We All Fall Down

This Week’s Releases (Aug 8-12, 2005)

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week five of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Finally this week, a good balance: not too many games, not too few. About the same number of Japanese and North American releases. Some mainstream, some casual, and some incredibly obscure and hardcore releases. If only the release calendar were always so even, maybe videogame sales wouldn’t slump so much in the summer. Have at you! (Remember to note the release region.)

Today (August 08):

Madden NFL 06 (DS/GBA/Gamecube/PS2/Xbox)
EA Sports/EA Sports (NA)

Yes, yes. Another Madden release. EA’s stock price goes up, enabling it to buy out another six or seven indie developers who were daft enough to sign publishing deals in the last few years. Or maybe buy out Activision. Or Equador. I understand Saudi Arabia’s government is going through a period of transition. Weird what can happen to a company when it goes public. I wonder what Trip Hawkins thinks of his old labor of love. The company that was founded to promote game designers as authors in their own right.

Oh, whoops. Sorry. Tangent. This is a football game in what I understand is a popular series that began on the Sega Genesis in 1991, on one of those weird custom cartridges that EA manufactured before it bothered to acquire an actual license to publish Genesis games. I am told each incarnation of the game is essentially the same as the previous year’s, with a few slight adjustments and an updated team roster. I am also told that the last couple of games have been a little better than usual. That’s nice. I guess.

The 2006 edition (that is, the one released in 2005) is reported to feature a “brand new passing game” in the “Quarterback Vision Control system”; “Formation Specific Audible”; and some fiddling with the offensive and defensive games. There’s also a “Superstar Mode” single player game, which allows the player to “live the life of an NFL star”. I’m sure this must appeal to a lot of people. If you’re one of them, now you know which mega-corporation to support. Get to it!

Seeing Ear Theater

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Hey, now that BBC7 radio has begun broadcasting the McGann audio plays, the BBC has suddenly been scrambling to tie them in with the new series, with RTD’s “blessing”. And heavily promoting McGann’s Doctor, perhaps as a stopgap between Eccleston and Tennant. By all appearances, McGann’s “audio seasons” have turned into canon overnight. At least, as far at the BBC actually keeps track of this stuff. Which isn’t too far. I guess it makes sense. I mean, why not. It’s the closest the show has had to new (forward-reaching) episodes between 1996 and 2005. And it’s the only opportunity McGann’s really had to play the role, and make it his own.

So that seems to mean that Doctor Who’s official run now consists of 26 TV seasons, then four seasons of radio with the Eighth Doctor, then the new series.

Roger. Noted.

Advertising in Games West

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by [name redacted]

The first Advertising in Games West conference was held on Thursday, July 28th at 600 Townsend Street, near the Sega building in San Francisco, and consisted of six panels, a keynote, two breaks, and a lunch, all on the subject of how to intelligently twine the worlds of game development and consumer advertising. Each of the first four panels contained more or less the same points and information; the last two, which dealt with the design and publishing ends of the argument, were a little more varied and informative.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

This Week’s Releases (Aug 1-5, 2005)

  • Reading time:5 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week four of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation.

This week is devoid of releases. There are only three games coming out in North America in the next seven days, the most noteworthy of which is the PC port of Bloodrayne 2. So again we turn our gaze across the sharp, cold fins of the Pacific in search of inspiration. As before, everything that Japan has to show, it’s showing on Thursday. That is, in this case, August fourth.

Armored Core: Last Raven (PS2)
From Software/From Software (J)

The tenth Armored Core game in ten years, Last Raven is intended as a kind of return to form after the previous game, Formula Front. From is trying to stir up a bit of hooplah over this entry, both by posing it as a “tenth anniversary” game and as the final PS2 game in the mech action series. As far as what this game does differently, each part of the player’s mech now accrues its own damage; too much damage, and its efficacity suffers. Notably, according to the plot, the player must finish the game within twenty-four game-hours.

It comes down to this…

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Here’s a theory: The worst thing a videogame can do is assume I have nothing better to do than to play videogames.

The problem here is that I still manage to play Nintendo’s recent games, sort of, begrudgingly — so either it’s not the worst thing or EAD hasn’t yet quite refined its process.

Here are some not-unrelated forum posts, which I provide without context:

  1. Super Mario World sets the stage for the star hunting bullshit to come along half a decade later and confuse game design for another half-decade after that.
  2. Oh hell. Yeah. The puzzle element of the level design. Which later turned into drek like the Metroid Fusion level design and… everything else Nintendo’s done lately. Making all of Nintendo’s games feel exactly the same, when they each originally had such different things to say.I don’t like that, either. It’s in SMB3 also — though the focus is different there. It’s incidental, and just meant to augment the experience. In World, it’s practically the whole point. Locks and keys. It’s all locks and keys now. Find the right block. Goddamn.
  3. That’s about it. World is about milking the game for all it’s worth. It sets up the whole modern design philosophy of “here’s a bunch of stuff to do — so get to it, because doing things is what the player is supposed to do!” without thinking too much about providing emotional motivation. You wind around and around until you’ve scraped everything out of the game — and not by choice. Not by whim. Not because you’re clever or lucky. This isn’t like the “secret worlds” in Metroid. It’s calculated. It’s what you’re supposed to do. What you’re expected to do, just because that’s what people like you do. It’s like Miyamoto has headed the player off and ruined all of the fun by setting up a theme park where there should have been something special and personal. I find it kind of patronizing. Note that, for its own sake, I don’t really mind Super Mario World. It’s not offensive yet. It’s just less interesting than what came before; given that what came before is perhaps one of the best games ever made, that probably doesn’t mean lots. It’s only in the broader Nintendo timeline that the game starts to irritate me. Cause and effect. Context and consequence. So on.

Scrawled amongst conference notes

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As you get older, you drop the specific questions. You get more general. You see the patterns. See past the inane, the momentary — grow to appreciate the inane, the momentary.

People walking up to each other as if they are old chums. Talking, giving long anecdotes — they’ve never met. They just like to talk. Mouths never stop. Talking about improv comedy — Second City — and their education. Laughing insincerely. Speaking with continuous lilt: “you know? isn’t that wild?” Travel, polo shirts, connections. Hot out of college and onto the job market.

Very expensive sandwiches and beverages.

Rent and groceries — not a bad lifestyle if you can meet it.

one as a person
No one
someone

Person standing ildy while people around her die; X-files style show; comes up with bizarre theory that would be right in any normal drama; “are you insane?!” people would ask; turns out, yes, actually. The end.

R&D1 does what Ninten… D’OH!!

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I think I figured it out.

I just read that Nintendo R&D#1 is no more. It’s been absorbed and folded into Miyamoto’s boring old EAD studios. This dismays me, as R&D#1 has always been the one Nintendo studio that actually interested me. (Well, I like R&D#3 also — I’ve no problem with Ice Hockey or Punch-Out.) This was Yokoi’s studio. It’s where Metroid and Kid Icarus came from. The Game Boy. The Wars series. Fire Emblem. Wario Ware, as flawed as it is (mostly for EAD-ish reasons), is one of Nintendo’s few breakthrough game concepts in years.

Now, though, it’s all EAD from here on out.

Shit.

Anyway. The SNES was where EAD, through force of sheer star power, first began to shove R&D#1 to the gutter. Mario and Zelda were Nintendo’s most popular series, so Miyamoto got priority. The SNES was his system. R&D#1 was reassigned to support the Gameboy. Note that the one real game the team made for the SNES, Super Metroid, is often cited as the one real reason to own it. Although I think it’s the most boring in the series, it’s sure head and heels above fucking Mario World or Starfox.

Again, the SNES was Miyamoto’s system. Suddenly there was no more competition. He just got his way. So this is where it all began to devolve. Nintendo just went with what was popular instead of challenging itself, internally (as had been the case previously). Refine what had been proven effective. And this philosophy bleeds out of every pore of the system. It’s like a whole system devoted to a more-competent Sonic Team.

In contrast, the Game Boy was Yokoi’s system. The DS is basically the successor to the Game Boy, and to the whole R&D#1 approach to design. This is the progressive direction, because it has to compete with the popularity of white bread.

And that’s just what the SNES is and always was: the Wonderbread console. The start of Nintendo’s entrenchment.

Time And Relative Dimension In Space

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A certain legion of Doctor Who fans has been incensed by the New Series exterior TARDIS prop. Mind, not the interior set — the outer police box prop. The most common complaint is the size. It’s “too big”, people say. Actually, more like: “it’s huge!” Another issue is that the bevelling on the panels isn’t exactly right. Then there’s the aspect that it’s “just horrible” — or, in the Klingon slang UK Internetters speak, “naff”.

One fan was so irritated that he decided to build his own “proper” prop to assuage himself. Fan reaction was unanimous, from what I could see. This was a proper TARDIS, all right. It’s what the New Series prop should have been all along, damn that Russel T. Davies.

Just for the fun of it, let’s see how they compare. The New Series prop is on the left, the incomplete fan prop on the right.

Note that the fan prop is incomplete. No signs, and not fully painted yet. Still, you get the idea.

Spot the changes? Smaller windows, smaller space up top for the “Police Box” banner. Those are the major ones. The guy who constructed it admitted that he made the windows narrower intentionally, on a personal whim. Also note that the guy made it to scale of an actual police box, and found that it was the same size as the New Series prop. You can see for yourself how big it is, in the picture. As for the New Series box:

Actual police box (slightly older model) on the left. Notice the scale. Now compare to the John Nathan-Turner box, from the 1980s:

Also Note the amount of horizontal space given to the “Police Box” sign. There goes that detail.

Of course, the 1980s box is well-known to be larger and more “accurate” than the original TARDIS prop.

…

So. Let’s talk about gamers, shall we? Say… fighting game fans?

Crulling Horror

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Since I’ve been out West, it seems that Dunkin’ Donuts has STOPPED SELLING CRULLERS.

What is wrong with this world?

More observations into the vortex

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The new series is most well encapsulated in the opening and the ending of The End of the World — all of the melancholy wonder there, that the series always seemed like it was trying to get across yet which had never before been so concentrated. About how fleeting life is, and how important it is to understand and appreciate what you, while you, can.

It really is the overarching message of the series — the new one, in particular. It’s kind of the message the Ninth Doctor gives us. Everything has its time and everything dies. He especially is doomed, by his own head and hand. And yet when Rose’s father figures the reason he’s never done anything important is that he was meant to die, he’s told that “it doesn’t work that way”.

The new series is doing a really good job of commenting on the nature of life by crossing it with the nature of time. Being and Time; Heidegger argues they’re the same thing. It’s not a bad argument, from a subjective standpoint. From a human one. From the only perspective we can know.

Which is, incidentally, the new perspective of the series — now that it’s focused on the companions again rather than the Doctor as-such.

Some people have expressed dismay at how they no longer can appreciate the original series as they used to, much to the derision of the hardcore. I think the problem is now there’s a frame of reference for the old stories. Before, they were all that existed — so it was easy to take them for what they were. Now you get to compare with the current production. You can’t help it, really — even if it’s not really a fair comparison. Since there is a “New Who”, the old who by nature becomes “Old Who” — with all the baggage that entails. One of those unavoidable details.

The question then becomes, how do we reconcile the distinction? It’s something each of us has to answer on his own, in his own way.

You know what’s the least dated? The black-and-white stories.

Really. It’s obvious they’re from another era. They’re old. They’re crackly. There’s a completely different headspace to black-and-white film, compared to color.

Check out Tomb of the Cybermen, for instance. It holds up nearly as well as, say, Lang’s Metropolis. There’s enough distance that you have no real inclination to compare it to the new material. It simply is what it is.

Once you introduce color, though, you run into a whole host of psychological problems.

In response to some message board shenanigans

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Most of science fiction is magic in the end: you make an assumption for
the purpose of illustration (usually of a social or political issue),
and as long as everything around it follows in a reasonable manner, you’ve got a successful gimmick.

Doctor Who has never been any different; the difference is that its key
assumptions, on a long-term basis, tend to be more for dramatic than
hypothetical purposes. To provide solutions rather than ask questions.
The sonic screwdriver exists, for instance, to resolve any physical
impasse. Davies has had fun with this and, flying in the face of JNT,
has made it even more of a panacea. (Note Boom Town and the
teleportation.) This is fine because this one magical assumption allows
us to skip the obligatory procedurals (that frankly have little to do
with story) and go more directly from cause to effect, on a narrative
level.

The TARDIS has always been another magical device. It works how it
needs to work to do what the writers want to do. That Davies is having
more fun with this than earlier writers and producers just follows his
whims and — frankly — the demands of the modern format of the show.
And of modern standards in storytelling.

That montage at the start of Rose tells all, really. In two minutes we
know all we need to know about her, and all we really get are setup
shots. It would be pointless to fill in the blanks, as that’s not what
the story’s about. We get all we need to know from what we’re shown,
and we can fill in the rest ourselves. Take that, expand it, you have
Doctor Who in a nutshell. All Davies has done is boil it down. And in
most places, it’s effective in the end. If you really need
explanations, you can make them up on your own. Fans are good at that.
They’re kind of irrelevant to the purpose of the series, though.

Thus concludes my review of Metroid II.

The Art of Selling Out

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by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Katamari Damacy ends with the player roaming the Earth, ripping up all of its nations and rolling them into a ball. Hard to follow up on that.

The sequel is, therefore, the exact same game as the first. It had to be, really; that’s how sequels work. You capitalize on the investment of the first game by recycling your work and cashing in on the good will the first game bought you. The curious detail is that this sequel knows what it is; it was made with knowledge of the first game, and of the success of that game – for without that success, there would have been no sequel. And more to the point, it was made knowing just what people expect in a sequel.

Tarnish

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I had a dream about the N-Gage.

Devils in the Details

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by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

All right, so Lament of Innocence wasn’t so hot; the next game would be the real clincher. Lament did have a good engine. And Leon controlled just right. There just wasn’t much to do with him, was all.

So what does Igarashi have to show this time? As it turns out, not much — yet. As of E3, Curse of Darkness strongly resembles its predecessor: another 3D Castlevania that feels nice to play, but has the level structure of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That in itself would be fine; Castlevania began as an action game, and it worked then. What is worrisome is that Igarashi wants to make this game nonlinear.

Wonder of Wonders

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by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Yuji Hori’s Dragon Quest was the first console RPG. It established the template that every other Japanese RPG has followed, and none of its sequels have fundamentally strayed from that form. It’s the unchanging grandfather of console culture. In Japan, it’s an institution. Here, it’s been a dud.

Maybe it was the name. Thanks to TSR’s lawyers, we knew the series as Dragon Warrior. On the cover, we saw a man who might as well have been Captain America, battling a huge, leering wyrm. Instead of a game where we took the role of this warrior, we got an introverted little quest where straying too far, too quickly was suicide.

Dragon Quest VIII is much the same; the only real change is in presentation. That might just be enough, though.