Mario

The Nintendo Syndrome

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part two of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

So Nintendo’s at the top of its game again – or near enough to clap, anyway. The DS is one of the bigger success stories in recent hardware history. People are starting to buy into the Wii hype; even Sony and Microsoft’s chiefs have gone on record with how the system impresses them. Japan is mincing no words; 73% of Famitsu readers polled expect the Wii to “win” the next “console war”, whatever that means. And these people aren’t even Nintendo’s target audience.

Satoru Iwata has done a swell job, the last couple of years, taking a company that was coasting on past success, whose reputation had devolved to schoolyard snickers – that even posted a loss for the first time in its century-plus history – and making it both vital and trendy again.

So what happened to Nintendo, anyway? How is it that gaming’s superstar was such a dud, for so many years? What’s the white elephant in the room, that everyone has taken such pains to rationalize? It is, of course, the same man credited for most of Nintendo’s success: Shigeru Miyamoto.

The Ends of the World

  • Reading time:27 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part one of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Games and Metaphor”.

For the last several months, this site and others have been nodding along to figures like Satoru Iwata explaining that everything you know is wrong; that everything you recognize as videogames is actually backward and childish, and making bold claims about what the future might hold for the medium. We’ve seen the “games as art” movement and “new games journalism”, and the backlash to both. It’s understandable enough; we’re human. We get attached to things; mere familiarity is enough to calm us down. Make the world a little less lonely.

Something I’ve not really seen addressed is, well, what’s wrong with videogames, anyway? The simple answer is that, in their current form, they’re pointless. Or, well. They’re not conducive to conveying a point, anyway.

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.

Tomb Raider: Legend

  • Reading time:6 mins read

by [name redacted]

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

Something that people keep bringing up, yet probably don’t bring up enough, is that the first Tomb Raider was a damned good game. The last few levels were thrown-together and buggy; still, at the time it was Lara and Mario. Lara was your 3D update to Prince of Persia – all atmosphere and exploration. It had a snazzy, strong female lead, when that was unusual. (At the time, I had a friend who wouldn’t stop complaining that the character was female. He couldn’t understand why they’d made such a dumb move, since the rest of the game was so good. Go figure.) The game felt fresh and new, and – right or wrong – just a little more sophisticated than what Nintendo had to show.

Then, immediately, Core and Eidos started to listen to the fans. They listened to the media. Posters on the original Tomb Raider message boards kept complaining of a lack of thumping music. They kept asking for more human opponents to blast away, instead of these stupid animals of the first game. They wanted more and more outfits for Lara. And of course, there was the whole “nude code” business.

So a year later, there’s a sequel with the same engine – fair enough – with most of these concerns addressed. It was less interesting, less atmospheric, less intimate than the original game. Still, not too bad. Then a third game, and a fourth, and a fifth, with barely an update to the game engine – since, hey, who has the time for that with a yearly schedule – and less and less focus on what made the game so appealing to start with. The game became the Lara Croft franchise, and everything else became secondary to her new look, her new abilities, her new weapons – because these are the things that fans yammer about, so therefore this was the feedback that Eidos got.

Yes, videogames are toys.

  • Reading time:6 mins read

I don’t think anyone’s saying that there isn’t human potential to videogames. It’s just that they aren’t really living up to that potential yet. Even in the best cases. Give ’em a couple of decades.

Ebert hasn’t spent much time with them. He hasn’t really thought about them. Freeman’s basically on mark in saying the problem is, we don’t really have the vocabulary down.

I responded to Ebert, telling him that although he was essentially right as far as he went with his argument, he was a little off base in what he was using to judge. He says the main problem with videogames is that they ask for user input, so there isn’t any “authorial control” to them. Well, sure there is. The control is, as with film or novels, in the rules that the fictional world goes by. The difference is really just in what the different media study.

Film is about the juxtaposition of imagery over time, and what that can do to us. Videogames are about cause and effect, and what that ultimately can do to us.

The reason most videogames are kind of trivial right now is that few games really bother with the idea of consequences. I don’t even necessarily mean within the gameworld itself, although in some cases that could be a good step. I just mean emotional consequences. Given that almost all videogames are based on physical violence, you can see how they’re a little hard to take seriously.

This is the problem with the whole “videogames are supposed to be fun!” argument. Not really. Videogames are supposed to elicit some kind of emotion in the player. It’s the quality of that emotion which the medium and indeed the game must be judged on. That, and the elegance with which the emotion is elicited.

This is not to imply that every videogame must be “serious” — meaning Important or Dark or Thoughtful or Artsy or what-have-you. Or that most should be. Or that any should be, really. I still can’t bring myself to play killer7 because the beginning annoyed me so much. I’m just saying that they should try to be a little more human, is all.

Ideally, every videogame offers us a unique perspective of the Way Things Are. The way life works. What the rules are, what the possibilities are.

Are there any videogames out there that revolve around the bizarre way rules work when you’re a child? I don’t mean the invisible walls that don’t let you explore that part of a level just “because I said so”. I mean all of the little lies and half-truths and simplifications that are handed to us, either to get us to obey or to shut up or to mask that our parents don’t really know the answer — or just to toy with us. What about a game that explores that world, and the fear that comes along with potentially violating a rule by accident. The fear that comes with being called in that certain tone of voice, even if you don’t remember doing anything bad.

There are so many interesting things to explore. Instead we’re mostly just collecting trinkets and shooting things. See something, shoot it, get points. Cause and effect. We’ve still yet to progress past Space Invaders.

I guess maybe the reason I like older games so much, especially things like scrolling shooters and fighting games, is how honest they are. Somewhere in the last fifteen years, between the RPG explosion and the SNES and 3D and full-motion video, things have gotten kind of distracted. There’s this idea that videogames are better than they ever have been, that because people have (in some cases) learned how to put together the old pieces rather more competently than before, we’re at the heights of the craft and the art of game design. It’s all inbred bullshit. A group hug about how great Videogames are for their own sake. It’s a lie, like William Gibson’s computer-generated pop stars. Or like pop music as a genre and an industry, really.

Everyone’s been so busy looking down that something’s gotten lost and no one’s much noticed: the justification for any of this shit being here to begin with. Why are we doing this? Why are we playing videogames? Why are they being made? The only answer is that it’s because they’re videogames!

…

Now. This is real, and it’s a real problem. Most people just don’t have a name for it yet. They don’t know how to describe it. The industry’s getting restless. People are always complaining about sequels and about EA and about lack of good IP. Japan’s gaming industry has been imploding for a while. People keep predicting crashes. People keep talking about how jaded they’re getting, and about how much better videogames used to be. To shrug off any of that, no matter how much you might be thrilled with things as they are now, is pretty hard to excuse.

For all the talk about how healthy the industry is, how much money it’s making, as a percentage of the population videogames have exactly the same market saturation they did twenty years ago, during the NES era. There’s just more on the market, and the people who buy videogames are getting older and buying more. New people aren’t really playing videogames. And if they are, they’re doing it at about the same rate as existing players grow disillusioned.

…

If modern videogames tend to take the player for granted, I guess it’s because they take videogames for granted. Everyone does, really. Videogames are videogames. They’re Mario and Pokemon and Grand Theft Auto and everything we’ve ever seen. That’s all kind of poisonous. It’s best we just put it out of our heads. Those are examples of what has been done with videogames. Most of them are very well-done, for what they are. They’re just sketches, though. Videogames can be so much more interesting. So much more relevant. To see how, don’t look at videogames; look into yourself. Look at your life. Look around your town. Look at the news. Society. Look at why you like anything. Look at what makes Catch-22 such a great work and not just a funny story about World War II.

For those of you have attained enlightenment from widget-gathering, feel free to ignore this whole argument.

This Week’s Releases (Oct 31-Nov 4, 2005)

  • Reading time:17 mins read

by [name redacted]

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

Monday, October 31st

Star Wars: Battlefront II
PSP/Xbox/PS2/PC
Pandemic Studios/LucasArts

I recall a day when LucasArts had something to show for itself aside from Star Wars. For the record, I have never been fond of Star Wars. And from the perspective of someone who is not particularly impressed with the ability to play as Yoda in a duel versus Darth Vader, it is exceedingly difficult to find useful information on this game. After twenty minutes of research I can’t even tell what genre it is, although people keep talking about a new “space battle” mode.

IGN spends three pages comparing the game to its predecessor and going into specific detail about exactly what every character in the game is able to do. GameSpy is able to tell me that the original Battlefront was the best-selling Star Wars game ever, which tells me exactly nothing, actually. The site does talk about “capture the flag” mode, which suggests to me this is a first-person shooter. It then goes into detail about all the mega-cool things the writer was able to do in the game. Finally, GameSpot tells me right up front that this is “an online multiplayer [first/third-person] shooter with new levels and reworked AI”. So there we are.

I think this exercise probably says more about the game and its market than anything I could add.

What’s so good about Dragon Quest games?

  • Reading time:4 mins read

There’s no nonsense to them. Keep in mind every other JRPG is a Dragon Quest clone, and has to contrive something to set itself apart from Dragon Quest. Draon Quest is, therefore, the fundamental game that everything else is a deviation from.

And there is a certain purity and wholeness to it, as an experience. It’s balanced for a certain sense of immediacy: all that matters is right now.

For the most part, the game realizes where its abstractions are and that they are abstractions. Although it’s mostly just statistics, fighting means something in and of itself: the stronger you get, the further you can safely explore. The larger your world becomes. It’s a barrier you must butt heads with if you want to grow. Nothing to glory in; it’s just a fact. This is compared to most RPGs where you fight to make it easier to beat upcoming bosses, or to level up for the sake of levelling up, or where fighting appears to be the whole point, for whatever reason, rather than a mere fact of exploration in dangerous places — and where you move forward to get to the next area and forward the plot and finish the game.

Its simplicity and its honestness really drive home how most other JPRGs have missed the point — by slapping on extra systems, extra layers of complexity just to make themselves different, trinkets, fetishes, by taking literally things that were abstract for a reason (like the numbers, or the concept of an “overworld”), by putting the focus on petty issues rather than practical ones.

When it comes down to it, Dragon Quest is about growing up, maturing, seeing the world. Experience has meaning, because the more experience you have the broader your world becomes. Money is practical because it allows you buy tools to help you in your travels.

You will constantly be hitting your head against your limit and being forced to go home, rest, recuperate. The next day you go out and hit the world again, a little wiser, a little stronger. Maybe today you’ll see something you never saw before.

That’s more or less the focus of every game. DQ8 makes it more clear by making trees trees, making mountains mountains, giving you a horizon and putting things on it to inspire you to go out and look for them. You will still keep having to go home. Stray too far, too quickly, and you will get in over your head and you will be in trouble. And you might just get killed. Yet that danger just adds all the more excitement to every day’s travel.

Curiously, if you can get around the interface issues (like having to choose “stairs” from a menu every time you want to climb them), the original Dragon Warrior has hardly dated at all. Again, that’s just a matter of the game’s fundamental simplicity. It’s like playing Super Mario Bros. or Asteroids. They’re all complete, as far as they go. Not as complex as current games, but so what. What’s complexity other than complexity. Compare that to Final Fantasy 1, which is pretty much unplayable by current standards. It just doesn’t know what it’s doing, or — more importantly — why it’s doing what it does.

When it comes down to it, playing Dragon Quest is a meditative experience. In Dragon Quest, things just Are. When you play, you just Are. It’s a game about Being. There’s no real goal; anything that the game might throw at you is a MacGuffin, really. Something to get you out the door. It’s a joyous game, a little melancholy, all about the patterns of life and change while always remaining the same. It’s happy simply to exist, and do what it does because that’s what it was put there to do. No ambition. No glory. No drama. Just a quest. A quest after dragons.

This Week’s Releases (Aug 22-26, 2005)

  • Reading time:21 mins read

by [name redacted]

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

Today (Monday, August 22nd)

Advance Wars: Dual Strike (DS)
Intelligent Systems/Nintendo

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the Wars series. This is, what, the fourth Wars game announced in the West, after the two GBA iterations and the endlessly-delayed and frequently-renamed GameCube iteration. And it looks every bit as good as previous games. I understand it’s to make some decent use of the touchscreen with a real-time mode where you move things around with the stylus. Good and well; this is something the DS should excel at. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more strategy games and RPGs for the system.

The name, though – why is it still Advance Wars? The answer is the same as why Retro’s second Metroid game is called Metroid Prime 2, instead of just “Metroid: Echoes” and why Metal Gear Ghost Babel became simply “Metal Gear Solid”; it’s an issue of branding. The assumption, from a Western marketing perspective, is that you need “brand unity”. If you’ve got a successful product, you need to cash in on its name as far as you can. So if you’ve got a new cereal, you’re better off introducing it as, say, Cinna-Crunch Pebbles and putting Fred Flintsone in it, rather then letting it fend for itself, on its own merits.

The thing about the Wars series – well. It’s been around for a long time. Going on twenty years, actually. It began on the Famicom as Famicom Wars, then moved to the Super Famicom and Gameboy as Super Famicom Wars and Gameboy Wars. Thus we have Advance Wars. And since the GBA games were the first we were introduced to over here, every future game in the series must have the word “Advance” in it.

Well, to be fair, we’re to receive the GameCube one (called, inexplicably, “Famicom Wars”) as (even more inexplicably) “Battalion Wars”. I guess that complicates the theory right there. And the Western title for the DS game is no less arbitrary than the Japanese one (again, simply “Famicom Wars DS”). That doesn’t make this trend any less irritating.

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!

It comes down to this…

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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.

R&D1 does what Ninten… D’OH!!

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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.

Texas Gunfire

  • Reading time:7 mins read

Doom is very different in philosophy and design from modern FP shooters.

Doom is built like a console game. Heck, Romero idolizes Miyamoto. Commander Keen came out of a demo that he and Carmack whipped up for Nintendo, showing how to implement the scrolling from Super Mario Bros. on a PC (which, I guess, was a feat at the time). Howard Lincoln yawned. The Texans made their own game.

Quake is, indeed, more the prototype for the modern shooter. It’s also kind of boring in comparison — at least, for me. Here they paid less attention to actual design; more to just getting a 3D engine up. That, and getting Trent Reznor involved. I mean, they already had a template with Wolf3D and Doom. Quake was just technology. They filled in the blanks with gray textures and asinine Lovecraft references. It feels like they were bored, doing it — as well they should have been, I guess, since that’s not what they cared about anymore. And this was about where Romero started to flake out, too. Whether the rise of Superprogrammer was the cause or result of this, I don’t know.

Doom isn’t concerned with being a first-person shooter as-such, since the genre didn’t exist at the time. Instead, it is an attempt to rework the rather barren Wolf3D into as vibrant a design as possible. To do something substantial with the concept, if you will. It’s kind of the same leap as from Quake to Half-Life, because it’s the same mentality at work.

Doom’s console sensibility extends from its controls (as with Wolf3D, it’s made to be played without a mouse; the mouse only really enters when you have a Z axis to worry about) to its level design and (as someone noted) pacing, to its monster designs, to its set pieces and its idea of secret areas and items.

For one, the game just drools charisma. We all can rattle off most of the monsters in Super Mario Bros. and Zelda. We know Brinstar like the backs of our hands. There is a certain iconography even to the level design: even if on a cursory glance it might not stand out as anything special, it bores into the consciousness just as well as a cheep-cheep or a zoomer. Everything is placed preciously, exactly because there is no template to fall back on.

And, as we know, there is a certain subconscious pacing built in, for how the game introduces concepts. You run to the right, jump up and hit the flashing object overhead. It makes a chime sound and a coin pops out. You’ve clearly done something well. You hit another block and a mushroom appears. It must not be harmful, unlike the enemy you either ran into, jumped on, or jumped over a moment before, as it comes out of a block like the one which rewarded you with a chime a moment before. When you touch it, you grow. Since you’re bigger, you can more easily reach the platforms above you. You try jumping and can break the bricks. Keep going right and you hit a pipe. Then two enemies. Eventually a pit. Then a fire flower. Then a koopa troopa.

And. So on. It all sounds simple, yet so few people get it right. And since it’s supposed to be invisible, so few people notice on a conscious level when it’s missing.

Doom does this, yes, on a mechanical level. Yet it does something else, too. It paces the atmosphere. I maintain that the best part of Doom is episode one (the Shareware episode) of Doom 1. After you leave the manmade environments, where something has gone really awfully wrong, and enter the abstract flesh-tents of Hell, the game has pretty much blown its wad (pun very much intended). Then the game just becomes about shooting, and I don’t much care for it. Episode one has a certain stress to it, however. You wander the station, looking for something to restore your ailing health. The lights go out. You hear snarls in the distance. You know something’s out there — but where?

And then there are just so many hidden passages. You never know what wall might open, and how. Or what you might find (like the Chainsaw). It’s kind of like Zelda, again. Often you can see things in the distance, or through windows, that you just plain can’t access through normal means. This gets you exploring.

The whole mindset that the game creates, with all of this — the mindset that it asks for — is different. It’s more introverted. More careful. The game is as much about exploration and generally owning the gameworld as it is about blowing shit up.

There’s a certain balance here, from level to level. Just study how things are laid out. It’s no mistake that the shareware episode is the best; after all, it’s the one that id needed to be good, if anyone was going to register.

>How would you say the modern FPS has deviated from this Doom mindset? And starting where, exactly? Doom II? Duke Nukem 3D? Quake?

I don’t know. I became disgusted with the whole degenre around the time of Q3 and UT. I like what I’ve seen about HL2, from this distance. It reminds me of, uh, Myst.

…

Quake’s probably a good place to start. Or maybe you could begin with all of the knockoffs of Wolf3D and Doom, which used the same engine yet didn’t do anything interesting with it. They helped to pollute the mindspace a bit, I bet, and distract from the reasons why Doom was as excellent as it was.

Quake’s the landmark, though, for all the obvious reasons. I mean, it led the way, from Quake to Quake II to Quake III, to a technology-oriented philosophy. It doesn’t matter what you do with the engine; it just matters what the engine does. Throw in a few rules and some network code, and you have a game.

I’m oversimplifying to an insulting degree, I realize. On the one hand, the whole multiplayer thing, although it appeals to me in NEGATIVE INCREMENTS, meaning a piece of me dies every time the subject comes up, has attained something of the same distinction that a versus fighter has in comparison to a sidescrolling brawler. It’s a place to show skill and piss on other people (even more so than with a fighter, for various reasons), and if that’s your kind of thing, there are a lot of excellent games to help you vent that testosterone.

On the other, you have the Half-Life-inspired movement toward using the form for a more holistic experience — expanding on exactly the part of Doom that the Quake thread gave up on. Halo sits on this end, mostly — though a little more to the right, toward Quake, than HL. If you were to count Metroid Prime as a FPS, it would be about as far to the left as possible.

>Masters of Doom says that Quake’s formative years were sort of the epitome of development hell. […] Carmack was going off into his abstract, workaholic computer world and Romero was becoming increasingly arrogant and was slacking off more than usual. The end result, then, was a Doom clone where the engine was designed independently of the levels, which were designed independently of each other, which is why they’re so goddamned bizzare and incongruous.

Yeah! I remember that, now. I guess that’s whence came Daikatana.

For my part, I did enjoy Quake at the time. It’s not half-bad. It’s just — it leaves me empty.

Dragon Warier

  • Reading time:4 mins read

There is something strange about the renaming of Dragonquest, in the West. Linguistically, the two titles imply different concepts. (That much is clear; if they didn’t, then the game would never have been renamed.) The word “Quest” denotes a search. It is somewhat more ambiguous, and uncertain. There is no guarantee of the direction or of success, in a quest. It is, in effect, a venture into the unknown. With luck, some fruit might come of it. The word “Warrior” conjures an image of a large man with a codpiece, bashing something’s head in with a big stick.

In this case, the former is more appropriate a title in that the game is basically about the quest; about its purpose. It is a template, more or less, for the execution of an extended search as the body of a videogame. That is why it exists. The western title, however, implies a focus on character that isn’t present in the game. Who is this “Dragon Warrior”? The hero? Erdrick/Loto? Dragonlord/Dracolord? None of the above, I say. Though the intention, I venture, is to pretend that the hero, thereby the player, plays the role of this “warrior”. It is not enough to suggest that the player is to be sent on a quest, and for any function and role to come as a result of the actions required by this goal; it appears that the Western player must feel important. He must feel that the world revolves around him, as it might an epic hero. Or at least, that’s what Nintendo figured when they localized the game.

I’m not saying that this is a correct or an incorrect set of assumptions about the cultural biases of one territory against the next. I just find it interesting that someone clearly thought that there was a significant enough a disparity to account for it.

Perhaps, rather than it being a cultural issue wholly, it is more of a Nintendo issue. You recall what I have been saying for a while about Super Mario Bros. and what the game did, in effect, to the popular conceptions of game design and focus. Maybe this just follows the shift from concept to character.

I wonder whether the change in title had any effect. I’d like to think that some people would be frustrated when faced with a game which seemed to purport a focus upon character, and was really more about a melancholy search, and all the travails necessitated in the process. The level-chugging and growth does serve a purpose here, to illustrate just how hard this particular quest is; how much work and trial and error is required, just to set a couple of things right. It’s kind of bleak, yet educational. And it’s filled with moments of whimsy.

It’s not about any person. It’s bigger than that in a sense. In another sense, it’s just not concerned with individuals. It’s a concept game.

Had the game been labeled more well, would it have done better over here? Would it have done worse?

What about now? Were Squenix to release DQ8 as “Dragon Quest VIII” over here, rather than bow to Nintendo’s convention, would it make a difference? Would people get it?

It might be time to give it a chance. Heck, Castlevania is called “Castlevania” in Japan now, rather than “Akumajou Dracula”. There’s precedent. And it’s not like too many people here would be confused. Foew who are not already fond of Dragon Warrior would be confused by the change, as they probably have barely heard of the series, despite its influence — and I think most of the existing fanbase would welcome it.

Or. Perhaps not.

EDIT: See comments.

The Shooting

  • Reading time:4 mins read

In a sense, the interaction in a shooter is about the most basic interaction available in the medium. You reach out and touch your environment by sending out a “ping”; a probe. As you mention, the shooter is the original videogame — starting with SpaceWar. Even Pong operates on a similar principle, really. It’s just… backwards, kind of, in that the “bullet” is coming toward you, and you’re trying to catch it. (I don’t quite like this model as much.)

All through the medium, shooting more or less equates to exploration. In Metroid, you test the walls, and get a feeling for your environment, by shooting at them and it. In Asteroids and Centipede, your shooting shapes the very gameworld.

It was something of a revolutionary leap to switch away from this mechanic in Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. — that whole thread that I was mumbling about before. In that model, you’re no longer pecking at the environment from afar but personally running around and punching and gobbling and jumping through it. Sort of interesting to tie this into what I was saying earlier. Not sure how it all goes together.

…

Mizuguchi went back to a rail shooter for Rez for a reason: he wanted a clean slate; to strip away all of the junk we have piled on top of the medium for the last few decades, and make the most basic videogame he could, that would still be palatable to a contemporary audience. There’s nothing more basic than a shooter. This is ground one, for videogames. Everything else is built on, or exists in rebellion against, this mechanic. Mizuguchi then tried to find just how much he could express with this mechanism — to show, in part, that it’s not the game system which necessarily drives a game, on an artisic, on an emotional level. Also, just to show how much can be said with how little — and thereby to ask why we have come to tend to express so little with so much.

This is why I like Rez — just the whole way it disassembles our whole notion of the videogame, and shows how it might be used more well than it has been.

I’m really curious what his next step might be.

Parts of the above, combined with parts of what I said about Gradius V

Again with the objectivity

  • Reading time:2 mins read

On a certain level, you could argue that Super Mario Bros. signalled one of the most drastic changes to the superficial in the history of videogames.

>That’s only true if you fully accept the maxim that All That Is Important Is Gameplay, defining all other aspects of presentation and style as “superficial”.

No, it isn’t.

Super Mario Bros. introduced a bevy of new(-ish), and useful, gameplay concepts. It introduced little new in terms of character or story, over games that had existed long before.

The most significant problem that the game fleshed-out into the form we see it now, is the one first popularized in Pac-Man: preference for a rigid pre-established world template, to explore and master, over a more complex series of dynamics, as in, say, many of the earlier works of Ed Logg, where the player’s actions determine the nature of the gameworld, and thereby the future of the game.

I’m being simplistic, sure. There are plenty of counter-examples you could find, were you so inclined, of previous games with this structure. There is plenty you could provide to argue that this concrete storybook objectivenesss was the direction that games were moving in anyway, or that this is where they always sat. And for that matter, Super Mario Bros. is not so much a culprit here as is the whole design culture that it insipired. But there you go. Super Mario Bros. more or less shaped the modern videogame. Most of what exists now does because of the concepts in that game.

Of course, this is how games became popular. First Pac-Man, then Super Mario Bros. You give something obvious to latch onto, emotionally. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. It’s a natural creative impulse. I just kind of wish that games had gotten a little further before this objective quality took over, overriding so much potential for abstract potentiality.

…

This is also, to a certain extent, why I so dislike the Super NES, and why the Zelda series has been a bore to me after the second game. I just wish developers would quit giving me overt toys to play with, within a specific framework — action figures and playsets — rather than a framework where my presence actually makes a difference.

I would like to matter.