Monthly Archives: September 2002

Caffeine buzz kicking in. Heart rate critical. Crankiness engaging.

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Yesss… I think perhaps I shall throw together that review. After looking through my usual collection of sites, I’ve come to the conclusion that almost no one else writing about the game has more than sixty percent of a personal clue toward the subject at hand. Come to think of it, it’s actually rather rare that I see more than a few mediocre hints at background knowledge — or even a strong desire to grap the inner essence of a particular work — in the analysis of those who would consider themselves to be game critics.

Even on fan-run sites, I feel like I’m running through a consumer reports analysis — more often than not, by someone without a whit of either aesthetic discipline or deep background in the essence of gaming. I’m not trying to sound pretentious here, as greatly as I might neverhteless be succeeding at it. I just mean — well, hell. You get the obvious hacks, but as often as not the people you’ll find reviewing movies in any respectable sense have some kind of claim to authoritativeness (whether or not their opinions end up being valid in the end). Yes, they’ve seen Citizen Kane and the works of Kurosawa and Wilder and Hitchcock. They’ll agree to the genius of Buster Keaton, and at least one Marx Brothers movie will be in their top five list of favourite comedies. They’ll understand pacing, framing, and they’ll have most of the tiresome “rules” of cinema memorized, so as to amuse themselves by checking them off during the more mundane features imposed upon their time. They might disagree as to what makes a great movie, but they’ll at least be qualified to have a public opinion.

This is, I fear, yet another extension of the current attitude toward gaming as an expressive medium. At best, videogames are generally considered little more than a profitable form of enterttainment. Even Miyamoto, of all people, considers it a mistake to think that videogames can be art. Hell, art isn’t in the object; it isn’t in the medium; it’s in the method. And frankly, although still immature, videogames have more expressive potential than any other medium out there. Hell, some of the most cherished art in the world was originally intended as crass, throwaway entertainment. I’m not about to compare Yu Suzuki to Shakespeare here, but you see what I’m getting at.

But that’s exactly what makes decent coverage all the more important — we’re at the early stage of a form of human expression quite possible greater than any previously devised. Even now it’s usually pretty easy to separate the pure throwaway entertainment from the worthwhile experiences. And then compare a developer like Treasure or Sega’s United Game Artists to the likes of Square or (ugh) say, Take-Two Interactive. There are some very different motivations going on here. Then check out a company like SNK. How do you explain them?

There’s so much humanity here that it seems amazing that it could be overlooked. And yet no, all people see are machines. It’s worse than the flak that electronic artists and musicians used to get up until a few years ago, since at least people are well used to the visual and aural arts. Again, the medium is still in its birthing throws. Look at the pain film has gone through. Some people even now still don’t comprehend photography as an artistic medium — and there will be any number of excuses, from the ignorant to the elite. But behind all of it, you still have humans pulling the levers. And as often as not, they’ve got something to say. In some cases it might just be “give us money!” In others, it’s a deep respect for the fans. In other cases you’ve got individuals working their butts off to form and maintain fleshed-out, vibrant universes.

Shenmue is art. Anyone who can’t appreciate it on that level will probably not be impressed. And you know how people have reacted to this game — particularly in the US. I could slap every single person I hear trash the game because of how supposedly boring it is, or because it doesn’t cater to his or her every whim. Christ, people. To appreciate art, you have to take it at its own level! But then we’re back to where we started. Videogames are meant to be entertainment. Even Miyamoto will tell you this. But you know what? Miyamoto is an artist. He’s a slacker art school kid who was hired as a favor to a relative who worked at Nintendo in the early ’80s. He’s not an engineer. Whether he chooses to admit or believe it himself, what he creates is as often art as it is entertaining. Never trust the artist to judge his own work, people. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he’s only the conduit for his vision.

And damn my ass, I forgot that I’m supposededly working.

Watch for falling spoilers (not too many, and nothing huge)

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Wow. Only thing is… Harmony of Dissonance is damned short. It was a fortuitous decision, in this light, for Igarashi to have jammed so many secrets into the game. I accidentally ended up finishing the game, getting what I think must be a luke-bad ending, in less than ten hours, with nearly 200% map completion, all but two items for Juste’s room (one of which I’ve since found), somehow without two of the magic books (again, one of which I’ve since got — it’s the one I put off getting for a while, since it was kind of stressful to race the marble (you’ll… see what I mean)), and without two of the relics (one of which I believe must be Dracula’s eye).

Circle of the Moon, to mention, I’m probably well over fifty hours into — and I’m still missing the Black Dog card. (It’s in the battle arena.) I beat the game it at around thirty hours or so (though I took my tubular time, as I tend to), but since then I’ve still been wandering around, collecting things, and generally powering Nathan up far more than necessary. In comparison to this nigh-pointless time vacuum, HoD is amazingly self-contained.

There are only two isolated map squares which I can’t seem to access, one in each of the two castles. One of them’s behind a big lump of rock (which isn’t there in the other castle), and the other one is in the marble-racing room. It’s just that there doesn’t appear to be any obvious entrance in the A castle.

I’m guessing if I’ve got all of Dracula’s parts and have the maps completely filled-in I’ll get a better ending than the one I received — not that it was really too bad, mind. And during the ending credits I was treated to one of the two high-res bits of music in the game. Might as well not spoil which one, but it was what I thought one of the better themes anyway. If audio was working properly on Edgar here, I’d probably have dubbed the tune off a while ago for referencing in my post the other day.

I’ve toyed around a bit with Maxim, and it seems like his game has been completely reformulated from Juste’s. While playing through the first time I noticed that HoD had a very classic, almost action-oriented layout to its stage design. Although there was a lot of wandering, whenever I needed to go somewhere it tended to be along a pretty straight route and usually through some new territory. What happens in Maxim’s game is that nearly all of the adventure elements have been removed. You can save, but that’s about it. Otherwise, it’s more or less become a classic Castlevania game. What’ve been mixed up are the paths available to you and the order in which you play through the castle. So far (though I’ve barely played into Maxim’s game at all) it looks like you’re constrained to a somewhat linear path.

Also, Maxim plays like a ninja. That’s about the best description I can give. He’s got Juste’s dashes, but on top of that his running, jumping, and attacking speeds are all about fifty percent greater. He’s got a triple-jump, a slide kick, and a normal ducking kick from the outset, and his normal attack is a quick sword swipe. He only has one special weapon, which is a strange and elaborate cross-like contraption. Maxim is just a speedy, strong character. His game ends up playing something like a cross between Strider and Ninja Gaiden (though without the wall-crawling). Considering that Ninja Gaiden and classic Castlevania play almost exactly the same, this seems appropriate.

The boss mode is actually fairly interesting, and the widely-reported secret contained therein, really is firing up my jones for a GBA compilation or remake of the original NES trilogy. (I mean, it’s perfect down to the sound effects. Even the irreplacable “whoop!” sample.)

Muh. So. There that is. I guess it’s better to have a condensed hunk of gaming goodness than a sprawling fifty-hour affair stuffed with needless filler and busywork. (God, why are so many games full of tedious chores these days, just in order to increase playtime? Who started this trend? Wasting my time is not the key to my heart, people. Let me finish the fool game already, so I can move onto something else!) There was barely a moment in HoD which felt superfluous, with the exception of some nasty backtracking in the last third or so. Once the teleporters are all located this isn’t as much of a problem, but — oy. And y’know, people always make what seems to me to be way too big of a deal about backtracking in adventure games. So far as I’m concerned, it’s all part of the exploration aspect in a game like Metroid or Zelda.

But remember what I said about the castle’s layout in this game? There are two sides to everything. The first time through, it’s great and really focused-feeling. The problem is, whenever you want to go back to someplace, you usually have to go far out of your way to return. Much of the time I just put off some smaller tasks which I knew I could finish in another part of the castle because I didn’t want to put in the effort to slog all the way back there through ten minutes of rooms and corridors. The game’s pretty good at directing you back to each part of the castle in turn, though. So generally you don’t have to do a ton of backtracking if you’re patient enough to wait until you’re back in the neighborhood. But the thing is, there are a ton of shortcuts that are present from the beginning but which are locked until very late in the game. The “skull doors”, for instance, exist mostly to keep the player from being able to revisit earlier sections of the castle without putting a ton of effort into winding his way back through his own footsteps. I don’t see why this is in many cases, except perhaps to keep the player from being distracted from the tasks at hand. This is fine in retrospect, but at the time it was kind of frustrating.

And yet this kind of a limitation has its interesting effects. Indeed, it kept me from bothering to revisit the start of the game until about eight or nine hours in. And there’s something… well not exactly poignant, but at least interesting, about finding one’s self preparing for the end by going back to where one began. Everything just went full circle, in a sense.

And come to think of it, isn’t this kind of the point of the series?

And yes, it’s even got the Konami code.

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Ken Burns’ Civil War series is showing on PBS this week, two episodes every night. I watched another chapter a few moments ago, but I just don’t have the patience to stick around for the second one. It’s interesting stuff, but this miniseries has perhaps the most soporific presentation I’ve ever seen. Must escape before I lapse into a coma. Sorry, Grant.

Onto other things.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance has a very nice tone to it. It’s… a little harder to immediately get into and enjoy than was Circle of the Moon. It’s not as instantly agreeable, and it feels kind of… cold. But now that I’ve played a little bit, it’s opened up a lot and it’s become clear how much more well-made this game is in general than KCEK’s last effort. The control is much tighter. The level design is more interesting. And the entire thing is much more Castlevania-ey than CotM ever managed to be. It’s got that same slightly… uneasy tone that most of the main chapters have had, and which I’ve not felt for quite a while. All of the edges of the screen are crammed full of minute and curious gothic detail.

The game also has a constant sense of forward motion that was lacking in CotM. It feels like I’m going somewhere when I’m playing — like there’s a goal — rather than like I’m just puttering around randomly in an adventure game world. CotM was fun, but that was about it. A fun, Metroid-style platformer with Castlevania trimmings. HoD feels like Castlevania. You know how that map popped up between levels in the first game? You know how in level three you could see the final tower in the background as a goal? It always felt like you were making progress. And that sensation is back.

What’s more, and what is interesting — something I’ve not felt for a very long time with this series is that… old movie sensation. The first few games in the series were spattered with spoke holes in all of the title screens and menus, as if you were playing through a silent horror movie. And the games had an aesthetic and an atmosphere to match. HoD seems to bring this general feeling back. It’s not just going through the motions, it’s doing its best to do things right. Igarashi seems to really understand the heart of the series, in a way that KCEK just can’t handle.

As for the music: you’ve heard how awful it’s supposed to be. This is both entirely true and false.

To be sure, compared to what KCEK achieved with CotM just a year ago, the sound quality is a obviously lacking. A few months ago I spent an hour, one night, simply lying in bed and listening to the Catacombs theme from Circle of the Moon in a pair of headphones. Much of the music in CotM was borrowed and remixed from other games (mostly Bloodlines and Dracula’s Curse), but the music quality was higher than anything I’d heard on a handheld system before. And indeed, it was some of the best Castlevania music I’d ever heard. What’s more, the original compositions were absolutely perfect and memorable additions to the growing roster of Castlevania anthems.

This comparison is, I think, the greatest factor which initially makes the music in Hod so very startling, and for a while even a little grating. Although it might be interesting on its own right, the music is not of the same almost unreasonably high standard set both by CotM and by Castlevania in general. This just doesn’t sound like what you inevitably going to expect. Beyond its mere quality, the composition is also a bit odd.

That said, it’s not as bad as people say, and it has its own odd personality. Try to picture Darkstalkers music played on an NES. Now mix in the occasional motive from Simon’s Quest, and top it off with a few tunes from the original Gameboy games. That’s the HoD score, in a nutshell. It sounds like NES music, basically. But like Castlevania music. Only… a more recent kind of Castlevania music, played on an NES. It’s atmospheric and sprawling. As opposed to NES Castlevania music, which is more melodic and clever. Got it?

The thing is, the music here manages to set its own sort of retro tone. If you’ve played the NES games and the original Gameboy trilogy, I think it’s a lot easier to appreciate what’s been done. Try to take the music as a low-fi experiment, rather than a result of ROM budgeting. On its own level, especially in contrast to the high-budget presentation of every other aspect of the game, the music has its own interesting tone going on. If anything, I think it helps just a bit in adding to the “grainy” emotional texture of the game that I was getting at before. If there’s anything that Castlevania needs in order to retain its unsettling ambiance, it’s a certain offputting creakyness — and the music in HoD seems to do a very good job in maintaining this sensation.

Controversial? Certainly. But I think the music succeeds in its own strange way. Perhaps I’m being too forgiving, but I dig.

All of the other sound effects are great, though (further adding to the perplexing aural quality of the game). Something that strikes me: there’s a strange, startled “nAnI?!” whenever Juste is poisoned or cursed. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be Juste’s own squeak — as it doesn’t sound like the same voice who does all of the item crash screaming and the hopping grunts and so forth — or if it’s intended to come out of the monsters which are whapping him. I suppose the latter wouldn’t make much sense, so I suppose it’s kind of amusing to see a Belmont (especially as arrogant a one as Juste) lose his cool when things don’t go as he plans.

The control, again, is so much better and tighter and more… full-seeming than in CotM. Don’t get me wrong; I loved how Nathan felt in that game. But the control was generally pretty loose, and while Nathan always did exactly what he was told to, he didn’t seem to have much… substance to him. The entire game had that weird sort of a sensation for me, so it’s not just the control. But there was no heft. What flexibility he had felt both kind of messy and strangely contrived. Why did he suddenly get certain abilities when he did, for instance? Why was being able to push crates a special power? What the heck is that “rocket jump” special move? Where does it come from? Whenever I learned a new move with him, it felt more like it had merely been arbitrarily unlocked for me so as to allow me to progress.

Juste, in contrast, starts off feeling much more… rigid than Nathan. His dash ability is indescribably helpful, and it’s neat that he’s able to swing his whip around as in Super Castlevania IV. But he’s less of a jumping bean, he doesn’t start with a slide move, he initially can’t automatically twirl his whip as Nathan could. He’s certainly animated a hell of a lot better than Nathan, and his sprite is larger and more visible — but he’s… well, he feels more like a Belmont than a random platforming character with a whip. Just as floaty ol’ Nathan was great for soaring aimlessly around the open structures in his game, Juste has a much more satisfying kind of focus to him. What he loses in out-and-out freedom he gains in precision and, frankly, respectability.

Nothing seems to be wasted on Juste, and nothing seems to be arbitrary. His starting abilities make sense, and (at least so far) every time I’ve gotten a new one it’s been a pretty logical (and balanced) addition. Plus, if you’re missing a particular move from nearly any other Castlevania game — it’s apparently in here somewhere. Now that I’ve got a slide move and can automatically spin my whip around as Nathan did (although I could manually approximate this effect before), I feel like I’ve earned the abilities and like they’re natural extensions to what I started off with. They’re not just there.

I also like how carefully Igarashi has been to make clear the time period in which the game takes place, and exactly who the characters are in relation to the universe we know so far — from the box to the instructions to the game itself, there’s no mystery at all. It’s stated right out that fifty years have passed since Simon’s Quest and that Juste is Simon Belmont’s grandson. It says what he’s doing, what the relation of this task is to the previous game (chronologically speaking), and how uncommonly gifted he is even for a Belmont. And in the (commendably well-made) instructions, it quickly mentions that his magical abilities come from the Fernandez (Belnades) family.

I’m only about two hours in, but — as you’ve likely gathered — my impression is good so far. The game feels — again — more like a true Castlevania game than any I’ve played in a while. And there are elements I’ve seen from a bunch of other Castlevanias, here. The refereces are particularly heavy to the first two Gameboy games, to the NES trilogy, to the Dracula X series (which makes sense, seeing as how HoD can sort of be considered the third game in that subseries), to Bloodlines, even to CotM and Super Castlevania IV. And heck, the N64 games are even referenced slightly (what with the Fernandez name).

I think a few more things probably could have been done with the game, but in general I’m impressed up to this point. And I’m more confident than ever that Igarashi is the guy who should be heading this series; no one else at Konami seems to really get it the way he does. And even if the game does have its flaws, it feels real. It’s not hard to tell how much effort went into the game, and how devoted the man is both to the legacy of the series and to its fans. This isn’t something you get a whole lot in any form of art or entertainment, seemingly least of all videogames and film. And it’s exactly what was missing from Circle of the Moon. He’s got my trust for the future.

A short note: Is Ayami Kojima (Igarashi’s chosen artist since Symphony of the Night) of any relation to Hideo? They both work at Konami, after all.

Hmm…

Yes, in fact. By golly.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

If there’s one word to succinctly describe me, I bleef it could very well be pedantic.

I’m not sure why such a realization brings me the comfort that it appears to. Yet.

There.

Edit:

Well, in some respects anyway.

The pillow.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I just saw Mulholland Dr.. It made me feel much better.

PROJECT RS-2

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Ikaruga, Ikaruga, Ikaruga!

Geh. I haven’t yet slept. I’ve been staying up all night playing Space Channel 5 Part 2 and… the above. The games are blurring together in my mind now… which might not be that bad a thing, considering how much dancing Ikaruga requires. They’re both similarly dynamic. And they both make my heart flutter as few things do.

And right before I bed I flip one last browser window open, to check if PA has yet updated. I begin to think: “Y’know, they should’ve mentioned Ikaruga by now…”

For my next demonstration, I shall change George W. Bush into a semi-dehydrated rutabaga. Just you watch.

Normal Mode

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Ikaruga is keen.