Monthly Archives: October 2004

New Grounds

  • Reading time:21 mins read

Judging from what’s in the game now and from what Keiko Iju said in her intervew, it looks like Noise intends the roster in Maximum Impact 2 to look something like this:

  • Kyo, Beni, Iori
  • Terry, Joe, Rock
  • Mai, King, Lien
  • Ryo, Robert, Yuri
  • Alba, NEW, Soiree
  • Athena, Kensou, Mignon
  • Leona, Ralf, Clark
  • Chae, Chang, Jhun
  • K’, Maxima, Whip
  • Seth, Vanessa, Ramon

I’m not saying that’ll be the exact arrangement; it’s just an example. I can see a third Magical Girl taking Kensou’s place. Or a new woman, in King’s.

I’ve broken this into teams, because it seems from the current arrangement like Noise wanted a team-based structure; they just didn’t have enough characters to support it. If you notice, I’m mostly just adding one color character, as Noise puts it — meaning a supporting character or sidekick, such as Benimaru or Kensou — into each of the existing rough “teams” (going horizontally).

Color characters are the likes of Joe, King, Robert, Chang, Ramon, Whip, Vanessa. They serve no important role in the game balance. They don’t represent anything that isn’t already covered by someone more obvious. They exist mostly to provide different kinds of energy. To make the game feel more alive and varied. In my interpretation, it’s the kind of subtle variation just for the sake of humanity which makes The King of Fighters what it is.

Which might go a distance toward why MI doesn’t feel like a KOF game to me. You might notice that there are basically no supporting characters here. It’s all heroes; protagonists. Main characters. Icons. The only ones who you might count as supporting characters are Maxima and Seth — yet K’ and Maxima are close to a matched set, and Seth actually serves a bigger role in the plot than anyone outside the new characters.

Keeping Your Options Open: Reinterpreting a Legacy

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

This is an early draft of a feature or review (depending on your perspective) that soon after went up on Insert Credit. The version there is probably better. Still, interesting to compare.

I must be forward: although the series has charmed me for two decades, Gradius is as cold, arbitrary, and unforgiving as videogames get. It almost feels like it doesn’t want me to play it. For my part, I abide where I can; I turn the game off when I lose my first life. The only chapter that has stuck to me through the years is the NES version of Life Force — yet I adore the game. Life Force is one of my favorite games for the NES. It’s one of the best shooters I’ve played. It’s probably one of the games I have the greatest affection for, overall.

Clearly something is odd here.

On Metroid: Zero Mission

  • Reading time:2 mins read

> So I was wondering, why did you never review Metroid Zero Mission?

Because I moved to the other side of the continent, and some plans have gotten kind of lost along the way.

It’s a good game. I really like a few things it does, in particular the way it frames itself and what that means; how it justifies existing alongside the original version of that game. There are some little bits of narrative which I find uncommonly clever and illustrative of just how videogames work, as a medium. The game also tries hard to fix some of the problems in Fusion. Much of that is a success. Some of it, not so much.

I just had a dream in which it was common knowledge (and indeed true) that oranges, left unpicked, grew up to huge gourd-like fruits; their rinds hardened into a shell, while their pulp decayed into a juice then dried away. Oranges also grew along the ground, on vines. There was one orange in particular, on the front porch of my mother’s house in Maine, that had a fungal infection on one corner. Sort of a tumor. I knocked it off, only to realize that if it had the one infection, the whole orange was bad. Especially if I left the hole in the shell which I (unintentionally) did. So I tipped the orange over, adding a flood of rancid matured orange juice to the front lawn.

There are a few things about the game which I don’t like as well as I might, of course. Most of those would take a while to explain, though.

On the Outside: An Informal Look into Silent Hill 4

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

Today’s post is brought to you by Andrew Toups and the letter Æ.

People complain about Henry’s personality. I don’t get it. I mean, I do. There seems to be this idea that The Room is substantially more character-based than the earlier games, and that the tendency toward supreme understatement in all parties somehow undermines what emotional potential there might be. I don’t know how true that is, though. Taking the game for what it is, I get the idea that the characters are distant because they’re distant. Because that’s the nature of our interaction, as the player and as Henry Townsend.

See, Henry is a strangely normal guy; in a way, more typical than either Harry or James. He doesn’t have a dead wife and a lost daughter. He doesn’t have a dead wife and a crushing sense of guilt. He just has a bottle of white wine and a carton of chocolate milk in his fridge. He has no particular problems, outside his current predicament. Although compassionate for his part, he maintains his distance. As far as others are concerned, Henry’s role is of the bemused observer.

Although he’s not just a foil, Henry is a parallel for the player. You might call him a bit of a Raiden. Think of his circumstances in terms of Myst — with the Malkovich-holes in place of linking books. Notice how much of the game involves peeping — Henry, taking in his world indirectly, which we in turn take in indirectly through Henry. That is, except for the portions in room 302. Those, the most overtly Myst-like, we experience in the first-person. It is only when we leap through the holes, back into the game world, that Henry returns as a buffer.

In his relationship with others, Henry continues this role. He’s nice enough a person; it’s just, this isn’t his world. He’s busy living the life of the mind. Even when he’s standing next to Eileen, he’s still peeping. He’s not really there. He’s just watching.

It is this distance, and the safety it provides, which the game later tries to dissolve — for Henry and the player alike. When the game notices Henry is when it notices the player. When the darkness intrudes into room 302, it is intruding into the player’s own perceived safe space, where there is no Henry to fall back on.

For my part, I would find Henry’s conversations jarring if they were any less zoned-out. I would be distracted if the human relationships were any more satisfying. That would be too perfect. Perfection ruins any illusion. Henry would cease to be so very normal. He would become someone special. And he’s not. He’s no hero. He’s barely a protagonist. He’s just a twentysomething guy with white wine in his fridge. And at the end, Henry has resolved no personal problems. He remains the guy he always was. He just needs a new apartment.

Boston

  • Reading time:1 mins read

It just hit me the other day how absurd the term “scientist” indeed is, as it was considered from about two hundred years ago when it was coined up until around a hundred. If you consider that “science” is just a formal term (being Latin) for “knowledge”, and that the field that we now call science really IS basically a natural philosophy — it…

I mean. It’s like labeling yourself an ideological proponent of knowledge. Which is fine, I guess, but doesn’t it seem both inordinately arrogant and a little silly to claim that a rational consideration of exterior evidence (a reasonable, if inherently backward approach — as evidenced by the absurdity and horror that the scientific method has brought to, say, psychology, or any system where exterior variables only hint at the actual story) is equal to knowledge itself — and that you are a ideologue of this standpoint, this One Truth?

Sifting for Treasure

  • Reading time:5 mins read

When Yu Suzuki began his work on Shenmue, I doubt he any more understood what the game was going to be than I know what I’m going to eat for breakfast tomorrow. Sure, he had a plan — a plan for a Virtua Fighter-themed RPG. And when the game was finished, it had turned into a hands-on parable for the idea that life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

If, as they say, creativity is the tendency to make interesting mistakes, and if the best works are found in the editing, then intent becomes academic.

What, then, I find really interesting are those supernaturally clean concepts — statements so precise and frankly obvious that they surely must have burst from the aether of their own volition, without any human filter to muck them up. The truth is that, almost to the last, these are just the same shotgun ideas we all try to express, only edited to such a fine point that you feel you can use them as a weapon.

After a brief period of awe, I now understand Gradius V as one of these cases.

At the outset, I admit I was a little confused by how few choices the game seemed to present in comparison to past games. There is only one ship: the Vic Viper. There are four weapon modes, yet they all seem so similar; each has the same kind of a force field, all have the same laser, and what variable factors exist are much the same.

Later I saw that Treasure had merely brought the Options to the fore and center of the game mechanics, doing the uncanny obvious. With this one move, the game and indeed the whole concept of Gradius sticks as it never quite has and never would have otherwise. For the benefit of focus, away with the ripple laser and the photon torpedo and the classic Gradius shield, in favor of the Life Force model. Away with the checkpoint-respawning, again in favor of the Life Force system.*

Though — apparently not too far away. As insightful as the final game is, it looks like Treasure didn’t know any better than I what they were doing when they began. I say this because it seems they actually developed a bunch of that excess material which has so bogged down the series just for the sake of being there. When you beat the game — despite the difficulty level, I find it is more a when than an if — you are treated with a few of the details that Treasure apparently chose to leave out. Namely, a weapon select mode that includes a trove of abandoned concepts, largely inspired by past games.

As far as extras go, this one is about perfect; like a deleted scenes reel, only better. After the game knows the player has had the full experience, it eases up and returns all the toys that Treasure had taken away for fear of distraction, or even of undermining the whole game design. Even if it breaks the game, I finally get my ripple laser. I get a couple of neat missile types, which are far more useful (that is, easy to exploit) than the defaults. If I really want it, I can now use the old-style Gradius shield. I even have some wonky flavors of double shot, that I can combine with my Option type at will.

To me, this is neat precisely because I feel I have now earned the liberty to mess around. I’ve listened to what the game had to say. I’ve done what there is to do. Now we can let down our hair. It’s much the same strategy you see in fighting games like Capcom vs. SNK, where you to make want certain characters available, yet where those characters don’t really fit the main roster. So you lock them away, to make it clear that they’re just there for the fun of it; they’re not part of the actual design.

If I thought the game was brilliant before, I now also consider it generous. Particularly in regards to the insight it provides on Treasure’s creative process. It is a relief to see that they don’t just come up with these ideas; as with anyone, they have to just throw paint at the canvas, and see what sticks. Still, what editors they are!

A note: I see that Gradius V, as with Ikaruga, was designed and developed by only about half a dozen people. I think this says a lot for small teams. I wonder how the growth of team size corresponds to the way the medium has changed (and grown distracted) over the last decade. Something to think about.

* – If the game seems to draw from Life Force so much, I think there is a reason: Life Force is one of the only other games in the series to get certain key things right. Most of the other games in the series are so mired down in tradition and clutter that they become relics of broken-yet-cute ideas.