Gradius

Fuzzy Horribleness: Pervasive, Worrisome

  • Reading time:10 mins read

These are the edited highlights of a three-way Twitter rant, simplified for flow and structure. Note that some of the features I lament here may well be present in the remake. I don’t really remember; it has been ages since I’ve played it, and I’m speaking to my vague, blurry memory of the game. If the remake retains the exploding eyeballs, which without checking it may well do, then… okay. Good job. How astute of you to notice. Here, bring this note to the old woman and she will give you a medal for your trouble.

Freezing Inferno: The Castlevania Adventure is not very good, but parts of it have a strange charm. When you play the patched version, I mean.

Me: I don’t know what the patched version is, but where the game falls down on mechanics it truly excels in atmosphere.

I’ll never argue that it’s a good game, exactly, but I love the feel of being in the game.

It has sort of a neat silent horror, crackly expressionist tone that feels just right. That’s sort of the tone I get from the best Game Boy games. Gargoyle’s Quest, Return of Samus. Silent horror.

It’s a curiously appropriate side-step, considering the Universal monster movie tone to Castlevania NES. Instead of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, on the Game Boy we have Nosferatu. Sort of. Maybe a blurry print of Nosferatu, lacking a few intertitles and exposition scenes, played at the wrong speed.

It’s full of neat, weird ideas, some of which are creative workarounds to limitations; others… just odd. Had the game a billion times more checkpoints, I might call it playable. Still worth experiencing, though.

The Wii remake missed the boat by ignoring everything good and distinctive about the game along with the bad. The result is just about the most generic action-style Castlevania game ever, with the odd shout-out to TCA.

At least keep the game’s basic structure! Keep the ropes and the EXPLODING EYEBALLS and bounce-spit… things. Keep the weird upgrade path. Keep the most interesting setpieces. Keep the goddamned amazing soundtrack!

Why even call it a remake or reimaging if you’re going to throw away everything that defines the original?

ReBirth is like every shitty retroactive fan bullshit scenario of ignoring or “fixing” the oddball chapter to match. See the fan remakes of Metroid II, that try to make it more like Super Metroid. Or, well, Zero Mission. Except those had much more thought put into them, as misguided as the thought processes might have been.

In this case it’s more like some asshole looked at TCA and said, “That’s not a Castlevania game. But THIS is!” Then he ripped out random hunks of a half a dozen more-popular Castlevania games, and taped them together. I mean, of everything to replace, the music? Seriously? TCA has one of the best ever Castlevania soundtracks!

I mean. ReBirth is a polished videogame, if you’re looking for one of those. There are many out there. It just doesn’t have anything to say except, DUDE! THIS IS TOTALLY A CASTLEVANIA GAME! SEE! IT’S GOT ALL YOUR FAVORITE CASTLEVANIA MOVES AND MUSIC AND STUFF! IT’S ALL IN HERE! DUDE!

Fuckin’ gamer culture bullshit, that thing is. But it is a polished videogame, correctly made.

I mean, if you want to play that game, go play one of the games it’s tearing apart instead. Castlevania: Bloodlines is a good replacement. A near-era pastiche of the NES stuff, but weird. Or just play the NES games. Or Rondo of Blood.

Or… don’t. Go, feed the cynical meta-machine.

But… anyway. Yeah, I like The Castlevania Adventure.

Freezing Inferno: I remember being wowed by ReBirth, but I agree; there’s hardly a lick of any atmosphere.

Me: Or originality. Or purpose. Everything in there is just repurposed from an earlier, better game. And unlike, say, Gradius V it doesn’t have anything new to say about the elements. They’re there solely to say, LOOK! HERE THEY ARE AGAIN! SEE! IT’S TOTALLY A CASTLEVANIA GAME!

The remake falls into the trap of thinking a game is defined by its content rather than concept. Gradius V is a game built on concept. It strips away decades of cruft to dwell on one idea. I don’t think there are even any moai in the damned thing. Just setpieces built around Options. It spends a whole game trying to break down and define the series’ defining mechanic: Options.

That’s just about the best ever reason to revisit an old concept: to better explore its purpose. The worst reason is to dwell on and fetishize past notions for their own sake. HEY REMEMBER THIS?

That latter path is the one that has dragged game design down its own anus since 1985 or so.

Freezing Inferno: [So] Rebirth is basically a piece of dread NOSTALGIA in [your] eyes. It references things and incites memories of old Castlevania things in the name of lighting up those neurons that remember Castlevania… but it lacks the atmosphere.

Me: It’s not nostalgia per se that bothers me here, though I’m certainly no big fan of nostalgia in its own right. (Nostalgia is zombie thinking, out to devour the present and the future.) It’s more the regressive mindset of objective design — the idea that there’s some perfect game out there to be made; that design is all about doing things right, putting in all of the elements that people expect from a game. That’s as opposed to having a core idea, and then doing what is appropriate to conveying that idea to the player.

I’m being reductive. There was an idea to ReBirth: to “fix” Adventure and make it match all the other games. That, though, is the other thing that bothers me. It’s not much of an idea, but it’s troublesome in itself.

It’s one thing to look at the game and say, “Okay, what was it trying to do, and how did it fail in that?” and then to adapt all that, and try to accomplish those goals from a modern perspective. That’s cool and all.

It’s another thing to say, this sucks and it was wrong, because it didn’t match all of these other things. So let’s tear pieces off every surrounding game and fill the hole left by this unmentionable piece of shit.

That’s… I mean. It doesn’t affect me personally, but conceptually I find that kind of offensive. You know?

Freezing Inferno: Nostalgia in place of innovation. That’s the killer.

Me: I don’t even really know what innovation means. It’s nostalgia in place of a distinct idea or voice or theory. It’s like people who instead of thinking problems through rely on quoting famous, semi-respectable people. No, I don’t really care all that much what E.B. White said here, cool as he is. Think it through yourself.

By the same measure, all these quotes from other games — I’m sure they were great in their original context. How, though, do they apply to the present conversation (not our conversation here; you know, the design’s)?

In a good design, every decision, every game element comes from within the basic thesis of your design. It comes pragmatically out of what you’re trying to say with the game, and what that logistically may imply.

This stuff that ReBirth is grabbing from everywhere, by nature it’s not coming from within but from without. That right there is the crux of my irritation here. It’s a prime example of contemporary design vapidity.

ReBirth is a well-made game that has nothing to say, and borrows ideas to serve little but a priori expectations. In its own right I don’t mind it. If it didn’t claim to be a remade, improved version of another game, then… okay. Whatever. It would just be another generic, low-rent Castlevania game. With a series like this you’re going to repeat yourself and borrow from the past continually.

This, though, is more than a case of a series caught up in its own increasingly rigid myth. It’s an empty-headed piece of rote repetition that holds this formula as superior precisely because of its familiarity. In the process it discounts every idea that doesn’t fit the template, precisely because it doesn’t fit the template.

This is a shitty way to think about anything creative.

It’s an attempt to make an individual game fit the series, rather than to explore what the game has to say — which is both a pointless exercise and a tremendous missed opportunity to do something genuinely cool.

Deny the outliers. Sanitize the dissodants. As opposed to helping them better achieve their ambitions. It’s a kind of intellectual fascism.

There is a fine line between this mentality and all of the shit that women put up with from Gamers. There’s this enfranchisement of extremist reactionary entitlement bubbling below the surface of Gamer culture. It shows in subtle ways, and in totally disgusting ways, but it’s all the same process in the end.

This all is a big reason why I hate Gamer culture and why I’ve backed away from game writing as of late. I realize that it probably should be a reason to write even more, and even more infuriating pieces. But. Well. I just don’t feel the responsibility anymore.

John Thyer: Yeah, when you’re approaching every game as an imperfect permutation of some non-existent ideal, of course you’ll react with hostility to experiences outside the norm, often games by marginalize authors.

Like, Gone Home really isn’t that radical all things considered! But it still falls outside the closed mindset. And it’s ultimately what leads to the creator of Depression Quest being bombarded with rape and death threats.

Me: “Yeah, when you’re approaching every [woman/person] as an imperfect permutation of some non-existent ideal,”

It’s all the more raw and disturbing with games, compare to other media, as games are bottled perspectives. They’re not just a narrative that you follow. A game is a thesis about the way the world works. “If I do this,” you say, “then this happens.” Then you hand this to people, and let them see the world by your rules.

And in response, they get fucking furious and want to kill you.

Anyway, there’s something about mainstream game design that reinforces, rewards this way of thinking. It’s a small stimulus, but it feeds into this entitlement and pettiness, normalizing it as a thought process.

It’s not even the deeply ingrained violence that I’m talking about. It’s the Pavlov factor. Keep hitting your head on that button until you get the shiny reward. No means maybe, which means yes.

I’m being simplistic here regarding cause and effect, but there’s a fuzzy horribleness to game psychology — and that it is so pervasive is worrisome, especially when you consider the number of people who obsess over videogames, who make them their lives.

Because of the way that our brains work, everything that you do becomes a part of you, just a little bit. Learning is all about reinforcing those pathways between nodes. And the pathways that videogames reinforce… well. It’s not much of a mystery why gamer culture is host to such a population of irredeemable fucking monsters.

And that concludes my review of Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth.

A Life Worth Living

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Some of the typical themes to indie games, and art games, and deconstructionist games in general, include violence, death, and loss. I find it interesting that the deeper problems of game design, toward which the more thoughtful game authors are drawn, so closely mirror a boilerplate list of human concerns. At least, metaphorically speaking.

Of the three, death and loss, and the association between the two, are the bigger concerns — perhaps because in the short term, with such a narrow communication bottleneck, it’s more worthwhile to hand out monosyllabic verbs for the player to sling around: shoot, run, jump, grab. Let players use the grammar they know, while you precisely sculpt a context to lend the discussion an illusion of eloquence.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

R9

  • Reading time:1 mins read

There’s a bonkersly thoroughly contemplated recombobulation of R-Type on Xbox Live. It’s two-player co-op; it’s got an instant-respawn option, and a million redone graphics options. Hitting the “Y” button flicks between original 2D and remade 3D (with various graphics filters) at will. It’s an instant fade. Crazy!

This game seriously has some of the best music ever. Hearing that theme reappear and develop as the game progresses is weirdly poignant — I get a chill in the back of my neck, as I do whenever some permutation of “Esaka Forever” pops up. It’s just one of those soundtracks.

And the game is now more playable than ever! You can do the proper survival horror experience, or you can just have fun with it in full Life Force mode.

The New Generation – Part Two: Masterminds

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Something is happening to game design. It’s been creeping up for a decade, yet only now is it striding into the mainstream, riding on the coattails of new infrastructure, emboldened by the rhetoric of the trendy. A new generation of design has begun to emerge – a generation raised on the language of videogames, eager to use that fluency to describe what previously could not be described.

First, though, it must build up its vocabulary. To build it, this generation looks to the past – to the fundamental ideas that make up the current architecture of videogames – and deconstructs it for its raw theoretical materials, such that it may be recontextualized: rebuilt better, stronger, more elegantly, more deliberately.

In the earlier part of this series, we discussed several games that exemplify this approach; we then tossed around a few more that give it a healthy nod. Some boil down and refocus a well-known design (Pac-Man CE, New Super Mario Bros.); some put a new perspective on genre (Ikaruga, Braid); some just want to break down game design itself (Rez, Dead Rising). In this chapter, we will highlight a few of the key voices guiding the change. Some are more persuasive than others. Some have been been making their point for longer. All are on the cusp of redefining what a videogame can be.

The New Generation – Part One: Design

  • Reading time:15 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

An idea is healthy only so long as people question it. All too often, what an idea seems to communicate – especially years and iterations down the line – was not its original intention. Context shifts; nuance is lost. To hear adherents espouse an idea, measureless years and Spackle later, is to understand less about the idea itself than about the people who profess it, and the cultural context in which they do so.

In 1985, an obscure Japanese illustrator slotted together a bunch of ideas that made sense to him that morning, and inadvertently steered the whole videogame industry out of the darkest pit in its history. Since that man’s ideas also seemed to solve everyone else’s problems, they became lasting, universal truths that it was eventually ridiculous – even heresy – to question.

So for twenty years, skilled artisans kept building on this foundation, not really curious what it meant; that it worked was enough. They were simply exercising their proven craft, in a successful industry. Result: even as technology allowed those designers to express more and more complex ideas, those ideas became no more eloquent. The resulting videogames became more and more entrenched in their gestures, and eventually spoke to few aside from the faithful – and not even them so well. Nobody new was playing, and the existing audience was finding better uses for its time. A term was coined: “gamer drift”.

The Nose Before Your Face

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eight of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “The Value of Simplicity”.

So lately we’ve been swinging back toward thinking about games as a medium of expression. It’s not a new concept; way back in the early ’80s, companies like Activision and EA put all their energy behind publicizing game designers like rock stars – or better yet, like book authors – and their games as unique works by your favorite authors. This all happened just after figures like Ed Logg and Toshihiro Nishikado started to extrapolate Pong and SpaceWar!, incorporating more overt narrative frameworks and exploring more elaborate ways of interacting with the gameworld. From this initial explosion of creativity came Steve Wozniak and the Apple II, providing an easy platform for all of the early Richard Garriotts and Roberta Williamses and Dan Buntens to come.

Then stuff happened, particularly though not specifically the crash; the industry changed in focus. On the one hand we had ultra-secretive Japanese companies that – like Atari before them – usually didn’t credit their staff for fear of sniping and for the benefit of greater brand identity; on the other, what US companies remained tended to inflate beyond the point where small, expressive, intimate games were economically feasible. And then there’s just the issue that, as technology grew more complex, design teams grew larger and larger, making it harder for any one voice to stand out, leading to more of a committee-driven approach.

It’s-a Heem! Again!

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So far, New Super Mario Bros. isn’t as annoying as I expected. Kind of flavorless, yes. Well-made, though. Some nice ideas in here.

I like how they’ve stripped down everything except the mushrooms, fire flowers, and turtle shell — and then refocused the game so it’s basically all forward momentum. There’s plenty of stuff to dink around and find; that’s kind of peripheral, though. The overworld map pretty much drives the point home: it’s a straight line from the first level to the final castle, with only the occasional tangent to access an alternate route or a special item. The levels themselves are much the same. And the way the secret routes and items are hidden is nice and old-fashioned; reminds me of Mario 1 and Sonic 1.

Likewise, the focus on Mario’s size-changing is interesting. In past games (except Mario Land), there’s never been much point in being small. Here, not only is being small occasionally of value; you can also be smaller than small. And to trade it off, you can be bigger than big. Conceptually, it’s definitely got its stuff together; this is kind of like how Gradius V focuses on the Options. In execution — well.

The problem, as Toups pointed out earlier, feels like a lack of confidence. That seems to be an issue with a lot of Nintendo games these days. A shame. I mean. With more confidence in its own ideas, Wind Waker could have been really amazing. And again, whoever conceived of this game was a really clever person. You want to revive an imporant series, you break down what defines it and you build upon that. In this case, you focus on Mario’s growing/shrinking ability and on forward momentum; ditch all the suits and playground design and as much clutter as you can get away with, then slowly build back up with an eye toward the central themes.

Even the level design is often quite snazzy. Same with the very limited treasure hunt aspect, and how that ties into the world map: spend the coins however you like, whenever you like; go back and dink around to find the other coins whenever you feel like it. No pressure to complete everything; to the contrary, the game’s constantly pushing you forward. Yet it allows leeway if you want to explore. Again, sorta reminds me of early Sonic. Heck, Mario even runs like Sonic now.

Partly because of all that, I really wish this thing felt less generic. Less… cardboard. Whereas Gradius V and OutRun2 almost supplant Life Force and OutRun, this comes off more like a tribute game than something important in its own right.

EDIT: Actually, I want to say it reminds me a lot of a milquetoast follow-up to Super Mario Land. You’ve got some of the same ideas in it: better use of Mario’s size and working it into level logistics; more thematic enemies, and levels with memorable one-time quirks. I keep expecting the fireball to work like the Power Ball, and bounce all over, allowing me to collect coins. Instead, it just creates coins. (Not sure of the in-game logistics there. I think the Mario Land model would have fit better.) What Mario Land has that this doesn’t is a bizarre and quirky personality of its own, allowing it to stand as a response to Super Mario Bros. rather than just a new take on it.

NextGen’s Top Ten Years In Gaming History

  • Reading time:30 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published in some form by Next Generation. I was asked not to include 1999 or 2000, because the Dreamcast was perceived as a low mark in the industry rather than a high one. I was also asked to include the previous year, to suggest that we were in the middle of an upswing. So… that explains some of the selections.

In videogames, as in life, we tend to get things right about a third of the time. There’s one decent Sonic game for every two disasters; one out of every three consoles can be considered an unqualified success; the Game Boy remake of Mother 1 + 2 was released in one out of three major territories. With the same level of scientific accuracy, one can easily say that, out of the thirty years that videogames have acted as a consumer product, there are maybe ten really excellent milestones, spaced out by your 1984s and your 1994s – years maybe we were all better off doing something out-of-doors.

It kind of makes sense, intuitively: you’ve got the new-hardware years and the innovative-software years, spaced out by years of futzing around with the new hardware introduced a few months back, or copying that amazing new game that was released last summer. We grow enthusiastic, we get bored. Just as we’re about to write off videogames forever, we get slapped in the face with a Wii, or a Sega Genesis – and then the magic starts up all over again, allowing us to coast until the next checkpoint.

This Week’s Releases (Sep 26-30, 2005)

  • Reading time:15 mins read

by [name redacted]

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

Catching up from a strong PSP showing at TGS, the DS has begun its cavalcade of fall delights. Also, some decent compilations and a creative D&D game. Check it out!

Today (Monday, September 26th)

Trace Memory (DS)
Jinx/Nintendo

In Japan, this is called “Another Code”. Neither name is that memorable, I’m afraid. The game itself is (as with Lost in Blue, below) one of the new slate of adventure games that serves to demonstrate how the DS hardware might be used. Trace Memory is in essence a Myst-style adventure game – nothing special on its own right, except that point-and-click games have generally been alien to the console and handheld side of the industry, due in part to interface issues, in part to the different mindspace projected by a PC and a TV environment.

In their intimacy, handheld games are a little closer to PCs than are console games – so in theory, the only real hurdle should be the interface. With its stylus and touch screen, the DS is perhaps even more ideal than a PC-and-mouse setup; simply tap where you wish to look. Beyond this, Trace Memory blurs a few edges between PC adventure games and console-style adventures by displaying an overhead view on the top screen and leaving the bottom screen for your character’s first-person perspective. Use the control pad to precisely navigate, or use the touch screen to point your way around. You can think of the bottom screen as a heads-up display or the top screen as a mere map, if you like.

The game is short, from what I gather. That seems just as well, for what the game is. There was a little buzz around Another Code a few months ago, even before people stopped dismissing the DS out-of-hand – so it should gain a small and reasonably loyal following on release. Even if it doesn’t sell through the roof, it still should be valuable to study.

Psychology

  • Reading time:11 mins read

So. Videogames tend to be built like videogames. People tend to play videogames like videogames — even if playing them that way hurts the experience. People go to great lengths to do stupid things in videogames just because they must collect every item, do everything that can be done, before they finish. And videogames know this.

Why is that treasure chest placed in that out-of-the-way room that no one has reason to go to? To reward someone who goes down there. Why do most people go down there, even if it’s clearly not the right direction? Not out of curiosity, but because they expect a reward. It’s become a task, almost. (Again, look at how RPGs tend to be made.) Some second-guessing is fun, if it’s clever and unobvious. Much of it is just tiresome. Everyone’s nodding, saying, “Yeah, we get it. We’ve been here before.” And yet there’s this unwritten code, that everyone’s afraid to break. It leads to leaps of logic like the player being expected to wander around and level up for two hours to beat a boss. That’s just plain fucking bizarre. Grotesque. Picture it, for a moment. What FUCKING reason do you have to do that?

Same for the perfectionist impulse, where you must collect everything — just because it’s there to collect. And the games now take way too much advantage of this, as a result of people reacting in that dysfunctional way to start with. It’s a natural compulsion, so the games treat it as if people actually gain joy from it. When it’s really more of a feeling of obligation. A quirk of mental chemistry, because the game presents it as a viable option. And now we’ve come to expect it so much that we become pissed off when we can’t finish a game with a perfect save file. Same with speed runs and sequence breaking for the sake of sequence breaking and all of this inanity that comes out of that stew of boredom, idle greed, and the natural human response to a lack of consequence.

Doukutsu Monogatari makes me wonder. It’s weak here, but. Perhaps a way to discourage, say, hoarding in a game is to make it so you can’t get a good ending unless you play it in a sane, non-videogamey way.

Silent Hill 2 also comes into this a little, as does the discussion about hardware — although you don’t really need advanced hardware for this. Not in a basic sense. I mean. Some version of this goes as far back as Ultima. Further, probably.

I don’t mean imposing arbitrary (or strict story-based) limits, of the kind we’re all so used to and annoyed with. Damn, I can’t get through this door because I have the Zippomat instead of the Gizmodrome. Or I haven’t given this item to this other character, triggering this plot event. So I can’t progress until I do it. What I mean is, sure — let the player do whatever he wants within the boundaries of the game world. Yet if the player is obviously behaving in a manner inappropriate to the situation, just because he CAN, or because he’s used to second-guessing what videogames are asking of him, it will result in — well. Not punishment, so much as consequences.

Someone else can come up with specific examples, I’m sure. As well as too many examples of when a game’s charm comes from exactly that freedom to put your trinkets in a row. Or from subverting the system (though that’s not what I’m talking about here, exactly; I’m all about subversion within the established rules — which is why I can appreciate Nippon Ichi’s SRPGs even as I am unwilling to play them). I’m just working in vague generalities. And I don’t know where they’re going.

What are the possible ramifications here? Is a lack of consequene for the player’s acting like a yo-yo, or like (simply) a gamer, part of why videogames are still so fucking adolescent? Clearly, a good portion of their existing audience — probably the most vocal and obvious segment — would do as well to grow up as the games they’re playing. How much are the two sides encouraging the current situation? What are the dynamics?

It basically is a question of motivation. In Shenmue, there’s such potential to get absorbed in the gamey nonsense — and some people do, and become lost and annoyed. For the most part, though, I just feel compelled to drink in the situation. Play it as if I’m living a life, rather than play it as a game. It’s actually rather boring if you try to second-guess it and to treat it as a typical videogame. I think maybe its fault is that there is little aside from boredom to dissuade the player from going all OCD and missing the point. If you linger too long, I hear that Long Di eventually comes and kills Ryo. That’s a long way out, though. I’ve never had to worry about it, even at my slowest poke of a pace. It’s likely boredom will drive anyone on by then; the only reason to remain, in fact, is to find out what happens if you don’t do what you’re expected to.

What might be an organic solution? I don’t know. You probably don’t want to wall the player in. As much as we like to make fun of it, the “But thou must!” mechanism is pretty omnipresent. It seems to me that it’s best to allow the player to make those bad decisions (sorry, Nintendo!), and to naturally wind up in an undesirable circumstance as a result. That’s the way we learn, y’know? On the one hand, don’t encourage acting like you have a mental problem — so if the player goes there, it’s his own doing. On the other, make him feel like a genuine idiot for behaving so erratically.

I think the latter would be most effective as an end effect, rather than a snap response to walking outside certain boundaries: the game cuts short, or the player gets a bad ending that shoves in his face all of the junk he’s done, or what-have-you. This would allow some leeway for the player to stray. No one’s perfect, after all.

Would a more immediate response help as an additional deterrent? I don’t know. Something in me says that this might just encourage a person, out of curiosity to see what else the game has to say about him. Any attention is a reward of some sort. And a lust for trivial reward is the main motivation for behavior lke this.

Perhaps the issue of motivation isn’t something that can be explained in a rational, mechanical way — since it relies so much on the ephemerals of emotion and tone. And because we all interpret our signals in different ways. The Zelda discussion seems to show that. What motivates me to explore Hyrule is much what would motivate me, were I put in Link’s position. What motivates some others is less experiential; more… baubly. It has to do with the gameplay mechanisms for their own sake, rather than to the end they were implemented to start with. With, in effect, how the game plays as a game. And that mentality has determined where the series has evolved as it has been refined, as it has with RPGs and so many other games.

I want to say that something’s lost here. It’s hard to define to people who aren’t tuned to it to start with, though. Or to explain why it’s so important. Hell, it’s a big part of the reason why I play videogames. And so, I expect, it is with many others before they become distracted or mis-trained because of the mental level that videogames so like to tap into. The feeder-bar level of gratification.

It’s seriously unhealthy, I think, where videogames are now. I think, in a manner, they promote and hone OCD and ADD-oriented levels of behavior and thinking. And although it might sound a stretch, I think that might be one factor in why so many gamers are such… insufferable fucks, to be blunt. And the sad thing is, this is gaming’s audience, so there’s a feedback loop. Games are developed for people who already exhibit these signs, and those games just promote them all the more.

Yet. Videogames can operate on a more human level. How much needs to come from the player, seems to depend on the game. For its time, Zelda promoted a much richer mindset. Myst and Riven piss off the core gamer demographic, which tries to approach them like puzzle games, even as they reward people who come at them looking for something more involving. And even Treasure’s games — say, Ikaruga and Gradius V — have a transcendent emotional quality to them, born out of their self-conscious design. They depend on the player’s familiarity with videogames, to make a grander set of statements about the medium itself, and the way we interact with it.

I guess the situation can be summed as follows:

Q: How do we get players to behave like human beings?
A: We motivate them on a human level.
Q: How do we do that?
A: That’s the key, isn’t it.

I was about to go on, and say something about discouraging unhealthy lines of thought — then it struck me how vague that is. More like discourage OCD and ADD-oriented thought strains. I would love videogames to mature enough to allow, or even encourage, the player to explore unhealthy modes of thought. Silent Hill 2 has a passive reaction to the player’s way of thinking; if the player behaves in a suicidal way, for example, the game decides that the main character went to Silent Hill to kill himself. A more tangible set of reactions might be interesting. Not sure how that might be achieved, though.

A while ago, I explored the idea of an emotional change in the player’s avatar, depending on the player’s actions. For instance, in an RPG, you, the player have the option to wander around and kill things, to grow stronger and more experienced and whatnot — yet you lose a bit of yourself every time you kill. A little bit of civility. Of humanity. And that will affect the way the avatar will interpret and interact with the game world. The more you kill, the more unpleasant the game becomes. The more hardened the character becomes, until he becomes something of a psychotic monster. The type who would just wander around and kill anything he came across, for no good reason. He will be treated as such, in-game. Most important, this can’t be seen from a clinical distance. It has to be done in a way that the player will grow uncomfortable with the way things are progressing.

I think Fable experimented with a bit of this line of reasoning, though it couldn’t take it far — so in the end it became something of a cartoon illustration of ideas someone else might want to reinterpret and implement more seriously in another five years or so.

That quality of discomfort seems the most important one, for barrier-building. As long as we’re dealing in emotions, anyway. Whether that discomfort be moral, ethical, fear-based, or just plain boredom and disappointment must, I guess, depend on circumstance.

Again, I would love to get to the point where it would be possible to make an effective Clockwork Orange of sorts; a truly transgressive experience. I’m afraid that’s not really feasible until we’ve established some barriers, though. Made them standardized. The most transgressive a game you can get at present is something like a Kojima game, which rebels against the assumed contract between game and player on a mechanical, on a conceptual level. That’s all nice. I don’t know if we’re really there until it will actually mean something to do that on an emotional level. And until gamers are accustomed to behaving like human beings, that’s not going to happen.

EDIT: Discussion continued here.

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.

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.

Optional behavior

  • Reading time:1 mins read

That’s a thought.

The focal point of Gradius is the Options. It always has been. They are the most uncanny element of the game. They are one of the most critical elements to success. They are what make Gradius what it is.

G5 knows this. As mentioned, it designs the controls and the power-up systems around the Options. There is also the respawning, though. Unless, for some foolheaded reason, you set the game to restart you at a checkpoint, the Options wait around for you to reclaim. They are the powerups you keep with you throughout the game, regardless of error. With the Options in hand, it’s not too difficult to get back on track. All you need are a few speed-ups and a laser. That’s not hard to earn back.

Options, for all their enigmatic charm, are the heart of Gradius as a game and a series. G5 is the first game, though, to notice that; to be entirely built around them. At least, so far as I am aware.

…

I intend to dwell on this for a while.

Ultima disappointment

  • Reading time:8 mins read

Gradius V has now arrived.

It is, of course, terrific. I could go into detail. Instead, I ask:

WHERE’S MY LORD BRITISH?!?!

I could have sworn it was there at E3, last year. Now player two just steers a red-tinged Vic clone.

GIVE ME MY LORD BRITISH, MISTER IUCHI.

WHERE’S MY COPPER SPACESHIP OF LOVE, NAKAGAWA?

…

Otherwise, all is good.

EDIT:

Here are some things from an IM conversation with Shep over the evening:

—
Gradius V is really, really good. It’s pretty hard. It’s the kind of hard where you get a little further every time, though.

It’s also got a lot of… details. I mean. You can set two different kinds of respawn behavior, in the options. The default is Life Force style. You can also set it to go back and restart at checkpoints, though, as in the other Gradius games. If you really want to.

If you get your ship fully sped-up, it nowhere near as too-fast as in past games. And then it cycles back. If you want to slow down, you just get another capsule and select it again, to reset.

Also. You don’t need your shield to be depleted entirely, to activate a new one. This is actually helpful.

The game looks like Ikaruga, stylistically. You can tell they just dumped everything they learned about rendering a 3D 2D shooter into this.

It also, though… incorporates some elements of Ikaruga’s decoration. Along with all of the Gradius and Life Force stuff. Subtle things.

Like the tube that the player’s ship flies out of, as Ikaruga begins. I swear that’s in the background somewhere.

When you play for long enough, or maybe when you get far enough, or when you reach a high enough score (I’m not sure which), you unlock more credits. To start with. Much as in Ikaruga.

There is a little Bangai-O influence in here. Mostly with how chaotic it can get, and the way the options work now.

The remixes of old Gradius and Life Force tunes somehow make them sound majestic. Epic. Something from a big space opera. That’s part of the whole tone the game tries to capture. This elegant… space thing. Even the font on the side of the DVD case looks like the one used in the logo for The Last Startighter Starfighter.

After three or four tries (and after having already practiced all last E3), I managed to improve enough to beat the first level on one life. I’ve discovered if you can power up the Viper to full strength by the beginning of level two, you should have few problems for a while. If not — well. It’s not impossible, like other Gradius games. It’s just much tougher. Treasure manages to always leave leeway — some desperate means to get through a situation, even if you’ve no real means to protect yourself.

So far.

Limeade! BRB

Smiley: I want Limeade.

Actually. The boss of level four — I blew two credits on it when I went in with full power (and still had all of the options for the subsequent lives). Then I went back and beat it without a single power-up. Not even a speed-up.

It’s. I really like the balance here.

Smiley: Whrr? That… didn’t used to happen in the old games. Dying was a pretty big deal.

I know. It’s been a real torture in past games. Now it’s just… very bothersome. It makes the game much more hair-raising. You have to try that much harder.

limeade! brb

Smiley: Now you’re just taunting me.

The game does similarly. I mean. It has fun with the player. In that virtuosic, subconsciously self-aware Treasure way.

In round three, three-quarters of the way through the level, you blast a hole in the floor and start scrolling down. You know that boss-thing from Gradius, that pops up at the end of every level? One of those starts chasing you down the snaking corridor, shooting all the while. You need to either aim your options to shoot behind and above you, to hit it while you’re running away and dodging its shots and trying not to get crushed against the walls, or you need to wedge yourself through a corner and behind it, so it passes you. Before you’re done, another one appears. Then another. And then you’re done with that section. You start to scroll to the right. You shoot your way through a few barriers. Now you’re in a narrow corridor, with very little space to move around. And another one of those boss-things starts to hurtle right at you, from the right side of the screen, spinning as it goes. Then another. Then another. And another. And another. And another. If you’re fully powered-up, you can blow up each one an instant before it collides with you. Otherwise, you need to duck into any crevices you can find or somehow time it to slip past as they spin.

It’s… just toying with you.

At one point, you go through a time warp and meet the Vic Viper from some earlier Gradius game and you have to help it defeat an older boss. [EDIT: Actually, that’s not so. After beating level seven, it becomes clear what’s going on.] After that comes a huge sequence of boss battles. One after another. There’s another stage where it calmly throws an entire screen full of asteroids at you, to find a path through. And you scream.

It likes to scare the hell out of you. But. It’s Treasure. So. There’s always a way through, if you know what you’re doing. Usually more than one. They just like trying to rattle you.

As in every Gradius game since 2, there are four different power-up schemes. All of the facets except for the Options one are more or less standard, across the board. One scheme will have rear shot; another will have double. One will have this kind of missile, one will have that. The factor that all of these are balanced around, however, is the options: how the options behave. And rightly so, since they’re a big part of what makes Gradius what it is.

The first scheme is a the classic one. The options just follow you as normal. If you hold R1, they freeze in place, relative to your ship. Easy enough.

The third scheme causes the options to line up vertically, above and below you. When you press R1, you pull them in or stretch them out.

The fourth one allows you to gyrate the options quickly around the axis of the Viper. When you have the laser, this is particularly interesting to witness.

The second scheme is the scheme; the scheme which makes Gradius V what it is. Namely, it lets you aim the options. By default, they shoot forward; when you hold R1, then press a direction on the D-pad, you swoop the options’ beam in that direction. When you let go of R1, the beam stays fixed. It’s… kind of like Forgotten Worlds. You can aim them in any angle. And. Most levels are designed around you doing this constantly.

Now. There’s only one kind of laser. The only other things which really change, from scheme to scheme, are the bomb and the double shot. And, again, they change according to the option behavior. In scheme 2, clearly, you have no need for a standard double shot, since you can just aim the options wherever. Instead, you have a rear gun. Of course, this means when you aim the options… you get a lot of bullets. Because the options have the double-shot as well…

Scheme 1 is the “classic Gradius” scheme. Scheme 2 is the G5 scheme, essentially. Scheme 3 is for tacticians, who want to precisely control where they’re putting what shots. Scheme 4 is kind of the opposite. It’s for going nuts.

And. Actually. More than the other Gradius games I’ve played, this game does seem designed specifically to allow any of these approaches. Even if the second one is the one it’s really made for, you can still come at it with any of the above strategies. And heck, again, you can even set it to the old style of respawning, using checkpoints, if you want to go all the way with the “classic Gradius” layout.

It’s a very flexible game, in that Treasure way: amenable to, and understanding of, the different ways people go at material like this.
Depending on your approach, the challenge will be a little different.

It really took someone with a bit of distance to dissect the series and put it back together again, to make it everything that it could be but never quite was (with one exception). Mostly, fun. Focused. And yes, majestic.

Thunderstorm hovercrafts

  • Reading time:2 mins read

F-Zero GX does, indeed, go fast.

…

I enjoy this, lots. This game has spirit.

The original F-Zero never caught me. It struck me as little more than a glittery tech demo for the totally amazing Mode-7 capabilities of the SNES. Then, I had that problem with a lot of SNES releases.

This is clearly a real game.

* *

It occurs to me that there could be a less-deep reason for the whole Kobe/Igarashi twist in the Castlevania series. Igarashi, of course, includes Kobe’s games in his revised timeline. (He also omits Dark Night Prelude, or “Castlevania Legends”, as it’s called here, for even murkier purposes.) The obvious rationale is that these games generally aren’t all that good (save Circle of the Moon, which is fun and well-made for what it is), and that they kind of ruin the storyline that Igarashi had been putting together.

A less-obvious and less-inspiring possibility lies in something that I learned from someone at Konami a few days ago. It seems that every development studio has independent rights to the games it produces. Even for as self-referential a company as Konami, it seems that the different studios have to be careful not to reference each other’s games without permission, for legal reasons. So KCE Tyo can inwardly reference anything it wants (Castlevania, Contra, Gradius, and so on) — but it can’t mention games made by, say, KCEJ (Kojima), without reason. And vice-versa. And all around.

So.

Hmm…