taito

Touch Generations

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “FEATURE: A Short History of Touch”.

A few years ago, Nintendo launched the DS with a vaguely unsettling catch phrase: “Touching is Good”. Their PR team sent disembodied plastic hands to everyone on their mailing list, in the process creeping out Penny Arcade. As creepy and forward as the campaign was, it had a point. Touching historically has been good, for the game industry.

On a whole, videogames are an awfully lonely set of affairs. They paint an alluring well, then give the player rocks to throw, to see what ripples. From Spacewar! to Pong, you’re always shooting or batting or throwing some kind of projectile, to prod the environment. Even in some of the most exploration-heavy games, like Metroid, the only way to progress is to shoot every surface in sight, with multiple weapons. Little wonder art games like Rez are based on the shooter template: it’s about as basic a videogame as you can get. See things, shoot things, you win. If things touch you, you lose. Except for food or possessions, generally you can only touch by proxy; toss coins into the well; ping things, to see how they respond. To see if they break.

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

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

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

Game of the Week:

Guild Wars Factions
ArenaNet/NCsoft
PC
Friday

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

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.

Attack Patterns

  • Reading time:1 mins read

A couple of observations.

The “Mars People” from the Metal Slug series strongly resemble the top-row aliens (second from the bottom, here) in Space Invaders. This doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me.

Samus Aran’s space ship, from the Metroid series, bears a close resemblance to the enemy ships in Radar Scope — the early Space Invaders clone from Nintendo (which flopped and was later reworked into Donkey Kong). This is probably a coincidence. Maybe, however, not!

EDIT: HA HA

“‘Warners is afraid that Revolutions won’t sell very well because of the word of mouth on the movie. The only way to make the money on sell-through is to package it with the other two.’ The retailer went on to say that the number of requests for the film have dropped significantly since the film’s opening day.“

PAC NEEDS FOOD BADLY!

  • Reading time:1 mins read

There is an intrinsic difference between the Asteroids/Centipede model of game design, and the Space Invaders/Pac-Man one. It’s the latter, somewhat less flexible, design sensibility (through a Miyamoto filter) which has most directly evolved into our current ideas about console and arcade games. I’m not entirely sure if this is ideal, although it’s lent some mass appeal to the medium.

I wonder how things might’ve been different if the American model had continued to evolve into the modern era. If we’d gotten a chance to hone it as well as the Japanese model has been (up to the painfully entrenched form that it’s in now).

I’m too tired to illustrate. I might, later.

I’m sure some of you out there already are tracing my thought patterns, however.

I think it’s kind of interesting.

Again. Probably the solution is to combine the two sensibilities. Retro and Silicon Knights remain the test cases for a rather different kind of a merger (that being the quickly-tiring Miyamoto school and the modern Western PC-oriented mindset). I wonder what’d happen if we were to work back in some of the Ed Logg mentality.