept should override petty concerns like the odd bad camera angle or repetitious quest. My kids saw the ads and really wanted to play a game that plopped happy lil’ Mickey Mouse into such a Tim Burton-looking game world. So even if the game turned out to be not-so-good to me, they’d probably love it (not being so picky). I was so confident they’d love it, I bought the guide at the same time. I’d insist they NOT use the guide for their initial play-through if possible, but have it around to manage the huge collect-a-thon that I knew the game was going to be after they’d beaten it. And the book is pretty nice, a decent collectable in itself.

Well, I was right about the kids. They do love it. My son is on his second playthrough. My daughter hasn’t finished it, but only because she’s been really distracted by DDR. She just broke her dance pad (wore it out actually), so now she has no excuse. But who gives a crap what they think? They’re just dumb kids. This blog is what I think.

Epic Mickey is pretty damn good looking. The visuals are amongst the best I’ve seen on the Wii. Maybe not quite Muramasa great, but pretty far up there. Being a third-person 3D platformer, the graphics are all polygonal but they have a very moody hand-painted style. And the soundtrack is terrific. Composer Jim Dooley did a great job of coming up with original tunes and riffs on well-known songs (like It’s A Small World and the Pirates of the Carribean leit-motif) and imbuing them all with a Danny Elfman tinkle-tinkle creepiness. If you’ve seen any Tim Burton film that Danny has scored you know the kind of music I’m talking about. The game is not as dark and edgy as the ads made it sound, mostly because the game is almost non-violent (little in the way of real threats for most of the game takes a lot of edge off), BUT the aesthetic aspects and parts of the narrative (lost and forgotten cartoon characters) do imbue a lot of atmosphere and melancholy into the game.

It also does make Mickey an adventuresome hero once again. Plumbing the archives for the old Mickey and bringing along Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and plenty of other little-remembered characters was a great idea. Mickey has to own up to his mischief and deal with its serious consequences. You do this by performing tasks (a lot) and defeating minions and bosses (not so much) in order to undo YOUR original catastrophic mishap.

The controls worked fine for me. I’ve never really understood flat out hostility or antipathy for the wiimote controls. For older games come down the Virtual Console pipe I’ll use a joystick or the classic controller. But for modern Wii-designed games I never seem to have a problem using the waggle stick. For running, sneaking, jumping, and pointing at the screen to stream paint or thinner, the standard controls were fine.

But even with all this, it turns out much of the critical sniping is spot-on with my own opinion. The camera IS pretty effin' bad. I read a lot of 'kills you during critical jumps' complaints, but actually since you can have go pretty slowly and carefully you almost always have time to swing the camera around with the d-pad. If anything, actual onscreen visibility was more of a problem when making harrowing jumps. The game is dark, so the questions of whether you need to jump or where you could safely land seemed to crop up periodically. My problem with the camera was during combat. It tries to keep the same perspective as it does during most of the exploration time, but this is not the best choice in a fight in this particular game, especially where multiple enemies are involved. Honestly, the camera chooses not to be helpful even in battles with a single large beastie. I spent more effort trying to run and keep the camera facing the foe, than I did dodging or shooting paint. The battles aren't actually all that hard, but making the view work for you is an additional challenge that just did NOT need to be there. If I'd had a say in this particular aspect of the game, it'd have been to probably zoom out and up to give a higher, more encompassing isometric view, sort of like Powerstone 2. You'd sacrifice some detail during battles, but you'd know where everyone was at all times, and not have to fuck with camera facing. Again, this is a fault that is manageable, but because you're under duress in the battles, managing the camera while trying to dodge and shoot will seem a lot like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time while driving a car in traffic.

Even THAT is actually not the games biggest fault though. Some reviewers refer to 'tedious fetch-quests'. And boy are they right. That's all this game really is. I bitched about the fights up above, but they only constitute a fraction... a frustrating fraction... of the overall game time. Everyone in the game has some goshdamn thing or other that they need you to do. And you will back track over and over again, to make things happen for the NPCs. And many of the deeds have multiple layers. So you might have to ferry ingredients back and forth between two locations more than once, or have the same mission repeat but with a bit more challenge. You learn several of the levels and their connecting 2D stages far more than you'll want to. You'll be able to navigate 'em with a blindfold on. Bafflingly (and also frustrating) there are a number of levels you CANNOT get back to. So if you fuck up a quest, you're done. I don't have a problem with that, but trying not to use the guide, I didn't know if I exited certain levels I'd never be able to get back... because many levels you can. Ugh. Points I guess for so much non-violent challenge. But it's a challenge just staying awake or maintaining interest in monotonous tasks, finding another flower or rounding up more annoying Bunny Children.

What really gets me about the fetch-quests though, is not the number of them, the repitition or the happy banality. Its the 'guide-itis'. This is where a game contains a puzzle that cannot be solved with normal logic or without a working knowledge of what the games' designers expected from you strategy-wise.

Spoiler alert: Here's an example. At one point the game wants you to find 'power boxes' scattered around a level. These are more or less analagous to the electric meter that every home (in the USA at least) has located on the outside of it. The game shows you one on the outside of a house-- blue with a voltage symbol on it. Then it says 'find three more'. So naturally I go looking all over the other houses. On the back of the buildings, like the one shown. But when that fails to turn up anything, I figure it's a game so they might be stuck on roofs or cornices or something. So I get on top of buildings and look. This turns up an additional one. I cannot find the final two anywhere. After way too much time spent looking, I crack open the guide.

One is located behind in an alcove INSIDE A WALL. The other is in a pit UNDER SOMEONE'S LAWN. What the fuck? Yeah, I could've found them... IF I'D SPRAYED THE ENTIRE LEVEL WITH THINNER... to uncover these hidden spaces. Another time I got stuck, and the answer this time was a hard-to-see route that again, YOU SPRAY WITH THINNER TO UNCOVER. After those two times, I never had another problem finding shit, because the answer is SPRAY EVERYTHING WITH THINNER. There are no hints from the NPCs, no 'fault' in the walls or ground like almost every other video game has in similar circumstances to keep you from hitting every possible spot on a stage. Nope. You pretty much have to thin ever goshdamn spot that looks like it can be thinned. And not only was this tedious, but it was antithetical to how I was trying to play the game. I was kind of playing like Mickey was unhappy that he caused the 'thinner disaster' that started the bad stuff, and created the villain. So I tried to be as positive and lean toward the constructive 'paint' end of things. Covering a whole level in thinner was just NOT what I wanted Mickey to do, purely from a character standpoint, let alone it's just dumb and arbitrary. End spoilers.

So I went to the guide twice to help me get on with the game. I'm not proud about it, but I maintain that I just couldn't get my head around what the game was after from me, the player. AFTER that, no difficulties. I didn't even try to do every quest that came my way. About 60% of the way through the game, the endless whining needs of the game world just stopped mattering. Some of the quests even 'improve' the ending cutscene, but I just didn't have the stamina.

The cutscenes were good, though I'll agree with the majority of critics that not having them fully voiced was odd. As much of a budget as this game obviously had, you'd think having Mickey and company talk would've been a no-brainer... at least during the cutscenes if not during all the in-game conversations. But no, it's all exclamatory oohs and ahs and the occasional grunt of effort. That's it.



Whatever the faults, the game's final act was pretty cool and I'm glad I stuck it out. That game becomes much more what I was hoping the whole game would be like actually. More focused on play skill with some timing on the jumps and peril from enemies while you are trying to perform other tasks. There's a fake-out with the final boss that works better than most final boss fake-outs.

I have NO desire to run through this game again and find more shit. I did do that for Brutal Legend and a few other games, but this game just emphasizes the wrong things for me. It certainly isn't the lack of violence or relative lack of difficulty. Not all games need to be as bloody as Mortal Kombat or as challenging as Ketsui. At first I welcomed the change of pace afforded by Epic Mickey. But it got old pretty quickly. It is hard for me even to say this game is great for little kids and their patience for fetch quests because the game is so damn long, and it does have that camera. My own kids like it, but they are nearly in middle school. I think younger gamers would get totally bogged down on the first run-through.

Unless they have the guide. But you didn't hear that from me.

Times of Excess

Video game players who've been around a long time, like old-timers in any culture, frequently pine for the good old days... frequently its those never-to-be-equaled times when 2D was the order of the day and your-choice-of-dead-system ruled the kingdom.

But honestly we've never had it so good. I've done my share of cranky old bitching with the rest of 'em, but we are living in a golden age game-wise. When I was a kid, I'd have let a pack of grimy gnomes pull half of my teeth out if I could've had access to all the amazing shit players have today. There are times like, uh NOW, when I think gamers, journalists and players both, are almost assholes for complaining.

Some things were the same then as they are now. There are still cheesy or cheating players. The companies ARE out to make a buck and sometimes they do things or make decisions that suck. Some design choices could've been implemented a lot better. Games with frustrating difficulty.

But we are such absolute spoiled little shits. I mean I look around at what I have... what my kids have. Maybe not everyone has the gaming setup my family does... some have more, some have less obviously. Currently I have a large plasma screen with multiple consoles hooked up (through nothing less sharp than s-video) to two switch boxes, including a Neo Geo AES which was an untouchably expensive system when it came out. My kids each have an LED flatscreen in their rooms with my daughter having a Wii attached to hers, and my son having an Xbox 360 and PS2 on his. Both of them also have DSi handhelds, and a box with most generations of Nintendo portables ready to hand. Currently they are enamored with iOS games because they've each gotten an iTouch this summer. All the games... and these number in the hundreds by now... are all readily available, neatly arranged on shelves organised by system and whether it has been 'beaten' or not. Compared to most 'civilian' households this is a bit deranged, but compared to many homes where video games are a big part of the landscape this is nothing. We don't even have any video game merch apart from some Sonic shirts my son owns.

But what the fuck, yeah? I mean 'the good old days'? What is that really supposed to mean? If there's some old system you want, you just go buy it on ebay or emulate it on your laptop or play downloaded versions of that system's games on a newer console. Lamenting the passing of good old 2D gaming? Through these means you can relive all the old shit OR just take a look at the dowload or portable spaces and see where 2D platforming and fighting and shooting lives again.

It's endless. I can't even keep up with it anymore. If you want to talk about games, gamers, or gaming, communities small and large are never futher away than your mouse opening up a browser. I can have an online conversation with a buddy in Australia and then go see what he's playing on his Xbox 360 right then, live. My son frequently puts on his headset to chat with one friend who's playing Fallout, while he himself is fighting seven other guys in a Halo retread!

Recently my kids have taken to the so-called social gaming scene. These are retardedly casual games that require little more than patience and the ability to resist spending real money on virtual objects. Tap Zoo, Bakery Story, etc etc ad nauseum. It looks like most of the 'fun' is in making friends and looking in on what other people are doing with their versions of the game. Not my cup of tea. But the point is that it is a whole new form and venue that doesn't even have an analog in the 'old days' of video games.

Child of Eden is the first game I've seen that makes me think about buying a Kinect. Standing in your room and moving your body about to play a game is something out of Tron, kids. We could only imagine it. You can join a MMORPG and thousands of fellow adventurers are pushing around in the same sandbox as you are... at the same time. The closest thing to that in the really old days were MUD dungeons. Those almost aren't even recognisable as games by today's standards.

There ARE things that have gone away, and not for the better. Shit that I miss. As connected as we all are, none of it replaces the thrill and immediacy of arcade gaming. All the lights and sounds (particularly in GOOD arcades). The competition, particularly in fighting games. Even in shooting or platforming, getting your initials up on the high score screen, knowing the next person to come along might knock you off, that was something. Civilians frequently picture gamers as solitary loners, sweatily pawing their keyboards to slog through onscreen dungeons between visits to porn sites, but video gaming has always had hugely social aspects to it. The whole world is the arcade now, but fighting teabaglulz99 from Novia Scotia doesn't have quite the thrill, to me, of sending little Billy packing after he's beaten four previous players spamming Genan's spin move in Samurai Shodown.

A lot of the creativity SEEMS to have left. Favorite franchises get mired down in their same old mechanics. But then the fans shit noisy geese if the devs try to change anything. These are more contentious times. Everyone thinks they should have a say. Access to other gamers is so easy, the noise can be overwhelming. Print isn't really dead, but in terms of game magazines, the information mainstay of the old days, it might as well be. Getting all your gaming news, reviews, and opinions from the internet seems so very soulless. And how much work is it to separate out all the fucksticks at Kotaku, Destructoid or wherever, from worthy information. Developers often seem to operate like movie studios and their summer blockbusters. Big budget titles pandering to the lowest common denominator. Committees deciding what gamers want, and the creator/auteur aspect squeezed completely out of the equation.

Games these days are too easy. Or too hard. Or too short. Too long. Too expensive. Really?

I'm dabbling with Mushimesama Bug Panic on my kids iTouch. It is five 'worlds' long, with each world having five stages and a boss stage. It has hidden items and areas if you wish to look for them, and rewards you with pieces to a jigsaw puzzle mini game for each item you find. Each stage probably takes about five to ten minutes if you try to search out all the hidden items and manage not to die. Bosses take only a few minutes but you are not likely to get them on the first go. I'm currently stuck myself on one of the stages in the middle of the last world. So adding togther thirty stages at say ten minutes apiece, you could say you get three hours of game assuming you play perfectly AND don't replay anything for a better score or fiddle with the jigsaw puzzle bonus game. On an iTouch, it is a pretty small screen, but the graphics are colorful sprite-based objects typical of Cave. And of course loads of bullets on screen and a bazillion point items all being vacuumed up by your avatar, Reco. This would probably be the cat's ass on an iPad.

I paid five bucks for it. That's only one dollar an hour assuming I get ONLY five hours total out of it. Here's a game that answers all the complaints. It isn't too short, it is a few hours for a five dollar game. There's more with the replay value. It isn't too long, it is perfect pick up and play gaming, you can leave off wherever and get right back to it whenever. It isn't difficult to get pretty far in the game, but it isn't so easy that there's no challenge. As I said, I'm currently rather stuck near the end. Just as it should be.

Also? Five bucks. My biggest complaint is the controls, but I'm a big fat baby when it comes to touchscreens so my complaint about that should be taken with a grain.

In a world where video games are so common and available there IS a fuck-ton of dreck out there, no doubt. But a little looking around and a willingness to read up on shit and mess around with demo versions will do wonders. My kids will download and play with any piece of crap on their iTouches, but that's part of the fun too.

I guess this rant is a bit of a call for perspective. There are reasons to bitch. It's fun to bitch and vent. But to go back to the good old days? Time and memory paint those days rather rosy. It WAS more exciting to get a new game back in the Genesis days. Games weren't just falling around us like they are now. Every purchase or gift was an event. But the actual PLAYING... there's so much more to it now. AND you can have the games from the old days if you want to. I can jump and dash Sonic through his contest with Metal Sonic just as I did then. But I can also play a game where a single controller handles dodging, flying, slashing, and pointing into the screen to shoot (like a lightgun game) ALL AT THE SAME TIME. See Sin & Punishment: Star Successor for the Wii.

I'm grateful my kids get something good out of video games just like I did (and still do). They also have an appreciation for the older stuff, as I've gone on about before in this blog. I've been around, and playing, from the early early days of video gaming, and I need to appreciate the NOW. Games are still really fun. a player just might have more sifting to do now then I did back then. That seems like a small price to pay for all the choices.

Motherfrickin' Missile Fury

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

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

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

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

Nin2 Jump Pisses Me Off

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

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

The controls.

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

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

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

Nerd-Stick Part Deux

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complete Nerd-Stick

That fine old game controller, the joystick, seems to be increasingly uncommon amongst the general gaming population and yet there's a pretty big sub-market for high-end and even custom versions.

Ever since I started playing on home consoles, I've had to buy a joystick for use as a controller. The need stems from all the arcade playing I used to do before the NES resuscitated the console market from the post-Atari days. Joysticks... really crappy ones... were the standard on the old Atari 2600, the most popular home machine before the NES. But I didn't get into the 2600 too much... or the Colecovision, or the Intellivision, or the Atari 5200. My video game time was spent on quarter munchers.

There were some different input devices scattered around the arcades. All-button layouts for a lot of games. A steering wheel for any driving game. A spin knob for Tempest. A trackball for Centipede. There were cool custom devices like the the periscopes for Battlezone or Sea Wolf. But mostly it was a little knob or bat-shaped stick jutting up from the panel and with it you moved Pac-man around the maze or alternately blasted aliens and rescued humans in Defender. It was a simple, durable way to translate directional inputs, leaving the other hand free to push whatever buttons were needed.

When the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, I got the little brick 'd-pads' just like everyone else. I wasn't TOTALLY unfamiliar with the concept because years before I'd had a friend with an Intellivision. I'm not sure why the Intellivision pads are considered so awesome now. Back in the day I hated them so much I wanted to jam them up a stray dog's butt and then shoot the dog, hoping the controller got crushed in the death throes. The NES pads were better (to me) but it wasn't even a week later that I tracked down a Toys 'R' Us carrying official Nintendo joysticks. And these things were pretty damn awesome at the time. MILES better than the Atari 2600 stock versions. They worked with every game and made every game better. I think the only NES games I didn't use them for was Pinbot and other pinball simulators because it was unnatural to move a stick for the left flipper and push a button for the right. With the d-pad you could 'press a button' for both flippers to make it much more like actual pinball.

When I upgraded to a Genesis, there were no joysticks immediately available. I was pretty frantic. There had to BE joysticks released, since I was not a particularly early adopter of the console, but it was like a month or two before I could lay my hands on some. So before that happened I took a fairly heavyweight screw and drove it right into the middle of the directional pad on the Genesis controller. It stuck up about an inch, and it made all the difference in the world. It was not super comfortable... I got a pretty sore thumb nudging the screw around instead of cradling a joystick in the hand as I normally would... but it was a workaround that kept me from dying a bazillion times trying to learn how to get along with a d-pad. And when I finally did get the real joysticks, again my enjoyment of the console skyrocketed. And these were some goshdamn cool-looking pieces of hardware too, all-black with lights above the buttons. Both these and the NES sticks had turbofire buttons, which really helped considering that, as cool as the joysticks were, their base size and button placement didn't allow me to hammer the fire controls with anything like the speed and stamina I could manage in arcades.

So in the years since, every time I've bought a new game console I've immediately gotten a joystick (or two) to go with it. I don't use them for every game any more. When Sega released the analog pad for Sega Nights on the Saturn, I finally started using the type of analog thumbstick controller that everyone else had been using for months on their Playstations (the predecessor to the dual shock controllers that are synonymous with Sony now). The thumbstick was kind of like the old screw I put in my Genesis pad, only a lot more comfortable. Hours spent on the Dreamcast (bought after the Saturn, I skipped the PS1 for awhile) made me finally tow the line and become comfortable with a non-joystick.

The thumbtick based analog controller is now the standard. Even the unconventional wiimote has a thumbstick on its nunchuck accessory.

Except there are still certain types of games that absolutely suck balls on a regular controller. The games that still adhere to oldest (some would say *shudder* 'most retro') game mechanics.... namely 2D fighting games and 2D shooters. I'd argue that 2D platforming games and beat 'em up/beltscroll fighters are also WAY better with a stick, but you can at least play them competently on a pad. I understand there are gamers who can play shooters and fighters very well on a standard controller but I don't know how they do it, especially the ever-present-in-fighting-game shoryuken/dragon punch motion.

So, uh, guess what kind of games I played to death in the arcades AND on home consoles. Yep. 2D fighters, shooters, and platforming games.

My kids are totally unfamiliar with joysticks. By the time my oldest could even muster interest in video games, the PS2 was the dominant machine. So all they've ever really known is dual shock controllers and their antecedents. I have the pads to all my old consoles, so if they feel like jumping in the wayback machine and play some games on the Genesis, the d-pad (screw now removed) is pretty similar to the cross-pad on their Nintendo portables. But when I'm playing... or when I drag a joystick out for a specific game on a newer system, you'd think I was bringing a musket to a drug war. Much eye-rolling and snorting is sure to ensue. It isn't enough that I like those stone-age style games... and that includes RECENT shooters or fighters like Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu or Super Street Fighter IV... I have to drag out the stone axes and flint arrows with which to play them.

The derision reached something of a crescendo recently when I decided to upgrade my PS2 and Xbox 360 joysticks. I don't mean upgrade as in purchase better ones... I mean upgrade as in replacing parts. This is a level of fanatic nerd-ery the likes of which my daughter thought she'd never see me display in my home. I think she'd have been less affected if I'd cosplayed Evangelion pilot Ayanami Rei at an anime convention. My son, however, was intrigued. He has always been something of a 'fiddler'. He loves buidling models, taking stuff apart, or messing with Legos. In racing games he spends more time playing with color schemes and decals for his cars then he does on the actual driving. These joysticks are big too, Hori Real Arcade Pro models, so the idea of cracking them open and working on the guts was like asking him to help me work on real-life automobiles. I asked him to second 'the surgery' on one stick and my daughter to help me with the other. I wasn't trying to foment love for the joysticks amongst my children, I just thought this would be a cool and very different activity for us to bond over. And despite the utter nerd-ity of the project, my daughter also wanted to get in on it. Just to 'help me do this correctly' of course.

The Japanese company Hori makes a line of controllers for all makes of video game consoles, but they have a particular rep (and cult following) for their higher-end line of joysticks. These frequently use the same parts as the candy cabinet style arcade machines still found in Japan. In the case of the two sticks under discussion, both have Sanwa JLF sticks, the most frequent model found on fighters, and Hori's knock-offs of Sanwa buttons.

The 'need' to do this upgrade has been borne out of my frustration playing Super Street Fighter IV. It has been quite a while since I've put any emphasis on getting good at a 2D fighting game, but the new SSFIV is pretty awesome. However it is the first game of its genre that I've tried playing on the Xbox 360. I haven't done BlazBlue or any of the HD Capcom remakes on the Xbox Live service. I might be a little rusty, sure.

I've never really had problems executing any of the command motions in any previous fighting games, from any company on any system. But wow, I am having the devil's own time executing commands on this game, particularly the double fireball motion needed for most supers and ultras. My understanding is that the timing window to execute these commands is very forgiving. I've had no issues managing the same mechanics in various Street Fighter III iterations on other platforms, which is supposedly much more strict. I *think* my problem is the size of the 'throw' on the HRAP (Hori Real Arcade Pro) stick that I use on the 360. I think the time it takes to do the full range of motions goes outside even the timing window because the stick has to move very far in order to register each direction/point. I think the actual proper points the stick needs to hit are not quite all the way to the outside of the stick's range of motion... so in effect the map to get out the command is kind of smaller than the area the joystick moves... and I'm too old and impatient to sit there and fuck with this and learn it when all other fighting games I have DON'T have this 'placement' problem.

Because I play a lot of Cave shooters, small precise movements of the joystick are a must. Online the consensus seems to be that the short throw of the standard Seimitsu brand arcade joysticks are the best for these sorts of games. Short throw equals quick changes in direction... EXACTLY what seems to be required to overcome my problem with SSFIV. It appears the distance the Seimitsu sticks need to travel to engage each direction is smaller than the Sanwa sticks that my HRAP comes with. My play with Cave shooters could stand improvement but was never so bad that I felt like spending the money to upgrade to Seimitsu parts. But being unable to access a primary mechanic in SSFIV pushed me over the edge. My abilty to tap buttons quickly has never been a problem (my kids ALWAYS hand controllers to me for button mashing sections of games), but I figured I'd replace the Hori buttons with less-mushy Seimitsu versions as well.

The kids helped me with the modifications... small hands equals useful... and I'm really pleased with how they've turned out so far. I say so far because I actually got the wrong replacement stick for the Xbox 360 HRAP. From the outside the two models (HRAP 2.0 for the PS2, HRAP EX for the Xbox 360) look really similar apart from the colors, but actually the PS2 stick uses an easy slip-on molex connector for the wiring, where the Xbox 360 version is soldered. Which I didn't know. Seimitsu makes replacements in both slip-on (LS-32-01) and soldered (LS-32), but the soldered one ain't here yet.

The finished PS2 HRAP is pictured above. The original had all bright red buttons and a bright red ball top to the stick itself. I changed the button colors to match the color coding of buttons on stock Sony controllers. It makes the stick gaudier (though not brighter actually), but I then put black buttons corresponding to the controller triggers and a black ball top all to compensate for the color riot. Having the correct colors on there was done in the first place because onscreen prompts or quick time events can get confusing when your buttons are all red AND not placed the same way they are on the pad. I've also got a Dreamcast and an Xbox 360 with their own button color schemes. I'm not even going to try to memorise them all.

I'm not having fighting game troubles with the PS2, but I thought I'd give the new Seimitsu stick a whirl with one just the same. There is a noticeable difference in the ease with which the moves come out for me. The stick is a bit stiffer, and it has a smaller dead zone (the amount of travel the stick can move from center before engaging a direction). So subtler motions net the same effect as the unmodified stick. If my impression holds true, this should fix my problem playing SSFIV when I can get THAT stick changed out... hopefully next week. We've already done the 360's buttons.

Perversely, and probably temporarily, this little project has gotten my son all interested in joystick-necessary games. Up to this point, he hated almost all 2D fighters (doesn't like command motion inputs) and was indifferent to shooters and platformers. Now all of a sudden Gradius V and Thunder Force VI on the PS2 are hot commodities. And of course he wants his own joystick. If this interest holds up and we wind up having to get him one or two, the irony will be that I would probably give him the ones we've modified ourselves and I'd just get myself new HRAPs... but this time I'd get some specials that already come with Seimitsu parts (like the HRAP EX-SE). Modding these was fun, but I did it mostly because it was less expensive than buying new joysticks. If we're going to get new ones anyway, might as well get 'em already done. Unlike the kid, I'd rather spend the time playing than fiddling.

Before Steroids Got Such a Bad Rap

In the 80s we had a surfeit of action films starring brutish, muscleheads that carried big guns and spouted one-liners. Think Rambo, Commando, any Dolph or Jean-Claude movie. These movies are still remembered and exert a fair amount of influence on the summer blockbusters of today.

In the 90s, following the success of Doom, video gamers had a bounty of games letting them relive all the 'good parts' (ie the violence) of those testosterone flicks through the running, bouncing wonder of the first person shooter or FPS, though at that time, the term 'corridor shooter' was typical. As the environments opened up, 'corridor shooter' dropped from common usage.

These days the genre is extremely popular. As of this writing my Xbox 360 dashboard is dominated by announcements and advertisements for gobs of these things. At times it seems like there's nothing else getting released. Already past, but still showing ads for downloadable add-ons, Halo: Reach, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Borderlands. Just released Homefront. Coming soon: Bulletstorm, Crysis 2, and Brink. I know floaty-arm games are popular, but jumpin' Jeebus!

I like me some floaty-arm game, don't get me wrong. I'm just not devoted to them. As time has ground on and the genre has evolved, simply running and gunning like we did in the old days through Doom, Quake, Powerslave and Duke Nukem has been replaced by 'realistic' missions, level designs grounded in reality, and (game-)logical methods of accounting for player protection and health. The original Serious Sam games for PC and Xbox (before the Xbox 360) don't actually hail from the TRUE old days but they were designed to get back to the basic spirit in a genre that was (and is) getting bogged down in being too serious (ha) and reality-based to be fun all the time. Serious Sam HD games are just high definition remakes. The same retro-styled games but re-tooled for the giant flatscreens we all play on now.

For the most part, I liked being reminded of how it was. Weird enemies (and Sam's are weirder than most) throwing themselves at you. No complicated AI. Nothing about enemy grunts attempting to use cover or roll away from grenades. These alien scum just stand and shoot, moving only to get the clear shot or throwing themselves at you if they aren't armed with ranged weapons. They pop up out of thin air, frequently just as you've grabbed a box of ammo or a health up. This leads frequently to being startled and panic-firing whatever happens to be armed at the moment. Awesome. Constantly on edge. You have a lot of ammo lying around but there were times when the game threw so many enemies that I found myself rationing... just so I'd have some on hand for situations that really required specific guns. It isn't logical for health packs, armor, ammo and guns to be lying around either, but that's how it worked in the time before Master Chief-style regenerating shields or Battlefield Bad Company's (retarded) adrenalin shot.

Rant tangent: Honestly. The Bad Company health mechanic is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. You LITERALLY walk around with a permanent health pack, available at a button press. On the one hand, that would seem to make the game too easy, and I think early on it does. But as I understand it, later you'll be pushing that thing into your chest constantly. Bad Company might be finely tuned for balance, I don't know, but it just FEELS to me that having a method like that is just an excuse to not have to tune the enemies and stages very much. In Serious Sam there was something of a balance between just enough enemies to pose a challenge before you had another health-up available. If you picked a higher difficulty then there was a seesaw effect of more/harder enemies versus fewer/smaller health-ups. If someone has a health-up always on tap, it seems like a lot of this balance is lost... never mind that continually jamming a fucking great needle in your chest for instant life extension is hardly more realistic than enemy lairs having first aid kits strewn about the place.

But Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter was pretty damn fun. It was simple, over-the-top, and cheesy in just the right way. Sam spouts one-liners right from the Arnie playbook, though the voice actor has a really guttural voice, like he's speaking from a broken-glass shredded throat. The aliens are really strange, but the game plays them straight, complete with datafiles that matter-of-factly give background on scorpion-centaurs with chainguns, or headless humanoids running around with Wile E. Coyote bombs. One of the few concessions Serious Sam gives to the new gaming mentality is the ability to instantly save at any second. In the old days you had to reach checkpoints, or in some brutal cases the end of an entire level before you were given the opportunity to save. In SSHD it is almost too easy. I found once or twice, in an almost convulsive fit at some surprise, that I'd saved at a really bad place, and had to struggle to extricate myself from that frozen moment right in front of an enemy missile or flailing above a spike pit. I'd like to say insta-save is total bullshit and real men don't need 'em. But I was pretty grateful for it most of the time. There really were some serious frustrations in the old days when I had to restart an entire level, and play through it over and over again. That shit works fine on some arcade games like fighters or STGs, but on an FPS it can be beyond monotonous. These games are not thirty minute affairs from start to finish. Each level can be pretty long. And frankly, as an older dude and a parent I just don't have time to spend perfecting every room and hallway.

So the concession to today's pussy gamer was actually welcome. However, a little over halfway through the game I started to remember just why FPS games have moved away from this old model in other aspects too. I don't mind games being a bit repetitive. Almost all games and game genres suffer from this. But the basic style of the environment in Serious Sam, like Doom and Quake before it, never really changes. It is always Egypt, Egypt, Egypt. And while that might seem like a pretty unusual environment for an FPS, too much of a good thing gets old. And I happen to have played through Powerslave on the Saturn which is ALSO an Egypt-themed FPS, though it had a lot more variety to it.

Then there is enormous repetition in the enemies. By the time you've played a couple of hours, you've seen about all the enemies you are going to. From that point on it is just different combinations of the same grunts thrown at you over and over. Even if the game had no more enemies than it does (twenty I think), if it had spread them out a bit more over the course of the whole game it'd have been more appealing. I kept waiting for some new badass around every corner, or at the beginning of each new level... and he never showed up.

And bosses are kind of a fixture for video games in general. Most puzzle games don't have them. Rhythm games don't have them. Racing games used to not have them, but a lot of racers have narratives now, so a boss driver isn't all that uncommon these days. Sports games based on real leagues don't have them... and uh, neither does Serious Sam.

Here is a game that absolutely REVELS in bizarre creature design, and the designers took no opportunity really to go all-out and just wow the player with some big motherfucker of an alien/weapon hybrid? What the hell? As I got to the end of each level, at first I was thinking 'okay here we go' expecting to be tested, and have to find some new inventive way to use my weapons or my dodging skills. Nope. Usually just a big room with a horde of grunts and then a quick cutscene of Sam running up to grab the item-of-the-level. Bosses are NOT a new video game convention. And there ARE games where it'd be stupid to include them. But this just feels like a huge missed opportunity. The irony is that there are two bosses and both of them are really huge and epic. Did they just run out of development money? No, thinking back on it... A LOT of those old FPS games didn't have bosses. But hell, I just played the new Wolfenstein game and it managed a few boss fights from occult-obssessed Nazis. Surely invading aliens with a penchant for grafting weapons onto corpses could've managed to do at least as well.

The enemies teleporting in, especially as I touched an item in a room kinda wore thin after a while too. It made the game tense, but when they'd teleport behind you, especially in a room you'd already 'cleared', that went from tense to annoying. The game frequently generated enemies up in high places that had a clear shot at me, but that would take precious minutes to search out and destroy. And when you're getting shot (or stabbed, or punched) the game, like many old corridor shooters, gives you no indication which direction it's coming from. These sorts of things; popup enemies or difficult-to-trace damage make the game more challenging, but they also feel sort of cheap. Like they are substitutes for more substantially thought-out challenges. In the old days, these difficult mechanics existed because the genre was nascent. There wasn't money, knowledge, or time to NOT have these things. Now that FPS have developed out of these old tropes it is odd to experience them again. I know Serious Sam, whose original version is still relatively new, is determinedly looking back at games like Quake. It's gibs instead of ragdoll physics for Sam. I just can't believe I'm actually finding myself appreciative of the mollycoddling and over-complexifying (I'm trademarking that word by the way) in modern FPS games.

We played and loved those old games because that's all there was. None of us knew any better. I still enjoyed most of Serious Sam HD: TFE. I particularly dug giving my kid endless shit about playing it on easy, but frankly he just didn't want to die as much as he saw was happening with me. As it turns out, the step down from Normal to Easy is a huge one. Easy is wwaaayyyy fucking easy. I think my son died three times in the entire game. And he has very little FPS experience, let alone with this older, balls-to-barbed-wire style represented here.

I'd still recommend Sam. It is pretty enough to not put newer gamers off on the graphics... because, well they're new... and it certainly makes a different play experience from the Call of Duty episode of the trimester. Looking at Bulletstorm or the new Duke Nukem (finally!) it isn't like tongue-in-cheek or bizarre FPS games are dead, but these games will probably not bend you over your cell cot like Serious Sam does.

Please note this post contains a lot of hyperbole and simplification. It isn't my intent to provide a thorough and accurate history of FPS games. I KNOW there have been exceptions and exemptions to almost every generalisation I made up there. Tough shit. I'm just framing my emotions upon playing Serious Sam.

The Metal Path Nears Its End

I finished the single-player campaign for Brutal Legend last night. Given all the ranting I usually do about game length, I find myself in the unusual position of being sorry it is over. Technically I don't think the game is too short. And like a lot of open-world games it puts you back into the game world to finish finding whatever you missed, replay side missions, and generally explore to your heart's content. But I actually would like THIS main game to go on for a bit more.

So I don't HAVE to leave, but the save-the-world narrative is complete. I like the game enough to definitely travel around in it to finish up all the loose ends. I don't even care that it'll net achievements or gamerpoints for me, it is just plain fun!

The last few dreaded RTS 'stage battles' were much less awful than I feared. At one point I was reading the BL guidebook, looking for any help to just get through a battle that was kicking my ass, when one particular tactic sort of leaped out at me. I tried it, and it got me through the shitty part. On the next battle I applied it again, and it made it much easier than the one before, though it had much tougher enemy troop types involved. I died once total through all the rest of the games stage battles.

Basically, my problem before was overthinking the battlefield, and trying to do everything at once. The key to Brutal Legend single-player stage battles turns out to be simplicity. I took the time to amass a large force at the get-go, before sending any one of them to any objective, THEN tackling each objective whether it was a power source, a bottleneck, or whatever, with my entire force in turn... one at a time. Since the AI opponent doesn't build forces faster than you do (at the normal difficulty level anyway), keeping everything you have together is going to roll over anything the enemy has. The AI DOES split its forces a bit, but if you're whole army is hammering away at his main force, Eddie can break off to crush an enemy splinter force on his own. Finding a good bottleneck or main route on the field and blocking it with your entire army does wonders for how much running around Eddie has to do. Very little. And that's what was so frustrating before. I couldn't keep tabs on everything. So my epiphany basically was 'don't try to cover it all, keep everyone together'. Stopping up a bottleneck with my entire force, always sending reinforcements to that exact same place, and then rolling them forward towards the enemy HQ, the AI can't get around you, so the resources on your side are all safe. I definitely felt my nerd-boner push out my pants when I learned this!

Anyway, blah blah blah. The final fight, a one-on-one action confrontation (NOT a stage battle) was a LITTLE on the easy side, but Tim Curry's dialogue and awesome death scene ('deeecaaapiiitaaaatioooooon!) made that section rock anyway.

Too cool. I'll putz around in BL world for awhile as I decide what my next 'big game' is. Current contenders are Darksiders for the Xbox 360, Baroque for the Wii, and Epic Mickey for the Wii. Probably I'm going to have to strike Mickey from the list since my kids are both currently working on it, and if I get ahead of them it'd be shitty for them to see any spoilers. I've been spending a fair amount of time on Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu (Angry Bee Boss Great Resurrection) the newest Cave home port. It is absolute awesome, but as with all shooters, something I sit down with for a half-hour to an hour at time, between forays into 'the big game'.

Future entries will cover my thoughts on all the 'pachi' (bee boss) games. I've also ruminated on what I think my Game of the Year for 2010 is. And y'know? MY award for GOTY is the one all the developers should be courting. But they're dumb. I read this roundtable discussion about what should be GOTY between several high profile writers and reviewers and their points (and most of their choices) were utter ass. So it is up to me, in THIS 'blog to fix that.

Brutal Hybrid

Mommy

Daddy

Baby

As I knew they would, the Real Time Strategy aspects of Brutal Legend are giving me fits.


If you have been reading this blog for a while you may remember some ranting about my general lack of skill and/or patience with strategy-based pursuits (and some puzzles or puzzle games). I like the idea of being an armchair general, and in fact I have a decent track record with tabletop wargames like Warhammer. But Warhammer and 40K are turn-based. You take a turn, then I take a turn. You have time to think about what you are doing. The ‘real time’ aspect of RTS games kicks me in the nuts.

It shouldn’t. Emotionally I think an RTS is a good idea. If you were commanding a real battle, the enemy doesn’t pause while you consider your next move. Not that video games are really like actual war, but the continual unfolding of events whether you direct it or not, is a feature in warfare (and so many other things) that video games are uniquely able to duplicate or simulate.

But I’m terrible at it. It is the whole resources management and control facets that suck the fun out of it. Almost universally, there’s a ‘cost’ to building or acquiring units in RTS fames. Usually it is money, energy, fuel, or some other facsimile of a real-life resource. In Brutal Legend, the resources are the fans, as in concert fans. The more ‘fans’ you have pouring power into your ‘show’, the more frequently you can call up troops. RTS games also frequently have time delays to the arrival of your units (representing travel, build, or recruitment time), and depending on the technology represented, command and control limits… ie, your general can’t be everywhere at once.

All these restrictions are a fundamental part of the genre, simulating the limitations that might be imposed on real commanders, and composing much of the challenge. You have to learn to make do with what you have, and learn to adjust on-the-fly as the situation changes and your resources wax and wane. But for me, that shit just isn’t fun. It is too much like real work! I don’t think the genre should change for me, but I usually steer well clear of these games. My video game enjoyment is almost entirely predicated on immediate feedback, physical coordination skills, and memorization. That’s why the preponderance of my game collection comprises 2D shooting games, racers, fighting games, and platformers. With a few first person shooters and third person action games thrown in. I have a mere sprinkling of RPGs because I don’t cotton to the lack of immediate, direct control. So for real-time video wargames I think I have three… and that’s including Brutal Legend. My gaming background springs from the arcades, ‘twitch gaming’ as it were, and on home consoles I’m happiest near my roots.

So I’m running around BL, enjoying the utterly spectacular and badass scenery, getting in the occasional small fight, and finding the hidden items. The game makes finding stuff really rewarding because they aren’t just items collected for some long-term goal, you frequently get new abilities and entire new music tracks. The game keeps throwing something cool or interesting at me. My kid is just blowing through the story mode and it's a shame because a lot of work went into making this world. A player really needs to slow down and look around in it.

Then it comes time to fight one of the major battles. The RTS battles. I don’t feel like they are just shoehorned into the game like some reviewers have opined. The designers did an okay job justifying the mechanics and integrating them into the story. BUT. I hate this kind of battle nonetheless. They shove me all the way from having the time of my life to getting apoplectic with frustration. It isn’t that I can’t learn how to play the RTS battles… but I really don’t want to. Like I said before, it is too much like work. Everyday life is an exercise in resource management. Balancing a checkbook or juggling priorities at my job might not be as cool-sounding as ordering a unit of Razorgirls to annihilate enemy Grave Diggers, but it comes off even more of a hassle because its landing square in the middle of my fun. I’d feel the same way if someone handed me that checkbook to balance just as I was climbing aboard a rollercoaster.

So I’m being a total lame-ass and using the guide to help me. I just don’t have personal ‘resources’ to get good at this on my own. And using the book isn’t sailing me through these parts either, because it is terrible… one of the worst game guides I’ve ever seen. The map poster is useful. Everything else about it, the organization, descriptions, everything is jank. In effect, even making the book useful (during the battles) is WORK.

This isn’t killing my enjoyment of the game as a whole. The rest of the game is just too much fun for that. This game could’ve easily just been a total joke. A game about heavy metal? How did that even get greenlit, much less turn out to be fucking awesome?

From the point where I am in the game I think I have three more of these ‘stage battles’ to go. I’d rather they’d made the RTS stuff a separate mode, but its obvious a shitload of work went into that part of the game too, so that might be more than I could reasonably expect. Hopefully I can shut up about it now, get through the RTS battles as they come up, and remember the game for its strong points after its over!

Brutal At Last

Finally.

I'm getting around to playing Brutal Legend, the exploits of Jack Black's muscled roadie character in a world based around heavy metal. A comical, but extremely loving tribute to the songs, artwork, and attitude associated with the musical style.

Anyone who knows me (in real-life) would think my playing this game is not only a no-brainer but probably necessary to life. That's not far off. I managed to survive not playing it, but I'm not sure how. I put it off because the game is yet another major investment in time when my game playing mood is clearly bent towards shorter score-based sessions. But I've had this thing a year and figured it was high time I cracked it open. I DID play through the demo when it first premiered on XBLA.

I'm a little put off by the idea of how much real-time strategy stuff there is here. RTS games are not my thing, and ordering your army of headbangers around in medium-scale battles is a big part of this game. But I'm so enamored with the style, humor, and of course the music, that I'm eager to give it a go anyway.

This is the role Jack Black seems closest to in real life. You can just feel how much he loved doing this and that he totally gets what the designers of this game were going for. He has dozens and dozens of on-the-fly lines that totally rule. Whatever one thinks of his movie roles... his acting not really BEING acting because he's always Jack Black... here is a context where Jack's actual personality fits perfectly. The co-creator of Tenacious D has landed at his place in the universe. Near the beginning when he 'prays' to the evil powers that rule this strange world he's found himself in (while driving a demonic walker vehicle) I thought I was going to pee it was so funny. Watching Jack's promos for this game on the talk shows via Youtube (complete with him dressed in long black wig and muscle suit to match Eddie's appearance) are pretty hilarious.

There's an option to bleep out the swearing. I chose yes to that because I have kids who might be around occasionally while I play it, but as the game states it also makes it even funnier... in the same way South Park is funnier because they censor the language. The kids are totally gobsmacked too that all the weird music their Dad listens to suddenly has a high-profile, flashy presence right up there on the TV. Like, wow, there must be a world of people who listen to that noisy shit Dad likes.

I can so 'identify' with this game (except the strategy/command parts) that playing it is two-thirds nostalgic for me. And the game is only two years old!

Vanquished At the Sales Counter

Gosh damn Vanquish is an awesome game.

Anyone looking at my sidebar here or my backloggery listing might see I've shown this as 'currently playing' a pretty long time. This game is not a 50 to 100 hour slog-a-thon. To play through the entire campaign mode only takes six to ten hours. And Vanquish has taken knocks from players online for the brevity of its play time, especially as there is no multiplayer component to make up for it.

That naysaying is all asshattery as far as I'm concerned. It has been an off-and-on bitch fest for me about how so many games today just take too long to play through. I'm a working parent that makes time to play games, but I don't really enjoy becoming super-invested in the same narrative for hours and hours. That's what I have books for.

Games have been padded out the ass to increase their so-called value for money. This smacks of catering to the same cheapskate whining I used to hear working for Games Workshop. People (usually older players and fans) would complain about how the models used to be a dollar apiece and now it was just unaffordable now. Wanting to convince rather than turn off long-time customers we'd explain that the models were better sculpted, had more expensive metal in them (to make them lead-free), and that marketing and production needed to be bigger and better because we were now competing with flashy comics, big budget movies and video games for every entertainment dollar a customer might have to spend. These reasons were all true. But it really boils down to this:

Even today, with GW having brought down the price of basic plastic regiments the Warhammer hobby is still expensive. But y'know, the days of fucking selling dull grey fishing weights with rules to be found in shoddily printed one-color pamphlets are long the fuck over. Even when I was working there, there was no way you were going to lure a teenager away from their goshdamned Playstation 2 unless you could smack them in the head with serious cool factor. That means big art, big production, big marketing. And that shit costs money. The irony of course is that the old guard of miniature companies have almost all died away with only GW/Citadel really surviving unscathed. There are tons of new-ish miniature wargame companies that have come along more recently... and guess what they all do. Have expensive figures and really expensive rulebooks and modules. I'm not saying their price point stuff is exactly like Workshop's but one would have to be complete mongoloid not to see the enormous impact GW's marketing and pricing strategy has had in showing wargame companies how to survive.

I used to 'use' how much video games cost as a counter point to GW's investment expense. You'd pay 200 bucks for a console and then thirty or forty dollars for each new game. Never mind any oddball controllers, chairs or TVs a serious video gamer might buy. So a few hundred dollars for rules and a decent sized army seemed, to me, right in line with that. But it was really hard to convince some people. Not young kids so much. You just had to let them get them into a game to show them that it was like video gaming only with more imagination and more of yourself put into the characters. They were inured to paying out the ass for their colorful pastimes. That's just how it was (and is). But adults just didn't get it. Paying three bucks for each comic read in 15 minutes or less-- okay. 25 dollars paid for each movie (with concession snacks) that you experience for two hours-- okay. 15 to 20 bucks a pop for a DVD that you'll watch two times maybe-- okay! What the hell!

NOW apparently there's this perception (with the increase in new game price over the years from thirty-forty dollars on average, to sixty-plus for PS3 and Xbox 360 games) that video games are perhaps too expensive. So the game companies' answer (sort of echoing the refusal to drop prices that killed CDs) is to increase the content, including the length of the basic game. This in the face of the knowledge that only a tiny fraction of game players complete the games that they buy. Most game purchases are played part of the way through, with a lot of time spent on multiplayer aspects or getting the easiest achievements.

So padding the shit out of the one-player modes would SEEM like a wasteful answer. Why do that if most of the players (and whiners) will not stick with a game long enough to see that distant ending you've just made even more distant. And yet... here we have a game like Vanquish which is a veritable case study in distilling the fun down to a short but extremely intense experience for single players only... and people bitch. So I guess the suits have some point after all.

Here's why I've spent so much time (probably thirty hours at this point) on such a supposedly short game. It is REALLY fun. It requires a crapload of skill. It is very intense. You will die a lot. It isn't like Halo or a lot of these other modern murder simulators where you can kind of fake your way through the lower difficulty levels with your reflexes and time-honored shooter methodologies. You are going to have to learn how to control your guy really well. You are going to have to learn every enemies vulnerabilities. You are going to have learn the timing of your own 'superpowers'. And not just to be better, but to simply survive. The action is intricate and explosive. If you approach it casually like you've done it all before (it resembles Gears of War at first) you will have your ass handed to you on a kebab. The game is also score based. You are supposed to replay levels ever increasing the difficulty and refining your technique. Getting faster and cooler. Maybe I like it for much the same reason I like STGs. Short intense burst-gaming that rewards practice.

Can't really complain about weapon effectiveness either. Unlike a lot of FPS or TPS games, most of the enemies cannot take dozens of shots from the basic weapons. If you target weak spots then every gun in the game is useful and kills. And the slo-mo mechanic enables this. I can't remember the last game I played like this where I didn't feel like there was no way I could get past some group of enemies or a boss without better guns. In Vanquish, I could almost always make do. In fact, even though ammo is counted in the game, I frequently found myself well stocked on my most powerful weapons (that have the smallest magazines) because I just didn't need to use them. That isn't because the game is easy. It is because the game trains you to be good with everything. It gets its challenge from the fact that enemies have good guns too and that there are a lot of them.

The achievements in the game are all pretty fun and mostly tied in with normal goals in the game. I hate online based achievements because I really don't do multiplayer, but thankfully Vanquish has no online mode. I've heard people complain about that too. But Vanquish wouldn't work in multiplayer. One of the key aspects to the game is a slow motion or 'bullet time' mode. It is critical to the game. How would you represent this to an online opponet in real-time. If you are in slo-mo and they aren't... how do you reconcile that? You can't both go into slo-mo at the same time every time... the player controls it for him or herself to get an advantage over the enemy. If you say 'take it out of multiplayer' then you've just chopped one of the two major aspects that makes Vanquish unique. I applaud Platinum Games for not shoehorning in some broken multiplayer just to shut those people up.

But it cost Platinum at the cash register. I find the game great, and while it may not be my game of the year, it will probably be the first game I've tried to get all the achievements for. I should have done that with Bayonetta (Platinum's previous release) but I put it down with the intention of coming back to it. And of course, never really did. I'm sticking with Vanquish 'til I've done everything I want to do... which isn't far away now. My love notwithstanding, lack of marketing on the part of publisher Sega, the word on the 'net that it was short, and releasing it at the same time huge juggernaut franchises got new releases spelled mediocrity in the sales department. I don't think it flat-out tanked... it has a big budget look and polish, but was made on a fraction of the money of Halo or Modern Warfare titles. So it can show a profit with a lot less sales, but it certainly wasn't a hit. Platinum Games is kinda becoming known for making critically acclaimed games (Bayonetta and Vanquish are pretty much universally loved by commenters) that don't do so well commercially. And based on interviews I've read they seem okay with that.

So I paid my sixty bucks for Vanquish and have MORE than gotten my money's worth out of it. I've played through the campaign completely twice, once on normal, once on hard. I've used a guide to poke through each level on its own to find all the hidden statues. I've gone back to some individual levels to get the combat-based achievements. Now I'm working on the 'tactical challenges'; individual new levels set in some of the arenas from the campaign game but with many more and different enemies. These are pretty hard, but they will definitely make you work every technique and ability in your arsenal. I haven't found the game to be repetitive at all. You can do things in so many different ways. When you get some new technique down it is really cool to have a go at 'an old level' to see if you can get through it faster and easier with what you've learned.

Despite some fairly graphic violence and a lot of inappropriate language, I've offered to let my son try this game. He is fascinated by its look... the speed and the firepower. But he won't touch it. He says he absolutely would not be able to handle it.

I'm going to apply that sentiment to a lot of the bitchy boys online. They just can't handle it. Playing through the campaign in six hours on casual is for pussies.

(image cribbed from cinedork)

Bringin' The Meat

You never know what is going to catch on with your kids.

We recently downloaded a demo of Super Meat Boy on Xbox Live. I’d heard a lot of good things about the original flash Meat Boy game, but I’m not a big fan of playing games on a PC so I had no experience with it. Mostly it seemed to be described as a 2D platformer with old school difficulty (the very idea of 2D platforming is old school now) but a modern sense of humor and up-to-date sheen. That’s pretty accurate. It doesn’t limit lives or continues like the old games tended to. It does send you back to the beginning of each level when you die, BUT the levels are very short… most not much more than a single screen for the tiny Meat Boy to negotiate. It is a very accomplished distillation of what was fun about those old games, together with the challenge… but minus a lot of the grueling aspect that could make those games frustrating. Although I’m not really in the mood for 2D platformers right now, I do recognize the greatness and will probably give it a go at some point.

What I was not expecting was for my children to think Super Meat Boy is the Second Coming.

My kids are pretty varied in their game tastes… if I compare them to what I hear about their friends. My daughter has almost no buddies that play, but the little they do, it's all ‘Bemani’ stuff like Dance Dance Revolution. She likes DDR, but she also plays singing games like Lips, the action puzzler Peggle, platformers like Super Mario Galaxy and Drawn To Life, and she’s beaten the story mode on two Naruto fighting games. She’s also deadly at Wii Tennis. She doesn’t follow video game reviews, and without input from friends she just gets what she thinks she’d like, based on the game’s artwork, if it has a license she knows, or from something she might see me demo.

My son is much more into video gaming, and he has a ton of friends who also play (Yeah duh I guess, tween boy in USA circa 2010). All his cronies however, are into the latest murder simulators or whatever edgy M-rated game has the biggest hype-fest going on down at GameStop. As of this writing, the headliners are things like Modern Warfare: Black Ops and Fallout: New Vegas (yeah I know, an RPG). Well, because he lives with a parent who restricts the shit out of his intake of video game gore and criminality, he has had to find games that break away from all headshot junk his friends play... but that he'll still enjoy. In addition, because his gamer Dad only delves into gritty FPS or cover shooter games himself occasionally, he has been exposed to much of the OTHER stuff that’s out there. So like a kid whose culinary likes can be broadened by what the parents feed them, my son casts a pretty wide net (for a twelve year old) when it comes to playing games.

The dearth of his experience with M-rated games and his love of other genres baffles his friends and subjects him to some hardship unfortunately. But fun is fun and he has managed to cultivate a they’re-just-being-dumb-and-don’t-know-what-they’re-missing attitude. On the occasion he CAN overlap his experiences with theirs he does. This time he surprised me by going seriously old school with Super Meat Boy. And then so did my daughter.

Super Meat Boy has some edgy, sometimes inappropriate, humor but it isn't much worse than anything they might see on a Nickelodeon gross-fest situation comedy... um, apart from the inclusion of the lead character from the game Mighty Jill Off. If you don't get the double-entendre of that title Google awaits. The visuals and sound effects are cute black humor of the same sort one gets watching something like Mighty Tree Friends. So that got their attention, but the play mechanics have kept them there. Short, brutal levels with tight controls and really exacting platforming perils and solutions. You'll die a million times, but restarting at the beginning of each level is so quick... and the levels themselves so short... that most of the time you won't even have time to cuss and throw the controller. That's the genius. Yeah, its tough and potentially frustrating, but the game doesn't really give you enough time to think about how much you suck. The restart is instant, effectively showing you how a tantrum thrown is just wasting time you could be spending making another attempt. And when you do get through a level, the game replays all your attempts at the same time so you get the amusing sight of Meat Boy copies all throwing themselves at the various spots that were so difficult with one loner finally making it through!

I don't necessarily think my kids will suddenly want to just jump into old school 2D platformers. They are kind of interested in Sonic The Hedgehog 4, a new game with old mechanics, but that's probably about the limit. Besides the clunky music and graphics, the old games usually limited lives or continues or had MUCH more limited (or imprecise) controls compared to Meat Boy. As I said earlier, it is a modern distillation of an old set of mechanics which can be very satisfying and enjoyable when negotiated correctly. And it's almost as far from Call of Duty and the other flavor-of-the-month FPS games as you can get. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining what was so good about those old games... and why I still play them sometimes. Meat Boy pretty much explains it for me.

And too bad for their friends who think a cube of anthropomorphic meat ain't cool. No, he doesn't wear the latest in body armor or pick off gun runners with clean headshots through a 30x scope. A little break from that shit isn't a bad idea, kids.


(image cribbed from Kotaku, the devil's very armpit for Gaming Journalism)

True This...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vanquish-blog-entry

Along my oft-repeated refrain that length (or so-called 'content'), doesn't make or break a game's quality. I've played through two-thirds of Vanquish, doing fairly poorly, and it has taken about seven hours.

Rubbing My Hands Together and Chortling

So I've finished a big game and need to start another. After the mind-numbingly long slog that was Okami, I want my big game to have some meat on its bones but still be a lot less of an investment.

Also this month sees the release of, not one, but TWO Cave shooters, Guwange and Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu. So I have to be prepared to drop 'the big game' for a few days at a stretch and not feel like it is a huge chore to pick back up again and figure out where I left off.

I really need to get to Brutal Legend, but I *think* that game is going to be longer than I need right now. Vanquish just came out, looks awesome (and I've played the demo) but at about seven hours to play through the campaign game it doesn't even qualify and can just be added into rotation like it was an STG!

So I think I'm going to hit the Xbox 360 version of Wolfenstein. I haven't played an FPS since the prequel... in fact I bought the prequel specifically to bone up on the narrative and setting for THIS game. I don't think it is brutally long. And since the previous Wolfenstein had very clear objective aids, and all FPS games have pretty standard controls, I don't think breaking off for a rounds of Cave games or Vanquish is going to leave me discombobulated in my mission to off the Nazis.

I'm kind of in the mood too. After all the fluff and humor in Okami. Its time to get down to some serious killin'. The only thing that stands between Hitler and his quest for mystic power is ME. Okay, BJ Blasko the protagonist of Wolfenstein. But that's still me.

Fuck that Hitler guy.

Wolf Time Is Over

So wow. I finally completed Okami.


I didn’t try to do all the side quests or collect all the items. I didn’t just do a full-tilt run through… there’s some extra gathering and grinding because I didn’t really know what would be necessary to complete the main objectives. Now that I know what the main narrative is, and have a good idea what abilities are needed to reach hidden items, I could do another run-through, and even without looking at a guide any further, complete it with a pretty high percentage.

But I’m not going to go through the game again. And here’s why: It is just too long.

It seems odd to me that this game has so many aspects of a long RPG (that most people would probably play through once, maybe trying to complete as much incidental stuff as possible) and many aspects of a collectible-heavy action game like Super Mario Galaxy (that folks might play over and over again to get better grades on each level and find all the shit).

Okami is another in a huge array of action-RPG games, the definition of which varies from gamer to gamer….with Okami seeming to skew heavily to the action side. You move and fight in real-time… and it is possible to run from one end of the kingdom to the other without using the overworld map. Like Odin Sphere or Muramasa your characters strength and survivability are greatly affected by the RPG elements, the items and leveling up. My problem with Okami is a lot like the issues I had with Odin Sphere. Even long action games tend to be a more distilled gaming experience compared to RPGs. When an action game tries to BE an RPG… in some misguided attempt to provide value for money or something… then it overstays its welcome. Okami took me fifty hours to complete. At 25 or 30 hours it would’ve been more than a good buy (play time-wise). If I’d tried to find all the items and do all the side missions I can’t imagine how inflated my time would’ve been. And Okami is beautiful and slick, but it ain’t THAT beautiful and slick.

If you’ve read any of my posts on Odin Sphere, my feelings about Okami would read very similarly. It is very beautiful, it has a wonderful soundtrack, and the story is cool and funny at times, with a lot of characters, some of which are quite memorable. So the aesthetics are firing on all cylinders. It doesn’t recycle scenery as much as Odin Sphere did, but other aspects of the game drag on and on and on. Boss fights in particular a hugely long AND recycled. You fight Orochi, the major villain of piece three times… and none of them are quick.

The whole game illustrates the adage ‘too much of a good thing’. You can get sick of you favorite food if you eat enough of it. Okami threw new missions, new characters, and new locations at me, and I still got sick of it after the first half. There have been a number of times I’ve tucked in with a long book, or a huge game and enjoyed it. But the mechanics of this game just speak to a more focused play experience than it turned out to be. When these guys formed a different company and produced Bayonetta I think they figured out what works. Bayonetta has A LOT in common with this game apart from the style of the artwork… but is much shorter and more focused, while still having aspects you can dig into and explore. You get graded on your performance for each battle in Okami, just like in Bayonetta. There’s a lot of skill and technique involved, choosing the correct weapon and practicing enough to get good and kill the monsters as quickly as possible, just like Bayonetta. There is no method to jump right back to a sub-level without replaying the whole campaign, which is decidedly NOT like Bayonetta. They’ve got this whole action/combat thing going on, but it is inextricably woven into this GIANT story.

Ever play one of those games where the objectives, steps towards objectives, or puzzles are so obtuse you’d swear they are in there just so you have to buy the guidebook? Yeah, Okami has some of those. Japanese mentality being different and all that, there were times when some of what the game wanted from me was just impossible to figure out. It might be a puzzle, or it might be ‘where to go next’ based on some obscure hint an NPC gave out. The game keeps a log of objectives and hints but some of it was just so oblique I couldn’t manage it. I probably looked at an online guide about five times through the course of the game. I’m not proud of that, but four of those times I went ‘how the fuck did they expect me to know that?’. So there you go.

I can’t say it’s a bad game. It looks like no other game and it is obvious that the designers put their all into it. I’m a game aesthetics whore, so there is a lot about Okami that really speaks to me. But, it kind of sucks for such a huge, beautiful, expansive game to make me say that I’m glad its over.

But I’m glad its over.

(image kyped from GameFAQs)