sonic the hedgehog

What’s in a name (e.g., Sonic Mania)?

  • Reading time:10 mins read

So, on Twitter, John Thyer pointed out a tweet suggesting that the new 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game, over which the Internet has obsessed for the last 12 months, is meant to be of the scale of STI’s (that initialism grows all the more pertinent with time) split 1994-ish opus, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles. This was an ambitious game that, as with many Sonic Team affiliated projects, didn’t meet its deadline, so was hurriedly completed — only to be patched with a second cartridge several months later, containing what was left of the original game plus a surplus of new “content” to justify selling a whole second cartridge. Lock the two cartridges together, and they merge into a monster platforming epic that overstays its welcome by about two-thirds yet that a certain demographic will nonetheless cite as the epitome of its form. It certainly is the epitome of something. I’ll give ’em that.

Anyway. I groused a bit that this claim was not a promising sign, which led to the predictable Twitter push-back. Though, the format of that push-back was a little strange. The claim there was, hang on, Sonic 3&K is the perfect length! It had fourteen whole levels! What, did I want it to be 20 levels more more? Was I nuts?

Uh. Well, uh. Hm.

Let’s dial back a bit, and redefine what we’re talking about.

[The following, I shall repeat directly from Twitter. Consequently, there will be a certain degree of ramble.]

Fourteen “levels” [more properly, Zones — which matters; see below] is, like, three times too many. Especially since half of them are terrible. Sonic 2 was already too long by 1/3 or so. The original Sonic the Hedgehog is just about the ideal length. You get a nice variety. You can explore and master every level. It doesn’t overstay. You can replay. The one thing I’d say against Sonic 1 is, we don’t need to iterate a zone’s concept three times before moving on. Do act 2, boss, move on.

It’s like. Compare.

How many times have you played a game of Tetris, versus how many times have you completed Final Fantasy X for fun? Any time I want to spend half an hour, I can play straight through Sonic 1, have a slightly different and complete experience. Sonic 3 & Knuckles? No way.

You know the best 2D Mario game? Super Mario Land. Lots of reasons why, but a really big draw? You can beat it in 20 minutes. I have never beaten Super Mario World, and I can assure you that it will never, ever, ever happen. There’s too much “content” for the experience. Super Mario Bros. 3 is pushing it, but at least it’s made to be pushed through at a sitting. It’s dynamic, momentum based. Keep moving, changing.

Memory cards, and to a lesser extent their battery-based predecessors, are possibly the worst thing ever to happen to console games. If you want to trace the downward trajectory of design versus rote content addiction, it begins here. We lost all focus once we could save our progress.

I abhor the mentality that we’ve all silently grown into that games are meant to be “finished” then put on the shelf and never played again. No rule is absolute, but that’s basically the point. Expansiveness isn’t linear progress; it’s an accessory to design that has specific uses. Does the nuance of Metal Gear Solid 3‘s discussion justify its length and complexity? Almost certainly yes. Does Sonic 3&K‘s? Probably not. What’s the point of scale when the game never uses that space to say anything novel, and half of the “content” is trash?

The issue at hand is context. For a game based so intrinsically on forward momentum, does it suit that remit to so sprawl? I’m not going to pretend that the roller coaster streamlining of Sonic 2 is ideal, compared to the more measured study of the original Sonic, but it shows what I mean. Underneath whatever variation of (the side scrolling iteration of) Sonic is this set of physics that demands the player to Get It Done; Keep Moving.

When the game gets in the way of Getting It Done, this is a pronounced conflict, best used to draw intentional dissonance with the player. When that dissonance is unguided or misguided, it gets in the way of the game’s essential grammar and message in an infuriating capacity.

This dissonance is a reason that so many people dismiss Sonic 1. No spin-dash! [The slow-moving] Marble Zone! You don’t just keep holding right all the time! Blah! This reaction, though, I submit is a result of a retrospective misreading of the game’s grammar and message, based on a priori assumption. The portions of Sonic the Hedgehog where you aren’t just holding right aren’t examples of broken or misguided design; they serve a purpose. They serve both to establish a broader sense of grammar, causality, and purpose and to underline the moments of speed with significance.

Without a low (or at least a medium), any highs are rendered meaningless. Over years of Pavlovian garbage, Gamers now expect nothing but high. Not only that; thanks to memory cards and decades of rote remakes, they expect lots of it, and never to have to repeat it quite verbatim. We’ll never play this level again, so let’s have twenty more that repeat its basic ideas, so we can say we’ve had our full. Then sequels! And of course we have to save our place, lest we lose our progress and have to play those tedious levels all over again! Heavens! We can’t possibly lose anything, or we’re being treated unfairly. We need more, more more. But — nothing too different, or because we only want this one specific thing.

After 20 years, okay, another major 2D Sonic is probably warranted. Good-O. It’s not like we’re talking a yearly EA franchise update. But. To do this demands that one go back and deconstruct the grammar and messaging: how does how the game say things affect what the game says?

Pac-Man CE is a brilliant deconstruction/refinement of the basic concepts of Pac-Man, cutting out the parts that distract from its message. Sonic 2 is not quite as brilliant, as it just abjectly chops out or papers over the portions of its predecessor that don’t involve zoom-zoom — which makes burn-out a real thing, as the dialogue is nothing but one-dimensional peak messaging for way, way too long. Holding right on a D-pad isn’t interesting in and of itself.

Sonic 3&K gets around this slightly by introducing much bigger levels with different kinds of blockades — so you have to press other buttons besides just right — then mixes its messages, creating a new type of unpleasant dissonance, by timing the maze. (Granted, the levels in Sonic 3 are more considered than the garbage in its content patch (Mushroom Hill can go pleasure itself fungally).)

Point being, if you’re gonna revisit a 25-year-old legacy, there’s a certain remit to plumb deep and try to rediscover its essence. To wit: Gradius V, which, oh my God, finally nails what makes Gradius what it is, and builds a whole game around exploring the consequences of that notion.

This Sonic Mania thing is full of fan service, which is fine, if you’re really into Moia, as it were. The announced scale gives me pause, though. Bigger ain’t better. It can be a neutral quality that supports a justified discussion. But, if it’s huge just to be huge… then, oh dear. When you combine this intended scale with the admitted glory of fan service that seems to make up the game’s fabric, it sounds worrisome.

What is the justification for the scale? What is it doing that demands the player keep trudging forward, saving progress, continuing later? Does it just serve to eat up the player’s time, so that it can put a number on the back of the hypothetical box next to play value? Because, and this is key to the whole relationship between a game and its player, I have a life. Being is time, you know. If something is going to eat up what precious life I have to give it, it had better have a reason. It had better give me some kind of insight, or at least unburdened joy, that makes me measurably better off than I was before I played it.

Each time I play Tetris, or even a short epic like Metroid II, I gain something. I’ve been down this road, but it’s a rich and subtle journey. The journey doesn’t demand so much from me that the burden of embarking it outweighs what fresh nuances it has to impart on a review. I come out rewarded.

A game like Sonic 3 & Knuckles asks that I give it measurably more than it has to offer me. It does give a me negative inspiration — “Don’t Do This” — but it’s not thoughtful enough to use its time effectively. It doesn’t really question its premises and bring them to a logical set of conclusions. There’s not much questioning going on at all, which is, I think, most of my point. The design here is less art; more a matter of rote craft and capitulation.

If the game were to use that space to dwell on the sort of progress that defines a Sonic game and give time for thought, well, okay then! Sonic Adventure justifies its scope for reasons similar to this. It goes to such lengths to dwell on the elements that make up the series. When you’re looking at the motivation that drives the characters and the way all of their perspectives interlock, this is heavy stuff. If there were more meaningful interplay amongst the characters in Sonic 3, and that interplay were reflected in its design, then okay. Scale.

Mind you, I’m not saying that “story” in and of itself is a necessary prerequisite. That’s just one example of a possible justification. If a game is to go deep in exploring the expressive and logical consequences of Sonic the Hedgehog‘s underling assumptions, then take the space you need. I’m not working on a faith that this is why the new game is to sprawl, though, precisely because of how Sonic 3&K is used as a reference point.

If you’re just going to go through the motions of iteration, keep the length to what that iteration can support without overly burdening me.

(And, this is why I can’t ever play videogames anymore. I take them way more seriously than is warranted.)

Addendum:

Incidentally, Sonic 3&K actually has 26 levels, not including special stages or multi-player stage. Ergo it is, to use the original power’s words, “tiresome and boring.” The original Sonic? It has 18 main levels, plus Final Zone [the final showdown area] and all of six special zones. By the poster’s standard (an ideal of 16 levels), it’s much closer to an ideal length! If we were to chop out those unnecessary third acts (which Scrap Brain bulks out by repeating a Labyrinth level), it’d be twelve, plus the special zones. Even better!

Sonic 2 has 20 main levels (plus a few extra in the mobile remake) — with, importantly for this discussion, far less variety. This is the poster’s litmus for too many, and exhaustion.

Sonic CD? If we take into account the past, present, future, and bad future variations of each stage, that gives us SEVENTY barely-differentiated levels. (You may well guess how much I enjoy Sonic CD. The answer lies not in the number alone, but the “barely-differentiated” plus the number.)

Good Games, Bad Design – Episode 2: Repeating Chaos

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

Sonic Team has always had trouble finishing its projects. The Sonic Heroes demo had a great premise and played well; then after E3 they just dumped in a bunch of content and called it done, without adequately bug-checking or thinking through the actual game progression. The first release of Phantasy Star Online was bare-bones, with a rushed cut-and-paste level structure, a fraction of the planned races and locations, and a tacked-on offline mode (albeit with a well-written story). Even the final, International edition of Sonic Adventure was weirdly abbreviated and riddled with bugs.

This tendency goes all the way back to the Genesis. The otherwise streamlined Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is famously crammed with unused material, some of which made its way into the third game. That right there hints at Sonic Team’s problems; they’re fine when they keep small and simple. ChuChu Rocket! is glorious, if confusing; Samba De Amigo is respectable enough. Although Sonic 2 is less diverse and quirky than the first game, it is more focused and polished — but given a hint of scale, they quickly lose perspective.

Rather than extrapolate a premise to its logical extremes, Sonic Team overloads a simple game with details and systems and drowns it in a deluge of random content, then calls it epic. Then, more often than not, they fail to complete the content in time, resulting in a half a game of padded level designs and incomplete ideas. Sometimes, as with Phantasy Star Online, they get a second or third chance to finish what they started, which basically means packs of content lumped on top of the existing unfinished structure — resulting in, well, an underdeveloped game straining under an inappropriate weight. Which is much better, apparently.

The problems first showed themselves in 1994, with the release of Sonic the Hedghog 3. The game was a slight departure from its predecessors: different music staff, different visual style, different level pacing and structure. The game was to be huge, with three characters and battery backup. Instead of blindly racing through the levels as in the previous game, players were encouraged to play over and over from multiple perspectives, to explore the game thoroughly.

Therein lay the problem: the plans were too huge to complete in the allotted time and memory constraints, and no one was willing to strip back and look at what was really necessary to make the point. The clever, if perhaps ill-advised, solution: break the game in two, and release the halves eight months apart.

The solution might have been brilliant, had their ideas stretched far enough to allow each half to be unique and vital. Unfortunately they barely had one game’s worth of ideas.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

Mascots and Messages

  • Reading time:16 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part four of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation under a different title; something like “The Problem with Mascots”. Somewhere between this article’s completion and its publication, one of my more vocal “fans” started a forum thread about Sonic the Hedgehog. He felt a few of the points were similar; I think something in my description of Sonic. Considering this is one of my least favorite articles, I sometimes wonder if it was worth the bother. Still, here it is again.

I wrote a while ago that there’s maybe one good Sonic game for every two flops. At the time I was halfway kidding, setting up the premise for a silly “top ten” list. Where I wasn’t kidding, I was speaking from a historical perspective rather than a contemporary one. As much as I have loved the guy, I’m aware that Sega hasn’t done too well by Sonic for a long time – to the point where he’s now the butt of dumb jokes on semi-respectable business websites. Since the Genesis we’ve seen, what, one truly great Sonic game?

When Sonic and Sega came back with the Dreamcast, they did it with a collective bang. Everyone cheered at his return, and at Sega’s. Then came a less interesting sequel. Then Sega went out of the console business, and suddenly there didn’t seem much point to Sonic anymore. More games kept coming out, each worse than the last, each building on the least compelling parts of Sonic Adventure. People stopped caring about the character, then started mocking him. Sega tried to address the problem with Shadow: a grittier, cooler answer to Sonic. Without even playing the game, people immediately wrote off the character, Sega, and everybody involved with the franchise.

The problem wasn’t really Shadow, or his game – even the concept behind it, for what it was worth. Heck, people didn’t even have to play it to dismiss it. The problem was that it didn’t seem like Sega knew what the hell it was doing anymore.

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 (May 22-26, 2006)

  • Reading time:9 mins read

by [name redacted]

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

Game of the Week:

Steambot Chronicles
Irem/Atlus
PlayStation 2
Tuesday

You have likely read, if you like to read, of a game called Bumpy Trot; this site in particular, in the hands of Japan columnist William Rogers, has taken every possible opportunity to name-check the game – resulting in a blurb on the its Atlus USA site. Here’s where I remind you of its Western name – the Haruki Murakami-esque Steambot Chronicles – and mention that it really is nifty, for what it is. For a more elaborate description you can turn to NextGen’s “Ten Best Games in Japan” column for last year; for here, suffice that it’s sort of like a Zelda game done right, thrown into a post-GTA sandbox, and produced on a shoestring budget by a sincere bunch of underdogs who aren’t used to making this kind of game. So it’s a little wonky, and a little glitchy, and it doesn’t know what it’s not supposed to do, which results in as many weird decisions as inspired ones. It’s not really made for prime time, and yet it’s got so much heart and it’s got such good ideas that it’s got the workings for a real sleeper hit. Give it some hype and some word-of-mouth, and this game will surpass expectations.

Atlus has done a pretty good job on the localization; the voices are… solid enough, and the writing is appropriately stark. Though something tells me the game might have made more of an impression with its original Japanese name, the new one maybe fits the game a little better. This is only one of maybe a half-dozen impressive new acquisitions Atlus USA had to show at E3; if Atlus can just get the word out the way it did with Trauma Center, this could be one of the company’s best years yet.

More on experience

  • Reading time:3 mins read

If EXP and other RPG elements are so horrible, why do they get implemented in just about every other type of game? From platformers to GTA to fighters to shooters to sports games, there’s no other genre that hasn’t been infected by the RPG virus at least a little, and often a lot. RPGs don’t seem to be dying, as much as growing, in both audience and into other genres. So they must be doing something right, right?

Not necessarily something right, in that it’s ideal for its own sake. It’s simply an easy solution for just about any context. Design problem? Balance issue? Afraid the game will alienate people if it’s too hard? Throw in an experience system, and let the player work it out.

For a topical example, see the discussion on Sigma Star Whatever in the other thread, and the people pissed off that its shooting segments depend on levelling-up rather than on skill. From some accounts, it’s to the point where skill doesn’t really matter, as the game will just throw things at you that you can’t deal with through any means other than leveling up.

Another high-profile example. The only reason there’s an experience system in the Metroidvania games is that Igarashi wants everyone to be able to finish the games, and doesn’t want people put off by the difficulty. This is a design problem with many elegant solutions (see Metal Gear Solid — or hell, Metroid). Experience is the easiest, though. You don’t have to think about it.

It’s kind of a lazy out. Which would be, I’m guessing, the best reason why it’s used so much, in so many games. It’s almost a get-out-of-jail-free card if you don’t know what you’re doing as a designer.

On that note: experience is often used as a way to make the player feel like he’s actually doing something in a framework where he’s not really doing much of anything else. When you win a battle, you feel like you’ve accomplished something because, hey, you just collected 156XP! It’s materialistic in a monetary way, in a system where there is no real ceiling to inflation, therefore no implicit value.

This is even more obvious when you consider that as you progress, the difficulty generally scales to match whatever experience you collect. Some games even cause monsters to level up at the same rate as your characters, meaning there is effectively no point to this game system at all.

And that’s what I think annoys most of us, and sends us looking for alternatives.

Then again: although obsessive-compulsive game design is a plague in a general sense, and you honestly can’t make me care about those last few emblems in Sonic Adventure, not every widget hunt is unfulfilling. It’s all about context.

Similarly, if experience points aren’t an annoying mechanism in, say, Dragon Quest, then maybe that has to do with what they mean both in the context of the game’s objective design and in the psychology of the playing experience.

The question, therefore, is: what’s the difference? Is it in how the EXP are gained? How they’re used? What they represent? What’s the context?

I venture a big factor in Dragon Quest has to do with expanding horizons (on the player’s end), and the part EXP play in the facilitation and regulation thereof.

That is, they are the key objective metric. They therefore have purpose, value, and weight. They have practical representative meaning, even if they remain mere representation.

Sonic and Yuckles

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The problem with S3&K, in a word: clutter.

It’s a problem on a micro, a macro, and a lukero level. It’s a problem with nearly every design element from art direction to level design to game structure.

What good ideas are there — and there are some good ideas — are smothered by reams of noise. Sonic 3 was bad enough, both being cluttered and clearly unfinished. Put the second half on, though, and what you get isn’t a complete game. It’s a game that was complete once, then someone fucked with it for six months to make it bigger. For the sake of being bigger. More full of stuff, for the sake of having more stuff in it.

It needs an editor. Badly. A third of the ideas need to be killed. Half of the levels need to be removed. The levels need to be redesigned with some focus to them. Somewhere along the way, someone needs to ask just what the game is attempting to accomplish, both in a grand sense and at any individual moment.

And redraw the damned graphics already. Jesus. Stop pretending all the sprites are digitized clay models. Learn how to use the colors you have instead of pretending you have a larger palette than you do.

A good game could be made from Sonic 3 & Knuckles. It’s not a bad starting point. On its own merits, the thing is just a ridiculous mess.

Speaking as an editor.

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!

In contrast with hedgehogs

  • Reading time:3 mins read

OH JESUS THE FARMHOUSE IS EXACTLY THE SAME!

The barn, same architecute. Same placement. Windmill, exactly the same. Farmhouse itself: run down in exactly the same way. For all I know, all they did was trace over one of the old illustrations.

…

How unexpected.

I mean. There’s faithful adaptation, and there’s… something more than that.

Basically the only real alterations so far, from Mirage volume 1, have been for the better — expansion of Shredder’s and Stockman’s roles; the addition of Hun; an extra half-season of character building before the first big showdown. All of the TCRI stuff saved for season 2 (after season 1 will have focused on the entire original Shredder storyline).

Looks like the Stockman stuff from volume 2 will be worked into the upcoming Return to New York plot. Fine enough. Not a bad place for it; just get rid of all of the key season 1 villains at the same time, so we can get some closure and move on to the next big plot without any regrets.

I imagine that there should be more than enough material with the Fugitoid (assuming he’s around) and Triceratons and the Utroms to fill up season 2 — especially given the way that the animation team’s been operating so far. They’ve proved that they can run with a concept and flesh it out better than Easman and Laird ever really did.

What’ll that leave us with, for season three (assuming it’s coming)? How about City at War? Seems perfect; a return to Earth, and the setting of the first season. The remaining Foot will have been in chaos while they’ve been gone (in this case, whatever corner of space the Triceratons are found — as opposed to Northampton, lounging around for several years).

It’s the next big plot arc in the official canon. The series will be closing on episode fifty by the beginning of season three. Issue #50 is where the C@W arc begins, in the comic (although there’s about thirty issues of one-off meandering by random authors, in place of the paced development of the TV series). Yes! This will be a good thing.

…

I need to calm down.

Ahem.

Now I’m going to watch North by Northwest. And then, maybe the semi-yet-not-really-restored version of Nosferatu (for the sake of contrast with the other version that I own).

And then — hell, maybe Secret Agent? I don’t know.

I’ll just play it by ear.

Say “Guh”

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Sega hasn’t had much to say, so far. Their booth space occupies about a third to a quarter of the area devoted to Sony or Nintendo. Many high-profile, recently-announced games (Dororo, Kunoichi, Shining Force) are absent. Others, like Altered Beast, are relegated to a short and uninformative video loop.

It’s entirely possible that Sega is keeping all of the interesting stuff locked up until tomorrow, the last day of the show. We’ll see, we’ll see.

( Continue reading at Insert Credit )

Break on through to the other side

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Sega claims that SA:DX (now named, in full, “Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut“) has five hours of new gameplay in addition to all of the other additions.

A “mission mode” has been added, for COLLECTING JOY. This is where one unlocks “exclusive items”, “secrets”, and the Gamegear games. Whether this mode is what constitutes the five purported hours of new gameplay, I don’t know.

Personally, I don’t think that the emblem-hunting in the Sonic Adventure games counts as real gameplay. The story mode is the actual game. Being forced to go back in and perform inane stunts under arbitrary limitations just seems like a waste of time and energy to me.

I suppose it’s better that the emblems actually do something now, though. Or maybe it’s not. At least I knew I wasn’t missing anything by not bothering with a number of the more annoying ones.

My patience is really starting to wear thin with such thinly-veiled time sponges; tasks which have no substantial reason to exist, other than so as to keep the player glued to the game for an unnaturally, unhealthfully long time. As far as game design goes, it’s manipulative, lazy, and not at all intriguing. Worse, it’s becoming so omnipresent — even where it just doesn’t belong.

It’s… starting to make me dislike videogames in general, at least as they are at present.

I feel not unlike how I felt a decade ago. My levels of disgust and apathy are being strained.

I don’t intend to give up. That’d be too easy. I did it once before, and in the process, I missed most of a generation. Yet, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to care about a lot of what’s out there today.

The industry is entering a rut just as pathetic as the one of ten years ago. Not as damning as the one of 1984, but…

…

there’s a pattern here.

I’m starting to think that there really needs to be a shakedown.

For a while, I’ve been watching its approach. The old guard, as it were, is going to have to either get with the picture soon or it’s going to fall apart. The trouble has already long since begun, spreading the fallout of an industry’s greed and ineptitude as wide as possible so as not to choke the largest perpetrators in their own filth. Meanwhile, a new generation seems to be quietly, humbly (for the moment) emerging — far enough away that the garbage isn’t nearly as much of a problem.

The established head of the industry is flat out of ideas. It’s just going through the motions, without any real understanding anymore for why it does what it does. (Sort of like KoF2002, or any contemporary RPG you might choose to pick up.) There’s no foundation anymore. The old-world elite have been doing what they’ve been doing for so long that they don’t even remember why they’re doing it.

The benefit about new blood, from a separate world, is that it doesn’t have these problems; assuming that the newcomers understand where they are to begin with, and that they know what they’re doing, the ground is always still within reach. They can easily trace down to see how things stand. It isn’t so hard to retrace and start over if need be. They’re informed by the ideas of the older generation, but those ideas are adapted in such a way that is relevent to the newcomers in the context which they know most well.

This is, I think, the difference between the two things that Nintendo’s been doing lately.

The way that the apprenticeship thing seems to be going at the moment is that the methods are being taught by rote, for their own sake — rather than as possible answers to more fundamental questions.

But on the other hand, Nintendo is also supporting developers like Silicon Knights and Retro; contributing funding, polish, and advice — but allowing the newer houses to find their own direction.

It’s the difference between following a religion and being informed by its philosophy. Following in the footsteps of your forebears, or being inspired to do your own work by building upon what came before.

Mrrn.

I can see Eiji Aonuma presenting his game before Miyamoto. “This is how it goes, right?”

Yes, technically…

But… no.

Cell division

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Legally, I must comment that Metroid Prime has the best music in the world.

Something weird comes over me, just sitting and listening to the theme which plays behind the game options menu (one button-press past the title screen).

Game music has done odd things with my emotions on numerous previous occasions. It has ever since the original Legend of Zelda, where the first time I placed the game into my NES I simply stared at the TV for what might have been half an hour for all I know, listening to Kondo’s lilting title theme and watching the item scroll. It does when I watch the opening FMV to the first Sonic Adventure. The Phantasy Star II score has done mountains for me.

But even in the best game scores — Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Ninja Gaiden II — generally the best that happens is that they impress the hell out of me and then that’s that. And even in the cases where I’ve been struck more deeply (for one reason or another), generally it’s been a single blow — often a manipulative one — in an otherwise so-so score.

Frankly, the reason the intro to Sonic Adventure does a weird job with my chest lies more in the direction of the intro sequence and my own personal share of nostalgia than anything about the music on its own. Heck, I’m not even very fond of half of the music in that game for its own merit. What music I do like well is mostly from Kumatani Fumie’s end of the stick rather than that of Jun Senoue.

Kenji Yamamoto has done something different here. I can’t explain it rationally. But it fucks with my head. The more I listen to it, the more this becomes true.

I’m afraid I’m going to develop a nervous condition, playing this game.

A bigger one, I mean.

I find this interesting, as I’ve honestly never been as impressed with the Super Metroid score as just about everyone else on the planet. It didn’t come near to Hip Tanaka’s original vision, or even the chirpy B-ambience of Return of Samus (a soundtrack which I still contend has never gotten its proper due). Super Metroid‘s music was appropriate, well-written, and… there. It suited the game, and sounded Metroidy.

But this? Ye god.

…

Again, I feel more or less exactly as I felt when I was eight and Zelda was new. And this fact is all the more peculiar just because I’m no longer eight years old. Zelda isn’t new. Metroid isn’t new. I’ve played so many games. I’ve seen so many conventions. Cleverness and skill and joy and wonder are about the best I can expect. That anyone can expect who has been around as long as I have.

There just isn’t a lot out there which feels new anymore. There aren’t any more revelations. There’s no new life to discover.

But perhaps there is.

And perhaps it’s not in Japan?

Who would have thought.

It’s not that this game is anything so totally original that it should — taken as a mass of parts — be as much of a breakthrough as Zelda. We’ve seen most of the elements here in at least some form before, for years on end. Some of the incarnations perhaps aren’t even all that different.

Half-Life was a step away from its FPS roots, and toward a more evolved gaming sensibility — and look at where that got it. Metroid Prime, I suppose, a person could consider the next logical step in this direction. Except that when you pull its laces, this is something else entirely.

I guess the way one could put it is that what this game feels like is something close to a culmination of what we’ve learned over the past thirty years of game design. Someone managed to boil it down and make The Game — or something like it. After all of the struggling since the last checkpoint, suddenly we’ve got progress. And we’re allowed to move on.

I’ve not played Eternal Darkness yet, but it’s worth noting again that this game was developed by an American studio, with aid from Nintendo. I imagine it’s got its flaws, but it still sounds like that game did a hell of a lot more right than most games have been doing lately. And like it had a solid vision to it.

Edit:

Nintendo has been doing a lot for the industry lately. They’ve gone through some pretty huge changes in attitude since the glory days of the NES, and now seem to be pretty much content to be Nintendo. I keep harping on that Q-fund thing of Yamauchi’s, but I feel it’s a lot more important than it looks. It fits right in with the recent “apprenticeship” system of game design that Miyamoto’s been pioneering, and what Nintendo’s been doing with second and third parties.

They’ve got the money and the expertise, so they’re investing it in the next generation. They won’t have it forever. Miyamoto won’t be around forever. Nintendo won’t be. But the art will remain, the skills will flourish. And maybe someone else will march on to victory, birthed from the seeds of that knowledge and support.

Sure, Nintendo is acting in Nintendo’s best interest — but they don’t have to do it in such an enlightened way. The fact that they are, says mountains to me and sets a tremendous example for the rest of the industry.

I think we’re closing in on a new era here. And it’s not going to come from where we expect. The old guard is starting to break down. The entire old infrastructure.

Just look at all of the shit happening in the industry right now. If you’re clinging to the old ways, it’s bad news. And it’s pretty scary. But there’s a new wind in the air, and just about everyone is clueless about it so far. If there’s any time to block one’s sails, I think this is it.

And dammit, I want a copy of this soundtrack.

Shadow of a Dream

  • Reading time:1 mins read

SA2 is getting much better now. A bunch of sources had reported that the game seemed sort of disappointing at the outset but that it improved dramatically somewhere in the middle or toward the end. This is more or less accurate.

When I first put in the game, I was basically turned off by its progression, structure, difficulty, and by the evil camera. Now that Lan and I have hacked our way pretty deeply into the story mode, it’s become very fascinating; the plot is now interesting, and somewhat more coherent, the level design is impressive, the bosses are neat, and things in general seem to at last be coming together.

I think I can confidently say that I like this game now — though it’s still got a terrible camera in places, and some of the early level design especially is discouraging. One has to make an effort to figure out how good the game is, and I can see how a lot of people would not do this.

I still have to do research on that magazine thing…

Sonic Misadventure

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Finally got a working copy of Sonic Adventure, after several exchanges with, and no actual help from, various store employees over the past month (excepting one young lady who, for around fifteen minutes, actually did attempt to break into the display DC to let me test a (ultimately defective) copy. No good; she couldn’t get into the cabinet. And yes, the copy was again defective. Yet all is good now!

The Polygon Paradigm

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Well, I buried my shame and picked up a a Dreamcast — even though I don’t really deserve one. And my god — what it does nearly brings tears to my eyes. Unfortunately, I made two largeish mistakes —

  • Although I checked what are supposed to be the outside tell-tale signs of the disc, the copy of Sonic Adventure I picked up is the corrupted one. I couldn’t easilly test the thing in-store, as I picked up the thing at Toys “R” Absent (what happened to all of the stuff that used to be in there? Where are the Lego?), so I just held my breath that I’d not have to take the hour drive back to Portland just to return the thing. Well. Hum.
  • I decided not to read the box and assumed the system came with one of those memory card/tamagochi things. Nope. So I guess I have to grab one of them if I want to be able to save at all.

The warnings about disc scratching are because the Dreamcast games are encoded on normal old cds (insofar as their physical properties) rather than those black, indestructible PlayStation discs.

The controller’s not too bad. By fact of it being a controller, it’s starting just now to wear out my hands. But it could be a lot worse. I have no particular gripes about it, but there’s nothing to acclaim loudly, either.

From playing the demo disc version of Sonic Adventure, they seem to have given Knuckles the personality of Ryoga. Hm. And Sonic appears to have Billy West(Stimpy; Fry from Futurama)’s voice — it’s similar to his voice in the ABC cartoon, but a little less annoying. The theme song reminds me strongly of the seventh or eighth season intro to Ranma 1/2.

Since I don’t want to bother retyping it all in original, slightly more comprehensible verbiage, I’ll paste in here my initial comments made on Soul Calibur, the other game I picked up:

Soul Calibur reminds me of Tekken, from what little I saw of that. But it’s astounding.

In SC, there’s this one character — she has a sword which is divided into several horizontal segments, connected through the center by a long fiber of some sort. When she swings the sword out a certain way, the segments seperate along the fiber, making a long, barbed whip. Strange.

I like Xiangua quite a lot —

It’s interesting. The different “players” — player one and either player 2 or the opponent — use different versions of the same characters. Not just different colors, as in Street fighter. I mean, the first xiangua has short, scruffy hair, a blue bandanna, a kind of happy smirk, is wearing a white-with-yellow-fringe silk blouse-thing and blue pants. The second xiangua has long, primly-dressed, darker hair, is looking a little less “wild” in her expressions, and wears a formal red kimono with white trimmings and a yellow sash. In otherwords, a kinda’ tomboyish version versus a noble-looking one. The same kind of differences go for everyone — the extent of it, I mean, rather than the details. The first player’s “nightmare” is in shining steel armor, while the second “nightmare” is in a corroded, barbarian-ish, copper helmet and neck armor, and has a bare chest and arms. This happened in Tekken, again, but it’s still a new concept to me.

Very well put-together game.

It’s odd, though — I’m not used to “next generation”-feeling games, with very clean fade-ins and outs and so forth — like a bunch of different elements are put together. A still screen is very recognizable as a static screen. And so forth.