Video Games

NES Games: Honorable Mention

The NES has so many good games, any list is bound to be incomplete, but here’s a few I haven’t mentioned yet.

  • Blades of Steel: Sports games still didn’t quite have the appeal back then, but they could be fun and somewhat memorable, in a simple way. Blades of Steel had that awesomely lame attempt at play-by-play commentary that ended up making the game hard to forget. It would be far surpassed by later games, but this represents the first true playable hockey game…
  • Contra: It’s got guns and aliens. What else do you want? Also infamous for the Konami code, which allows you to start the game with 30 lives instead of the usual 3 (and even then, I don’t think we ever won this game, though we did get pretty far).

    Scoring a goal

  • Double Dragon II: The Revenge: This game is not nearly as good as I remember it, but this brawler was a lot of fun at the time. I believe this second game was the one I owned, and I’m pretty sure I even beat it. Later games would improve considerably on the formula set by these games though, so there’s that.
  • Gauntlet: A port of the arcade game, it was still a lot of fun, and very hard in the later levels. What can I say, I was a sucker for the swords and sorcerer stuff.
  • Mike Tyson’s Punch Out: That’s right, I said it. Mike Tyson. Not Mr. Dream. Who the hell is that anyway? Even to this day, this game is amazingly fun to play (I haven’t played the recent Wii version, but I gather that it’s pretty much the same game with a few extra fighters and updated graphics, which is all it really needs). One thing that was obvious even to my younger self but which is so blazingly strange about the game is the absurd racial stereotyping that each fighter represents. It’s still a great game. Also, when you win a title match and you start training, the music is incredible, some of the best for the NES. Later boxing games improved graphics and realism, but I think this might remain the best.

    Super Macho Man

  • R.C. Pro-Am: Did you know those were supposed to be radio controlled cars? That’s what the R.C. stands for. I always thought this was just a regular racing game. And a really, really fun one. For all its simplicity, it’s a really great game. That I was never able to beat. Dammit.

    Racing

  • Shadowgate: This is almost a throwback to those old text adventure games, but it’s more formalized for use with a gamepad. I remember being completely consumed by this game when I got it, but it’s the sort of game that doesn’t do so well upon replaying. Once you know the secrets, it gets a bit boring. Still, it’s one of the more memorable games I played.

    Shadowgate screen

Again, there are probably dozens of other games I should be mentioning (Double Dribble? Excitebike? etc…), but this series of posts has to end somewhere… Perhaps one more wrapup post next Wednesday…

NES Games: Final Fantasy and Dragon Warriors

Like the action/adventure games described in the last post, this post contains a few standouts from the RPG genre. I’m sure there are a few others that were popular at the time, but these were my favorites. Unless you consider old dungeon crawlers like Temple of Apshai a full blown RPG, these are really my first experience with the genre (at the time, I was also getting my feet wet with tabletop RPGs as well, though I never progressed that far there).

The three games listed below are remarkably similar. At least, that’s how I remember it. I didn’t get very far in replaying, well, any of them. One of the features of the games I’ve covered so far is that they were very difficult and required a lot of time playing and replaying various aspects in order to defeat the game. The same thing goes for RPGs, but here it’s more systematic. A common feature of these game is something called grinding. I did this in Zelda II and Metroid, to an extent, but neither really approaches the levels of these RPGs. I spent countless hours trolling forests and dungeons, picking fights with imps and slimes in order to gain experience points and leveling up my characters. I didn’t really recognize it then, but this was my way of cheating (grinding for a long time will make your characters more powerful than they are required to be). I honestly think that more recent games where the enemies’ power is proportional to your power (for example, Oblivion), while eliminating the tedious and unfun grinding process, also take some of the fun away from the games. You didn’t really need to grind as much as I did, but I did it because there was a benefit to it. It made the world more open to exploration for me, and as I’ve already established, that’s a big part of what I like about games.

For the most part, the game mechanics are the same. There is a top-down overworld of sorts (similar in some ways to the original Zelda) where you lead an adventurer (or a team of adventurers). You will randomly encounter enemies, at which point the game enters a combat screen in which you engage in a turn-based battle with enemies (i.e. for each adventurer, you select which enemy you want to attack, then the game plays out your attacks, followed by enemy attacks, and so on, until one group is completely killed). When you defeat enemies, you get experience and loot. When you get enough experience, your characters go up a level and you get new abilities, etc… And when you defeat powerful enemies, you get better loot. Usually there’s some sort of epic story of a land beset by a powerful evil and a chosen warrior (who you play) chosen by the king to defeat the enemy. Pretty standard stuff, really. But if you enjoy exploration and the steady improvement of your characters through experience and magic items, these games can be addicting. So here are my favorites:

  • Final Fantasy: This is really a great game, from start to finish. You start with a team of four characters, each of which from a different class of character (usually combining the offensive strength of a fighter with other types of fighters and magicians) and begin exploring the various areas. Most of the time, you are funneled through choke points, forcing you to face off against a boss in an area before continuing. You are also prevented from exploring to certain areas because of the power of the enemies you face there (hence the aforementioned grinding). Many of these bosses are memorable and challenging. I distinctly remember several, including the first boss named Garland (which I borrowed as a name of one of my D&D characters, a ranger if I remember correctly). A later boss was the Kraken. I remember it being very difficult to get to the Kraken without depleting your energy too much, to the point where I kept my NES on for a few days (i.e. I didn’t want to turn it off because I got so far in good condition). Of the games mentioned in this post, this is the only one I’ve actually completed. For some reason, despite loving this game, I never played any of the sequels or spinoffs (of which there are over a dozen at this point), though I have to admit a certain anticipation for FF13.
  • Dragon Warrior: This game actually predates Final Fantasy by a year or so (and I’m sure it influenced the makers of FF) and is very similar. To be sure, I don’t think I ever got that far with this game, but it introduced me to the franchise and I remember playing this game and Dragon Warrior II at a friend’s house often.
  • Dragon Warrior III: When I finally saved up enough money to buy one of these games, Dragon Warrior III had just come out, so I ended up purchasing that game. This game expanded upon the others by including a massive amount of content. A larger world to explore, more and varied enemies to defeat, and a massive amount of special items to collect. Indeed, I remember it having an absolutely huge instruction manual and a big map of the world with a list of magic items and creatures on the back (such things were common then). The game was huge, so despite enjoying it, I don’t think I ever finished it. I did get pretty far though, and I had a lot of fun with it…

Well, that about wraps up the RPG portion of this series. The Six Weeks of Halloween series of posts will be starting up this weekend, so I’ll probably be finishing off the NES posts with an honorable mentions post and some final thoughts on the coming Wednesdays…

NES Games: Zelda, Zeus and Dracula

Like any game genre, there were tons of great action/adventure games for the NES, but to me, it really comes down to the following four games (and a few other implied games).

  • The Legend of Zelda: I’m surprised at how well this game holds up, even today. Sure, the game is very difficult and requires a level of mastery I rarely attained, but the game’s mystique has always kept me interested and wanting more. This is yet another proto-open-world game (I’m beginning to see a pattern here in early games that I consider great), where you simply begin playing in the middle of a gigantic video game world. In the Zelda games, these are referred to as the “overworld” and you navigate up there to find various dungeons, fighting monsters in order to find and reassemble scattered fragments of Triforce. Once you have all the fragments, you fight Gannon and save the princess.

    Navigating the overworld

    Link navigating the overworld

    The overworld is a masterpiece of game design. It’s mostly open, meaning that you can go almost anywhere at any time. There are some areas that require an item or two to reach, but even then, you’re given surprising freedom of movement within the gameworld. The thing that keeps you out of certain areas are all based on how powerful the enemies are. Sure, you could head over to the graveyard at the beginning of the game, but chances are that you’ll have some trouble surviving there long enough to get anything good. I haven’t played much of the newer Zelda games, but there seems to be a distinct lack of “overworld” style gameplay that really causes the newer games to suffer. Like Metroid (another pseudo-open-world), the original Zelda is a game that places a premium on exploration. The world is huge and filled with secret rooms, stores and dungeons. The game doesn’t make you feel as isolated and alone as Metroid (you encounter many NPCs in Zelda), but it does a lot of similar things.

    Link entering a dungeon

    Link entering a dungeon

    One of the greatest things about the game is the music. It’s amazingly good. Despite a decent amount of repetition, the music never really seems to get boring, which is kinda surprising (the dungeon music is perhaps less brilliant than the overworld stuff, but it’s still damn good). Likewise, the visual design of the world and the various creatures that inhabit it are excellent. The world is bright but not overly cheery and the dungeons are all ominous without being suffocating.

    One other thing that seems silly, but which definitely differentiated this game from all the others was that the physical game cartridge was gold in color (rather than the standard, boring gray). Normally, I would think of gold as being gaudy and obnoxious, but the Zelda cartridge, manuals, and packaging all seemed to be somewhat classy. So perhaps I was just buying into the hype of the day, but hell, it worked.

    Zeldas Gold Cartridge

    Zelda’s Gold Cartridge

    This is actually a game I never owned as a kid. Winning the game was a group effort undertaken by several kids on my block, and it was a lot of fun. Due to various time constraints, I only got about halfway through the game as of this writing (that’s even relying on my tendency to cheat at video games), but it’s something I definitely want to finish replaying at some point. Other games in this series of posts (or this post itself) won’t be so lucky. But Zelda is a true classic, one of the best games of all time.

  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: Having loved the first game, I naturally moved on to the sequel, which ended up being a very different game. There was still an overworld, but that was not the main arena for battle. Instead, you used the overworld as a way to get from one dungeon/cave/town to another, occasionally running into some enemies along the way, something more typically seen in RPG games. Indeed, this game built on the RPG elements of the original Zelda in many considerable ways, instituting an experience points system, allowing various magic spells, and of course, expanding upon the concept of collecting magic items and other special abilities. The other huge change in this game was that all of the combat took place in a side-scrolling action/platforming environment. This is a rather large change in gameplay style, though my young self didn’t seem to have any issue adjusting (the new and expanded RPG elements were enough to placate me). This game was made rather quickly after the first game, so perhaps Nintendo wasn’t sure if the original game’s top-down view would continue to work. In any case, the game’s controls were relatively well balanced, making it easy to pick up and once you got some of the more advanced abilities, the game gets more fun. It’s also worth noting that the overworld had more significant obstacles and choke points, making the game progress a little more linearly than the original. This was mitigated by the sheer size and scope of Zelda II’s world, but it’s something I found a bit lacking.

    Zelda II Overworld

    Zelda II’s Overworld

    From what I can gather, this seems to be one of the least favorite Zelda games in the series. Having played only 3 myself (the original, this one, and Twilight Princess Wii), I’m not really a good judge, but I loved this game when I was a kid. I played through it at least 3, maybe 4 times. One time, a friend got his save files corrupted after getting pretty far into the game, so I volunteered to play the game up to that point for him so that he could continue on.

    The music for this game was good and more varied, but somehow not as iconic as the original (which isn’t to say that it’s not iconic in its own right). The visuals and enemy design were a definite improvement though. The boss fights, in particular, seemed to be more memorable. One distinct step down in this game was the way it handled character deaths. In the original game, if you died in a dungeon, you would start back at the beginning of the dungeon. In Link, you’re given 3 lives, but if you die that many times, you end up back at the beginning of the game. So dying is more of a pain in Zelda II.

    A frequent cause of death in Zelda II

    I hate fighting these guys

    Now, replaying this game, I’ve only managed to get to the second dungeon (due to the way the overworld is constructed in this game, the dungeons/caves/towns are the star of the game, so that’s what everything gets associated with). This is mostly because I didn’t have time to figure out the appropriate cheat codes, but it’s also because this game is extremely long! At one point, you get to a screen that very much resembles the overworld of the first game. Malstrom has speculated that Zelda I was perhaps just a close-up view of a piece of Zelda II (See the map in his post – he also mentions that most of the new Zelda games are lacking in the overworld department).

    Despite any complaints above, this game is still a classic and one of my favorites of all time. I’ve probably logged more hours on this game than any others in this post, which is pretty impressive. I doubt I’ll have time to completely revisit this game in the near future, but it would be worthwhile if I did.

  • The Battle of Olympus: Given my undying love for Zelda II, it’s no wonder that I ended up loving this game as well. It’s basically a Zelda II clone in terms of action and fighting gameplay, only it uses Greek Mythology as a base. There’s not much of an overworld to the game (there is a map of sorts, but I wouldn’t call it an overworld in the Zelda sense), but it’s not a completely linear experience either. There are branching paths and backtracking, just not as much as we’ve seen in games previously discussed.

    Visiting a god

    Visiting a god

    Despite stealing gameplay elements from Zelda II, the game feels very distinct. I think a lot of the power of this game had to do with its reliance on Greek Mythology. You play Orpheus, a real figure from Greek Mythology, who goes on a quest to the Underworld to save his beloved Eurydice from her afterlife in Hades (if I remember correctly, the game is a somewhat less tragic retelling of the story). Along the way, you meet up with familiar gods (Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, etc…), mythological beasts (a Cyclops, a Minotaur, Cerberus, the Lamia (which I find amusing considering the current season of True Blood), a Siren, a Centaur etc…), and you collect various legendary items (Apollo’s Harp, the sandals of Hermes, etc…) All these familiar elements lend a timeless quality to the game, even if it isn’t the most innovative of it’s time (something that God of War would much later cash in on as well, though that game is probably more timeless than this one).

    All of that said, this isn’t really as good as Zelda II. The platforming and fighting controls are a little more floaty and difficult to master, and some of the enemies in this game are ridiculous. In particular, I hated battling Cerberus. He has three heads, and you have to destroy each one to defeat him. The only issue is that after destroying one head, you have to be really fast because if you wait too long, it will regenerate. On the one hand, this was annoying as hell. On the other hand, it really stuck out in my head, and once I did manage to defeat him, there was a real sense of accomplishment.

    Fighting some enemies

    I didn’t get very far in replaying this game, so it’s hard to say for sure, but I can see the appeal to my younger self. The game very clearly depends on a love of mythology and Zelda II, but given that I enjoyed both, I have very fond memories of this game. It’s probably not something you’ll see in a lot of best-of lists, but it holds a special place in my gaming history.

  • Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse: Having played the first two Castlevania games at various friends’ houses, I ended up getting this game when it came out. I never really got far in either of the previous two installments of the game, but I really liked the feel of those games and the prospect of vampire hunting seemed fun to me, so I took the plunge with this game. Technically a prequel to the first two games, you play Trevor Belmont, a vampire hunter on a quest to defeat Dracula. Pretty simple stuff.

    Trevor Belmot and his trademark whip

    Trevor Belmot and his trademark whip

    As gameplay goes, this is more similar to the original Castlevania. It’s more of a platformer than anything else, though it’s not completely linear. You can take different paths to get to Dracula’s castle, and depending on your choices, you can pick up companions along the way. These companions apparently wind up being pretty important throughout the game series, but for the purposes of this game, they’re pretty great (well, two of them are). The first one you could encounter is Grant DaNasty, a pirate who was corrupted by Dracula (which is kinda funny considering that pirates aren’t exactly saints themselves). Once you defeat him, he becomes human again and you can choose to have him come with you on your quest. He gives you the ability to jump higher and further than Trevor and he can also climb on walls, making some previously inaccessible areas available. He was one of my favorite characters and became the basis for a D&D character I played for years. Another character you could play was Alucard, who is actually Dracula’s son. Alucard would go on to star in what is often considered the best game of the Castlevania series, Symphony of the Night. If you chose to use him as your companion, you got the ability to use a fireball attack and you could also change into a bat. Finally, you could also play Sypha Belnades, who didn’t have much of a physical attack ability (and thus was probably the least useful of all the characters), but she made up for it a bit with some magical abilities.

    Visually, the game was decent, though not exceptional. Same thing for the music, which is memorable and contains that iconic Castevania theme, but is otherwise not particularly special.

    Grant jumps onto a swinging pendulum

    Grant jumps onto a swinging pendulum

    In replaying this game, I have to admit that I’m surprised it held my interest so much back in the day. Granted, I do still love the mythology of the Castlevania franchise. Dracula is a fantastic villain in any medium, and video games are no exception (and the game makers certainly made that final bossfight count – it took me forever to beat him). The addition of Grant and Alucard (and to a lesser extent Sypha) also did a lot to help my interest in this game (I mean, come on, did you know that Dracula had a son? Holy shit man! That’s awesome!). I don’t necessarily shy away from a challenge, but man, the platforming and control scheme in this game is just plain shitty (things are improved a bit with Grant, who has a bigger leap and his ability to cling to walls also comes in handy). Unlike previously discussed games like Metroid and Zelda II, the controls here seem quite poorly balanced. So a big portion of the challenges in this game are only challenging because the controls are crappy. I do remember eventually finishing this game and yes, it was quite a good feeling of accomplishment, but looking back at that now, I’m still a bit surprised.

    Aside from the platforming annoyances, it really is a good game, and apparently an influential one on the rest of the series. Alas, I’m not that familiar with other games in the series (I remember playing one on the PS2, but that game wasn’t very good), but perhaps I can change that in the near future. I have a lot of fond memories about this one, so perhaps a more lengthy visit in the future would be warranted.

Well that about wraps up this installment. Next up are the RPGs. I will be traveling this week though, so they might get short shrift (which is probably for the best, considering how much time I spent playing those damn games – time that I would never get away with these days).

Metroid

Emergency order. Defeat the Metroid of Planet Zebes. Destroy the Mother Brain.

–Galaxy Federal Police M510

One of my favorite games for the NES is the non-linear, action/adventure game Metroid. In revisiting the game, I realized several important things. First, not only did I never finish Metroid back in the day, I didn’t get very far into the game at all! At best, I had gotten to one of the bosses, but that, of course, is nowhere near the end of the game. The game was indeed hard, but it’s interesting that I did fall in love with it nevertheless.

Metroid Title Screen

In replaying the game, I actually managed to win. Of course, I cheated. I used maps, walkthroughs and most importantly, I utilized my emulator’s ability to create saved games. That last one, more than anything else, made the game about a hundred times less frustrating to play. I recognize that the hardware limitations of the NES made it difficult to allow saved games (this game was released before the batteries that allowed saves on newer games), but Metroid was incredibly punitive. It often seems like the game is constructed to waste time, something that would infuriate me in a game today (and indeed, I was not a fan of Metroid III). So the ability to save the game at any time made things a lot easier. I know this isn’t a “fair” way to play the game, and I’m sure purists are leaving my site in disgust, but I have to say, the game was a lot of fun.

So why do I love this game? I think a lot of it has to do with the atmosphere of the game. There’s not much of a story, but it’s clear what you’re supposed to do. The music is evocative, the character and monster designs are fantastic for an 8 bit game, and the gameworld is sprawling, open and varied. Again, there’s no real narrative in the game, so when you see various designs, you’re forced to come up with explanations of your own. For instance, whenever you find a power-up, it’s being held by some bird-like statue. Why? Who knows? When entering various boss’ lairs, there is a weird alien creature’s head that is evocative without being too cheesy.

Entering Kraids lair

Samus entering Kraid’s lair

This is an action game with platforming elements, but the primary gameplay element is actually exploration. One of the most shocking and subversive things this game did was that it forced you to go left. Indeed, in order to start exploring past the first screen, you need to go left first and gain a power-up. This might seem trivial or silly today, but it was revolutionary back then. The notion of going left-to-right is so ingrained in our consciousness from reading (and other video games), that the concept that we not only could go left, but that we were required to do so, was amazing. The game was also one of the first to use backtracking as a key element. In addition, the game is filled with secrets, hidden barriers, and tricks. Furthermore, these secret barriers were necessary in order to win the game, making the process of exploration that much more fun. Despite the punishing difficulty of the game, the focus on probing captivated me, even when I was younger (and now that I can mitigate the difficulty with saved games, the focus on probing and exploration is that much more rewarding).

Samus finds a new weapon

Samus finds a new weapon

Like other games of the era, such as the Zelda series, Metroid required you to collect various items, weapons, and abilities in order to strengthen your character. And as you gained various powers, additional areas of the map became accessible. The sprawling, open-world design of the world was quite alluring (I’m also a big fan of precursors like Pitfall II and successors like GTA III) and again, the game’s atmosphere really draws you in. It’s funny, but part of the allure is the solitary nature of your character. You are literally the only person on the planet. A planet infested with all sorts of nasty creatures and lava pits and all sorts of other crazy obstacles. The design works well, emphasizing the solitude and desperation, yet somehow retaining a fun experience.

One of the things that really struck me upon replaying this game was just how excellent the platforming elements of this game are. Many platformers of the era had floaty, unresponsive controls (I’m looking at you, Castlevania!) which at the time were considered part of the challenge. Not so here. The control and freedom of movement of Samus was quite liberating compared to other games. You could even control a jump while in mid-air. And later powerups like the Super Jump and most importantly, the Screw Attack (one of the best video game weapons ever), made the experience that much better.

Samus is a woman

Samus is a woman!

One of the things I never realized about Metroid (perhaps because I never finished it back in the day!) was that there actually multiple endings to the game, based on how long it took you to complete the game. Three of the endings revealed something that was pretty shocking at the time: the character you had been playing for the whole game with the awesome power armor? It was a woman! The version I got had her take off her helmet to reveal her long hair. Other versions included her taking off all her armor to reveal a leotard or even a bikini. Then there are the versions where you took too long to complete the game. Those had her keep on her suit (in effect not revealing her identity) and in the “worst” ending, she turns her back to you and covers her face in shame. The fact that the game had different endings based on how quickly you finished started a trend of people doing Metroid Speed Runs, attempting to win the game as quick as humanly possible (The best time right now is just over 18 minutes, which is pretty insane).

It’s interesting that the original game has so many elements that I don’t especially like in games, but it makes up for any shortcomings with exceptional visual, sound, and gameplay design. It definitely isn’t my all-time favorite game for the NES, but it’s up there with my favorites .

More screenshots and comments below the fold…

A Video Game Retrospective: Part 3

Several years ago, I started a Video Game Retrospective, beginning with my first video game console, the Atari 2600 then moving on to the Commodore 64. In typical Kaedrin fashion, I have thoroughly ignored the series for a little over two years, so it’s probably time to get back on the horse. I was reminded of the series during my recent bout with Bionic Commando Rearmed as well as accidentally stumbling upon a box with a good portion of my old Nintendo cartridges (along with reams of paper containing various passwords and maps, etc…)

So this third installment will be focusing on the classic Nintendo Entertainment System (aka the NES). My memory on exactly when I got an NES is a bit fuzzy, but I can say that it was at the very earliest 1989 – this is actually somewhat late in the life cycle of the NES (the Genesis was introduced within a year, and the SNES not much later than that). Despite this fact, I played quite a bit of NES. The multitude of available games ensured I always had something new and interesting to play, and these games tended to be better, deeper, and more fun than the previously discussed Atari and Commodore games. In addition, the transition to the 16 bit era seemed to take a bit longer than other transitions in the history of gaming (at least, from my own subjective memory of such things, which is probably not very reliable). Most of my friends had an NES, and even the fancy ones who got newer consoles still had and played the NES.

The NES Gamepad

Something that never really occurred to me until recently is just how revolutionary the NES controller was. There really hadn’t been anything like it up until that point. Both of the previous systems I mentioned had joysticks of some kind. I remember that I had some weird handheld football game (not sure if those match exactly what I had, but it was close Update: It was an Entex: Color Football 4…) that had a sorta gamepad style control (i.e. buttons for up/down/left/right) and I’m sure some arcades had similar style controls, but the dominant controller at the time was the joystick. The gamepad was a huge innovation and it’s something that survives to this day (even Nintendo’s new fancy motion-controllers double as old fashioned NES controllers, which is actually kinda impressive). I don’t want to get into a holy war regarding the history of video game controllers, but it does seem like Nintendo has always been an innovator in that realm. Sometimes that hurt them (I believe the N64 controller was the first major console controller to feature an analog stick, but Nintendo wasn’t sure how that would work out, so they also included a standard gamepad style control, which resulted in a weird three pronged controller), sometimes they scored big (the wiimote). In any case, the classic NES controller is pretty awesome, despite the blocky, non-ergonomic design.

The previous two installments were an interesting exercise in nostalgia, and I had some fun revisiting those games, but for the most part, those games were severely lacking. The NES generation of games was the first generation that utterly enthralled my young self. I can still remember the excited anticipation as my parents drove me to Toys R Us to pick up the action pack, and the giddy joy as I played Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt well into the night. I fondly remember hours of grinding through RPGs, mastering various keyboard combos and maneuvers, taking notes and drawing maps on pieces of paper(!?), and other things that I’m amazed I put up with. I remember the strange problems with the top loading cartridges and the silly-yet-seemingly-effective countermeasures (such as blowing on the cartridge or using the Game Genie as an intermediary). Most of all, I remember having a lot of fun, which is what this is all about, right?

The way these retrospective series have gone is that I do an introduction, then I pick one favorite game, then I post several honorable mentions, and conclude with a few links and additional thoughts. Because the NES has so many incredible games that totally blew me away during my formative years, choosing a single favorite would be impossible. As such, I’m not really sure how many posts I’ll get out of this, but I plan to be done in a couple of weeks (at which time the annual six weeks of Halloween will commence). I’ve been revisiting my favorite games on the Virtual Console of my Wii and also on an emulator on my computer (much easier to get screenshots that way, and the emulator offers certain functionality that makes the more frustrating aspects of some games more bearable (i.e. the ability to save – which, yes, is a cheat, but sometimes I like cheats)). A tentative schedule of posts is listed below:

Depending on time, I might even check out some games I didn’t play much (or games I never played at all). In a lot of cases, I’ve played only one game in a given series. For instance, I never cared much for Mario, and as such I only ever owned the one that came with my system. Sure, I played part 2 and part 3 from time to time at friends’ houses, but I was never really down with the series. In other cases, when I got my hands on enough cash to buy a game, I ended up buying the latest incarnation of a series I know I liked (Castlevania III is a prime example, but there were several others).

In the end, I’m sure my retrospective will be woefully incomplete from any objective standpoint, but as with my other retrospectives, this is a) a subjective list and b) limited to my experience playing video games as a youth. That being said, feel free to list your favorites or make suggestions in the comments. I’m doubting that I’ll have a ton of time to devote to them, but you never know…

Bionic Commando Rearmed

Back in the day, the first NES game my brother and I purchased (beyond SMB and Duck Hunt, which came with the system) was Bionic Commando. To be quite honest, I have no idea what possessed us to pick that particular game. It’s not like we weren’t familiar with the other popular games of the era (i.e. Zelda, Contra, etc…), so I’m not sure what it was about that game that caught our interest, but I’m glad it did. And it turns out that it is something of a cult classic on the NES system – not a top tier title that spawned a massive franchise like Mario or Zelda, but a very well received game that had a big following.

The game was essentially a side-scrolling platformer, but the twist was that your character couldn’t jump. Instead, you’re given a bionic arm which can shoot out and latch on to stuff, allowing you to swing or climb over various obstacles. It’s amazing how lost you can feel without the ability to jump, but the core mechanic of swinging and climbing is actually pretty intuitive and once you get used to the idea, the game becomes a blast. It’s something I’ve revisited many times over the years. Not too long ago, someone decided it was time to give the game a facelift and release it on the next gen consoles. The result was Bionic Commando Rearmed. The game is technically a remake, with several key differences:

  • The graphics have been updated to modern standards. The game is still a 2d platformer, but the graphics engine is 3d and displays a lot more detail. The music has also been given a contemporary facelift. In both cases, the level design and feel of the game has been preserved, while at the same time giving the game a more modern look and feel. The music, in particular, is fantastic – so much so that Capcom has made it available for sale by itself…
  • Many of the annoyances of the NES era have been smoothed over and revised. The game automatically saves after each level, and while you’re in the level, if you die, you respawn where you were last standing (usually – there were some times I got sent back further and didn’t know why, but in any case, it’s an improvement over the original). One of the frustrating things about the original game was that you could only take one of each piece of equipment into a zone (i.e. only 1 gun, only 1 communicator, only 1 special item), but in Rearmed, you always carry everything. There are no “continues” and you don’t need to collect extra lives (at least, at the default difficulty you don’t).
  • The Boss battles have been completely revamped. There are minor similarities and some of the bosses resemble their original counterparts, but the way the boss battles work is now completely different. I could go either way on this. The new boss battles are definitely good and they can be challenging and fun, but I also enjoyed the originals. One of the things that I always thought was interesting about the original was that in some cases, you didn’t even need to defeat the boss in order to win the level – you just needed to destroy each level’s reactor to win… but that detail has been left out here. Still, the new Bosses do ensure a freshness to the game that would have been missing if the originals were simply copied.
  • The weapons have been updated, in some cases making them more powerful and also allowing for a few new ideas to make their way into the game. When combined with the ability to access all weapons during a given level, there are some interesting consequences to this variety. For instance, if you’re hanging out somewhere and you need to start swinging, you can change to the shotgun and fire off a blast that will get you swinging and allow you to jump to another area, etc…
  • The game features a couple of new modes, including something called Challenge Rooms which are unlockable obstacle courses. These start out pretty easy but quickly become nigh impossible. With a lot of practice and lightning fast reflexes and muscle memory, you’ll be able to get far, but man, these things get hard. There are 56 rooms in total (plus some bonus rooms), but by the time you get to the 10th or 11th room, you’ll be hurting, and it doesn’t get any easier from there. There’s also apparently a cooperative mode where two players can play through the game, but I haven’t tried that part yet…
  • There are a ton of secrets and weapon upgrades, etc… in the game. In some cases, these are fun to find, in others, I have to wonder how anyone would find them without some sort of walkthrough.

There are lots of other changes, but overall these updates to the game are for the best. The developer, Grin, managed to keep the essence of what made the original great, while jettisoning the stuff that is no longer necessary. The result is a game that retains the feel of its predecessor while still carving out an identity of its own. This isn’t a point for point, near identical remake, which ends up being a good thing.

Interestingly enough, the thing that struck me the most about this game is that it represented the return of sweaty palms to gaming for me. I haven’t had that sort of feeling for many years and definitely not on this latest generation of consoles. Given my predilection for cheating, I have to wonder how much I’d like this game if I wasn’t already in love with the original, but in any case, I think I can recommend the game. It should be available for download on XBLA or PSN for a paltry $5-10 (it sometimes goes on sale).

Update: Check out these comparison videos to see the similarities and differences in action. I swear, the transitions between the two different music styles are sometimes seamless, which is pretty amazing (though it’s annoying that they play so much of the Rearmed soundtrack over the original game visuals).

Playstation News

Some big news from Sony this week. Yesterday, they announced a big price cut for the PS3 as well as a new, slimmed down model. The new slim model does not have much in the way of new features, and the only thing it’s losing are some aesthetic stuff (i.e. matte black plastic finish instead of the reflective plastic on older models, actual buttons in place of the pressure sensitive things the older models use, etc…) and the ability to install other OSes (i.e. no more installing linux on your PS3). The one big miss is that Sony still has not reinstated backwards compatibility with the PS2, and in an interview with Sony’s head of hardware, John Koller, things don’t look promising on that front:

Do we need to stop yapping about backwards compatibility?

“It’s not coming back, so let me put that on the table,” Koller says with an air of finality. But it’s all people ever talk about!

“It’s not as big as a purchase intent driver as you may be hearing,” he claimed. “We’ve got such a substantial lineup of titles on the PS3; most people are buying the PS3 for PS3 games. They’ve buying it for PS3 games and Blu-ray movies.”

“That won’t be returning,” he repeats.

Darn. He may be correct that people don’t intend to purchase the PS3 for its ability to play PS2 games, but it certainly doesn’t hurt and it would seemingly increase goodwill. Ok, fine, I just want to be able to play PS2 games from my PS3. Is that so wrong? From what I’ve seen, a previous model PS3 had simple software emulation for PS2 games, which seems very reasonable (one of the older models actually included PS2 hardware in the PS3 to achieve backwards compatibility, something that was wisely dropped to help lower the amazingly high price of the PS3), even if it didn’t work for all games. If nothing else, being able to offer some PS2 classics for download on PSN would be pretty cool. Alas, it’s apparently not to be.

Still, $299 is a pretty good deal, especially if you can swing the same Playstation Credit Card rebate that I did (right now it’s only a $100 credit, but it is periodically raised to $150 for limited times). In essense, you could buy a PS3 for less than a Wii.

A while ago, I complained about the distinctly boring gamercard that PSN made available. All it basically had was your PSN online ID name… something that could just as easily be typed out (i.e. mine is “mciocco”). Well, sometime in the past week, they upgraded the PSN portable ID to include some more info, so here’s mine:


Get your Portable ID!

Much better! It would still be nice to have more info on the thing (i.e. show what games I’m playing, what trophies I won recently, etc…), but at least it lets me brag a bit about how much of a trophy whore I am (update: I think it will show you a lot more information if you click through the gamertag above)…

Anyway, it seems that the PS3 firmware is also due to be upgraded, but there doesn’t seem to be much of interest in the update (i.e. no PS2 backwards compatibility). All in all, it seems like it will be a good few months for Sony. I’m betting that Microsoft will respond, but Sony has a pretty interesting lineup of exclusives coming in the next half year or so (including a genuine system-seller in God of War III) and their general library is just as good as MS. Nintendo will, of course, obliterate Sony and MS, because that is just their way. Nintendo isn’t playing the same game. Three years after launch, Sony’s system costs half of what it once did and Nintendo’s costs… the same. And Nintendo was making a profit on the hardware on day 1, while Sony has lost massive amounts of money (the PS3 slim seems to be profitable for them though). I suppose time will tell, but Sony is finally priced competitively with Microsoft, so that part should be interesting. Here’s to hoping that it’s a rousing success, leading to more and more great games being released for the system (at the very least, we can hope that Bobby Kotick will shut the hell up).

Burnout Paradise Thoughts

Since finishing Fallout 3 a while back, I have played several games on my PS3. The most enjoyable, so far, has been Burnout Paradise. For a budget title that came out a long time ago, it really surprised me. If you are even remotely interested in driving games, this is a game you should play (I have no idea how it compares to other Burnout titles though, as this is my first). Anyway here are some thoughts on the game:

  • It’s a “sandbox” style game, meaning that there aren’t really “levels” or linear progressions. You’re simply dropped into a city and you drive around looking for various events. There isn’t really a story of any kind… indeed, there don’t appear to be any humans in the game (i.e. no pedestrians, no one appears in other cars’ seats, etc…) From this, I gather that the game takes place in a futuristic world where humans have become extinct and cars have become sentient, roaming our abandoned cities, doing jumps and smashing into one another. When I first heard about the open sandbox style of the game, I was a little unsure about it, but it turns out to be a fantastic framing device for the gameplay, ensuring continuity between events and allowing you to pursue more open-ended pursuits (like smashing through billboard signs or finding the big jumps). One neat thing about the open world is that the entire thing is available right from the start – you don’t have to unlock anything (though you do need to discover various landmarks like gas stations and junkyards, etc… but discovery is as simple as driving past the landmark). Every traffic light in the game represents some sort of event, and you can trigger any event at any time. As you progress throughout the game, more cars become available and you gradually get better and better “licenses.” There are probably a couple hundred things to do in the game, so there’s generally something fun to do at any given time.
  • While it’s an open world game, there are several events that you can participate in. A big part of the reason I like this game so much is that the events aren’t all simple racing events (which I find kinda tedious and which can get on my nerves after a while). Sure, there’s a few racing style events (where you race other folks or the clock), but there are a bunch of other events that liven things up. There are Marked Man events, where you have to make it to a specific point on the map while other cars try to make you crash all along the way. Then there’s the Road Rage events, where you have to “takedown” as many other cars as you can. Finally, there’s the Stunt Runs, where you attempt to chain together various jumps, spins and smashes to reach a certain number of points. All of the events are pretty well balanced and fun, and again, I really appreciated that there was more to do here than just racing against other cars.
  • Speaking of cars, there are a ton of cars available in the game. None are real-life cars, but they can still be a lot of fun. There are three basic classes of cars, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There are speed cars, which are all about fast accelleration and high top speeds, but which usually suffer from a weak chassis and often have handling issues (usually pretty good during races). Aggression style cars can take a lot of damage, but usually aren’t very fast and handle like a tank (perfect for Marked Man and Road Rage events, though). Stunt cars can take a fair amount of damage and also have some pep too them. These are probably the most well rounded cars of the bunch, though once you get later in the game, the only thing you can really use them for is, well, stunt runs. Each car has a “boost” that is recharged by doing things the car specializes in (i.e. do a jump or a spin, and you’ll racharge some boost in your stunt car, etc…) The only real complaint I have with the cars are with the speed cars. They often look the coolest, but can be really difficult to drive. Since they seem to be made of tinfoil, i also found myself totalling the car often. Considering that you can get up to really high speeds in these cars and that many of them have super-sensitive contorls that make handling somewhat difficult, it can be quite easy to total your car with even the slightest ding. And every time you smash the car, you have to sit through this animation of your car crashing in slow-motion. The first couple of times you see this, it’s pretty cool. After a thousand times, it gets kinda old. So the speed cars could use a little tweaking, but otherwise, the cars are a blast.
  • There are a couple of other things you can do. For instance, there are a number of high jumps and billboards throughout the city. There’s also something called Showtime, which is basically a “crash mode” style minigame where you crash your car and try to inflict the most damage possible on other cars and street property. If you get on a crowded road, you can keep this going for an amazingly long time, and I have to admit that crashing into a ton of stuff and demolishing whole city blocks worth of cars is pretty damn fun. Less exciting are setting time records on various roads. There’s also an apparently deep online mode that I never played (maybe I’ll check it out at some point though).
  • All in all, the game is great fun. During my Fallout 3 review, I mentioned that I had to dedicate 2 hours of time per gaming session if I wanted to get anything done, and that was indeed something that annoyed me about that game. However, I found myself playing Burnout much longer than that during most sessions and yet, I was having a blast. I think a big part of it was that Burnout‘s events are all short and sweet, so it feels like I’m making a lot of progress every time I play. There were times when I popped it in and just played for like 20 minutes or so, and even then, I managed to do an event or two and maybe find a billboard and smash it. Just knowing that’s an option makes the game more fun to play (whereas, I wouldn’t even bother with a game like Fallout, because I know I wouldn’t get anything done). Burnout also seems to have a massive amount of available PS3 Trophies. While I know they don’t especially mean anything, they do provide tangible milestones and can be fun to collect. Burnout Paradise sucks you in by appealing to the rewards circuitry in your brain, bigtime. This is something most video games do, but this game does it especially well.
  • In terms of usability, the core concept of finding and starting events is good. The only thing the game does poorly at is how you restart an event. Apparently, there was no way to do this when the game was first released, which meant you had to drive back to the starting point, which could be quite far away. However, Burnout has had quite a few patches and free updates, and they “fixed” the restart issue at some point (before I bought the game). The only problem is that the way you restart your last event is really awkward and involves using the d-pad options menu (as opposed to most every other option in the game, which you can do on the fly). There’s no way I would have figured that out without looking it up… but at least it’s there. Otherwise, the game does a pretty good job. The only other complaint I have is the latency when choosing cars in the junkyard. I have no idea why it takes so long for the car/info to appear, but it could get annoying. These are all nitpicks though, and the game does a damn good job keeping you in the game.The game’s controls are reasonably easy to pick up and don’t get too complicated either, which is a plus. I shouldn’t have to talk about this, but this game does a fantastic job auto-saving everything to the point where I almost forgot to mention it (which is how saving games should be these days!)
  • In terms of difficulty, I thought the game presented a pretty good balance (keeping in mind that I’m a cheater – not that I cheated during this game, as it wasn’t necessary). At the start of the game, it’s pretty easy and I think I won most of my events on the first license. As the game progresses, each event style gets harder or at least, the requirements get higher. Towards the end of the game, it gets a bit prohibitive, especially on the stunt runs and the races or burning routes. This might be another minor usability niggle – the city is huge, and once you get to a certain point in the game, the only way to win an event is to memorize, well, pretty much the whole city, including shortcuts and where every jump is located, etc… Again, the city is huge and it can be quite difficult to, for example, chain together the required amount of jumps, spins, and smashes to complete a high difficulty stunt run (though I will admit to a certain rush when I do manage to land an epic stunt run). I’m sure plenty of folks will dissect the hell out of the city and figure out all the fastest routes, etc.. but while I had figured out a few tricks and had certain parts of the city memorized, I never really got there. The game does try to get around this during events that have a finishing point by providing a nice mini-map (which works reasonably well) and a sorta blinking roadsign notification of when you should make a turn, but those indications can be a bit difficult to catch (especially when you’re moving really fast). Some people have mentioned that they would pause the game frequently to look at the larger map, but this isn’t something I felt I needed to do very often. Also, the various shortcuts sometimes make it hard to find the quickest route on a map. Again, these are relatively minor complaints – the game did an excellent job drawing me in and keeping me interested.
  • The game features an apparently robust online component, though I’ve never used it (perhaps I’ll try it out someday). There is also apparently quite a bit of downloadable add-on content as well, including whole new parts of the city and lots of cars. Some of these add-ons are free and will be downloaded when you first play the game (the amount of updates for the game when you fist play can be a bit daunting at first though – it took quite a while to get the game running that first time because there were so many patches and add-ons being installed.) For instance, there was a free add-on that gives you a few motorcycles and additional events, though that mode isn’t very deep (and it kills me that you can’t do the hand-breaking on bikes, which I know is a ridiculous thing to ask for, but still). At some point, I may check out some of the DLC for the game, but I haven’t as of yet…

All in all, I played this game a little less than Fallout 3, but I had a much better time with this, which is somewhat surprising because I’m not a big fan of racing games (but then, as I hope I’ve established above, this isn’t strictly a racing game). It’s a very cheap game, so if you have any inclination towards car games, give this one a try .

Cheating

When it comes to video games, I’ve usually described myself as a “casual” gamer. The whole “casual” versus “hardcore” gamer debate has become somewhat tired of late, but in modern parlance, “casual” is usually code for “moronic” while “hardcore” is code for someone who likes “adult” games with lots of violence, etc… But my notion of a casual gamer is someone who plays games and enjoys them, but doesn’t get all that carried away with them. The hardcore would be someone who borders on obsession. And not just a short term obsession either. Most gamers get engrossed in various games from time to time, but it’s rare for the obsession to last much longer than a few weeks (if that). But there are people who keep going, perfecting their performance to the point where (for example), they could complete Super Mario Brothers in 5 minutes (there’s a whole site full of these Speed Demos for all sorts of games).

I suppose I have some tendencies towards the hardcore. In particular, I’m a fan of probing, or exploratory play. I like to probe at the limits of a game, just to see what happens. I’ve written about this before:

Probing is essentially exploration of the game and its possibilities. Much of this is simply the unconscious exploration of the controls and the interface, figuring out how the game works and how you’re supposed to interact with it. However, probing also takes the more conscious form of figuring out the limitations of the game. For instance, in a racing game, it’s usually interesting to see if you can turn your car around backwards, pick up a lot of speed, then crash head-on into a car going the “correct” way. Or, in Rollercoaster Tycoon, you can creatively place balloon stands next to a roller coaster to see what happens (the result is hilarious). Probing the limits of game physics and finding ways to exploit them are half the fun (or challenge) of video games these days…

In short, I like to see what will happen. This will sometimes keep me playing a game long after others have gotten tired of a game. To me, this is the fun part. To the people who do speed demos, it’s all about skill. I don’t particularly care about skill (more about this later), and one of the ways Nintendo has been courting new gamers is to embrace the sorts of games that do not require hardcore skill in order to complete. To a lesser extent, PS3 and XBox games seem easier these days than things were back in the NES days. So there’s a lot of tension in gaming these days between making the game easy, making it more difficult, and making it friendly to new gamers.

A few months ago, Nintendo patented a system that sought to address this situation. The point was to allow them to make a difficult game, but give an option to us helpless casual players who aren’t interested in sharpening our skills for dozens of hours at a time just so we can make a particularly difficult series of jumps. Their idea was to allow players to let the game play itself through the difficult parts. So you get to a particularly difficult boss fight and instead of playing it a hundred times, you can just let the game know and it will play and defeat the boss for you.

There have been a variety of responses to this idea, mostly negative. Shamus calls it ungaming:

The problem is that the demo mode solution isn’t a solution at all. It’s a refusal to even address the problem. New players need a way to engage a game at their own skill and frustration threshold, and making a game play itself doesn’t help. Demo mode can’t turn a newbie into a gamer for the same reason watching Miles Davis won’t turn you into a trumpet player. You can’t learn to play if you’re not playing.

Sean Malstrom has an interesting take on how this functionality detracts from the skill based aspects of gaming:

I’ve been thinking about this frequently, and the answer I come up with is ‘mastery’. The old school gamer says, “I have finally got to level five!” The new school gamer says, “I am twenty hours into this game so far!” The old school gamer’s statement implies mastery. The player had mastered the game to such a level in order to reach level five. … The new school gamer’s statement implies intoxication, not mastery.

Malstrom brings up the various cheats from the NES era. In Super Mario Bros. there were Warp Zones that allowed you to skip ahead a few levels. The infamous Konami Code was indispensible for Contra players. Indeed, cheat codes became very popular in that era, to the point where even stuff like the Game Genie (a third party piece of hardware that you plugged into the game – it had all sorts of crazy cheats you could apply to almost any game) became popular.

Perhaps because a lot of newer games don’t have much of this, I’ve realized lately that I really enjoy cheating. Not for every game, but I did like my Game Genie. I like God mode and I like cheats that give me all the available weapons, etc… Why? Usually because it makes it a lot easier to explore the game world (i.e. to probe). One game I distinctly remember was called Rise of the Triad. The game was not especially fantastic. It was one of those FPS games that tried to amp up the violence and ridiculousness. I was almost immediately bored with it… until I found the cheat codes. The game featured some pretty neat weapons (in particular, I enjoyed the one that shot a wall of fire). There were a couple of cheats that I particularly loved – they let you change the gravity or even fly around the levels. A probing gamer’s dream. So I ended up enjoying the game quite a bit, despite not being very good at it in terms of “skill.”

I think this is why I don’t like Nintendo’s proposed system. It’s not that they let you get past the difficult part without having any skill that’s the problem. As I’ve established, that doesn’t bother me at all. It’s that the act of bypassing the hard part is completely passive. I like probing at the limits of the system, not watching someone show me how it’s done. I don’t want to do it the way it’s supposed to be done. That’s just plain boring. I say bring back cheating. Cheating is much more fun than watching someone else play, let alone watching the computer play. Of course, all of this is speculative. Companies patent stuff all the time (and as Shamus notes, it’s kinda ridiculous that some of these things are being patented at all, but that’s another discussion) and there’s nothing real to base this on, but it’s an interesting subject.

Wii Game Corner (again)

Some quick reviews for Wii games I’ve played recently:

  • Mario Kart Wii: One of the games I used to play all the time in college was the original Mario Kart for SNES (along with NHL 94/95 and GoldenEye). It was great fun, and with this latest installment, I find that Nintendo has more or less duplicated the simple and fun formula of the original installments (the last MK game I played was the one for N64) and made a few tweaks that make it feel fresh. The simple motion controls work well and it’s a nice change of pace, but at the same time, it’s not like the series’ old controls were all that tough. As with the original, this game is a blast to play with friends, especially with 4 players. Single player gets a bit repetitive after a while, but it’s quite fun as well – it’s nice to be able to pop in a bite-sized gaming experience. I’m glad I own this game becaues I’ve never owned a Mario Kart game before and I do find it to be a genuinely fun game to play (especially multiplayer), but at the same time, I can’t help but think that it’s just the same game I started playing 15 years ago. Indeed, it looks like the grand majority of the tracks are repurposed here from previous editions (of course, they picked the best tracks, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing…) But hey, it’s Mario Kart – it was pretty much exactly what I expected and I can’t fault it for that!
  • Wii Fit: For what it is, it’s quite good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really break any of the boundries I was hoping it would. The concept of a video game centered around a goal of fitness is an intriguing one, but while Wii fit is an interesting first attempt, I was hoping for more. The thing that really interested me was the concept of combining the just-one-more-level addictiveness of video games with the healthy side-effects of exercise… alas, Wii Fit doesn’t really manage that. The software seems more aimed at providing guidance on traditional exercises, along with a few balance games thrown in for good measure. When I first got the software, I played it for about a week straight, and then pretty much lost interest. I’m starting my annual summer exercise kick though, and I think Wii Fit may find a place in my regular exercise schedule, but more as a warmup and a way to keep track of my progress than my primary exercise tool (which will probably be the elliptical machine in my basement, along with some free weights).

    The software comes with a plethora of exercises and simple mini-games, many of which you have to unlock as you go. It can be a bit annoying at first, because a lot of the playing time gets tied up in listening to the Wii Balance Board or your virtual trainer explain stuff to you. The software keeps track of the time you spent exercising, but when you first start off, most of the exercises take only 1 minute or so to complete. So to complete a 30 minute workout, it took about an hour (with the other 30 minutes being explainations and loading time, etc…). As you unlock more and more exercises and get more experience, longer exercises become available. The step exercise gets pretty good after a while, as does the boxing exercise. Yoga poses can be cool, but they still eat up a lot of time. The balance games are a lot of fun, but they’re very simple and they also don’t seem to be the most vigorous of exercises.

    The software anthropomorphizes the Wii Fit Balance Board into a character in the game, and I’m pretty sure it hates me, though it doesn’t say so outright (it usually relies on passive-aggressive techniques to accomplish this). Seriously, sometimes the way the board talks to you is a little odd (my friend Roy thinks there might be some translation issues that cause the game to sound more caustic…). I’m not looking forward to returning after a few months absence… Ultimately, it’s not everything I hoped it would be, but it’s pretty good.

  • Ōkami: Traditional gamers have long complained that the Wii has left them out in the cold and not released any “Hardcore” games. One of the frequent counter-arguments to that is Ōkami. Originally released on the PS2, this game was ported to the Wii, presumably because one of the core mechanics of the game seems ideal for motion controls. The game’s setting is right out of Japanese folklore, and you play a sun goddess named Amaterasu, taking the form of a white wolf. The story centers on how Amaterasu saves the land from a terrible darkness, which sounds like a common trope, but since the setting of traditional Japanese folklore is one I am not that familiar with, it still feels fresh. One of the key abilities of Amaterasu is something called the Celestial Brush. When you’re playing, you can bring the game to a pause, which converts the screen into a canvas that you can paint on. Various brush strokes and patterns can be used for a variety of results: drawing a swirl can summon the wind, drawing a line through an enemy can cut them, drawing a circle in the sky can restore sunlight to the land, etc…

    You would think that these Celestial Brush techniques would make the game an ideal candidate for the Wii, but I am constantly struggling with them. There seems to be a certain precision that is required that is beyond what the Wiimote can provide by default. Perhaps I’m just doing something wrong (if I am, it’s not particularly obvious what it is), but I often find myself struggling to duplicate whatever exact movement they want me to make. In particular, drawing a straight line can be rough (and early on in the game, that is a very important technique). Human beings have elbows, which are essentially pivots. The very physical nature of our arms means that moving our hand horizontally typically describes an arc, rather than a straight line. This is a basic tenet of human factors design, and I believe it’s why I have so much trouble drawing a straight line in this game. So to be honest, I’m not even sure how well these motion controls would work, even if this game was ported to Wii Motion Plus, unless they also allowed some sort of corresponding tolerance to the system.

    The current generation of console video games seems to have massively improved a couple of the really annoying traits of the past. One of the most important of these is how you save your game. On most of my PS3 games, progress is mostly saved automatically whenever you accomplish something. Even games that do not have auto-save (such as Dead Space), make sure to provide frequent save points so that you don’t have to constantly repeat large areas of the game (and even then, I hate the arbitrary nature of save points in those games). Unfortunately, like most Nintendo games where progress into a story matters (i.e. not games like Wii Fit or Wii Sports, where there isn’t much in the way of “progress”), Ōkami suffers from save points that are spaced relatively far apart. This caused me to get stuck around 2 hours into the game at a point where I would have to play for about an hour, make a ton of progress, and then lose everything because I died in some random fight on my way back to the save point. I’ve now spent 3 hours trying to get past this point, and have pretty much given up on the game. Given the simplicity of the combat system, it’s clear that fighting is not the point of this game. Fighing basically consists of random Wiimote waggling combined with the occasional Celestial Brush stroke, and it’s not very fun. It would be one thing if the system was well balanced and fun to play – I’d want to master such a game and wouldn’t mind the save system so much. But seriously, it’s 2009. There are no more excuses for failing to provide an easy way to save games.

    The game also seems to be very heavy on text and dialog cutscenes (not sure if they technically qualify as cut scenes, but that’s basically what they are), often forcing you to read through several screens of text (each screen is relatively short on text, but still, reading through 5 screens at once starts to get tedious). Fortunately, most of this text is skippable… but skipping such text causes the game to pause itself and transition to after the cutscene (in some cases, you’re probably better off just pressing through the dialog as fas as it will let you). It doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to provide a more seamless transition from cutscene back to gameplay. Also, the interface is rather difficult to understand. It took me a while, for instance, to figure out how the health meter worked, which is kinda ridiculous.

    I know the game is somewhat old and that it was originally developed for the previous generation of consoles, but these flaws are intensely annoying, especially when I play a game like this side by side with PS3 games that get these usability details exactly right. This is a game I very much want to like a lot – the visual art style is actually quite good. This sort of stylish presentation is common on the Wii, but it truly does look great here and it fits the mood of the story well. I also like the way the game gradually nudges you to solve puzzles, allowing you the freedom to explore and figure out what to do, but also giving you some help if you really get stuck. The story itself seems pretty straightforward and conceptually the puzzles and general gameplay sound great. In practice though, they tend to be frustrating.

    This game gets generally great reviews from critics, but in all its incarnations, it has apparently sold very poorly. I can see why the critics like this game so much – again, it has all the right conceptual elements – but I can also see why it is shunned by players as well… it’s not a very fun game. Again, I wanted to like this game – it’s got a lot of elements I find intriguing (i.e. visual style, uncommon mythological setting, story, etc…), but in practice, the game just grates on me… I know I’m picky about usability stuff like the motion controls, save points, and dialog cutscenes, but I don’t think those things are excusable anymore (at least, the combination of all three should be avoided). Ultimately, I was very disappointed in this game and to be honest, I’m not sure if I’m up to giving it another try. To be honest, the games theme of restoring life to a darkened world only wants to make me play another motion controlled game – Flower, for the PS3.

That’s all for now (you could also check out the previous installment of Wii Game Corner). For all my gushing about the PS3 and for my general distaste for single-player Wii games of late, I still have several games I want to play or am otherwise looking forward to. Madworld, House of the Dead: Overkill, and The Conduit all sound like a lot of fun. The new Punch Out seems similar to Mario Kart in that it doesn’t look to add too much to the original experience, and I have to admit that sort of thing isn’t that exciting… but I wouldn’t mind trying out the game. I’m not all that interested in purchasing Wii Sports Resort or Wii Motion Plus, but I would definitely like to play the games, just to see how well Motion Plus works… Who knows, maybe it will restore my flagging faith in motion controls.