cavia

This Week’s Releases (May 15-19, 2006)

  • Reading time:5 mins read

by [name redacted]

Episode forty of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Game of the Week:

New Super Mario Bros.
Nintendo
Nintendo DS
Monday

Out of all the pre-release devisiveness, in my experience New SMB takes the ribbon. Every time the game’s brought up, the Internet melts just a little. There’s no pleasing anybody! Maybe that has something to do with the game’s own conflicts: it wants to both revisit the style of Super Marios 1 and 3 for the NES and to “update” it with all the advances since Super Mario World. It wants to both play on nostalgia and to attract all the new and disillusioned eyes who have gravitated toward the DS. It wants to both be the successor to the Super Mario Bros. mantle and to come off as something altogether new.

So what we’ve got is a forward-pressing 2D platformer (as with the NES games) that calls upon the moves introduced in Super Mario 64 to help Mario more precisely explore a 3D world, flashy gimmicks introduced in Smash Bros. as a kind of a joke, and a whole lot of silly scripted events and mechanic-wanking intended to impress the pants off of anyone who thinks he knows how Super Mario Bros. works. And yet, it’s kind of fun. Maybe it’s a little too concerned with the past instead of with doing its own thing – and maybe it’s too concerned with making the past appealing to people who weren’t there at the time – yet maybe the gamers are a little too concerned about Mario.

In its overkill, its mix of old and new, the game clearly isn’t taking itself very seriously. The game gives off an air of exuberance; it knows it’s just screwing around, and it doesn’t care. Within those constraints, New SMB is pretty neat. The past has had its time; if you’re going to bring it up again, you’d better either take it somewhere new and inspirational or have shameless fun with what’s there. Ikaruga and Jonathan Blow’s Braid do the former; New SMB does the latter. Fair enough.

This Week’s Releases (Aug 24-28, 2006)

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week thirty-seven of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Game of the Week:

Guild Wars Factions
ArenaNet/NCsoft
PC
Friday

This is sort of an expansion, though it’s being sold as a standalone entity. Think of it as Phantasy Star Online version 2, for the Dreamcast. With Factions installed, you can access either the normal Guild Wars campaign or a new second campaign exclusive to this release. This second bit, which ArenaNet likes to describe as a completely separate game, has your new regions, skills, professions, and whatnot and a whole new feature set for guilds and multiplayer play.

Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

Expanded from my weekly column at Next Generation, and posted on the game’s release date.

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.

A Japanese trend I’ve begun to notice lately is the subcontracting of lucrative licenses to the most prestigious niche or up-and-coming developers – the likes of Treasure, Dimps, Cavia, Yuke’s. These are damned good developers, each with specific skill sets, specific views toward what makes a good videogame, and a substantial cult following. The trend is not unlike Hollywood’s recent predilection toward matching big blockbusters to the Cannes elite, resulting in movies like Batman Begins and the Spider-Man series.

Over here, any parallels are more the exception than the rule. The closest you really get are the likes of Neversoft, which sprang out of nowhere with Tony Hawk and – despite its success – has managed to keep relatively small and self-contained, seemingly more interested in exploring its ideas about design than in growth for the sake of growth. Treyarch is another good example. Maybe some past incarnations of Shiny or Raven or BioWare would count, though in their current forms they’re a little too… important.

Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

With the public rehabilitation of the shooter in games like Ikaruga and Gradius V, the industry is apparently looking to the brawler for its next miracle; this year we can expect to see at least three significant attempts to remodel the genre into something people might want to play again. Of these, Cavia’s Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance can claim both the worst title and the oddest implementation.