by [name redacted]

Week thirty-five of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation. Two of the sections are expanded into full articles, posted later in the week.

Game of the Week:

Tomb Raider: Legend
Crystal Dynamics/Eidos Interactive
Xbox/Xbox 360/PlayStation 2/PC
Tuesday

Something that people keep bringing up, yet probably don’t bring up enough, is that the first Tomb Raider was a damned good game. And what it seems Crystal Dynamics has done is go back to the framework of Tomb Raider 2 and to break it down, analytically. What they chose to do is bring the focus back to exploration – in part by introducing some new gizmos, in part by making the environments more fun to navigate. Reviews nitpick a few fair issues; still, the overall response seems to be a huge sigh of relief. Maybe it’s not the best game in the world, or all it ever could be. Still – it’s not terrible! The theme that keeps coming up is one of nostalgia – that, for the first time, someone has managed to recapture what makes Tomb Raider interesting. And that sentiment is itself interesting.

Rest of the Week:

Auto Assault
NetDevil/NCsoft
PC
Thursday

For a while there was some uncertainty about just when the game was coming out. It’s now! To get an idea what this game is about, cross Twisted Metal with World of Warcraft and set it in the world of Fallout. You design a character, you get a car, and you go out into the post-apocalyptic wasteland to shoot up other cars. You gain experience, buy upgrades, etcetera, as in your typical MMORPG. It’s just, there’s this whole Blaster Master element.

Overall, Auto Assault is a novel spin on a genre that’s hard up for originality. That should work in its favor; it also has positive press so far. The thing that really stands out to me is that this is yet another NCsoft publication. After the likes of Guild Wars and City of Heroes, Lord British and the Korea Kids are really shaking things up. Where everyone else seems content refining or redefining the same general concept, NCsoft has consistently mining both East and West for new perspectives on what can be done with an online game, be it in structure, concept, or business model. I wonder how many other publishers will cotton on this.

Bone, Act Two: The Great Cow Race
Telltale Games
PC
Wednesday

Speaking of perfect niches, our intrepid gaggle of Lucasarts refugees continues its online distribution experiments with the second episode of its ongoing Bone project. Keeping in line with the original comic, The Great Cow Race is based on the second printed volume (out of nine). It is also being sold for a mere thirteen dollars. Thirteen bucks! I guess there’s the value in online distribution. That’s pretty hard to pass by, even if you’re only mildly curious about what Telltale is up to. It’s basically an impulse buy.

Another advantage to this bite-size design and distribution system is that Telltale has been able to dynamically adjust what it’s doing in reaction to user feedback – so in theory this segment should be substantially polished and tuned. Also in theory, Bone author Jeff Smith should be even more involved than last time. To some extent, Telltale seems right on the edge of figuring out this whole “episodic content” thing that the industry has been murmuring about for a while, and turning it into a viable business model. This is a project to watch.

Cabbage Patch Kids: The Patch Puppy Rescue
D3
Game Boy Advance
Tuesday

Disclaimer: the most interesting thing about this release is that it’s the third example of legendary “B-game” publisher D3’s new North American strategy. The game itself is pretty much licensed-fare-by-numbers, though the character sprites are bizarrely huge and the backgrounds are actually rather well-drawn. The license itself is kind of confusing me. Are the Cabbage Patch Kids back again? I’ve not been keeping up with the ’80s revivals. From here on, I’ll stave off the D3 alerts until the company puts out something that strikes me as particularly noteworthy. Nice to see that they’ve settled into the market, though.

The King of Fighters NeoWave
Noise Factory/SNK Playmore USA
Xbox
Tuesday

This port is a long time coming, as NeoWave was released to arcades in the summer of 2004 then to the Japanese PS2 a year later. Since it’s just the single game, of course, SCEA doesn’t want it on the PS2 over here – so SNK Playmore USA has to go to the trouble of porting the game to the Xbox. Though the process is slow, the end effect is Xbox Live compatibility – so there’s something, anyway.

NeoWave is essentially an enhanced port of the least interesting KOF ever, The King of Fighters 2002. The only real differences are that NeoWave, produced for the Dreamcast-compatible (and now-defunct) AtomisWave platform, has high-res backgrounds, a new boss, and a very slightly adjusted roster. As with the home versions of 2002, SNK has added a bunch of characters added back into NeoWave, including the missing fighters from 2002 – meaning basically you have a choice between two versions of KOF2002 for the Xbox, with two or three characters of difference between them. Oh, and the Xbox and PS2 versions of 2002 come with one of the better games in the series, KOF2003. And they should be kind of cheap by now. Still, if you want to see Young Geese against a high-res bitmap – and do it online – this is your big chance.

Ideally, I think this game should have been packed with the recently-canceled ’94 Re-Bout – a high-res remake of the first King of Fighters game, which has never been released on consoles. I don’t think either product is really that appealing on its own; together, they would have made a curious collection.

Monster Rancher EVO
Tecmo
PlayStation 2
Tuesday

Essentially Monster Rancher 5, EVO is the most ambitious revision to date of the Monster Rancher formula. As with past games, the player sticks any old CD, DVD, or game disc into the drive to generate a new monster (a trick likely lifted from those “barcode battle” games that were hot around the same time as Tamagochi), then raises the monster to do battle and whatnot. The major difference this time is the framework. EVO is set in a traveling circus, and the entire structure of the game has been focused on and expanded from that premise. Overall, EVO seems like the most coherent and substantial entry to the series yet. The previews all seem to be gushing with optimism.

Odama
Vivarium/Nintendo
GameCube
Monday

Odama is a pinball game made by Yoot Saito of Seaman fame, set in feudal Japan, crossed with a real-time strategy game, incorporating voice commands. By now you’ve already concluded either that the game is the most awesome thing in the universe or that it’s one of the stupidest things you’ve heard of. Still, read on.

Other than not letting the ball fall into the gutter, your other goal is to clear a path to the top of the screen, through which your your troops may carry an enormous bell – and then to direct them up there. There are all sorts of subtleties that make the game more dynamic and that make the setting feel more alive, including a lot of troop micromanagement stuff. Basically that’s it, though. There are a bunch of levels, including a scrolling one where you wander through a Japanese village, giant destructive steel ball in tow.

The game goes to admirable lengths to set up a story explaining this nonsense, and the entire game seems both completely serious about its scenario and completely conscious of how surreal the whole thing is. As a whole, the package drips with a certain deadpan charm – the kind of thing that leaves people wondering if the game is a joke or not.

As soon as it was announced, the game hit the consumer press like a bucket of Monty Python. Over the last two years, I think the only game I’ve heard referenced more than Odama is Spore. Maybe that’s just my imagination; still, there you go. I think the major reason people will buy Odama is to show off to other people, to assess their reaction. So I guess it’s a sort of a social tool, for the nerdcore gamer elite. Katamari Damacy went through a similar phase before exploding into its own. Somehow I don’t think Odama will have quite the same impact; still, it is kind of interesting.

OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast
SEGA-AM2, Sumo Digital/Sega
Xbox
Tuesday

Uh-oh! Today’s the day that OutRun became a franchise. The original OutRun is one of Sega’s defining works. Though it’s a driving game, that’s only an incidental detail. OutRun is really more of a dream about the freedom that cars represent: you jump in your idealized Ferarri with your dream girl, choose your cruising music, and you roar off as quickly as you can toward the horizon, where blue sky meets green grass, until the scenery becomes a mere blur of repeating patterns. However long you play, the dream lasts only five minutes – and yet in that time you tour the world. As you come to a fork in the road and you make your decision, the mountains shift and suddenly you’re somewhere else even more remarkable than before.

OutRun2 plays with the underlying principles of OutRun, both as an experience and as a videogame, and tries to marry the two a little closer. It’s a good game. The Xbox port, by Sumo Digital, misses some of the point of OutRun by making the main attraction a slog through frustrating gamey challenges in search of a perfect score. Of course, the gamers loved that and Sumo got no end of critical acclaim for its efforts. Fair enough; they did put a lot of work into the port – even if it was sort of misplaced.

Coast 2 Coast is basically a replacement for the original Xbox port, in that it compiles both OutRun2 and the arcade “SP” upgrade, which has a new set of levels and incorporates a few new design elements. Add in a kind of overwhelming amount of “added value” clutter, which I guess makes the package more appealing to certain people, and there’s your 2006 update. It kind of strikes me as overkill, especially given how pure and simple OutRun used to be. Still, there it is: proof that Sega is still making videogames.

Real World Golf
Aqua Pacific, In2Games/Mad Catz
Xbox/PlayStation 2/PC
Tuesday

You probably read that Mad Catz has expressed an interest in game publishing. Well, this release sheds a little more light on that decision. No doubt following on the success of Guitar Hero and its like, this is a golf game you play by physically swinging a golf club. Actually, the club isn’t so important; what the game does is it tracks the position and movement of two special gloves included with the package. The game also includes a mini club, though in theory you could grab anything and swing it around. The game itself isn’t getting much in the way of praise; it’s just something to show off the interface, really. Still, it’s hard to deny how neat the overall package is. (While we’re here, add one notch to our build-up to the Revolution.)

Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked
Grasshopper Manufacture/Namco Bandai Games America
PlayStation 2
Tuesday

Samurai Champloo is the latest hit by Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichiro Watanabe, who might well be described as the Sergio Leone or Quentin Tarantino of the anime world. killer7 developer Grasshopper Manufacture has what might be described as strong aspirations to be the Quentin Tarantino of the videogame world. So this is a sort of clever pairing. The big talking point is the relationship between the underlying music and on-screen action; every attack combo available to the player is timed to the music. The player can choose between two soundtracks for any given level, each of which opens different control possibilities. Bloodletting is hyper-gory by intention, to get a reaction out of the player. It’s all… that kind of stuff.